Anti-Music: Jazz and Racial Blackness in German Thought between the Wars 143846987X, 978-1438469874

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 8
List of Figures......Page 10
Acknowledgments......Page 12
Introduction......Page 14
Chapter One The Jazz Paradox......Page 28
I. Bloch’s Blacks......Page 30
II. Jonny’s Jimmy......Page 38
III. Parodic Primitivism......Page 50
IV. Nazi Neger......Page 54
Chapter Two The Jazz Machine......Page 58
I. The Jazz Machine......Page 61
II. The Principle of Looking......Page 65
III. Jazz Vulgarity......Page 71
IV. The Astaire Automaton......Page 78
Chapter Three The Monkey’s Trick......Page 84
I. The Monkey’s Trick......Page 86
II. The Track of the Divine......Page 91
III. Jazzman Mozart......Page 101
Chapter Four The Music of Fascism......Page 116
I. Jazz at War......Page 119
II. That Ol’ Wagnerian Rag......Page 121
III. Slave to Jazz......Page 127
IV. Sacrificial Jazz......Page 133
Chapter Five Jazz-Heinis......Page 140
I. The Inner Crisis......Page 143
II. The Nazi Princess......Page 146
III. Stop, Thief......Page 154
IV. The White-Face Minstrel......Page 164
Conclusion......Page 168
Notes......Page 174
Bibliography......Page 198
Index......Page 220

Citation preview

Anti-Music

SUNY SERIES, PHILOSOPHY AND RACE Robert Bernasconi and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, editors

Anti-Music F F

Jazz and Racial Blackness in German Thought between the Wars Mark Christian Thompson

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2018 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Thompson, Mark Christian, 1970- author. Title: Anti-music : jazz and racial Blackness in German thought between the Wars / Mark Christian Thompson. Description: Albany, NY : State University of New York, 2018. | Series: Suny series: philosophy and race | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017030303| ISBN 9781438469874 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438469881 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy, German—20th century. | Jazz—Germany —20th century—History and criticism. | Blacks—Race identity—Germany— History—20th century. Classification: LCC B3181 .T46 2018 | DDC 781.65089/96073043—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017030303 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

F

For my incredible daughter, Genevieve Rosaria

CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGU R ES

ix

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

I N T RO D U C T I O N

xi

xiii

German Jazz and the Metronome of Race CHAPTER ONE

1

The Jazz Paradox: Race and Totalitarian Politics in German Jazz Reception C H A P T E R T WO

31

The Jazz Machine: Brecht and the Politics of Jazz CHAPTER THREE

57

The Monkey’s Trick: Herman Hesse and the Music of Decline CHAPTER FOUR

89

The Music of Fascism: Adorno on Jazz

vii

viii

Contents

CHAPTER FIVE

11 3

Jazz-Heinis: Klaus Mann and Jazz Ontology CONCLUSION NOTES

14 7

BIBLIOGR A PH Y INDEX

141

19 3

17 1

FIGURES

FIGU R E I.1

xiii

“Me as Al Jolson”—Eva Braun, 1937 FIGUR E I.2

xiii

Scene from the Entartete Musik exhibition, Düsseldorf, 1938 FIGU R E I.3

xx

Poster for Jonny spielt auf (1927) FIGUR E I.4

xx

Cover of the 1927 piano book for Jonny spielt auf F IGU R E I .5

xxii

The Entartete Musik catalog cover and poster, 1938 F IGU R E 1.1

1

“Jonny” caricature from the 17 January 1928 Wiener Zeitschrift FIGUR E 1.2

13

Die Gondel jazz parody, Berlin, 1924

ix

x

Figures

FIGU R E 1.3

19

Jenny Steinerdancer in “Jonny” “clown” outfit, circa 1920 F IGU R E 2 .1

31

Josephine Baker performing in Berlin, 1929 F IGU R E 3.1

57

Berlin carnival party, 1927 F IGU R E 4.1

89

Weintraubs Syncopators rehearsing in Berlin with ballet dancers, circa 1931 F IGU R E 5.1

11 3

Karin Boyd and Klaus Maria Brandauer in Mephisto (1981) F IGU R E C .1

141

Duke Ellington and Maianne Lutz-Pastre, Frankfurt, 1959 FIGUR E C.2

14 6

“His Master’s Voice”

AC K N OWL E D G M E N TS

My deepest thanks to the entire editorial staff at SUNY Press, and to Andrew Kenyon in particular, for taking an interest in this book and seeing it through to press. Also, my sincerest appreciation to Robert Bernasconi and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, the editors of the SUNY series, Philosophy and Race, and the foremost scholars working on these concerns—it is an honor to be among you. I would also like to thank my brilliant, generous colleagues at Hopkins for all of their support and encouragement, offering special thanks to Eric J. Sundquist, Peter Jelavich, and Sharon Cameron, for reading this book with me and helping me to make it better. And I thank my wife, Kerri, for this and everything else.

xi

Introduction

F

German Jazz and the Metronome of Race

Figure I.1 (left) Eva Braun in a photo entitled“Me as Al Jolson,” from an album belonging to Braun, Munich 1937—while she was Hitler’s mistress. Hulton Archive, Getty Images. Figure I.2 (right) Entartete Musik exhibition, Düsseldorf. To the left is a portrait of lyricist and impresario Hermann Haller, on the right a portrait of singer Richard Tauber. In the center is a painting by H. Scholz entitled Jazz. The photo was published in the Berliner Morgenpost, 30 May 1938. Ullstein Bild, Getty Images.

F This book examines German reflections on jazz of the interwar period, finding in them an apparent paradox. This paradox reflects the established historical narrative of black musical reception in Germany, one that reaches back to the mid-nineteenth century. It is informed by twentieth-century European primitivist notions of jazz and racial blackness, and by the German critical-theoretical confrontation with modernization, technology, and xiii

xiv

ANTIMUSIC

Americanization. The overt political debate over jazz between Left and Right during the interwar period in Germany serves only to intensify these conflicts. The debate’s resolution in the early ’30s is achieved when both Left and Right become convinced that jazz acts collusively with the totalitarian culture industry. And herein lies the apparent paradox: jazz comes to be seen as a collaborator in the repressive, virulently racist Nazi enterprise. To investigate this paradox more fully, Anti-Music practices symptomatic reading to assemble the disarticulated yet dominant ideological structures of German jazz reception of the Weimar and Nazi periods. These fractured and fractious skeletal remains are conditioned by the strategical identification and appropriation of perceived primitive characteristics of blackness for the delineation of German “racial” superiority. Anti-Music thus shares adjacent scholarly concerns with cultural studies broadly defined, and with the specific, extensive field of black cultural studies in Germany, where the historical presence of blacks in German, Austrian, and Swiss cultural and political history has been widely addressed.1 Along with writing the history of German colonialism and its concomitant atrocities in Africa and elsewhere, these studies locate and sequence black Germans and other peoples of African descent living in Germany over a longer period of time than one beginning in the twentieth century.2 The fuller historical picture that emerges allows us to move beyond the persistent assumption that blacks were somehow unknown or irrelevant in German-speaking lands until the Rhineland occupation immediately after World War I, or until jazz’s ascendency in Europe, or until the American occupation after World War II. Rather, as Peter Martin has importantly established, the African presence both in Germany and the German cultural imagination exists as early as medieval conflicts between Islam and German crusaders (Martin 27). At that time, black African Muslims were lumped together with all “infidels” without special “racial” dispensation, which came, ironically, only after Africans converted to Christianity. Dark skin was perceived within Catholic and later Protestant Germany, as elsewhere, as an incontrovertible and irrevocable sign of extreme, abject sinfulness. Blackness as a signifier for an excessive share of original and accumulated

Introduction

xv

sin had a prolific and enduring political meaning, in addition to its significance for salvation. For, conversion also meant loyalty to the Kaiser, which could not be effortlessly recognized through the near-blinding opacity of radically and obviously foreign born black skin. Where religion and statecraft were so inextricably bound, suspicion in one domain meant mistrust in the other (Martin 39). Aitken and Rosenhaft continue the narrative of Germany’s black diaspora by underscoring how discontinuous that history was, unlike more fluid racialized histories of contact and colonialism in other national historiographic traditions (Aitken and Rosenhaft 3–4). The medieval “Moor” does not begin a seamlessly continuous historiographic narrative of black presence in Germany, despite the fact that blackness never disappears from the German racial imaginary. Indeed, Fatima El-Tayeb’s groundbreaking work details the various techniques and strategies used in German thought in imagining and making institutional antiblack racism, from the Enlightenment to the end of the Weimar period, including the insinuation of African Americans into German ideologies of white supremacy (El-Tayeb 57). As early as 1815, the African American becomes a literary type in travelogues, as well as in accounts of German immigrants in the United States, for many of whom, sadly, slavery was seen as the African American’s intrinsic, ideal state (Paul 4–5, 20–21).3 Part of the reason for this view was the early-nineteenth-century German encounter with New World slavery through extensive exposure to photographs of African Americans in various joyful postures and poses, including singing and dancing (Kusser 9). The history of this thought is consummated in the monumental success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Germany in 1852, the year of its original American publication and virtually simultaneous translation into German. The novel was not read as an abolitionist’s account of slavery’s horrors so much as it was received and revered as a children’s story. The fin de siècle saw black exoticism become a staple of German advertising, presenting yet another venue for the ascendency of “darkie” typology as the German racial imaginary’s multifarious, preferred vehicle for conducting consumer consumption (Ciarlo 3–4). By the Weimar period, such

xvi

ANTIMUSIC

advertising had already paved the way for black expressive culture’s infiltration in almost every facet of German cultural life in one mediated form or another, from the plastic arts and serious music and ballet, to popular music, dance, and nightlife, to Weimar radio shows and cinema, the production of which began to accommodate, visually and in other filmic aspects, the jazz music that was integral to the audience’s cinematic experience (Nagl 30). The virulent antiblack racism of the Nazi period that lead to the victimization of so many Africans and people of African descent was complicated by jazz’s continued, unprecedented popularity in Germany after 1933. But propagandistic and opportunistic Nazi racial-cultural policy was eventually able to invent a German jazz racial “tradition” that made such a swing suitable to the racial requirements of the Reichskulturkammer (RKK). After World War II, the racial politics collected and codified by the RKK remained part of the everyday German cultural experience and the focus of both East and West German efforts to distance themselves from their shared Nazi past (Fehrenbach 2–3). The German postwar period also saw a wave of occupation children, or Mischlinge, a generation whose legacy only deepens its impact as it continues to create that continuous history long sought and since reconstructed with profound detail in the field of black German studies (Fehrenbach 6–7). As a postwar, still racialized phenomenon, German jazz acted as a self-conscious index and estimation of German cultural and national identity, both black and white, playing either an overt or assumed part of such critical genealogical histories as just outlined (Hurley 5).4 Reviving and rehearsing these histories necessarily pushes considerations of German jazz far beyond clichéd critical approaches to the German interwar period that reads philosophical discourse on jazz as having concentrated relevancy solely in Adorno’s work, and which are overly concerned with or haunted by the question of whether or not he “got” jazz (and if not, why not).5 Obviously, from Weimar through the Nazi period Adorno was but one German-language philosopher of jazz, albeit a powerful one, among many involved in this important, pervasive cultural, political, and racial debate. The task of this book is in part to help trace the course of philosophical jazz discourse of interwar German

Introduction

xvii

thought, of which Adorno’s work only makes up a part.6 Thus while black German cultural studies clearly help to situate this book’s discussion of jazz in Germany, Anti-Music does not claim to contribute to this body of work in the sense of adding to or augmenting our current understanding of black populations in Germany and German-speaking lands. It does not address the lived experience of Africans and peoples of African descent in Germany at this or any other time. Its intervention is made in philosophical discourse centered on Americanization and culture in Germany that either conflicted with or contributed to the rise of Nazi rule, and in both cases quite erroneously but nevertheless rigorously understood itself to be conditioned by and limited to white audiences. Conscious of what could be done effectively in this single study, readings more inflected by and focused on questions and issues surrounding German black identity were felt to be neither possible nor requisite in these pages. Indeed, within the field of black German studies there are already several outstanding scholars working on various aspects of black presence and jazz in German-speaking lands.7 Anti-Music takes a different tack, concentrating on the philosophical and ideological aspects of race in the German jazz discourse of the interwar and war years. In this light, the most significant scholarly study for the current work is perhaps Michael Kater’s seminal Different Drummers. Kater classifies jazz musicologically as an African American cultural idiom that eludes the outsider practitioner at first, and can only be played “correctly” by such a musician with much study and practice. The elements of jazz most salient to this conclusion are, according to Kater, jazz’s almost imperceptible, notationally elusive down- and upbeats; its continuous reproduction of non-Western (as qualified by Kater) triadic and diatonic scalar elements; melodic and harmonic improvisation, often involving rapidly shifting structures of key and tone; and tonal inflection creating the sound impression of “impurity” to the classically trained (for Kater, not African American) ear (Kater 13–14). The “average German dance-band instrumentalist” failed to grasp jazz’s complexity and created a music instead that sufficed to satisfy audiences that didn’t know any better, so Kater’s impeccable narrative runs. “Lack of inner feeling” for jazz, already a loaded racial phrase, was supplemented

xviii

ANTIMUSIC

by the conscious creation of noise. Where jazz was subtle, silent, and/or highly sophisticated, the German jazz band staged a scene that was neither shocking nor sufficient, but that satisfied (Kater 14). In other words, jazz in itself was not shocking to Germans—because they couldn’t hear it. Jazz’s true, shocking metronome was always race and not some strictly formal, musicological element. This improvised product produced its intervals between racial silences, and was predictable, if not exceptional—a quality that had its value. Pretending to play jazz in the Weimar period may have been more lucrative to German musicians than actually playing it, precisely for reasons of race (Kater 16). Obliviousness to jazz as music in all of its racial complexity went hand in hand with the casual effacement of actual black composers and musicians from the lived reality of live jazz and from German jazz recording, for commercial reasons, to be sure, but also as a antidote to what Kater feels was an inherent, essential racial tone deafness to black American jazz (Kater 16). Indeed, German jazz critics and composers were most hopeful of the music’s potential for challenging, destroying, and/or revitalizing the classical tradition in musical and theoretical forms easily assimilable to it, and not of jazz as a new musical idiom, aesthetically valuable in its own right (Kater 17). The German attitude toward blacks themselves in the Weimar period was, according to Kater, ambivalent at best. By the start of the ’30s, it was openly hostile. This hostility was intentionally exacerbated by associating jazz with Jewish practitioners and theorists, making the music de facto degenerate in anti-Semitic as well as antiblack terms. This is brought out clearly in the 1938 Entartete Musik exhibition catalog cover and advertisement, in which a black grotesque wearing a Star of David sucks on that most hated of jazz’s instruments, the saxophone. Indeed, jazz’s survival in Germany is mainly due to its resilience as a malleable German art form, and not as a vulgar American commodity, an African American import, or an execrable Jewish invention. The German jazz variant speaks to jazz’s life in Germany masquerading and authentically abiding as a cultural, if not musical, form of German invention and invective. While this is undoubtedly historically and philosophically true, it makes little sense to suggest that “different drummers”

Introduction

xix

refers to a varying and potentially oppositional set of compositional practices between German and African American jazz. Such an assumption, also a silent, pervasive racial metronome, leads to the device framing Kater’s indispensable, otherwise brilliant presentation of German jazz, namely that there was an insurmountable racial quality in African American jazz that could not be reproduced by Germans, try as they might. This critical position, even when unintentional, is neither interesting nor worthwhile to pursue, as it obstructs analysis of the sociocultural, political, and aesthetic reasons for why German musicians either consciously adopted or outright avoided racialized black poses in the music itself. Germans wrote and played jazz. The critical difference lay not in whether German jazz composers heard nonnotational notes that African-Americans could hear, but rather how the German critical discourse surrounding jazz sought to manipulate that assumption to racist or antiracist ends. Thus, while Kater’s justly heroic narrative of jazz resistance accords well with the raw historical and musicological data of German jazz that his book so expertly and comprehensively presents, Anti-Music lights on the symptomatic strains of the philosophical discourse surrounding jazz to present an alternative reading of German jazz race ideology. In this sense, the present study has much in common methodologically with Weiner’s important Undertones of Insurrection (2009), which understands “the modernist narrative of music, like its more accessible and popular counterparts, [as] based on the art’s role as a sign for a variety of issues, but [which] does more than merely reflect the social status of music. It both exploits music’s social parameters and unmasks them, ultimately subverting the socially determined equation of a given kind of music with a given sociopolitical concern. By exploiting the social assumptions related to the art, the modernist text thus reveals the ideology at work in the cultural vocabulary upon which it itself is based” (Weiner 20). In the case of jazz, this symptomatic textual reading identifies two separate cultural views simultaneously present in Germany, and often in the same discursive statement, each assigning a different racial origin to the music. In this sense, the title “different drummers” is completely apropos in terms of oppositional sets of philosophical-critical

Figure I.3. Poster for Ernst Krenek’s 1927 Zeitoper, Jonny spielt auf, starring Alfred Jerger, pictured here in the easily recognizable Jonny garb.

Figure I.4. Cover of the 1927 piano book to Jonny spielt auf.

