There is no city that boasts a minimum level of cultural policies that for Remembrance Day does not put on a concert with what can now be seen as a “repertoire”: the music written by composers and musicians during the days of the concentration camp.
In analogy with cinema, which has produced a trend capable of gathering widespread consensus, the need to reevaluate music arose. In the sector, a pioneer like the pianist, composer and scholar Francesco Lotoro, in thirty years of work, has cataloged and sometimes rediscovered around eight thousand works, regardless of genre, from the symphony to the gypsy melody.
The music written in the concentration camps is a universe that questions us about the importance of art in conditions of deprivation, where hope is lost but man retains the will to create beauty.
Authors of Jewish popular music, a large group of classical composers (among others Erwin Schulhoff, Hans Krása, Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein, Rudolf Karel, Jozef Kropinski), Roma musicians and jazz musicians died in the camps.
The fact that Theresienstadt (Terezín), where most of the characters mentioned in the list lived and suffered, has become synonymous with ‘Shoah music’ is justified by the level of musical life inside the camp, an exceptional case in the Nazi system. In this provincial concentration camp, music develops as it might have done in an international centre. Alongside choirs, cabaret groups and classical orchestras, music criticism was also carried out and reviews of new authors were organised, as demonstrated by the work of Viktor Ulmann. You could listen to symphonies and chamber music, religious pieces and operas. A bar featured popular and swing music. In Terezín the composers had a vast team of performers at their disposal. Many imprisoned artists tried to maintain their artistic identity. The best ones were exempted from heavy work, obtained small benefits (better accommodation, extra provisions) and until autumn 1944 they were protected from deportation to Auschwitz. The goal was to present Terezín to the world as a model Jewish settlement.
The effort dedicated to this diversionary strategy was successful and in the summer of 1944 an inspecting Red Cross delegation found itself faced with an exemplary village. The inmates played an aria by Verdi and the children’s opera Brundibárdi by Krása. The representation could even hear the illegal jazz of the ‘Ghetto Swingers’.
A propaganda documentary was filmed (it’s online, chilling): Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem Jüdischen iedlungsgebiet. Despite everything, various artists believed in the illusion of the ‘model ghetto’. Clinging to art prevented them from understanding that they were being used as a screen.
Eric Vogel, a swing musician who survived the camp, commented: «We didn’t think that our oppressors would see us as a tool in their possession. We were obsessed with music and were happy to be able to play our beloved jazz.”
It wasn’t just propaganda: in the performances in hospices or for children you can sense the psychological and cultural mission of music in the ghetto. The notes become a means of preserving the identity of the musicians and those who listen to them, they serve to survive and give hope.
However, the propaganda function should not be underestimated in its various implications. The ruthless hierarch Joseph Goebbels, right-hand man of the Führer, Minister of Propaganda of the Third Reich, fomented hatred with culture and used jazz in an anti-English way. Yet syncopated music, as it was defined at the time, represents the enemy America and is the heritage of blacks, considered a subaltern race and was prohibited by the regime. For the Nazis, jazz was entartete musik, degenerate music. Hitler, in Mein Kampf, catalogs blacks as inferior. The racial laws of 1935 decree that those who have ancestors of Jewish or black blood are not German. Despite the assumptions of the regime (and of his ministry in particular), Goebbels founded a swing band, “Charlie and His Orchestra”, in 1940.
The group was born out of nowhere, by political order, with the aim of spreading intriguing music into the airwaves and giving a tone to the anti-Great Britain German radio station – which broadcasts in English – “Germany Calling”, hammering England with the more subtle propaganda, which wants to smuggle the “superior” National Socialist culture. Jazz is the perfect musical passepartout for infiltrating enemy rear lines better than V2 rockets or bombs. And who hires Goebbels for his band?
Excellent musicians, including Jews, homosexuals and other persecuted people. The group, led by Karl Schwedler, recorded over 90 sides of famous jazz hits between March 1941 and February 1943 with the new lyrics prepared by the Propagandaministerium. The success was widespread: the broadcast reached six million listeners daily in England.
