Customer Reviews

The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich

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What music historians and historians of the Third Reich seem to forget is that the National Socialist regime was very, very friendly towards those art forms it deemed pure and classical in nature. Germany's urban centers in the 1920's /early 1930's were full of jazz clubs, underground performance art theaters, cabaret houses and fly-by-night citizen art galleries. While modernists and the European radical chic may have appreciated Germany being on the "cutting edge" - the German National Socialist regime did not. The hierarchy of the Third Reich (most importantly Hitler's Minster of Culture Alfred Rosenberg) made concerted efforts to shun modern music and modern art forms (which were viewed as degenerate and Jewish in nature). In turn, the Nazis wholly embraced classical music and classical art. Indeed, Germany experienced a classical, cultural resurgence of sorts, with millions of deutschmarks being allocated by the government for public art and music programs during the 1930's/1940's. For many artists living and performing in Germany at that time, the government's attitude towards traditional art forms must have seemed overwhelming and exhilarating. It is here that Michael Kater's "The Twisted Muse" first falters - it neglects to take this delicate cultural shift into full consideration -- and then fails to place this shift within the context of German socio-politics and modern German history.

In "The Twisted Muse", readers are subjected to a thorough but overwhelmingly un-objective series of chapters each aimed at painting German musicians and conductors from the war era as demonic, crazed, maniacal fascists. If there is one thing that the book inadvertently reveals, it is that many artists of the era were simply caught up in the same frenzied whirlwind as the rest of Europe. War does strange things to people. The whole affair is infinitely more complex than "us good - them bad". Kater's sense of history is tainted in this sense, and we never get a true insiders look at the machinations of National Socialism and the intricate cultural forces at play in Nazi Germany. Perhaps some of the figures of the era were eccentric, but CERTAINLY they were no more competitive, egotistical or career-driven than today's millionaire, musical icons. Kater is no world historian, and his naivete of the events leading up to the cultural oppression (or reawakening as the German's called it) in the German art and music world is painfully apparent. The one redeeming quality of Kater's work is that it is reasonably well researched. Certainly embellished (the research into Strauss' relationship with the Nazis is often absurd and borderline fiction in spots) and blatantly, painfully exaggerated at points (perhaps Kater felt Germany's black past afforded him that luxury), but still reasonably well researched.

After much consideration I decided this book was worth at least two stars. If one can get past the sporadic character assassination and Kater's unimaginative historical weltanschauung, the book is a treasure trove of important dates and facts. An interesting book that could have been much better.