Introduction

xxi

standards in the evaluation of jazz, outside of musicological discussions and theorizations of the singular phenomenon. The paradox generated is not a musicological one, at least not strictly or necessarily, but rather one distinguished by the wider needs of the critical theorization of the culture industry and Americanization present in the interwar period. This is not to say something so patently absurd as that musicology does not and cannot play a role in the consideration and elaboration of such critical paradigms, but that the thinkers here under consideration did not even pretend to rely on “objective” musicological qualification as their jazz theory’s final arbiter. For, as Weiner also importantly discusses in his brief yet rich 1991 essay “Urwaldmusik and the Borders of German Identity: Jazz in Literature of the Weimar Republic,” the music’s perceived racial and national foreignness presented a threat to “Germany’s cultural sovereignty” (Weiner 477). The notion of such a threat gives direct evidence of an attitude of national, cultural, and racial homogeneity that posits jazz as radically other in each of these regards. Thus, the overwhelming racist designation of jazz in the German cultural imaginary is as a “nigger” form of mass entertainment that was, because of its pervasive presence, infiltrating serious music and other forms of high culture. Within these domains, jazz retains its blackface and an accompanying retinue of racist tropes with near uniformity, regardless of discursive location and the political orientation of the cultural practitioner. The rebarbative stereotype of the jazz “nigger,” brought to near apotheosis in Ernst Krenek’s well-meaning opera Jonny spielt auf (1926), is standard in interwar literary jazz renderings, which nevertheless react in different ways to the far greater anxieties it obscures in its ubiquity. In other words, despite the existence and popularity of its prevalent white, German counterpart, jazz was almost universally represented, but not universally conceptually perceived, as monolithically or even predominantly black in its social life as the symptomatic, formal expression of a troubling element in the interwar German political unconscious. Jazz was always conceptual blackface. The representative transformation of this paradigmatic conceptual charade and its eventual concretization as a politically operative and effective reality is the image of Jonny spielt auf actor Alfred Jerger in blackface in 1926. An

xxii

ANTIMUSIC

interpretive drawing of this figure, no longer fully recognizable as Jerger and acceptable simply as “Jonny,” would function as the 1927 piano book’s cover. A 1928 caricature of Jonny from the Wiener Zeitschrift (figure 1.1) has already transformed the stock character into a homunculus, more monkey than man. And by the 1938, Ziegler’s Entartete Musik catalog cover and poster effaced all trace of Jerger and his monkey familiar, both swallowed whole by the projected reality of the grotesque Nazi fantasy of “blackJewish” jazz. This image of jazz was authorized by the confabulation of its origins as early as the Ziegfield-Follies’ dancing Dolly Sisters’ 1917 account in “Jazz, Ragtime By-Product, Revives A Lost Art of Rhythm” of first contact with black jazz in Cuba, which they claim was only thereafter imported to the United States. This story was made canon in Franz Wolfgang Koebner’s early, influential 1921 history of jazz, Jazz und Shimmy, leading to the persistent and often intentionally erroneous perception of jazz as exclusively

Figure I.5. Catalog cover and poster for the Entartete Musik exhibition. (1938)

Introduction

xxiii

black by virtue of origin (Weiner 479). In the German popular imagination, jazz’s originary, unforgivable blackness was corollary to the more general and changing political ascription of racial origins to cultural manifestations. The images of jazz representation remained the same, but their ascriptive meanings changed or were supplemented in various ways depending on prevailing cultural-political needs. The late Weimar and Nazi association of Jewishness with blackness and jazz speaks to this political instrumentality of reading for instability in an otherwise tropologically static racial origin story, and in the recognizable routine of the racist tropes of interwar and Nazi German expressive culture, high and low. Weiner thus rightly states, “in the Weimar Republic [jazz is] an innately Black, dangerous, and liberating art” (Weiner 484). To this we must add that, while their emblematic narrative strategies remained the same, the terms “black,” “dangerous,” and “liberating art” changed rapidly from year to year, both as free-standing signified concepts, and in semantic, differential relation to one another. The apparent exception to this is, of course, Adorno, whose musicological analysis of jazz is derived from a critical philosophy of the culture industry, and concentrates on white, German jazz. That said, though reached by different means, his conclusions on jazz present a development in the same critical philosophical reflective attitude his less musicologically inclined peers adopted toward jazz, whether or not he “got” jazz musicologically correct. In other words, Adorno’s musicological evaluation of jazz is crucial to his theory of it, but not with regard to jazz’s cultural, political, and philosophical existence beyond its material composition and historical existence within a music continuum. Indeed, the “actual” or “real” musicological status of the jazz of the German interwar period is in its critical theory not considered in depth, as even and especially during the interwar period such an approach to jazz as a racial signifier in Adorno and others would have disrupted the ideological claims they themselves were making for and about jazz racial and cultural politics. For as important as this musicological analysis may have then been, it was not decisive for the critical theorists either tacitly or overtly concerned firstly with race. For some, jazz offered a racially vitalist, primitivist liberation from ossified, oppressive political structures. For

xxiv

ANTIMUSIC

others, it represented the debilitating political effects of the culture industry’s commodification of race. And for Nazis determined to appropriate jazz to their racist political and propagandistic means and ends, jazz presented an opportunity. In each instance, jazz simply as music is absent. In this way, but not in this way alone, jazz is anti-music. Because of this, a musicological approach during the interwar period in any rigorous, objective, nonracialized sense would have obstructed racial appropriation, if not aesthetic and cultural appreciation or condemnation. The results of this racist-instrumentalist attitude toward jazz gives rise to the apparent paradox in question. It is the force of the shockwave produced by the dialectical collision within a critical theoretical understanding of jazz that accommodates two related yet utterly disparate political needs, namely the racist vilification of jazz as black and degenerate (Niggerjazz), a product of Negerkultur, and the embrace of jazz as uniquely German and racially pure, or what this study will refer to as Wagnerian jazz, for reasons that will only become fully apparent in the first chapter. For the moment let it suffice to say that the reinvigoration of the classical tradition seen as possible through jazz intervention and championed by Brecht in cultural-political conflict with conservative Wagnerians becomes part of Adorno’s critical theoretical condemnation of the music as an instrumental, reifying force of the culture industry (Harding 145–46). Through a hard line of argumentation punctuated by shallow musicological gestures reliant on philosophical bluster and political polemic for its affective and objective potencies, Adorno constructs a historical narrative of German jazz originating in Wagner—a blisteringly critical genealogy that Nazi cultural politics will paradoxically embrace as the advent of racially pure Aryan jazz. How this paradox in the German philosophical-cultural reception of jazz comes about is the story of this book. This book’s first chapter, “The Jazz Paradox: Race and Totalitarian Politics in German Jazz Reception,” begins with a reading of Ernst Bloch’s “Der Schwarze” feuilleton, collected in Spuren (1930), that establishes the theoretical frame for the book’s argument. This includes definitions for the book’s guiding conceptual terms blackness, racial parody, racial imaginary, and jazz Pharmakon. It then provides a detailed historical account of the

Introduction

xxv

reception and development of jazz and black music in Germany, including a consideration of the aesthetics and politics of jazz primitivism, and a discussion of German antiblack racism of the time. The chapter traces the development of the line of thought that ends in jazz’s association with the totalitarian culture industry and Nazism. This chapter favors an historicist approach in order to set the stage for the critical and philosophical turns in German interwar thought on jazz, allowing them to become visible and intelligible. While the rest of the book does not abandon the historicism on which the validity of its claims ultimately lays, it does look primarily to philosophical criticism and close reading to reveal and understand the coherent development of critical jazz reception in interwar Germany. In doing so, this book examines four essential thinkers in the jazz debates of the late ’20s through the early ’40s: Hermann Hesse, Bertolt Brecht, T. W. Adorno, and Klaus Mann. Chapter 2, “The Jazz Machine: Brecht and the Politics of Jazz,” examines how, for Brecht in the ’20s and early ’30s, jazz is a hybrid construction of the new music and the sound of the cabaret. It denotes the full political potential of the popular song while retaining the aesthetic dimension of the avant-garde, lending itself to the critical needs of the epic theater. The jazz aesthetic unifies in one medium modes of critical substitution and racial parody whereby political pedagogy enters the avant-garde work of art and also pop cultural products. The jazz piece offers no inherent content of its own but instead acts as the catalyst for the “re-functionalization” of ideological and pedagogical elements in cabarets and theaters and over the radio. Chapter 3, “The Monkey’s Trick: Hermann Hesse and the Music of Decline,” shows that Der Steppenwolf (1927) deviates from Hermann Hesse’s other formal meditations on the aesthetic and cultural importance of music to the individual and society by affording a central place to reflections on jazz. What Hesse calls the “music of decline” is grounded in parodic popular culture, and jazz is defined in terms of its ability to “ape” aesthetic expressions of high culture. This is its “monkey’s trick.” Chapter 4, “The Music of Fascism: Adorno on Jazz,” posits that for Adorno, jazz is not a product of black expressive culture but instead a

xxvi

ANTIMUSIC

commodity born on the battlefields of World War I and exploited by the culture industry in Germany. The culture industry promotes “blackness” and primitivist notions of “Negro vitality” (Negervitalität) as an advertising slogan, and as a mask for its ideological support of totalitarianism. In his “German” jazz history, Adorno finds jazz’s precursors in the German tradition of “serious” music, and specifically in Wagner. This interpretive move has vast implications for the arc of Adorno’s jazz engagement over his career, allowing him to conceive of jazz as the product of fascist martial culture while avoiding claims of racism. Chapter 5, “Jazz-Heinis: Klaus Mann and Jazz Ontology,” shows how Adorno’s critique of jazz is realized and radicalized in Klaus Mann’s Mephisto: Roman einer Karriere (1936). But where Adorno attempted to distance himself from primitivist discourse and charges of antiblack racism by removing jazz’s origin from the scenes of plantation slavery and black expressive culture on the whole, Mann reracializes jazz and condemns Nazism. His novel accuses the Nazis of having a repressed, “savage” African core as the source of their barbarism. Mann uses an intentionally exaggerated, parodic conception of blackness and jazz to burlesque Nazi Aryan culture, calling it Negerkultur. For Mann, jazz is the damning Africanized sign of Nazi barbarism and racial hypocrisy. The conclusion discusses jazz in postwar German cultural politics, concentrating on the immediate Nachkriegszeit. It briefly suggests ways in which Weimar and Nazi jazz discourse was reproduced by East and West Germany, with the two countries ascribing opposed political values to the same jazz elements. Ultimately, it shows that jazz reception in East and West Germany was always overtly ideological, conditioned by race, and fraught with questions of national identity.

ONE

The Jazz Paradox

F

Race and Totalitarian Politics in the German Jazz Reception

Figure 1.1. Caricature of black jazz saxophonist in Jonny costume, from the 17 January 1928 Wiener Zeitschrift, entitled “Der Götz von Berlichen.”

F The Negro Someone already saw himself better, precisely in his error. Late one night this gentleman arrived at a hotel with friends; all the rooms were taken. All but one; but someone else was already asleep in the room, a black 1

2

ANTIMUSIC

man; we’re in America. The gentleman took the room anyway; it was only for the night; early the next day he would have to catch a train. He enjoined the bellhop to knock at the door as well as the bed, and the right bed, not the black man’s. He and his friends then drank into the night, all sorts of strong stuff, so much that his friends, before they put him in the room, painted him in blackface without his even noticing. When the bellhop later woke him, he raced to the station, onto the train, and into the restroom to wash his face. Seeing himself in the mirror, he bellowed, “Now, that idiot woke the nigger after all!” The story is told in different ways, but always with the same outcome. Was the man still half-asleep? Certainly, and at the same time he was never more awake than at that moment. So indifferently near himself, yet his habitual whiteness fell from him like taking off a suit, however comfortable, in which he’d been stuck. Even whites look mostly like a distortion of themselves—nothing fits there; life is a sorry tailor. The black man would lose his suit even faster if he blinked hard just once. (21–22) —Ernst Bloch, Traces (1930) Der Schwarze Einer blickte sich schon mehr an, grade indem er irrte. Spät abends kam ein Herr ins Hotel, mit Freunden, alle Betten waren besetzt. Außer einem, doch im Zimmer schlief bereits ein Neger, wir sind in Amerika. Der Herr nahm das Zimmer trotzdem, es war nur für eine Nacht, in aller Frühe mußte er auf den Zug. Schärfte daher dem Hausknecht ein, sowohl an der Tür zu wecken als am Bett, und zwar am richtigen, nicht an dem des Schwarzen. Auf die Nacht nahm man allerhand Scharfes, mit so viel Erfolg, daß die Freunde den Gentleman, bevor sie ihn ins Negerzimmer schafften, mit Ruß anstrichen und er es nicht einmal merkte. Wie nun der Hausknecht den Fremden geweckt hatte, er rast an den Bahnhof, in den Zug, in die Kabine, sich zu waschen: so sieht er sich im Spiegel und brüllt: “Jetzt hat der Dummkopf doch den Nigger geweckt.”—Die Geschichte wird auch noch anders erzählt, läuft aber immer aufs Gleiche

The Jazz Paradox

3

hinaus. War der Mann nicht verschlafen? gewiß, und er war zugleich nie wacher als in diesem Augenblick. So unbestimmt nah an sich selbst und die gewohnte Weiße fiel vom Lieb wie ein Kleid, in das man ihn sonst, wenn auch ganz angenehm, gesteckt hatte. Auch die Weißen sehen meist nur dem Zerrbild von sich ähnlich; da sitzt nichts, das Leben ist ein schlechter Schneider. Dem Neger freilich fiele sein Kleid noch mehr herunter, blinzelte er einmal scharf hin. (35–36) —Ernst Bloch, Spuren (1930)

I. BLOCH’S BLACKS It is difficult to believe that this extraordinary parody of a fable by Ernst Bloch was written in the late 1920s.1 It uses multiple names and substitutions for racial blackness, including Neger, Nigger, the genitive des Schwarzen, and the nominative title, Der Schwarze. Using many differently inflected ways of racially designating a “black man,” Bloch has recourse to the unusual. “Der Schwarze” was not in use as a common racial designation (as Schwarzer now is) at the time Bloch composed the vignettes that form Spuren. If all that he wished to designate with his title was a man of discernible African descent, he would have used the terms he signals with in the body of the text, Neger or Nigger.2 Is Bloch guilty, then, of what would have been at this time an opaque usage, or of something else entirely? The answer lies in Bloch’s presentation of the racial substitution and parody on which the text depends for its content, signification, and significance. This will not be to say that Bloch advances a notion of race based on contingency. On the surface it will appear that Bloch makes a claim for race as a social construct as opposed to a biological essence. While this impression will prove to be false, he does insist that race can act as a type of secondary appropriation, that race is open to being parodied, that it cultivates staged imposture, and that it thrives on theatrical, costumed substitution. Whereas Bloch’s text ends with the isolated subject’s confrontation with himself in the mirror, it begins with the social individual in a crowd.

4

ANTIMUSIC

It is not yet clear that this male figure is abroad, only that he is among the masses. He is merely in a hotel that is booked to capacity, with the exception of one bed in a shared room. The room’s other occupant is a black man (Neger). This fact alone confirms to the man that he is in America. It is, of course, not the case that the European did not know which country he was in until seeing a black man in, or rather, included in, a hotel. Instead Bloch relies on the by-then-conventional cultural association in the late jazz age in Germany of the United States with African Americans. In doing so, Bloch situates the intelligibility of his discourse firmly in the realm of mass culture, and in particular in relation to jazz. The black man, coupled with the automatic assumption on the part not just of the man but the text, provides the interpretive schemata for the interlude. For to the German racial-cultural imagination of this time, African Americans stood in for all American cultural products, with jazz functioning as the determinative representative, or master signifier, in the mass cultural field. And if we understand the hotel as Bloch’s contemporary European American mass cultural field, then the man, or Germany, sleeps with African American jazz culture, slightly belatedly yet decisively. The man “enjoins” (einschärfen; “Schärfte daher dem Hausknecht ein”) the bellhop to wake him early, expressly commanding that the wrong man not be awakened. The scene is a play on Hegel’s critique of Schelling’s absolute as a night in which “all cows are black.” Bloch was a trained philosopher deeply influenced by German Idealism, and in particular by Hegel and Schelling. It should therefore come as no surprise to find Bloch alluding to the two philosophers’ most famous point of reference. In this common point of reference, Hegel objects that the absolute as Schelling conceives it lacks a modal construction, making it impossible to differentiate characteristics between the objects it mediates. Here Bloch slyly foreshadows the story’s ending by suggesting that the darkness of early morning might make it difficult for the bellhop to distinguish between the men, black and white, as if racial modality had been suspended or destroyed. A quick read, then, might be satisfied with Bloch’s partially shrouded suggestion that racial blackness is a matter of surfaces determined by the visible spectrum.