This real, but little-known historical fact forms the backbone of the novel by the Swiss Demian Lienhard, Mr Goebbels jazz Band (Bollati Boringhieri). Using as a background this idea that remained at the foot of the page in history books, the author ironically embroiders the story of the protagonists of this band and of those who revolve around it. The subtlety of Nazi propaganda becomes a normal war tactic. Readers find themselves immersed in smoky clubs, existential problems, power games within government offices and then the radio, band rehearsals, musicians, each with their own story and personality. On the radio waves of Germany Calling, the band Charlie and his orchestra accompanied in music the story of the world from the anti-English point of view thanks to a radio presenter with a perfect British accent, William Joyce, the most curious character in the story, an English Nazi expatriate in Germany by necessity and linked to the Mr Goebbels Jazz Band who was executed for high treason at the end of the war but who had done excellent propaganda work until the end. For the radio, only the result counts: Jewish, homosexual and foreign musicians are hired and they are paid high salaries. Not only did these jazz musicians receive a salary from the state which prohibited them from working and was also a way of avoiding the war. Belonging to the band guaranteed a sort of immunity: Germans did not have to go to the front, Jews and homosexuals were not persecuted. They worked as privileged people for the regime that wanted them dead. The other protagonist of the book is the writer Fritz Mahler, a character invented from scratch, tasked with telling the story in a promotional book. The history of the jazz group, musicians and officials of the propaganda service often passes through his gaze. The expedient used is that of the rediscovered manuscript, an old trick that allows the author to enter history with a fresh eye, not tied to the heavy judgment that we contemporaries inevitably give of Nazi Germany.
Mahler becomes a pen seller in the service of power (how many are there today around the world?) and we do not judge him as a collaborationist writer of one of the most brutal regimes in history. He’s lazy, a little lost; he sees the world with the eyes of 1945 and the author to some extent identifies with it (and forces the reader to reflect on him).
The orchestra wanted by Goebbles must be celebrated by all means, even the written word. Goebbels, unscrupulous as always, bent the hated jazz and the English language to his will to convey the desired messages. The hierarch believed that the function of the radio was twofold: to shape listeners with Nazi concepts (at home) and to sow doubts and discord (abroad). Today Goebbels is considered a grim ideologue, but in this episode he acted pragmatically. He wanted to win a war, at any cost. Thirty million listeners a week were a considerable human spoil to cultivate. As a motto of Confucius that did not displease another dictatorial leader like Mao Tze Tung states: “It doesn’t matter what color the cat is, the important thing is that it catches mice.”
In the book we find a nice dialogue between Nazi government strategists on how radio communication should be conducted in enemy lands. For the first: «It was necessary to make room for an internal orchestra, a so-called musical shadow army that was capable of bombarding the British day and night with the most refined jazz propaganda». A second doubts that this is the solution: «Wouldn’t Germany (and especially England!) be better served by broadcasting Handel, Beethoven and Mozart on the channel? Faced with that musical superiority, the British would necessarily have been forced to lay down their arms.” The most important hierarch then intervenes: «Nonsense, nonsense, idiocy, but that’s it. Perhaps the English aspired to be their brothers, but they were the alcoholic, quarrelsome, spoiled, soft brother who only knew the culture of the slums. Giving classical music to England was like giving pearls to pigs, while jazz was precisely the stuff of pigs…”. This exchange shows how racism also influences strategic choices. Jazz can be used in such a cynical way because it is considered objectively inferior music.
Even the writer’s thoughts in 1943 showing his more cynical side which the author highlights despite his sympathy towards the character.
«Supposing that jazz was actually banned even more (…) supposing also that the musicians were persecuted with even greater vehemence, supposing finally that Charlie’s orchestra was disbanded or at least some of its arrested members were arrested and sent back to Holland, Italy, Sweden – what would have become of him, Mahler wonders (…). Well in the best case scenario he would have lost some of his characters, he thinks, in the worst case scenario the subject of his novel would have disappeared completely, his writing would have lost all meaning.” The author Demian Lienhard leads us to reflect on the evil caused by Nazism also through works of art and the tensions that run through them.