The Jazz Paradox

5

A closer look illuminates the fact that for Bloch it is not a matter of physical appearance and juxtaposition. Race, or a certain understanding of blackness, is an intellectual-cultural complex that can be imposed on the subject from the outside, even on a “lowly” bellhop. There are differentiating racial modes, such as biology and culture. However, something has obscured them. After this stern, apparently necessary warning to avoid mistaking one black cow for another, a drinking party between friends ensues, a sort of symposium, during which the man no doubt imbibes to great excess in addition to, perhaps, using narcotics (we are told only that they took in, “allerhand Scharfes”). Bloch is of course well aware that jazz was strongly associated with drug use and drug culture in Weimar, as well as being itself considered like a drug. Spuren, then, as a work of expressionist philosophy, uses an adapted form of symposia and hints at drug use, immediately calling to mind both Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus. It will come as no surprise to mention that Bloch was critically engaged with Platonic philosophy, particularly in The Principle of Hope (published in three volumes in 1954, 1955, and 1959), in which he is deeply critical of Plato’s concept of anamnesis, but very supportive of his notion of Eros. Indeed, in the massive work Bloch explicitly and importantly joins the figure of Plato’s Eros in the Symposium and the Phaedrus. He writes: “Not least the image of the Agon is also of such an emotional nature, the image of the contest in which the nevertheless still amiable, indeed playful Eros, as Plato portrays it in the Symposium, becomes in the Phaedrus the all-beginner, all-creator” (The Principle of Hope, vol. II, 845). While it is not my intention here to give a detailed analysis of Bloch’s extensive investment in Platonic philosophy, it suffices to say that Bloch places great importance of the imminent connection between the Symposium and the Phaedrus. For Bloch, the two dialogues are intimately bound through Eros. Thus, despite its literary form, Bloch’s text is a philosophical discourse that makes reference to a drinking party and narcotic use. Embedded within, among other things, the Western philosophical tradition, the text alludes to the Platonic corpus and in particular to the Symposium and Phaedrus. Through Phaedrus the interlocutor, both texts are linked to discussions of ecstatic states and the Pharmakon.

6

ANTIMUSIC

While Bloch relies on the multiple philosophical meanings of the Greek term, his intent here is not Platonic in any strict sense of an analysis and appropriation of either the Symposium or the Phaedrus. Rather he wishes to consider the jazz scene through the various, general philosophical associations linked to the Platonic concept of Pharmakon, all of which are ultimately secondary to their contemporary social referent. The results of this effort read remarkably like at least two now imminently familiar theories of the Greek Pharmakon, both conditioned here by blackness. The first is blackness as scapegoating and sacrifice (Girard, which will be treated later in the book), and the second is blackness as difference, indeterminacy, and substitution (Derrida). Bloch is, however, neither Girardian nor Derridean before the fact. In Bloch, philosophy becomes a metaphor for naming the indeterminacy of value and hierarchy in material culture while still maintaining normative racial and sexual values. For Platonic eroticism (the two men both “sleep” together in the literal sense and join or couple in the night at the level of subjectivity) here names the perceived homosexuality as racial sexual perversion linked to jazz culture, not a transhistorical ritual signification or an irreducibly deferential operation. The degeneration of the race is accelerated in jazz’s invasive racial indeterminacy at a historically constitutive moment in a rigidly defined national-racial culture. Narcotics use and narcosis are seemingly unavoidable supplementary activities to the jazz scene alone. Ultimately, Bloch sees jazz blackness as the cultural-historical medium functionally akin to the iterative philosophical plenitude found in the concept of the Pharmakon, strictly and exclusively within his contemporary milieu. In so doing, Bloch, despite having the man fall into a deep, coma-like sleep during which his friends transform his race, is not positing the palliative, differential, or toxic properties of an ultimately indeterminate, ambiguous understanding of race. Painting him in blackface in his intoxicated, probably narcotized, dream-like state adds to the story a parodic element in which Bloch burlesques the fable of transformation while relying on the idea of Pharmakon to create the phantasmagorical, fairytale-like atmosphere of this otherwise deeply materialist story. Indeed, the metamorphosis has occurred through jazz culture as Pharmakon, bearing in mind that jazz was overtly

The Jazz Paradox

7

and insistently linked at the time with narcotic use and drug culture, and the music itself was seen as a narcotic. Jazz variations as much as anything else could be “allerhand Scharfes.” But this does not mean, for Bloch, that race is inherently illusory, or “pharmakological.” Phantasmagorical is the racial effect of jazz and the image of race imposed on the precariously constructed subject of mass entertainment, but not on race itself. The man races to the train in blackface, the tempo of modern, technologized life moving too quickly for him to have taken stock of himself before leaving in the early hours of the morning. In the train men’s room, finally finding a moment to look at himself, the man mistakes his own face for that of the black man. It is here that we get the use of the word “nigger” for the first and only time in the story. Angered by having the black man awoken instead of the white, the strongest racist epithet used in the story serves as a means for the man, first, to distance himself from his own racial blackness, and second and more importantly, to foreclose on the knowledge that blackness as he imagines it exists but is incomplete without cultural, pharmacological supplement. Bloch suggests here that blackness is a performance layered atop a biological fact, a painted black face that can be applied to black as well as white skin to equal effect. It is a reflection in the mirror, whose insubstantiality, whose emptiness, is filled by the needs, emotional and material, of the blackened subject. Indeed, for Bloch the subject’s formation is incomplete without racial imagining vis-à-vis blackness, without the construction and constitution of the blackness in the racial imaginary through which to see and interpret one’s reflection. The suggestion here is not, as in the type of fairy tale Bloch presents and undermines throughout Spuren, that the bellhop could not tell a white man and a black man apart, but that the blackface worn by the white man is racially just as convincing as the skin of the black man from a certain perspective, and that in any event, in the culture industry black men wear blackface as well.3 Ultimately, the man’s encounter with a stranger on a train reveals the parodic structure of blackness as essential to subject formation within the German racial imaginary and determined in the last instance by the culture industry. My use of the term “parody,” following the OED, stems etymologically

8

ANTIMUSIC

from the “post-classical Latin parodia (4th cent.; in classical Latin as a Greek word),” which follows the “ancient Greek ʌĮȡ૳įȓĮ a burlesque poem or song.” The prefix ʌĮȡĮ (para) means “counter” or “contra,” but also “besides.” “Ode” (ધįȒ), understood here notionally as a poetic mode of production as much as a formal attribute, mediates the combined two senses of the prefix. This mediation insists on both the nearness or “intimacy” that Hutcheon suggests “besides” implies, as well as the combative, adversarial aspect of “para” (Hutcheon 32). The “ode” in parody outlines the “formal address” by which two racialized subject positions, whose relationship is that of the irreconcilable yet intimate aspects in the prefix “para,” adapt to each other and coexist in the same space. Parody is a form of nearness, or promiscuity in the spatial sense of the word, that embraces—figuratively, formally, and poetically—the hostility between intimates and inmates. Thus, I also wish to retain at least the sense if not the rigor of the term’s origin in poetics as an “ode” or formal address while making a cultural and political argument. In this respect, I am deeply invested in the OED’s primary definitional trait of parody as “A literary composition modeled on and imitating another work, esp. a composition in which the characteristic style and themes of a particular author or genre are satirized by being applied to inappropriate or unlikely subjects, or are otherwise exaggerated for comic effect. In later use extended to similar imitations in other artistic fields, as music, painting, film, etc.” Bearing this in mind, the operational definition of parody I follow is, however, the OED’s extended-use listings: “a poor or feeble imitation of something; a travesty”; and “to imitate in a way that is a parody; esp. to copy or mimic for comic or derisive effect; to make fun of, satirize.” Parody comprehends, as Hutcheon writes, an “imitation with critical difference” and “the inscription of continuity and change” (Hutcheon 36). But this “critical difference” is not neutral, as Hutcheon is aware. It contains a value, in that it entails a derisive judgment as travesty. Parody does not simply mimic the structure of difference and repetition, it describes a subversive poetic practice. As Dentith has written, “while all language use certainly involves imitation, the particular inflection that we give to that imitation (and parody is one possible inflection) indicates the extent to which we have adapted language

The Jazz Paradox

9

to occasion, transformed the value given to he utterance, and thus redirected the evaluative direction in that chain of utterances. Parody is one of the means available to us to achieve all those ends” (4). The travesty of parodic transformation is subversive in that it attempts to “redirect” the meaning of statement from within. This subversive process is operative in what I refer to as the German racial imaginary and imagination. By these terms I mean a complex process of parodic interpolation, representation, and expression. Racially parodic images are structured in the imagination according to an aesthetic and sociohistorically generated conceptual imaginary—a stockpile of ultimately fictive racist images, “scientific” classifications and “historical” narratives used to determine the nature of blacks. After being deemed appropriate and allocated to the site of the racial reconstruction of a localized systemic failure in the structural integrity of the racialized ego, they are deployed for pharmacologically palliative, comparative purposes, the end of which is the justification of racial oppression. The already-given racialized subject identifies with the specular image of the black as a means of exerting control over the self. This means that the conceptual constellation of racial attributes imputed to the black other preexists within the self in an untenable psychological tension with an established, symbolic order of race. My terms here are Lacanian, but the overall argument is not. It is not an institution-based, Althusserian understanding of jazz and race in interwar Germany, nor is an inversion and relocation of Fanon intended. It is not my purpose to set forth a theory of fascist psychological, institutional, and colonial procedure. My interest is in the historical formation of philosophical jazz discourse through cultural racism and political expediency. While crucial, the imaginative aspect of this process is not thought psychoanalytically but poetically, loosely defined. The German racial imagination is the differential switch between historical content and cultural context.4 It mediates between the German racial imaginary and the culture industry. The racial imaginary, here set in the German context but certainly operative outside of it, “poetically” manufactures a racialized, commodified stand-in or dupe for, and fetish object of, the racial other. By “racialized” I mean the conceptualization and designation of the deemed

10

ANTIMUSIC

racial other within a value-laden industrial network of comparative, hierarchical racial properties as cultural capital. There are, then, in the racial imaginary, different “races,” and then there are “racialized” human beings, some of whom are for sale. Blackness for Bloch is, then, blackface minstrelsy as fetishized commodity constituting the subject as consumer. It is this jazz-inflected understanding of blackness that allows Bloch to go so far as to insist that both men could shed their suits and that the black man would have an even easier time doing so than the white because he is the unwitting source of commodified racial blackness; indeed, it would take him but the blink of an eye. The black man would need no narcotic, no mirror; he would simply need to refocus, momentarily, how he perceives the world to register his African American blackness as a jazz commodity. Naked beneath the suits one is left with one black and one white body, neither knowing how to understand and perform his inherent racial disposition within the mass cultural field. Despite the notable omission of music of any kind in the story, Bloch describes a jazz experience. His Negerfabel of America and mass culture mirrors precisely how debates surrounding jazz in Germany during the later half of the ’20s were framed conceptually. However distorted, it is still relatively easy to find in Bloch’s text the racialized face of jazz discourse in Germany. That experience is one of racial parody and performance, in which the concept of “race” as an essence is never challenged. Bloch’s commentary on jazz hinges solely on the fetishized, constructed nature of blackness as a commodity, and not on race in general. The text is about the commercialized nature of blackness; it names the commodification of blackness in and as jazz that comes to determine white subject formation as it becomes internalized, through the culture industry, by the German racial imaginary. The black man, too, can shed his blackness. Indeed, along with several different ways of naming a black man, Bloch also enhances his jazz code in the passage with variations on the word scharf. This dexterous wordplay links jazz hot music, which in German is Geschärfte Musik, with racial confusion (the man must “enjoin” [einschärfen] the bellhop not to confuse him with a black man in the dark), and the implied drug use in allerhand

The Jazz Paradox

11

Scharfes, with “blinzelte er einmal scharf hin,” or what the black man must do to have a similar experience to that of the “de-racialized” white man. The narcotized state, including that of sleep, becomes a way of seeing through the dream of race. However, even in such “sober” reflection, the black man cannot imagine himself as otherwise than black. In this sense, he is not a jazz consumer but, as blackness, an always-mediated, manufactured product of the culture industry. His “blackness” as a subject position is inherently illusory because of its hybrid, black-faced “nature.” African American “blackness,” of which jazz is the most pervasive, successful articulation in interwar Germany, is nothing but a shadow made substance. “Der Schwarze” designates the race complex given in African American jazz that is, in the final analysis, an empty color and nothing more.

II. JONNY’S JIMMY Bloch’s fable, then, is deeply forward-looking, not as a critique of the idea of race, but as an in situ rumination on blackness and the culture industry as evinced in interwar German jazz reception. One current, differing way of understanding jazz reception in interwar Germany is as “aural shock.” Attempting to adapt Alter and Koepnick’s Benjaminian argument for the disorienting, quasitraumatic effect of cinema as it established itself in modern mass culture to jazz, Wipplinger understands the music as causing a type of rupture in the German ear for the tones, rhythms, and the cadences of quotidian life. He writes, “[J]azz music and the German experience of it are bound up with specific transformations of sound and music under modernity and with the impact of the noise of modernity on the modern ear” (Wipplinger 301). Wipplinger doesn’t date or define the always historically and definitionally nebulous term “modernity.” To situate his argument, he gives instead a hard date for the introduction of the black jazz revue in Germany as the instigating event, May 1925. Wipplinger takes the Chocolate Kiddies’ first performance in Berlin to be the aurally shocking, watershed moment of African American jazz in Germany.

12

ANTIMUSIC

It is, of course, a risk to premise an aural argument on “the never before seen” in an historical field as wide and as deep as the one jazz commands, regardless of the country. For example, how can we consider the sound of the Chocolate Kiddies truly shocking in 1925 Germany when, in 1924, a year before Sam Wooding and the Chocolate Kiddies performed at the AdmiralPalast in Berlin, the black ensemble “Nigger-Jazz-Band” played in the city, as did the white Ohio Lido Venice Band in the same year (Weiner 475)? And even then, Germany did not receive jazz as “aural shock”: there had already been in the country a fairly lengthy engagement with jazz, proto-jazz, and African American music more generally, such that most of the stock imagery and racist assumptions that went into representing jazz in that country had already long existed. Indeed, the critical idea that African Americans and African American music in Germany were somehow new and shocking in 1925 is itself a cliché promoted by the German jazz age itself. To be clear, my purpose here is not to disparage Wipplinger. I fully understand that his claim is limited to the “first African American jazz band” which, despite its infelicitous inaccuracy, does not change the fact that his work in this field is of the highest order, setting the standard for much analysis of the intersection of German jazz and race. When reading Wipplinger I am not, therefore, primarily interested in the historical priority of black jazz bands in Germany, for which there are better sources. Rather, his trenchant analyses of Weimar jazz are of paramount importance where the primary issue is racism and the racist cultural and intellectual projects that interpolated jazz before it had ever been heard or dreamed of in Germany, dating back at least a century before the Chocolate Kiddies’ 1925 performance. This long-lived, pernicious cultural and scientific racism makes anything like even the “momentary” “aural shock” of jazz impossible. German racism had always been ready for jazz, regardless of which year the Chocolate Kiddies first played the Palace, as a highly developed iconographic language of jazz racial parody and offense already existed in Germany well before the 1925 appearance of the Chocolate Kiddies, as the image to the right from 1924 makes viscerally clear.

The Jazz Paradox

13

Wipplinger’s essay falls into this thought, so uncharacteristic for its companion pieces, through an understanding of “aural shock” that suffers from an overreliance on an overly optimistic interpretation of comments Benjamin made in a letter to Adorno regarding the latter’s “Über Jazz” (1936, which Adorno published under the Mickey Mouse–type name Hektor Rottweiler). Early in their correspondence, Adorno and Benjamin found a focal point of powerful conceptual identification in their respective work on jazz and film (TCC 130, 144). Indeed, Adorno insisted that Benjamin read his essay “On Jazz” as a type of primer to their intellectual friendship, going so far as to send Benjamin his personal reading copy of the essay in Paris. Adorno felt that the philosophical kinship with Benjamin was so close in their thinking on aspects of the culture industry that he was compelled to write to Benjamin that he had developed the basic conceptual framework for his jazz essay before he became familiar with Benjamin’s work (TCC 135).

Figure 1.2. Parody of a jazz band, by the Berlin variety theater group Die Gondel; stage design Paul Leni, 1924. Photographer: Zander and Labisch. Published in Uhu, February, 1924. Ullstein Bild, Getty Images.

14

ANTIMUSIC

For his part, Benjamin responded that Adorno’s thinking on jazz syncopation (Synkope im Jazz) helped him to crystalize his own theory of shock effect in film (TCC 144). On 30 June 1936, shortly before seeing Adorno in person, Benjamin writes him: In Erwartung unserer bevorstehenden Begegnung will ich auf Einzelheiten Ihrer Arbeit kaum eingehen. Immerhin will ich auf die lange, ja nicht einmal auf die kurze Bank schieben, Ihnen zu sagen wie sehr mir der Komplex ‘Chockwirkung’ im Film durch Ihre Darstellung der Synkope im Jazz erhellt wird. Ganz allgemein scheint mir, daß unsere Untersuchungen wie zwei Scheinwerfer, die von entgegensetzen Seiten auf ein Objekt gerichtet werden, Umriß und Dimension der gegenwärtigen Kunst in durchaus neuer und sehr viel folgenreicherer Weise erkennbar machen als das bisher erzielt wurder. (GS 1023) (In view of our imminent meeting, I do not wish to discuss any particular details of your work here. Nonetheless, I would not like to let this opportunity pass without saying at once just how much your own interpretation of syncopation in jazz has helped to clarify for me the entire question of “shock effects” in film. In general, it seems to me that our respective investigations, like two different headlamps trained on the same object from opposite directions, have served to reveal the outline and character of contemporary art in a more thoroughly original and much more significant manner than anything hitherto attempted.) (TCC 144) The possible current critical difficulty comes in reading Benjamin as having meant that these concepts were oriented in the same direction, when in fact his statement makes it clear that they were not (“Ganz allgemein scheint mir, daß unsere Untersuchungen wie zwei Scheinwerfer, die von entgegensetzen Seiten auf ein Objekt gerichtet werden”). Conceptually, Benjamin means instead that Adorno’s essay helped him to realize his own thought on shock

The Jazz Paradox

15

effect in film in opposition to jazz syncopation (Synkope im Jazz)—and not to jazz generally—and as jazz syncopation’s negation, which it fundamentally is in terms of critical-theoretical valuation. This is not to say that Benjamin disagreed with Adorno on jazz generally; quite the opposite, Benjamin states emphatically in the wider correspondence that he and Adorno are in full accord about the music, even to the point of its fascistic properties (TCC 192– 93). His point is that jazz syncopation and regularity, and not jazz generally, helped him to envision, negative-dialectically, the ways in which film deviates from this metronomic repetition and becomes an authentic aesthetic-political force, where jazz syncopation is obviously not that for Adorno. Using bombast to avoid this potentially fatal confusion, Benjamin goes so far as to reassure Adorno in the 30 June letter that jazz is not being valued positively, by insisting that he and Adorno are investigating contemporary art in an unprecedented critical manner. Obviously, Benjamin would have considered film art and, having read “Über Jazz,” would have known well that Adorno did not accord jazz the same honor (der gegenwärtigen Kunst in durchaus neuer und sehr viel folgenreicherer Weise erkennbar machen als das bisher erzielt wurder). There is no other way to read Benjamin’s comment on jazz in relation to his work on film without assigning a potentially positive, politically progressive, and avant-garde aesthetic value to Adorno’s conception of jazz syncopation, which would entail a highly unlikely misreading on Benjamin’s part. And if this does not convince us, we might well recall that Benjamin arranged and wrote large portions of his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928) while listening to jazz in an “after hours” club. As he tells us with no small amount of pride in “A Berlin Chronicle,” he “sat long evenings” next to what he slyly refers to as an “amphitheater” in the intimate, indeed promiscuous setting of the darkened upper room of the notorious Princess Café in Weimar Berlin—a space Benjamin provocatively calls the “anatomy school.” According to Benjamin, he would sit there “close to a jazz band, discreetly consulting sheets and slips of paper, writing my Origin of German Tragic Drama” (Reflections 24). Anyone wishing to read Benjamin’s view of jazz as uncritically congruent with Adorno’s would do well to remember this autobiographical scene. Wipplinger’s and others’ possible misreading of

16

ANTIMUSIC

Benjamin’s shock effect with regard to Adorno and jazz aside, his other, far more important, sensitive, and astutely history-driven essays do not engage in such speculation—and this lack is a strong reason for their brilliance. The true black shock to Germany came in 1919, and not from music but rather in the form of the Rhineland occupation. The presence of French Moroccan and Senegalese troops in the Rhineland was so odious to Germans that the soldiers had to be recalled in 1920 due to fears of a popular uprising, but not before this “insult” gave rise to a mini-industry of popular novels of black fighters raping German women and acting out other atrocities in accordance with racist stereotypes and fantasies (Partsch 1994, 111). In light of the Rhineland occupation and the culture that spring up around it, African American jazz, identified with US Army fighters but construed as related to the African soldiers, was truly seen as “barbarians at the gate” (Partsch 1994, 114). Any consideration of racial shock, including the possible aural disruptions and distortions recorded and created by jazz, would have to take into consideration the psychological “shock,” or more specifically “trauma,” Germans experienced during African occupation—a fact to which Wipplinger’s many other, often brilliant essays on the subject attest.5 Ultimately, jazz aurality, shocking or not, could not have been thought at all apart from race and as a symptom of traumatic modernity. The implication that African American music or American jazz concepts had no racial history of violence, shock and awe, or influential musical-conceptual predecessors before 1925—hence the “aural shock” of jazz—is thus deeply flawed.6 These mutations and recodifications of sound “under modernity” in Germany did not happen overnight but were the result of a protracted, negotiated history to which most Germans and the German racial imaginary, at least with regard to jazz, were already initiated. Indeed, the notions that jazz in Weimar Germany as inextricable from race registers “the shock of the aural, in its aesthetic mediation of the danger and exhilaration of the sounds of the street and the machine,” is unthinkable without a thorough consideration of race and untenable as an easy notion of racial construction as shock (Wipplinger 302). The fact is that by 1925 Germany was already well prepared to sustain the racial and aural experiences of jazz “modernity.” In the early ’20s,

The Jazz Paradox

17

these experiences were combined into the notion of American culture that modified the image of the African seared into the German racial imagination by the Rhineland occupation. The African American already had a mass cultural history in Germany, one that spoke more to musical amusement coupled with sexual submissiveness than it did to masculine military prowess and black male potency, despite the black participation in the war. Blacks became aligned with white Americans, the two standing for the two poles of American culture; for the Dawes plan left in its wake a craze for two “American” attributes: the freedom and originality of blacks, expressed in music, and the innovative, mechanized capitalist production of Ford, understood broadly as that which Germany must master to become great again (Partsch 1994, 106). Finally possible as early as 1923, jazz imports were by 1925 a commonplace among the social elite as jazz became Gebrauchsmusik for the educated middle class, associated with the radio and gramophone as the music of already familiar machines (Partsch 1994, 107–8). This means that, far from a shock imposed on Germany in 1925, by the end of 1924 Germans were comfortably reproducing and consuming jazz on a large scale. This demand was inspired by the much earlier German exposure to African American music and performance. Already from the last half of the nineteenth century blacks and black-faced “entertainers” performed across Germany in minstrel shows. These performances gave rise to an aspect of popular song and dance at the turn of the century constructed from what German songwriters and musicians had seen or heard of African American music, and what they imagined not just the music but African Americans to be. For example, in 1904, Rudolf Nelson and Hermann Klink had great success with his “Cakewalk-Lied: Meine kleine Braune,” and Walter Kollo’s “Das kleine Niggergirl” found a receptive audience (Lareau 32, 34). These songs also gave expression to the codification of a racial stereotype of the objectified, sexualized black female body. While this is perhaps unsurprising, what does give pause is the infusion into this body of a loving personality capable of understanding and adding to complex Western male subjectivity. As well as being a primal, bestial sexual partner, the “little nigger girl” is also deeply empathetic and slyly intelligent. Already at the turn of the century

18

ANTIMUSIC

we begin to see a paradoxical image of African Americans taking shape in the German racial imaginary. This imagination was only further fed from 1900 to 1915, when ragtime became all the rage in Germany. Ragtime was such a pop cultural force that in 1912 the Kaiser forbade Prussian soldiers from dancing to it in uniform, due to its unmanliness (Jost 24). This music also became ensconced in German musicology and popular composition, for throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century, ragtime sheet music was heavily bought and sold, as were ragtime recordings before the war. Particularly popular among these were two banjo duets by Diamond and Curry, “Hot Coon Medley,” and “Medley of May Irwin’s Coon Songs.” These and other such songs could be heard during this time in any of the many cabarets and dance halls established for the enjoyment of ragtime and pre-jazz “hot” music. Ragtime and “hot” dance also pervaded the cinemas, where mass audiences encountered jazz dance regularly in films, and jazz was played as film accompaniment, and where the film and revue ragtime dancers Irene and Vernon Castle were already internationally famous (Tirro 70–71; Petrescu 277–78). And yet, the international aspect of African American music’s dissemination, as jazz and otherwise, cannot be stressed enough, especially given that Germany before, during, and after the war is not hermetically sealed, despite embargoes and other restrictions. It would therefore be a mistake to limit the presentation of jazz’s influence in Germany solely to appearances in Germany by strictly African American performers of jazz. Musicians such as the white Ross Brothers were nevertheless coded black by virtue of the jazz they played; and the music, for example, of African American military bands playing in the immediate wake of World War I, most notably James Reese’s Europe’s 369th Infantry “Hell Fighters” Band, was nevertheless coded as jazz by virtue of the musicians’ blackness. In other words, the situation is more complex than schematic, two-dimensional notions of race and place allow. For example, although the war disrupted the importation of recordings in Germany until about 1923, recording stars such as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band were nevertheless known throughout Europe as early as 1917. Did not a single German musician know this in, say, 1922? The great Sydney

The Jazz Paradox

19

Bechet, who would eventually take the post of musical director of La Revue nègre in 1926, in Berlin, after Josephine Baker’s departure, famously played in London in 1919. Are we to assume that no musician in Germany knew anything of this in, say, 1921? By 1922, the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, the Ross Brothers, and the Four Black Diamonds had all played in Austria (Kucher 71). Did this mean nothing to Berlin? Had the Berliners not even heard? And it was by the mid to late ’20s that recordings of Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven spread, along with those of Wilbur Sweatman’s Original Jazz Orchestra, and of the Original Memphis Five, across Europe as a whole, finding audiences that had long been prepared for them critically, even in Germany (Tirro 71–79). How could that have been, if Germans had been in the dark about jazz for so very long? This series of questions voices methodological concerns in approaching the relation between German jazz and race when we realize that something as seemingly straightforward as Krenek’s Jonny costume was no invention of Jonny spielt auf, but rather had already existed as a fully established iconographic convention for years before Krenek’s Zeitoper, as the 1920 photo of Jenny (Jonny) Steindancer (or Stein-dancer) makes starkly visible. The war and its immediate aftermath of occupation and embargo obviously did not prevent Germans from acquiring extensive, and even firsthand, experience with jazz, a fact which becomes invisible when we become overly dependent on the ultimately incomplete data available regarding the historical priority of performance and recording dates, to Figure 1.3. Jenny Steinerdancer as the exclusion of critical common sense. a “clown” in Germany, in a revue by The main critical intervention Rudolf Nelson, circa 1920. Ullstein on behalf of jazz came in the major Bild, Getty Images.

20

ANTIMUSIC

avant-garde journals. One such contribution was from the Viennese avantgarde periodical Anbruch, which devoted an entire special issue to jazz in April 1925, one month before Sam Wooding’s Berlin performance (Cook 37). But the primary organon for the dissemination of reflections on jazz was Auftakt, led by Alfred Baresel, who writes in the journal of jazz as “deliverance” as early 1921 (Cook 30). By 1924, H. H. Stuckenschmidt, in Der Kunstblatt, and the Czech Erwin Schulhoff in Auftakt were considering jazz as a type of art dance music (Cook 37). In 1925, Baresel published his Das Jazz-Buch, which would influence all jazz discussion in Germany at least until 1933. Baresel, who also became a jazz pianist, likened jazz, in a positive sense, to a narcotic, in Auftakt in 1926 (Cook 38). By middecade Kunstjazz became the term Baresel and others used to describe attempts by “serious” composers to create jazz compositions, an idea taken up by Paul Bertrand in his 1927 book, Jazz: Eine musikalische Zeitfrage, which discussed approaches to jazz influences for and in European music (Cook 39–40). Other influential, sober books on jazz were published as well in the mid ’20s, at precisely the time Germany was supposed to be reeling in aural shock from the music. Indeed, already by the mid ’20s, jazz in Germany is a “muddled amalgam of genuine jazz, nut jazz, pseudo jazz, popular song, and dance forms (foxtrot, shimmy, Charleston) from America” (Bell 11; see also Lareau 44). And by the mid ’20s, black figures were staples of popular songs in Germany and firmly established in the interwar German cultural imagination. The “hot” dances were performed to syncopated music based on ragtime and contained the exotic allure of wild blackness (Bell 11). The shimmy itself was originally called the “Jimmy,” after the stock black Jonny character made globally famous by Ernst Krenek. While Krenek’s 1927 Jonny spielt auf took the music world by storm and at once either delighted or appalled the hardened German audiences of the roaring ’20s, the character of Jonny was, as shown above, neither “shocking” nor new. Jonny had been a stock figure in the German popular imagination at least since Holländer’s 1920 ballad, “Jonny,” in which the character is introduced with all of his enduring racist attributes (Lareau 24). Jonny expresses an “elemental vitality and wild sexuality,” giving him a “hypnotic power over white women” (Lareau 27). Despite his unmitigated success with white women, Jonny is construed as effeminate,

The Jazz Paradox

21

taking on race-gender attributes similar to those of the “little nigger girl.” In his capacity as effeminate womanizer, Jonny is open to possession by the white male imagination. In a different yet related way, Jonny is also sexually irresistible to white men. Because of this, he is felt to be a race-gender corruption striking at the heart of German masculinity by introducing black effeminacy into male German sexuality, thus subjecting it to cruel racial parody. With regard to blackness, racial parody and loss of purity mean loss of potent German masculinity, just as the Kaiser had foreseen. Seen in this light, the problem with uniformed dancing was not that it looked effeminate, but that it made the soldiers too sexually attractive to each other. One hears homosexual undertones in other popular Jonny songs, including Kolischer’s “Jonny, mein Nigger,” and Bertolt Brecht’s Kunstjazz “Surabaya-Johnny,” which Kurt Weill set to music for Happy End (1929) (Lareau 37). Weill made his own contribution to the Jonny convention with his song “Nigger Ging Gang,” and wrote his now lost “Nigger Song” for the 1927 opera, Na Und? (Lareau 49). Already by 1926, excited and inspired by African American musical influences mixing with serious composition, Weill praised on the radio Negermusik and “the marvelous jazz bands of the negro revues,” which were seemingly omnipresent in Berlin by that year, in which shades of Jonny were omnipresent (Lareau 52; Rolka 413). And Weill was not alone among so-called serious composers to experiment with and adapt jazz to the German avant-garde. Jazz had already been on the airwaves since at least 1924 and the end of the Dawes plan, inspiring early jazz compositions by Hindemith (“Jazz Band-Musiker”) and Krenek (“Radio-Blues”) (Röhing 141). By 1929, an anthology of Harlem Renaissance poets, Afrika singt, was published in German translation, and many of the poems were set to music by the established Austrian composers Zemlinsky (Schoenberg’s brother-in-law), Grosz, and Nick without the slightest hint of parody; indeed, the compositions were serious attempts at art songs (Lareau 52). One of the markers of jazz’s entrance into serious music was the presence of the saxophone. The paradigmatic jazz repertoire was thought to feature a saxophone, a banjo, and a drum set, with the saxophone as the singularly irreplaceable element (Partsch 1, 186; Bell 9). Indeed, Baresel’s 1925 Das Jazz-Buch prizes the saxophone as jazz’s primary melodic tool, with the 1931

22

ANTIMUSIC

book Das Saxophon by “Jaap Kool” in obvious, total agreement (Bell 11–12). Above all others, the saxophone served as both the musicological, notational, and racial signifier for jazz. Krenek’s Jonny was a master of many jazz instruments, including the violin, banjo, and trombone, but no other instrument summarized him so completely. The black grotesque featured in the now-infamous Nazi propaganda image that announced the Entartete Musik exhibition in Düsseldorf in 1938 plays the saxophone (Lareau 23). The saxophone became so thoroughly associated with jazz that serious composers on the right refused to score for it (Bell 2). The reason for this was, however, not limited to the saxophone’s prominence in jazz composition and performance. The saxophone went largely unused in Germany (with some notable exceptions) from its creation up to the jazz age because it was seen as an instrument belonging exclusively to foreign military orchestras and to French theater (Bell 6). The saxophone had already tainted jazz with visions of war, foreign occupation, and cultural infiltration before a blue note was ever heard in Germany. The presence or absence of the saxophone, then, carried political weight, with the left including the instrument as a sign of allegiance with jazz against the remnants of oppressive, bellicose Prussian society and rising fascism, and with the right ignoring it as part of a stand against cultural and racial degeneracy and the beginnings of the Nazi cultural apparatus. Aside from the saxophone, another political-cultural aspect of Jonny was his linguistic abilities. Krenek’s Jonny speaks at times a broken German equivalent to something that might be found in a translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, while at other times he has command over a flawless high German (Lareau 21).7 The two poles of Jonny-speak situate him along with jazz at the two ends of the political-cultural spectrum, those of high and low, Right and Left. When Jonny speaks in broken German he marks his racial difference and distance, making him a comfortable, entertaining interlocutor. But when he held forth in high German he could only be heard as perverse parody. Both linguistic spaces serve each political ideology equally, only the valuation of the otherwise identical political perspective changes with the politics of the auditor. Even and perhaps especially at the level of the linguistic sentence, there was no aspect of German aesthetic production that did not react to Jonny and jazz in some way, whether or not the engagement

The Jazz Paradox

23

was explicit or by omission. Ultimately, there was no escaping the politics of jazz and racial blackness in Weimar.8