The novel proceeds by stumbling back and forth in time between confused dialogues and out-of-focus atmospheres. Like life. The author’s awareness spills over into Mahler who, as a writer, thinks of himself as an omnipotent Greek demigod and instead finds himself to be nothing more than «a pitiful circus tamer, someone who has long since lost control over the horde chaotic of his animals, a miserable amateur who, with his greasy, greasy top hat and long-since sagging suit, no longer knows how to enchant his audience”. It is not far-fetched to think that jazz has an irrepressible vitality for a regime writer and that musicians do not allow themselves to be inserted into the pre-established framework, busy playing here and there and putting together a decent life in times of war and in a country for them increasingly hostile.
One of the most beautiful scenes comes when the orchestra plays Goody Goody. Mahler goes back in time, when the song in Benny Goodman’s version was the hit of 1936 and «was played in every club worthy of the name almost everywhere between St. Moritz and Gstaad». Instead in the Nazi rewriting the disappointed lover protagonist of the song who consoles himself by singing blues and swing dancing all night is obsessed with a less loving character, the traitor, liar and hated Winston Churchill. There are several examples of this kind of propaganda that distorts the meaning of songs: it is chilling and alienating to listen to the cheerful tune Makin’ Whoopee, an old hit from the roaring twenties brought to success in a musical by Eddie Cantor. The original text was jaunty and full of double meanings, but the one prepared for Charlie and his Orchestra is an invective against Jews, American capitalists, the British Empire and communists (it can easily be found online, if you’re curious). They are records, well played, swinging until the singer begins with racist, anti-Semitic, anti-American speeches. Suddenly we find ourselves faced with a fake, the music we loved turns into a nightmare, the inconsistency of the lyrics designed for “light” numbers of musical comedies takes on the martial pace of a war ministry and turns into a dystopian reversal. Melodies heard in carefree moments become horrendous pantomimes, the alteration of meaning is pushed to the limits, like Kubrick’s use of Beethoven in A Clockwork Orange.
Jazz has been a contested symbol since its origins. Let alone in a tragic moment like the Second World War and with the radio medium involved, not only in Germany.
Between ’43 and ’45, in Italy split in two by the war, one thing seemed to unite the devastated country: the EIAR radio stations in the hands of the Social Republic in the north, the free radio stations and those of the allied armies in the south, the clandestine partisan ones , Radio Tevere with its fascist counter-propaganda similar to what Germany Calling does… All for one reason or another broadcast jazz.
As Adriano Mazzoletti wrote in Jazz in Italy: «while the nation was being shaken: the carpet bombings, the civil war (…) the Italians who had had the time, desire and possibility to tune in to the radios active at that moment would have only listened and exclusively jazz.”
Power of the medium. Other examples can be given. Radio London, whose motto is: «Total war, total propaganda» addresses 48 different countries in its mother tongue and three thousand people work there.
However, we cannot ignore the malignant primacy of the Nazis, pioneers in rocketry as in other warfare techniques: this type of use of jazz for propaganda purposes is their own making. Voice of America and the international tours of the US State Department will take advantage of this weapon in an anti-Russian way, during the Cold War, but in the years in which the Nazis were already applying it successfully, Americans consider jazz as mere support for the troops, entertainment to keep morale high with records and concerts for the army. It will be the enthusiasm of the liberated peoples at the passage of American soldiers that will decree the success of boogie woogie or big band swing and will make people understand how their native music is also appreciated in the rest of the world as synonymous with freedom and taken into consideration as ” cultural weapon” in a propaganda key. Goebbles with crazy lucidity had already seen everything and had made use of “negroid” music but in doing so in a certain sense he had surrendered to the enemy since Charlie’s first record in 1941.