III. PARODIC PRIMITIVISM By the end of the ’20s it was clear that the omnipresence of jazz in popular culture, and its widespread appropriation by serious composers, were reflected in every facet of the German avant-garde, and ultimately in German interwar politics. Indeed, there is no way to discuss German interwar aesthetics, culture, and politics together without reference to jazz and blackness (Partsch 1994, 109). Jazz-inflected cabaret stages became symbols of cultural-political revolution as well as platforms for the avant-garde (Lareau 36). Through jazz, contemporary politics and aesthetics combined in the work of a Dadaist such as Walter Mehring, along with Brecht’s Hauspostille, which eventually became Weill’s Mahagonny Songspiel, and also with adherents of the New Objectivity (Lareau 36). The New Objectivity heard jazz as the art of America, and so the aesthetic of rationalization and Fordism fell perfectly in line with the Objectivists’ desire for mechanical precision in art and the Americanized transformation of German life as a means of salvation out of defeat in World War I (Partsch 2002, 181). As Paul Stefan put it in the April 1925 Musikblätter des Anbruchs, jazz was inherently, inveterately against prewar Prussian society and devoted to an almost utopian future of freedom from oppression, envisioned largely along American lines (Revers 131–32). In this way, the United States was perceived as a model for the future of Germany and the ideal of social harmony (Revers 130). Here, as in the Brecht of this period, Americanization is a positive term, so much so that Brecht sees the jazz musician as an engineer and his music as that of the automobile assembly line (Partsch 2002, 182; Partsch 1994, 109). The history of Brecht’s use of jazz becomes emblematic of the Left’s engagement with the music, as Americanization comes to carry its far more recognizable, derogatory sense as capitalist decadence and dehumanization. From this perspective, jazz still plays the role of positive cultural force as it is linked with the rise of the proletariat against Americanization by radicalizing its

24

ANTIMUSIC

means to reject its ends (Lareau 53). This type of contradictory, double-edged movement within the political discourses surrounding jazz came to define how the music was understood critically and politically. Commentators on jazz “embrace and disavow . . . doing both without critical reflection on that contradiction” (Rippey 96). One need think only of the work of Hans Eisler to see how jazz, in a single critical presentation, took on two opposed meanings (Lareau 55). The self-contradictory nature of jazz discourse is unsurprising when we recall that such ambiguities had been at its heart since its beginnings in Germany. The “little nigger girl” was nothing if not an enigma wrapped in a very plain racist statement. Black masculinity, perceived anthropologically as primitive, virile, anatomically overbearing, and unstoppably potent produced a culture so effeminate that even the Kaiser could see its implications, both sexual and political. The same seemingly ambiguous jazz elements described in the same way could mean one and the same thing for Left and Right, and yet leave the two sides worlds apart. Perhaps the most glaring inconsistency in discourses on jazz in interwar Germany was the music’s relation to primitivity and technology. Like blacks themselves, jazz was thought to possess an atemporal, mythological character, in the vein of an enchanted fetish object (Partsch 1, 183). Despite relatively few black performers at any time in Germany, jazz was, racially, fully and inalterably identified with blackness (Rolka 414). The “primitivist” understanding of jazz seemed to follow directly from what we find in the plastic arts earlier in the century in other European countries. In Germany, however, jazz primitivism is linked to the seemingly contradictory adulation of technological advance and mastery, evincing what one critic has called its “dualistic paradigm” of technological advance and primitive irrationality (Petrescu 277).9 Jazz is both primitive and technologically sophisticated, such that science and invention become mystified as magic and fetishized as national spirit (Partsch 110). To explain this troubling inconsistency, we must bear in mind that jazz in German political and intellectual discourse is not first and foremost about music or the nature of its technological reproduction, but about

The Jazz Paradox

25

race. The influential cultural critic Franz Wolfgang Koebner’s belief that jazz was nothing other than racial blackness was the dominant view of the period on either side of the political fence, not a fringe radical racist belief (Weiner 479). Even a cultural critic as astute as Siegfried Kracauer saw at this time the imprint of Negro origin on all the new American diversions (Partsch 1, 188). Judgments and pronouncements on jazz were not driven by musicological considerations but were determined in the first instance by racism (Partsch 111). Indeed, as the ’20s wore on and jazz itself began to stand in for all American products, the United States as a cultural entity became coded as racially black (Weiner 478). In the increasingly racialized atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, the “white,” technological, “Fordist” image of jazz could not survive the reifying German racial imaginary, becoming eclipsed instead by the music’s traditionally construed racial origin as black. African Americans now represented the faces of both technologized Americanismus and irrational primitivity (Rogowski 98–99). Listening to jazz as a cultural-political force begins and ends with blackness as part and parcel of the German racial imaginary. With this in mind, the history of paradoxical, cacophonous jazz theorization in Germany can be brought into harmony in this way: in the late teens and early ’20s, blackness is seen as primitive, fetishistic, and “extra-historical,” while the means of jazz musical (re)production are a clear manifestation of “North Atlantic modernity” (Rippey 97). The jazz-primitivist paradox arises in the mid to late ’20s when the music, in the increasingly racialized, fascistic atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, cannot be separated in the German racial imaginary from blackness, no matter who the jazz producer was. For Germans, there was no racial separation between jazz and its practitioners. To play jazz was to partake in a black cultural essence; as Ernst Bloch so clearly perceived, to play jazz was to be black (Stahl 1). Being black in this way meant partaking in a racially generative, transformative, technologized jazz essence. Conversely, it also meant the totemic animalization of the jazz subject (Stahl 5–6). In this sense, jazz follows the exact mytho-historical arc and theoretical claims as what Jeffrey Herf has now famously called German reactionary

26

ANTIMUSIC

modernism—Germany’s ideological marriage of heaven and hell in the form of technology and nationalism’s irrational cult of nature. Jazz modernism and reactionary modernism become shadowy reflections of one another, each following the same teleological trajectory in structure and form, but not in qualitative end (Partsch 1994, 110). When attempting either to assimilate or destroy cultural-ideological otherness, fascism always found only itself—its own critical constellations of thought; its own irrational, constitutive truth claims; its own notions of racial origin, development, and end. This way of looking at jazz in a theoretically coherent manner from the German reactionary modernist Right was made possible by the fact that the hatred of jazz was ultimately based not on jazz as music but on jazz as racially black. But blackness offered an opportunity as well; fascist racist cultural theorization entailed a notion of racial substitutability within a predicating critical order of human biological hierarchy. Just as misogynist fascist male fantasies enabled and even demanded a great deal of imaginative substitution among phantasmagorical subject positions, so too did white male fantasies.10 These forms of substitution were seen in toto as racial parody. Blackness easily came to be seen as a parody of whiteness, as a positive made negative, as a stain on an otherwise primary Aryan origin. Black jazz became a feminizing, sexually ambiguous parody of some ultramasculine white German original. Thus the idea of jazz as a form of cultural degeneracy was premised on race as much as, and indeed more than, on aesthetics. With no separation between the political and cultural spheres in interwar Germany, jazz became both the point of departure and terminus for any cultural-political attack, and for all discourses on race in general. As related to ragtime and to many of its German practitioners, jazz was condemned as black and Jewish at the same time; through its negative association with Jewishness, jazz was also construed as the music of blackness, Jewishness, and Bolshevism (Lareau 40–41, 43). Racial parody neither began nor ended with the inherent black burlesque of whiteness. Along with the perception of parody as an automatic function of jazz, an industry sprang up based on the conscious jazz parody of German culture. For another way in which German jazz musicians had

The Jazz Paradox

27

attempted to appeal to German audiences generally more interested in black performers was by producing serious Verjazzungen of Wagner and Liszt (Partsch 1994, 106). The Verjazzung of high German culture included at times serious reworkings, and at other times the parodic denigration of the so-called greatest compositions of German music. Wagner in particular was singled out for such “savagery,” most notably by Whiteman. Furthermore, Verjazzung, parody and imitative, aping Negerkultur in general, entailed more than merely aesthetic or strictly cultural questions; it struck at the heart of German military prowess, or so some believed (Partsch 1, 187). Reminiscent of the Kaiser in 1912, in 1930 Wilhelm Frick condemned jazz as parody that undermines German soldierly manliness. Feminizing jazz parody weakened the masculine military might, and so the racial purity, of the nation (Stahl 3). Parody itself, now defined racially, came to be viewed as a threat to national security. Bloch’s “Black” becomes instructive as a political parable.

IV. NAZI NEGER The dichotomous unity of jazz’s primitivist dialectic in German cultural-political discourse lay in the identification of and concomitant anxiety over the racial parody Bloch describes. In the Nazi era jazz remained, as Kater has put it, “one of those paradoxical quantities that could serve, from 1933 on, as a catalyst for those opposing the regime and those conforming to it” (Kater 13). This was possible not simply because the Nazi understanding of jazz contained a “fascist ideological mix,” as Peukert maintains, but also because it reflected and conformed to the fascist discursive structural analysis that defined it (Peukert, quoted in Kater 12–13). This definition received its truth value from the belief in blacks as essentially parodic, parasitical animals. Jazz parody is the dominant mode of jazz reception because, once again, jazz discourse in Germany was not premised on an “authentic” jazz experience; indeed, the very idea of such a thing would have been laughable to many (Revers 129). Jazz was a vessel, a representing and representative form for societal and cultural projections of the German racial imaginary.

28

ANTIMUSIC

To the Nazis, jazz signified an essential, national, spiritual condition determined by race. As such, Nazi cultural theorist and preceptor Max Merz was able to write without the slightest hint of irony that jazz was an “inner crisis, which has touched the entire white race” (Kater 15). This “inner crisis” shaped jazz’s place in Nazi cultural policy, which was legislatively implemented in some instance well before 1933, as was the case in Thuringia’s Ordinance Against Negro Culture, which was made law by Wilhelm Frick already in 1930 (Levi 86). Those afflicted by this inner crisis of jazz, the German jazz audience, were mostly “élitist, educated, upper middle class,” or the social élite. As such, they continued to listen to the suspect music in the Nazi era in private clubs, which, as long as they remained unpolitical, went undisturbed (Kater 25; Smith 37). Indeed, the jazz clubs remained open from 1932 to 1939, despite the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and Kristallnacht in 1938 (Smith 38; Snowball 64). The 1935 Verbot der Negermusik banning jazz from the radio did little to resolve the jazz crisis. There came directly in public reaction to the Verbot der Negermusik the popular insistence on some form of German jazz dance music as a substitute, but few if any knew what that would be and so jazz as previously understood played on, even on the radio. Indeed, the introduction of swing into German popular culture in 1936, as well as the 1936 Olympics—for which jazz was even given official sanction for the airwaves for the period of the games—complicated and confused matters to such an extent that the definition of Negerkultur became deeply problematic at its most basic assumptions (Jost 27–29; Röhing 144). And the Enartete Musik exhibition seems to have served more as an effective advertisement for jazz than as a deterrent. To clarify matters, Nazi musicologists increased their efforts to understand the racial-cultural situation of jazz in the Third Reich while realizing that some of the greatest purveyors of jazz in Nazi Germany were members of the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe (Jost 29–30; Smith 38). Goebbels needed to find a racially acceptable alternative to what he otherwise called “cacophony” without alienating the public as well as the military, that very arm of German society that, since the Kaiser, had been so protected from the deleterious affects of effeminate, sexually ambivalent jazz (Smith 38). Indeed,

The Jazz Paradox

29

the only Nazi cultural theorist to maintain an unyielding, negative evaluation of any form of jazz and swing was Alfred Rosenberg, who clung to the strictest sense of Nazi cultural policy in the face of social reality: Aryan racial purity and antimodernism (Levi 82, 84–85). Unable to prevent Germans from listening to jazz and, in fact, seeing a way to use a taste for swing in particular as a means to pacify the greater population and keep the military happy, the Nazi Ministry of Culture set about at giving the people a racially acceptable jazz form. Indeed, by 1939, allowing the greater German population some racially acceptable form of jazz came to be seen as crucial to the war effort as a morale booster and as a form of martial and social control (Levi 84). This “new” music had to be racially pure, and so jazz’s “black” essence had to be recoded as German. While the popular Nazi swing band Charlie and His Orchestra began recording in 1940 and continued on until the declaration of total warfare in 1942, it was not enough simply to give the people a German alternative with white bodies with instruments playing tunes (Jost 30–31). The Nazi retheorization of jazz precisely in this 1940 “Charlie” moment is exactly where jazz in Germany irrevocably splits in two. On the one hand, jazz remains the black music of rebellion and individual improvised freedom reviled by the Nazis. On the other hand, a racially purified German variant comes into being as an ideological construct, becoming the popular music of fascism—just as Adorno had predicted when he, and he alone among jazz theorists, separated jazz and blackness in the historicism of his critique. Removing blackness from jazz and inserting Germanness in its stead, the German parody of jazz is now simply called the original of an inherently superior racial lineage that shows the same development as all other racial lineages but that is more accelerated than any other, more masculine, more fascist in every way. This German fascist jazz variant was not manifested suddenly but had been developing since at least before 1924 alongside the “authentic” black jazz tradition in Germany (Smith 37). To compete with black jazz bands, German musicians developed in the mid ’20s “nut jazz,” a type of slap-stick jazz performance the Germans took as their overtly, avowedly parodic version of black jazz showmanship and virtuosity (Partsch 1994, 106).

30

ANTIMUSIC

Among such groups were the white German Weintraubs Syncopators, who were popular in the late ’20s through the early ’30s, taking on international fame in the Marlene Dietrich film, Der blaue Engel (Kartomi 16). Friedrich Holländer was a founding member and guiding force of the group, as jazz pianist, composer, and impresario (Kartomi 18). The group also achieved a level of notoriety in the plastic arts through the painter Max Oppenheimer’s Jazz-Band, in which the Weintraubs were depicted (Kartomi 18). However well-meaning, the Weintraubs and others sought a German jazz response to the far more lucrative black jazz, which they knew they couldn’t reproduce but only parody. With nut jazz at the fore, this effort created a second line of jazz, what Adorno might call a jazz fifth column, which advertised itself as authentically German. The “nut” character of the music was eliminated through the mediation of this music’s manifestations outside of orchestral space, in movies and painting, where it received more serious treatment simply by virtue of the change in medium. The Nazis, then, merely vacated from this now “serious,” pre-existing white German jazz the so-called Negerfabel they had so clearly articulated and which had existed at least since the first African American performers arrived in the mid nineteenth century, and which gave an origin to racist primitivism and notions of inherent black inferiority (Smith 37). The Negerfabel, so expertly rendered in Bloch’s fable, was then replaced with adapted Nazi myth—the very possibility that Bloch’s fable qua cautionary tale foresaw. For, just as in Bloch, the Negerfabel gave the German jazz variant a structure and a narrative with which to create a myth of jazz which allowed for racial substitutions. With these made, jazz officially became the music of fascism.

TWO

The Jazz Machine

F

Brecht and the Politics of Jazz

Figure 2.1. Josephine Baker, circa 1929, performing in Berlin beneath a caricature of her. Hulton Archive, Getty Images.

F Jazz is, for Brecht, emblematic of the wider aesthetic-political project of the epic theater, and it is itself a condition of that theater. The music is also the liquidation of theater’s traditional locative precepts, in that jazz helps to stage the collapse of the already nominal difference between cabaret and traditional theatrical space. Furthermore, as a product of and for the 31

32

ANTIMUSIC

radio, jazz is able to reach and instruct, much in the vein of a Lehrstück, a mass audience. Jazz is thus integral to the political lives of the avant-garde (theater and cabaret), the bourgeois (theater and cabaret), and the proletariat (dance hall and radio). Able to penetrate and permeate the social totality, jazz is instrumental in creating and politically reshaping, or what Brecht calls refunctioning (umfunktionieren), its audience in all spheres. Jazz as epic theater thus has great Marxist revolutionary potential, in that it not only penetrates these spheres, reaching a mass audience, but is also politically formative at the level of the subject. Ultimately, Brecht’s jazz theory is against an aesthetically ossified, politically reactionary tradition of “serious” music. This does not mean, however, that Brecht rejects “serious” music, but that he instead finds jazz nascent within it. Brecht understands under the heading “ jazz” a popular, mass-produced music that destroys the reactionary tendencies he and Weill see in a musical tradition still dominated by Wagner’s influence. As Dümling has shown, “The American jazz movement spread rapidly in Europe after the end of World War I. It has been seen as an antithesis to Wagner” (Dümling 118).1 Because of this, Brecht is able to find common cause with an avant-garde composer such as Stravinsky. Commenting on what at first glance seems the unlikely pairing of Brecht and Stravinsky, Stegmann points out that “both Stravinsky and Brecht rebelled against the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, and it may have been this common enemy, rather than their personal appreciation of each other, which brought the two artists together” (Stegmann 1995, 120). As opposed to a concept of opera as “absolute music” disconnected from the sociopolitical circumstances that give rise to it, and as represented in Wagner’s notion of the Gesammtkunstwerk, for Brecht, as Schumacher notes, “Oper wird durch die Herausarbeitung ihrer epischen und damit kritischen Elemente zu einer materialistischen Kunst” (Schumacher 201). Indeed Brecht, as Branscombe writes, “believed that traditional opera was doomed, unless the ‘culinary’ aspect of its character could be made instructive.2 Into the moral tableau he posited that something irrational had to be introduced at the right moment. Music has the job now of helping, now countering the exposition of the text. By showing the mechanics of approaching his audience; the music which did this Brecht referred to as ‘Misuk’” (Branscombe 484). This dark

The Jazz Machine

33

view of opera’s future did not prevent a direct engagement with the operatic tradition as Brecht understood it. Furthermore, it did not prevent him from appropriating other forms of “serious” Western music for the purposes of hastening the destruction of the canon. In Brecht, and in particular in his collaboration with Weill, serious music loses its designation as elite and is brought into the realm of popular culture. Indeed, the epic theater’s conception of “song” is inspired by a desire to de-psychologize and simplify “serious” music. As Brecht writes in, “On the Use of Music in an Epic Theater” (1935): The type of song was created on the occasion of the Baden-Baden Music Festival of 1927, where one-act operas were to be performed, when I asked Weill simply to write new settings for half-a-dozen already existing songs. Up to that time Weill had written relatively complicated music of a mainly psychological sort, and when he agreed to set a series of more or less banal song texts he was making a courageous break with a prejudice which the solid bulk of serious composers stubbornly held. The success of this attempt to apply modern music to the song was significant. What was the real novelty of this music, other than the hitherto unaccustomed use to which it was put? (86)3 Weill has been busy creating “serious music” of the “psychological sort.”4 Brecht’s suggestion is that Weill write scores to the author’s “banal” song lyrics. Brecht understands “song” at this point in time “as the jazz melody,” the music of the cabaret. To combine the song with the psychological, serious music of the contemporary composers creates a mélange of sound and meaning, a Kunstjazz that, according to Brecht, is a radical break with the new music of Schoenberg (Nieder 265–66). Brecht thus claims an originality of composition, in that he and Weill together transform both the so-called new music and jazz at the same time.5 This does not mean that recognizable elements of serious music do not appear in Brecht’s songs, but that they are often parodied. At the same time, they retain the austere formal attributes of their original settings.6 The epic theater presents hybrid music composed

34

ANTIMUSIC

of serious and jazz musical elements, each commenting on and modifying the other without resolution. This is Brechtian jazz. And it is a music fully invested in its historical-material setting, in its time.

I. THE JAZZ MACHINE In 1927, Kurt Weill proposed that “Jazz is the rhythm of our time” (Betz 37). By this, Weill, a composer of urban life, certainly meant that jazz is the rhythm of metropolitan temporality. For Weill, the city was the setting of our time. Thus, it comes as no surprise that “all of Weill’s city pieces amount to essays on the human condition, viewed from various perspectives, a condition at once formed and endangered by the modern city” (Hinton 156). The city is both genitive and disruptive of the modern human condition, and jazz is the contemporary music that provides the description of this struggle. Working with Weill, Brecht sees jazz as an urban phenomenon, although his sense of the music’s import is apparently different from the composer’s. Brecht writes in “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication” (1932): “The only art produced by these cities so far has been fun: Charlie Chaplin’s films and jazz. Jazz is all the theatre it contains, as far as I can see” (51). One of jazz’s most potent delivery mechanisms of its “fun” is the radio. According to Brecht, in its early years the “radio was then in its first phase of being a substitute: a substitute for theatre, opera, concerts, lectures, café music, local newspapers, and so forth. This was the patient’s period of halcyon youth. I am not sure if it’s finished yet” (51). Brecht posits that the radio proliferates art that is characterized by technological reproducibility, which he calls here “substitution,” and which is equivalent in signification in Brecht to parody. What this means is that one does not hear opera on the radio, one confronts opera’s parodic substitute, which has a life and art of its own. Because of radio’s wide-reaching instantaneity and substitutive faculty, both Brecht and Weill see in it an enormous political potential. This potential is realized in jazz, which, for Brecht and Weill, is a machine art. It exists solely in its technological reproduction. Technological innovation has produced

The Jazz Machine

35

both jazz and the means of its mass dissemination, the radio.7 Jazz has no life of its own beyond that for which it is a substitute, including politics.8 For Brecht, it is the music’s acts of political-ideological substitution at the mass cultural level that make jazz good “fun.” For, that jazz is fun does not mean that it is not serious and potentially dangerous. Just the opposite: because jazz is so much fun and “easy,” it has the ability to deafen its listeners to its political-ideological content. This capacity of jazz becomes a liability only if used for the wrong political-ideological ends. In Brecht’s hands, jazz carries Marxist revolutionary content across radio waves and into homes, as well as to live theatrical audiences. Indeed, jazz parody and substitution are of crucial importance for Brecht’s and Weill’s live theater. Even to discuss Brechtian theater without reference to music is fruitless.9 But jazz in the epic theater functions differently than, say, a folk song. By jazz Brecht means a form of music that can be reproduced on the radio, in the cabarets and dance halls, and in the film houses themselves without reference to anything outside of these spaces (Gilbert 11–16). A folk song always refers to a history outside of itself, without which it cannot be understood. In this sense, Brecht’s conception of jazz and its reproducibility is ahistorical; he is not overly concerned about its African American origin, for instance, except for rhetorical purposes. Like Weill, he is only concerned with jazz as it exists in and for the contemporary urban moment, and within a specific contemporary urban setting (Villwock 76). Thus, jazz and film are complementary; they rise in and out of the city as popular forms of mass spectacle relieved of the weight of history and traditional cultural referent. As aesthetic experience, jazz and film are no longer bound to aristocratic or bourgeois tastes; they belong to the urban masses. According to Brecht, because jazz accompanies all of the particular forms of new urban theater, it is the medium of this theater. Taking the place of bourgeois theater, the cabaret makes its aesthetic content legible through the medium of jazz. Brecht identifies an interactive form of theater that appeals to the proletariat because it fashions the worker as actor in her own aestheticized, jazz-syncopated life. Furthermore, jazz, as a wholly unalloyed urban phenomenon, has both the potential to destroy forms of

36

ANTIMUSIC

individual resistance to the ideological predispositions of bourgeois society and as filtered through the popular musical form. It also has the ability to suspend—in the moment of the annihilation of the individual and her subsumption under the heading of “ jazz audience”—the very class divisions that make jazz, film, and the urban space possible. For Brecht, jazz either enhances or annihilates theatrical content. The only narrative content that jazz itself offers is that which the jazz listener produces and reproduces within herself. For Brecht, whereas film displays characters moving within a developed narrative frame who are capable of being assimilated by the audience for purposes of subjective identification, jazz holds out no such possibility. Jazz identification is generated wholly from within the jazz subject, and as the jazz subject. And yet, the highly individualized jazz experience is lived by all the listeners in the same way. In this sense, jazz is a much more social experience than watching a film. Each member of the cinema audience experiences the film through a primary identification with an individual character, and so as an individual either with or against a crowd. Subjective jazz experience comes into existence through a secondary identification, that of the self with the crowd. In this way, jazz becomes politically effective in a way beyond film propaganda, which isolates the individual as a political subject. Jazz as propaganda nullifies the individual by creating social assonance in dissonance at the level of subject formation, creating a fully integrated group identity. Jazz, then, functions socially precisely as the epic theater that Brecht and Weill would later theorize about and realize. However, jazz retains the illusion of individuality by eliminating the appearance of homogeneity and totalization. As Brecht offers in “A Radio Speech” (March 27, 1927), the “variety” of “narrow stuffiness of the impressionistic drama and the manic lop-sidedness of the expressionists were to some extent offset by the use of music, simply because it introduced variety. At the same time, music made possible something which we had long since ceased to take for granted, namely the ‘poetic theatre’“ (18). Whereas impressionist and expressionist drama present a totality, jazz disseminates differentiated elements that maintain their individual integrity while still

The Jazz Machine

37

operating as a single unit. Thus, the “poetic theater” functions exactly as do the new urban art forms, film and jazz. Structurally, the poetic theater, long since disappeared, returns as the urban theater tailored by and for the city (Fischer 167). What differentiates the epic theater from its immediate precursors are the lessons it has learned from its urban surroundings. For Brecht and Weill, jazz allows diverse theatrical elements and variegated theatricality to manifest themselves as an integral unity, or totality, on stage or even in poetry.10 Different voices speak, or sing, to and in the music, opening up various political spaces and positions capable of creating accord from strife. Jazz is one of the disharmonious media by which the epic theater alienates its audience from their otherwise constant, unreflective subject positions, mediating a new collective subjectivity premised on individual social critique.11 In the epic theater’s conception of jazz, political antagonisms are made not only intelligible but integral to the individual and collective subjects. It is only in this way that a popular song becomes a work of art. As Brecht writes in “On the Use of Music in an Epic Theater”: “At first I wrote this music myself. Five years later, for the second Berlin production of the comedy Mann ist Mann at the Staatstheater, it was written by Kurt Weill. From now on music had the characteristics of art (could be valued for itself)” (85). Jazz is an art form because of its “separation of the different elements,” without which the epic theater is unthinkable. Indeed, the “most successful demonstration of the epic theater was the production of The Threepenny Opera in 1926” (85). The reason that Brecht considers The Threepenny Opera to be the most successful example of the epic theater and its use of music is because the “play showed the close Relationship between the emotional life of the bourgeois and that of the criminal world. The criminals showed, sometimes through the music itself, that their sensations, feelings and prejudices were the same as those of the average Citizen and theatergoer” (85). What we find in Brecht’s explanation is the extension of a feeling of criminal guilt to the “average Citizen and theatergoer.” Indeed, “[s]ometimes through the music itself,” we see that the three subjectivities are in fact the same, and that they are held together by jazz.12 The music has provided the medium by which the listener, who occupies any one of the three positions, can also

38

ANTIMUSIC

inhabit all of the positions at once. Jazz is the medium by which individual subjectivity gains and maintains a critical distance from its immediate surrounding, its political-historical situation. At the same time, jazz achieves mutual recognition between diverse social and political groups, allowing for the momentary opportunity to see the radical binding force (Grundhaltung) between sociopolitical positions. Thus the nature of the epic theater’s music is not just one of alienating effects, but one of sociopolitical reconciliation. But the pattern of jazz alienation and reconciliation is circular and syncopated. Brecht’s jazz is a song without end.

II. THE PRINCIPLE OF LOOKING With this in mind, Brecht’s use of the cabaret to describe the epic theater is objective and accurate. The cabaret is a form of epic theater because of the role jazz plays in both spaces. For Brecht, The Threepenny Opera is the best example of the epic theater because the opera succeeded in merging the theater and the cabaret. It exposed the false division between the two spaces, revealing that there is no real separation between the two at all. Thus, Brecht’s understanding of the epic theater is also his understanding of jazz cabaret, allowing him to write: This survey, springing from the examination of a few unpretentious songs, might seem rather far-reaching if these songs did not represent the (likewise quite unpretentious) beginning of a new, up-to-date theatre, or the part which music is to play in such a theatre. The music’s character as a kind of gestic music can hardly be explained except by a survey to establish the social purpose of the new methods. To put it practically, gestic music is that music which allows the actor to exhibit certain basic gests on the stage. So-called “cheap” music, particularly that of the cabaret and the operetta, has for some time been a sort of gestic music. Serious music, however, still clings to lyricism, and cultivates expression for its own sake. (87)

The Jazz Machine

39

Brecht practically apologizes for dragging jazz out onto the stage for serious political-theoretical inspection. However, his reasons for doing so are sound. “Unpretentious songs” make their way into the discussion of the definition of the epic theater because, as we have seen, these songs are in themselves a form of theater. Furthermore, jazz makes the epic theater possible. For jazz enables the characters of the play to become visible. This crucial function allows the conceit that jazz as epic theater represents the pretenses and achievements of Brecht’s aesthetic. Brecht himself is not undecided on this point. His ambivalence comes when attempting to decide whether jazz in itself contains the entire theater within it, or if it only makes the epic theater’s alienation effect possible.13 Brecht is certain that jazz is a “kind of ” gestic music and that, as one critic points out, “Gestic music . . . far from accompanying the theatrical events on stage as mere embellishment, represents and makes them precise through its power to ‘illustrate’ the social dynamism of human relationships” (Hosokawa 184). While it is unclear what type of gestic music jazz embodies, it is more certain that, with regard to the social purpose of the “new methods,” jazz and the epic theater are mutually supplementary forms of aesthetic production (Lee 212). Because jazz is gestic music, it encompasses theatrical gests. Brecht thus shifts the questions of the survey he takes—how did the “song” come to be used in the epic theater, and to what purpose—to the terrain of the gest. What Brecht now offers is a brief definition of the gestic, and the role the gestic plays in the epic theater as music. As it turns out, gestic music plays a, if not the, leading role. Without the medium of gestic music, actors cannot “exhibit basic gests.” There is no gestic theater without gestic music, in that theatrical gests are impossible without gestic music to act as backdrop against which they can be made intelligible.14 “Cheap” music, even outside of the epic theater, can also be gestic music. This means that the epic theater can occur outside of the theater. Or, as Rienäcker emphasizes: “Gestische Musik ist denn auch nicht nur Musica teatralis, sondern Musik, die dem Schein, der Lüge, dem Brei zu opponieren sucht. Mehr noch, sie ist Musik nicht der Vereinzelten, sondern des Gemeinsamen, weil sich in den Gesten, im Gestus des kollektiv Gewußt-Ungewußte, kollektives Handeln artikuliert” (Rienäcker 211).15

40

ANTIMUSIC

The consequence of Brecht’s thought is that one does not need actors or stage to achieve gestic theater. Indeed the gestic theater becomes epic not because of the actors, the stage, or the playhouse, but because of the didactic nature of the dialectic that takes place between spectacle and audience. This could mean the cabaret and music performed without formal theatrical spectacle. The difference between theater and cabaret in terms of the combination of formal aesthetic-theatrical presentation and social space is experiential. The epic theater is primarily pedagogical, whereas the cabaret is first and foremost pleasurable, or fun. Both experiences are political. That being said, jazz nevertheless reaches the zenith of its political potential only as gestic music for and as the epic theater. Without its manifestation as epic theater, jazz remains the unfocused noise of the anesthetized masses (Villwock 85). For it to be politically effective, jazz must be gestic music. It can only be this in the epic theater, where critical distance is mediated by didacticism. Within a didactic setting, whether heard on the radio or in the cabaret or the theater, jazz always contains the epic theater within itself. Thus for the Brecht of “On Gestic Music” (1937), “‘Gest’ is not supposed to mean gesticulation: it is not a matter of explanatory or emphatic movements of the hands, but of overall attitudes. A language is gestic when it is grounded in a gest and conveys particular attitudes adopted by the speaker towards other men” (104). The gest is not a banal mode of communication or communicative support. It does not merely accompany sets of linguistic data; it is not intended to reinforce the relay, reception, and relegation of objective information, or as a vehicle for affect devoid of critical disposition. As music, it is not, as Hartung writes, overly concerned with the content of the play it “accompanies”: “Dieser Begriff, wohl zuerst von Weill geprägt, meint eine Musik, die der Gestik eines Vorgangs angepaßt ist, bestimmtes Verhalten von Menschen musikalisch wiedergibt; gestische Musik soll die Handlung weder illustrieren noch weitertreiben, sondern nur ‘die gestische Grundhaltung der aneinandergereihten Situation auffangen und realisieren’” (Hartung 94–95).16 The gest imparts a Grundhaltung; it takes up an “attitude,” and in so doing it loses its objectivity. The gest is a critical disposition, or the critical position of an utterance or sign. It articulates determinations

The Jazz Machine

41

and affectations as politically shaped elements of aspects of the subject (Villwock 80). It is not enough merely to support a statement with a hand gesture. The hand gesture itself, if it is gestic, takes on a meaning of equal if not greater importance than the statement for which it was called on to substitute, or parody. The gesture is gestic when it is for-itself and carries the signification of subjective disposition capable of being understood politically as substitutive social parody. Thus, the gest is always a social substitution that contains as parody the totality of subjective dispositions and relationship between men. Under no circumstances is the gest to be understood as a private signification between individuals. The gest is always a public proclamation via substitution and parody of the sociopolitical totality as it exists in its individual determinate. Gestic languages are those that are aware of their essential gestic nature as substitution. They signify a conscious deployment of gestic principles as meaningful yet parodic exchange. To speak gestically is to be aware of the gestic signification of language, even if the speaker cannot determine precisely what the specific parodic function of a particular gest is. To speak of gestic language is to adopt a critical attitude to utterances with an eye to their political performativity as ideological, parodic substitution. Reflexively, once the gest or the gestic nature of language becomes for the speaker the object of critical analysis, the speaker will be better able to apprehend her own political positions. Gests makes visible the totality of social relations in a single representation. In doing so, these relations become a single object of contemplation for both speaker and addressee. The gest is, then, the parodic totality of sociopolitical positions and dispositions capable of bringing the individual subject to awareness of the identical, parodied totality contained within it. Along with the epic theater and jazz, the gest expands the individual subject position until it is itself in a position to contain all positions. It then decides which course of action it will follow. Brecht’s aesthetic is in this sense simple. It seeks to jar the individual out of her illusionary subjective singularity, to fragment her through parody without destroying her, giving her the opportunity to take informed, critical political positions. It does this gestically, which is to say through parodic substitution of the

42

ANTIMUSIC

other with itself. In fact, its entire internal operation is premised on such substitution, a function that can entail the replacement along its surface of “epic theater” with jazz with gest as well, with no loss of meaning and efficacy. This is what Brecht means with his “principle of looking.” “What is more important,” Brecht writes, “is the fact that this principle of looking to the gest can allow him to adopt his own political attitude while making music. For that it is essential that he should be setting a social gest” (104). Looking supplements hearing. It allows the composer to “adopt his own political attitudes while making music.” The gest provides the composer with the means of infusing her music with a specific political program.17 This is not to say that only one political position will be contained within her score. Indeed, gestic music is a priori a medium of multiple political positions.18 The composer’s act of layering her music with her own political attitude is in fact a repetition or recapitulation and reinforcement of a politics already existent in the gestic score. Looking to the gest reveals and measures the composer’s political attitude toward herself. The assumption is not that the composer is apolitical, ignorant, or apathetic, or that she requires the act of writing music to come to startling, sudden political awareness.19 What Brecht’s aesthetic asserts is the dialectical, critical reexamination of the composer’s pre-existent political beliefs, thus establishing and holding these beliefs on much firmer ground.20 Before the experience of gestic music as initiated by looking to the gestic in general, the composer holds pre-gestic, or untested, political values. Thus, Brecht’s aesthetic rests on the supposition that the aesthetic experience of the gestic provides the ultimate moment of self-critical, political evaluation. The reason for this is that, unlike any other form of political testing, the gestic actually allows the audience members to experience political positions each individual doesn’t necessarily hold, as if they were her own. Then, the audience member either reestablishes her original political position, or adopts a new one, after having experienced the political disposition of the other. This is what Brecht calls refunctionalization (Umfunktionierung), an aspect of this theater theory that he develops near the end of the ’20s, at

The Jazz Machine

43

the same time he is most invested in jazz. Refunctionalization brings the subject to commit to a single political position, but only after each individual position has been critically examined by real, subjective experience. Thus Brecht’s aesthetic provides the ultimate political proving ground, in that it is the medium for the free exchange of political ideas as carried out by potentially revolutionary subjectivities. As formulated by Weill and Brecht, jazz is the music of contemporary politics.21 It confronts the listener with the multiplicity of available political positions, including fascism, allowing her to reflect critically on each. And unlike expressionistic and impressionistic music, jazz has popular political currency. To Brecht, serious music has become irrelevant; the jazz beat is the pulse of the people. Because of this, jazz is the only music that can contain the constantly shifting urban terrain of the contemporary political landscape. For “this is precisely the common tendency of art: to remove the social element in any gest. The artist is not happy till he achieves ‘the look of a hunted animal.’ The man then becomes just Man; his gest is stripped of any social individuality; it is an empty one, not representing any undertaking or operation among men by this particular man” (104). Expressionism and impressionism and all the more-expressive (as opposed to cheap) forms of art degrade their auditors to the level of beast. At the apex of the cultured life, Brecht finds only bare animal existence. The implications of this are staggering for Brecht’s concept of the gest. In itself, the gest not only provides the intersubjective link between political subjectivities, but it also marks the difference between human and animal. Without the work of the gest, man is merely “man” as singularity. For Brecht, community does not belong solely to the domain of the human, and so does not define the human as such. The act of recognizing the community as a conglomeration of political subjectivities engaged in social activities defines the human being as “political animal.” Brecht’s “social individuality” is the crux of this aesthetic. When set in dialectical relationship with the social, the individual becomes productive negativity. She then produces the recognition of the social and its development along political lines. For Brecht, serious forms of art such as the new

44

ANTIMUSIC

music and expressionism deny this fundamental character of history, and are thus politically unproductive, and even reactionary. They are outside of history just as the animal and its community are outside of history.

III. JAZZ VULGARITY Without the social gest, “man” is outside of history, a state that Brecht describes in “On Gestic Music” as being like “a hunted animal.” But, Brecht writes, “[t]he look of a hunted animal can become a social gest if it is shown that particular maneuvers by men can degrade the individual man to the level of a beast; the social gest is the gest relevant to society, the gest that allows conclusions to be drawn about the social circumstances” (104–5). Brecht does not mean here that the social gest contributes to the reduction of man to animal. His point is that the social gest becomes social, and by this he also means political, once it provides a critical distance from the social forces that transform man into animal. The social gest as aesthetic gesture would thus critique serious modes of art for their bestial, or savage, aspects.22 The epic theater is not, then, just political theater, but also a genealogy of political theater. The aesthetic gest in, for example, jazz, reflects a political genealogy. Jazz critiques serious music; it reveals a sociopolitical situation in which serious music reduces man to a bestial, or savage (black), state. At the same time, jazz reflects on itself. Through jazz’s constant, critical self-reflection, it performs a genealogy of the musical tradition in order to comprehend and represent its material history. It does so, very simply, because it “allows conclusions to be drawn about the social circumstances” of its production and reception. The element of jazz that is most productive in this regard is vulgarity: “A good way of judging a piece of music with a text is to try out the different attitudes of gests with which the performer ought to deliver the individual sections: politely or angrily, modestly or contemptuously, approvingly or argumentatively, craftily or without calculation. For this the most suitable gests are as common, vulgar and banal as possible. In this way one can

The Jazz Machine

45

judge the political value of the musical score” (105). To determine if a piece of music can act as gestic field for a text, the actor must attempt to match a gest to the two gestic determinants. After having tried a series of attitudes, the appropriate gest will manifest itself. Brecht does not say directly how it is that the gest best fitting a particular combination of music and text declares itself. He takes it as a given that the gest best suited to the textual situation will announce and enforce its prerogative. This means that the gestic field, the combination and medium of text and score, brings forth the gestic attitude it requires. This happens not by means of an a priori determination of the gestic field, but by a process of trial and error initiated by the performer. Given the myriad amount of possible gests present in the gestic field, it is the case that the field itself elicits the determinate number and makes them available to the performer. And yet, each gest that the performer attempts to place in the gestic field is valid. The gestic field cannot solicit fully inappropriate gests, or ungestic gestures. The question is one of the best gest at a given moment, considered not only with reference to the elements of the gestic field, but in accordance with the abilities of the performer. Thus, once music and text resolve into a stable field of divergent elements, the dialectic between performer and gestic field comes into play as trial and error, or jazz improvisation. This secondary dialectic is comprised of the gestic field and the gests it solicits from the performer or makes known to the performer. The performer’s best gest will be determined as such by her ability, as judged by the gestic field itself. Jazz improvisation is, then, not subjective. Indeed, one can almost predict with accuracy which gest will make itself known as the best gest for improvisation, given the predicament of the gestic field at a particular moment. The best gests are always “common, vulgar, and banal.” If the best gest must be common, vulgar, and banal, then its medium, the dialectical cohesion and dehiscence of music and text, must also be common, vulgar, and banal, or jazz. Brecht’s choice in subject matter meets these requirements, in that a play such as John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera is, of course, about the common, the vulgar, and the banal. The music in which the text will become dialogue and gestic field must also share these elements. That music is jazz. Although

46

ANTIMUSIC

at its core serious music is common, vulgar, and banal, revealing man as animal without redeeming him, it is the surface play of the music’s aesthetic elements that denies direct access to the music’s unsophisticated inner being. The gest, and so gestic music and epic theater, must appear common, vulgar, and banal, while harboring its secret, namely that the gestic in all its forms is the most sophisticated aesthetic apparatus for the critical apperception and evaluation of the political. It is because jazz seems so vulgar that it is the gestic music of the epic theater. Jazz is always political music, precisely because it is so cheap, so light, so popular, so fun; for it is precisely its vulgar quality that allows it to function as gestic music while simultaneously and as a result causing it to shed its humble black origins.23 Jazz as vulgarity is, then, the gestic music par excellence. Indeed, Brecht compares the jazz vulgarity of the epic theater to a striptease. He writes: “It is a possibly blasphemous but quite useful comparison if one turns one’s mind to the burlesque shows on Broadway, where the public, with yells of, “Take it off!,” forces the girls to expose their bodies more and more. The individual whose innermost being is thus driven into the open then of course comes to stand for Man with a capital M” (87). From the perspective of vulgarity, the burlesque show analogy is perfectly in keeping with Brecht’s overall idea of the role jazz plays in and as the epic theater. The vulgar crowd coaxes, cajoles, and ultimately demands the flesh of the female cabaret dancer as jazz sacrifice (Pharmakon). This roaring mass of humanity, drunk on its own vulgarity in the cabaret hall, is in fact—in Brecht’s analogy—the embodied demand of the epic theater itself. The epic theater is a vulgar cacophony of voices, each demanding precedence in the formation of the concept, “man.” The concept will provide the intellectual framework for the concrete object of political identification for the collective subject of humanity, as represented by the audience. This means that by stripping the individual listener or theatergoer bare and “sacrificing” her, the epic theater or cabaret audience reflects its own vulgarity back on itself, using jazz theater as mirror. Jazz vulgarity also affects the actors, allowing them to behave (act) badly. Or, conversely, good, politically effective acting can best be displayed

The Jazz Machine

47

against the poorly conducted, vulgar musicality of jazz. For, as “On the Use of Music in an Epic Theater” makes clear, the medicinal (pharmakological) function of the music, good or bad, has been forgotten: Educational music is also in the doldrums; and yet there were times when music could be used to treat disease. . . . Our composers on the whole leave any observation of the effects of their music to the café proprietors. One of the few actual pieces of research which I have come across in the last ten years was the statement of a Paris restauranteur about the different orders which his customers placed under the influence of different types of music. He claimed to have noticed that specific drinks were always drunk to the works of specific composers. And it is perfectly true that the theatre would benefit greatly if musicians were able to produce music which would have a more or less exactly foreseeable effect on the spectator. (89–90) Music must rediscover its medicinal function. The pharmakological, healing properties of music are only one aspect of its inherent, predictable effect. It has been left to the cafe proprietor qua medico-musicologist to explore and practice the art of manipulation by means of pharmakological music, or music as pharmakon. The cafe and cabaret become jazz’s pharmacy. Outside of this space, didactic music languishes in the doldrums because it no longer taps its most potent resource: its medicinal properties. It has forgotten how to exploit music’s emotive plentitude, its ability to provoke in the listener particular affective states determined by particular musical arrangements. Furthermore, pharmakological music not only manifests a certain emotion in listeners universally, depending on the score or musical passage within a score; it also and more importantly determines the listener’s political activity. We recall that Brecht’s example for this type of music’s didactic setting is not the classroom but the cafe. Transforming the cabaret show into a type of Lehrstück, this choice of setting has a twofold political effect. First, through them Brecht is able to expand on one of his more frequently used

48

ANTIMUSIC

metaphors, that of the narcotic (or Pharmakon). Brecht sees ungestic cultural products, high and low, serious and cheap, as forms of drugs capable of inducing a benumbed state of subjective political unawareness in the culture consumer. The gestic work, however, has the opposite effect. Although the gestic work shares in the narcotic nature of other, nongestic mass cultural works, the gestic work has not forgotten its function as a cure. It maintains its legitimacy and so its legality as a “pharmaceutical,” and is therefore not consumed in the shadows of the back alleys. It is instead ingested publicly in the theatrical light of the cabaret and cafe, under the watchful, studious eye of the proprietor, or pharmacist, bearing in mind that the purchasing and consuming of narcotics in a cabaret and cafe would have at some point gone through the establishment’s proprietor. Hesse will also emphasize this aspect of jazz culture. Second, by transforming the cabaret into a type of laboratory for the psychical effects of music as narcotic, and their symptomatic manifestations, Brecht underscores the fact that the “liberator” was first the cafe or the cabaret. In this “liberated” space, jazz generates an automatic, unconscious response in the patron that caused her to order particular drinks. This type of manipulation boosted sales of both legal and illegal recreational intoxicants. Indirectly, Brecht affirms that jazz culture provokes certain “medicinal” responses. Deep in the heart of Parisian cabarets, a medicinal science, or alchemy, of jazz is being deduced. The cabaret being the closest thing to the epic theater, jazz provides both spaces with a means of producing a malleable, “drugged” subjective state in the listener that can then be recast through predictable modes of behavior determined by the intoxicating effects of the music. The gest that the actor produces, however, is not one that is appropriate to the narcotic music it accompanies in any positive sense: “It would take a load off the actors’ shoulders; it would be particularly useful, for instance, to have the actors play against the emotion which the music called forth. (For rehearsals of Works of a pretentious kind it is enough to have whatever music is available.)” (90). The purpose of the gest is to play against the music. The actor’s task is made immeasurably easier if he can produce the

The Jazz Machine

49

gest most inappropriate to the pharmakological music with which it comes into dialogue. This means that Brecht seeks to produce a dialectical tension between the gest the actor was called on to produce by the music, and the gestic field in which the gest appears. The gestic field summons the gest that best measures up to the field’s dimensions. But it is the disjunction between the gest made manifest by its productive field and the productive field itself that lends the gest its weight and political import. The actor, then, is called into the gestic field to act badly, in the sense that her manners and gestic proportion will in no way produce the effects anticipated by jazz. In this way, Brecht seeks to create an irreducible lack of cohesion between the gest and its medium, and in so doing manufacture not only the alienation experienced by the audience that witnesses the opening of this gestic aporia, but also the alienation of the gest from its origin. The gest and the gestic field become free-floating agents that are nevertheless dependent on each other for their intelligibility. The result of this is the violent fragmentation of the theater piece itself. The play, in the very tension in which it is suspended and that gives it its unique life, cannot come to a conclusion without an act of violence coming from outside the realm of the purely theatrical. The audience must intervene and perform the final act of sublimation required of the dialectic of aesthetic subjectivity manifested in the play (Kater 63–67).24 The space of the theater must be displaced from the realm of the contemplative to that of political praxis. The play, in its unique subjectivity, can only form a dialectically stable identity through the intervention of the audience. The audience will identify with the play considered as a comprehensive representation of a political problem within a structurally coherent society. At the moment of choice, when the individual makes the political-critical decision for one avenue of political disposition and action over and above all others, the play is effectively over. The play does not end until this moment of decision. The epic theater does not end until political praxis begins. None of this can be achieved without jazz and gestic jazz improvisation. It should not be thought, however, that this jazz activity is spontaneous, or the product of unstudied musicians. Jazz production is compositional.

50

ANTIMUSIC

As Brecht writes, “A further consideration is that the writing of meaningful and easily comprehensible music is by no means just a matter of good will, but above all of competence and study—and study can only be undertaken in continuous contact with the masses and with other artists—not on one’s own” (90). To write and compose well is to write music that is both “meaningful” and “easily comprehensible.” In the intentions and effects of politically effective music, Brecht has collapsed the resultant differences between serious and light music at the level of composition. He denies the false dichotomy that maintains an incongruity between studied meaning and spontaneous comprehension. If the listener cannot easily grasp some meaning from the experience of “hearing,” and not “listening to the musical arrangement,” then the written composition is a failure. Following this logic, Brecht then offers a simple definition of the contemporary work of art. Art must be complex yet comprehensible to the masses while at the same time generative of a plenitude of “meaning” in its deepest philosophical sense. The jazz artist learns her trade among the masses and not in, for instance, a conservatory. Just like the cafe proprietor, the artist too observes, studies, and deduces from the collective elements of social behavior found in a particular, “lower” social setting. What this means is that the difference between the social and the aesthetic, the theater and the cafe or wherever groups congregate and engage in social discourse, is no longer valid. Brecht does not assert here that the creation of the work of art can only be achieved through arduous study of technique, the expressive history unique to the mode of artistic production particular to the artist, and the refining of craft through isolated trial and error. That which decides the work of art as work of art is transmitted in sociability. Meaning is generated in the work of art because the work is comprehensible not as intellectualized content but as the social and subjective recognition of the individual for whom the work is created. The esoteric mannerism of modern music exists for Brecht in a social vacuum and therefore cannot be comprehended, insofar as comprehension is fully the work of recognition and identification on the part of the social subject. Within this frame, jazz becomes the ideal work of art— a position diametrically opposed to Adorno’s rejection of jazz as an art form

The Jazz Machine

51

but not an odd one for Brecht to take, given that jazz’s audience is not “the masses” per se but the bourgeois social elite. Despite all pretense, Brecht is not making an argument for jazz as a proletarian art form, but for a place for jazz within the bourgeois avant-garde. This distinction is important because the jazz audience is prefigured in the jazz work of art, in that the audience is a crucial structural element in the constitution of the performed work. But the “black” jazz artist (for, as we have seen, in Germany at this time all jazz artists, white and black, are determined by racial blackness) does not come from the same social milieu as the audience, either by virtue of being black or as an effect of the degenerative properties of black jazz. We recall that idea of cultural degeneration was conceived in terms of class as much as race. Brecht believes that a jazz-blackened bourgeoisie is roughly equivalent to the German proletariat—which is an expressionist primitivist conceit already present in the German avantgarde. Indeed, primitivism in Germany tended toward representations of “degenerative culture” through quasi-anthropological appropriations of folk art, content, and techniques. The materials of the jazz artist are in part the parodic anthropological recuperation of social content. Added to this, the artist draws on the inspiration received from other artists as social contacts within a separate class altogether, namely the avant-garde. Brecht sets jazz composition firmly in what he sees as the fertile ground of avant-garde Kunstjazz collaboration.25 In Brecht’s case, this was very often how a play was created and produced, whether it was his collaboration with a composer or his rewriting of an older play. Indeed, The Threepenny Opera would be the fruition of all of Brecht’s aesthetic aims, from artistic collaboration, to the elaboration of the cabaret as the new theater, to the realization of jazz as political force.

IV. THE ASTAIRE AUTOMATON As in his verse, Brecht’s use of jazz creates a shifting terrain of political meaning that must be stabilized by its audience through political engagement.

52

ANTIMUSIC

This political aspect of jazz is what makes it gestic. Just as the actor plays against jazz in a scene to create an alienating effect, so too does Brecht play jazz against the new music and his jazz-inflected verse against Goethe and Benn.26 But for all of the benefits of irregular jazz rhythms, Brecht sees potential problems in their reception. In “On Rhymeless Verse with Irregular Rhythms” he writes: It must also be admitted that at the moment the reading of irregular rhythms presents one or two difficulties. This seems to me no criticism of it. Our ear is certainly in the course of being physiologically transformed. Our acoustic environment has changed immensely. An episode in an American feature film, when the dancer Astaire tap-danced to the sounds of a machine-room, showed the astonishingly close relationship between the new noises and the percussive rhythms of jazz. Jazz signified a broad flow of popular musical elements into modern music, whatever our commercialized world may have made it since. Its connection with the freeing of the Negroes is well known. (119) The “one or two difficulties” derive from the ear’s limited ability to accept the seemingly disharmonious sounds jazz offers. Brecht does not deny that jazz is “cacophony.” He suggests instead that jazz as cacophony poses no real problem to the unaccustomed auditor. The listener’s ability to synthesize sound and recreate music to and for herself is in an historical period of flux and accelerated evolution. Alterations are occurring in the ear’s facility to hear and understand popular music as serious music (as Kunstjazz). In no way suggesting a notion of “aural shock,” Brecht believes instead that “the acoustic environment” is changing. His example for this change comes out of cinema. It is Fred Astaire. When Astaire tap dances “to the sound of a machine-room,” he lays bare the very nature of jazz’s revolution in sound. Jazz tells the story of the machine age as seen through the ears, or heard through the eyes, of the factory worker. In his immediate work environment, the factory worker transforms the irregular yet syncopated rhythms of his tools into a jazz symphony, a type of work-a-day ode to joy. Astaire’s

The Jazz Machine

53

ability to dance to this almost uncanny yet thoroughly ordinary mechanized orchestra indicates a moment in the work day when the mechanistic work itself provides the improvised outlet for escape and play. In other words, there is no aural shock, only jazz substitution. Jazz’s aurality is already well known in the form of machinery “noise.” One must only substitute “ jazz” for “machine” to feel right at home in the contemporary sound environment. This is, in effect, exactly what Astaire has done. This is not to say, however, that factory workers either individually or en masse followed Astaire’s lead, but that the music that can only be intuitively perceived as such. The music of the factory machine requires mediation to be redefined as jazz, and vice versa. This mediation is properly found in the cabarets and theater houses, where jazz can be recognized as akin to if not identifiable with factory machine noise. The epic theater thus parodies the working day of the industrialized masses, providing the workers not only with an instant of escape, but also with a playful critical tool with which to read and exploit the irregular rhythms of their immediate, exploitative working conditions. When heard as music, as opposed to mechanized factory sound, jazz, by juxtaposing work and leisure, reveals the inhuman conditions of the workplace. Astaire demonizes the machine, but this part of his act is legible only when reflected through the cabaret, at which point the tap dance appears as an all-too-human response to inhuman conditions. Conversely, Brecht admits that jazz itself suffered in the counterattack levied against it by commercialization, and that commercialized jazz has been reduced to the level of the drone of the dehumanizing machine. But in its essence, jazz was and remains, in its afterlife in modern music (i.e., the music Brecht creates with Weill for the epic theater, gestic music, Kunstjazz), the voice of human emancipation. Jazz’s “connection with the freeing of the Negroes is well known,” so well known, in fact, that Brecht need not articulate what this connection is. And indeed, for Brecht’s rhetorical purposes, it is not important to adumbrate whatever connection it is that he may or may not have in mind. The rhetorical force of his statement leads to the simple conclusion that jazz performs a critical function that can lead to the emancipation of an oppressed people, even wage slaves. Of course, to make this point, Brecht has to lean once again on a notion of racial degeneracy in

54

ANTIMUSIC

which race and class are made relative to each other. It is a necessary critical theoretical move for Brecht to make, if he is to suggest that jazz possesses revolutionary potential for radical social transformation, in a Marxian vein (Marina 67). Brecht writes in “The Epic Theater and Its Difficulties” (1927): It is understood that the radical transformation of the theater can’t be the result of some artistic whim. It has simply to correspond to the whole radical transformation of the mentality of our time. The symptoms of this transformation are familiar enough, and so far they have been seen as symptoms of disease. There is some justification for this, for of course what one sees first of all are the signs of decline in whatever is old. But it would be wrong to see these phenomena, so-called Americanismus for instance, as anything but unhealthy changes stimulated by the operation of really new mental influences on our culture’s aged body. And it would be wrong too to treat these new ideas as if they were not ideas and not mental phenomena at all, and to try to build up the theatre against them as a kind of bastion of the mind. On the contrary it is precisely theatre, art and literature which have to form the “ideological superstructure” for a solid, practical rearrangement of our age’s way of life. (23)27 The new things embraced by Brecht’s plays are actually old. What is posited as new here is not the source material with which the plays’ form and content are constructed, but the configuration of social elements that allows for the emergence of a new, socially transformative revolutionary sensibility. At the same time, the older, socially determinate constellations dim and flicker out, allowing for a near-opaque backdrop against which the new stars may shine forth. With regard to jazz, Brecht’s insistence that the ostensibly new is actually the emergent old is crucial. Having placed the revolutionary visibility of jazz in the past, in the moment of emancipation generated in part by “Negro” music, Brecht cannot assert that that which makes for the new aesthetic is a property generated solely by recent historical events. World

The Jazz Machine

55

War I is not the absolute generative cause of jazz for Brecht. However, the Great War did provide the necessary catalyst to make the new distribution of aesthetic determinants visible. At the same time, World War I drew the dominant aesthetic patterns and modes of production into eclipse. Jazz is, then, not something new; its visibility as a social, cultural, and political force is new. The eclipse of the older, once-dominant forms of art is a consequence of racial-cultural degeneration. As dire as this sounds, Brecht values this degeneration in the opposite sense of a reactionary cultural theorist such as Max Nordau. For Brecht, cultural rebirth comes from the ascendancy of precisely the “degenerative” modes of aesthetic production Nordau feared. The West’s decline is the fortunate opportunity for political reinvention and radically new means of self-fashioning.28 The representatives of the old order are hopelessly out of fashion and must be allowed to die to make way for truly new and liberating sociocultural forces. In other words, for Brecht, jazz is culturally degenerative and politically disruptive—and these are the music’s virtues. Brecht’s assumption is that all art that deserves the title is a representation of life as it is experienced in the historical moment of the work’s production. Brecht uses his form of historiography (Saint Joan, Galileo, etc.) as a means to shed light on the radical singularity of the historical moment of the present, what Benjamin would call the Jetztzeit. As a type of Brechtian dialectical image, even commodified jazz maintains the integrity and authenticity of its origin and historicity. This image can only be seen by artists of vision fully versed in the contemporary moment as well as in traditional historical forms. Jazz exists by and for this visionary new type of public: “What matters most is that a new human type should now be evolving, at this very moment, and that the entire interest of the world should be concentrated on his development” (18). The evolution of the new human type, despite being in media res, should command the attention of the entire world. And yet, the new jazz man is, of course, not altogether a recent phenomenon. The new jazz type has a prehistory, just as jazz is something quite old. This means that the Brechtian new human type is but one among many newly emergent modes of technological being to rise recently to prominence. Previously, the new human type

56

ANTIMUSIC

was simply one human type among many, all of which were subordinated to what Brecht now calls the old human type, and what Hesse will refer to as Classical man. But as Brecht insists, the new is not a dependent clause of a recent historical statement of fact; it is not a corollary to a contemporary sociological proof. The new is determined by the contemporary ability to see it as such, not just in learned discourse, but more generally in mass culture. This is a crucial distinction for Brechtian jazz aesthetics. The fact of the new’s contingency on historically determined modes of aesthetic reception places the essence of the new in the mass cultural realm. What has decayed historically is the old mode of perception and “its concomitant artistic life, theory and praxis, making them interchangeable and wholly subservient to the aesthetic regime of representation.” Thus Brecht’s jazz consists in relations of praxis that help to create political change. However, this idea is still haunted by supplemental notions of racial-cultural degeneracy and the reduction of the proletariat to the machine. In Brecht, “Man” is a radio and jazz his racially inflected voice. The jazz man is a cyborg. Brecht writes: “This new human type will not be as the old type imagines. It is my belief that he will not let himself be changed by machines but will himself change the machine; and whatever he looks like he will above all look human” (18). Brecht has already solved this problem for us through his example of Fred Astaire. But by Brecht’s own account Astaire merges with the machine through tap dance and jazz. Sharing in the essence of the jazz machine codetermines the new human type, opening a space within itself, within its factory-like existence, where a very traditional conception of “Man” is still at large and at play. In fact, jazz and other Brechtian aesthetic forms, among which the new human type may be counted, are the only spaces where human “authenticity” still exists. This authenticity is defined by leisure time and play, by having fun. In this sense, merely entering the space of the theater, the cabaret and even the factory offers the opportunity for cold, sober, critical reflection on aesthetic play, taken together with play itself. Jazz is not about abandon, it is about dialectical analysis and political subjective becoming while having fun.

THREE

The Monkey’s Trick

F

Herman Hesse and the Music of Decline

Figure 3.1. Berliners dancing at a carnival party in 1927. The photo was published in Die Dame, November 1927. Ullstein Bild, Getty Images.

F The importance of music to the construction of Hermann Hesse’s oeuvre is well known. Music functions as this oeuvre’s thematic leitmotif and also as its formal exemplar and constraint. Der Steppenwolf in particular evinces a strong formal relationship between its structure and that of the sonata. Indeed, Hesse writes in a letter that the novel is “um das Intermezzo des Traktats herum so streng und straff gebaut wie eine Sonate” (Hesse, quoted 57

58

ANTIMUSIC

in Pfister 109–10).1 The sonata form is just one of the reasons Mozart plays such a pivotal role in the novel, to be discussed at length below. But perhaps less expected is Bach’s strong influence on the novel, and in Hesse’s work more generally. Indeed, Hesse wrote two poems dedicated to the composer, “Zu einer Toccata von Bach” and “Orgelspiel”(Gojowy 72). And, as Matassi writes, in “Glasperlenspiel scheint Hesse besonders an Bach interessiert zu sein, den er in einer Wagner auf polemische Weise entgegengesetzten Dimension wiedergewonnen hat” (Matassi 121).2 As in the works of Hesse’s contemporaries, no meditation on “serious” music would be complete without taking a polemical position on Wagner. Despite his early enthusiasm for Wagner, Hesse participates in the movement against the composer’s music, not just in The Glass Bead Game (1943), but in Der Steppenwolf (Gess 193). But as we shall see, unlike with Brecht, this does not mean that Hesse turned toward jazz as a viable replacement of or tonic for the ossified tradition Wagner’s music represented. Like his Harry Haller, Hesse was still very much invested in the potency of a living musical tradition, one that embodied the best bourgeois values despite falling prey to the basest of bourgeois instincts, namely the Americanization exemplified by jazz. Hesse does not, then, share with Neue Sachlichkeit and with Brecht the view that Americanization could be, to use Baresel’s term, Germany’s “deliverance.” On the contrary, he sees Americanization and jazz technology in the much more familiar sense today as sign and cause, respectively, of cultural degeneration. Der Steppenwolf also hears jazz through modernist primitivism, understanding the music as the expressive, symptomatic focal point of European racial degeneration. The novel offsets notions of “classical” European culture with the return of the European’s primitive repressed, blacks. This regression is activated psychologically by the body’s somatic response to jazz. If Steppenwolf stopped here in its polemic against primitivism, the novel would have little to say that one couldn’t find elsewhere. But the stakes of jazz in the novel are world historical. The jazz age represents the penultimate epoch in the teleological narrative of the return of the primitive repressed. It is because of this view that Hesse makes the claim that to hear Mozart in the jazz age, one is forced to recognize the jazz elements retroactively in his

The Monkey’s Trick

59

music. In Hesse, jazz is the negation of “serious” music; it is antimusic that structures one’s positive experience of the classical tradition. In this sense, the novel is concerned as much about a crisis in musico-aesthetic form as about a psychological “inner crisis.” Hesse addresses this aspect of the jazz problem in part in the novel’s form itself, which is why the work is structured along recognizably musical lines. Enacting its own polemic, Der Steppenwolf ’s narrative structure suggests a combination of the sonata and jazz musical composition. As Ernst writes, “Da Jazz und Tänze im narrativen Text selbst explizit erwähnt werden, müssen auch entsprechende briefliche Hinweise im Kontext mit der Organisation des Romans ernst genommen werden; denn Hesse steht hier offensichtlich am Anfang einer Entwicklung, an die nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg andere Romanciers anschließen” (Ernst 301).3 One wonders if Hesse would have been pleased with the idea that Der Steppenwolf can be placed near the top of a timeline of experimental jazz novels in terms of content and organization. In any event, the novel’s structure engages in a type of parodic self-reflexion that corresponds to its notion of “the monkey’s trick,” or what Hesse understands as jazz.

I. THE MONKEY’S TRICK This interplay between and interchangeability of the two compositional modes that determine Der Steppenwolf ’s narrative development, that of jazz and serious music, create the epistemological basis of Hesse’s cultural critique. The novel contains at least three different narratives, that of the man with whom the Steppenwolf lodges; the third-person narrative of the Steppenwolf; and that of the treatise on the Steppenwolf. Each narrative contrasts with the others with respect to philosophical perspective, but together they form a unified, overarching philosophical leitmotif that is spelled out directly in the novel’s opening pages.4 The author of Der Steppenwolf ’s first narrative, the man who provides lodging for Harry Haller, a self-described man of bourgeois values, evaluates a book that Harry gives him during a

60

ANTIMUSIC

learned lecture. Sardonic and despairing, Harry’s book communicates the novel’s refrain against which its various philosophical improvisations will emerge: “It went right to the heart of all humanity, it bespoke eloquently in a single second the whole despair of a thinker, of one who knew the full worth and meaning of man’s life. It said: ‘See what monkeys we are! Look, such is man!’ and at once all renown, all intelligence, all the attainments of the spirit, all progress towards the sublime, the great and the enduring in man fell away and became a monkey’s trick!” (9). At the heart of humanity lies a simian essence. Man is no better than a monkey. It is not Hesse’s contention, however, that “man” is more animal than human. Der Steppenwolf is not a novel whose narrative procedures accept and perform a radical bestial “naturalness.” Hesse’s concern is to establish and delineate the shared, mimetic nature of man and monkey. This contention at once establishes a simian field of representation that on the surface is equal to that of man. The scene in which Haller reveals the core of his beliefs, and the central aesthetic question of the novel, comes during a lecture by “a celebrated historian, philosopher, and critic, a man of European fame” (8). While listening to the best, or at least most-acclaimed, European analysis of an undisclosed historical-philosophical problematic, Haller insists on the primal, parodic character of the mimetic faculty. Everything that is disclosed by history, philosophy, and critique is nothing better than “a monkey’s trick.” The “attainments of the spirit” (Idealism), and “the process toward the sublime” (aesthetics), can be described as not imitation, but parasitic parody. The questions the novel poses are thus: What is here being parodied? The monkey performs its trick, but for/on whom? If in fact the monkey’s trick is a trick, how can it be recognized as such if there is nothing outside of the trick, nothing that is not trick? Hesse’s choice of signifier, the monkey, is in the cultural context of the novel not a de-historicizing referent without social register. Like many of Hesse’s novels, Der Steppenwolf displays an almost morbid preoccupation with the role music plays as cultural phenomenon and sociophilosophical master-signifier. For Hesse, “Die Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Literatur und Musik manifestieren sich nämlich nicht nur auf dem Gebiet der Übertragung

The Monkey’s Trick

61

von musikalischen Formen und Strukturen in die Literatur, sondern auch unter anderem auf der inhaltlichen Ebene eines literarischen Werkes” (Grzywka 161–62).5 Thus, aside from formal considerations, in meditating on the relationship between music and literature, the novel’s content favors the classical while not excluding commentary on and even at times appreciation for jazz. In terms of form and content, jazz plays a significant role in the text; it acts as dialectical partner and foil to the problematized presence of classical music in Der Steppenwolf. Indeed, by the novel’s end it will be impossible to say with certainty if the one form of music can exist and become visible in Hesse’s contemporary context without the other.6 Jazz and classical music will be shown to be philosophically mutually dependent on each other, and each in their way crucial to a healthy spiritual life and for the creation of a robust German culture. This is not, however, to say that Hesse’s vision of jazz is egalitarian or affectionate. As we have seen, the putative representatives of jazz in its origin and “authenticity” in Europe in the ’20s were African Americans (for Hesse, Neger). As Haller makes clear, the “Negro” is for him little better than a monkey. Thus, within the novel’s jazz context, to say that we are all monkeys is to say that we are all implicated in the savage, primitive existence of blacks through the West’s complete appropriation and worship of jazz. Here Hesse echoes the racial thinking of his day, in that truck with a “racially inferior” culture causes cultural degeneration. This degeneration is a return to a shared originary racial state, one which Europeans had long since left behind but which blacks have hardly left. Even to possess the capability to degenerate means, for Haller, that some almost vestigial part of this black origin remains within the European, capable of being activated by the correct stimulus. The inability of the lecture Haller hears even to address this fact opens the void that reveals to Haller that to be of a higher racial type, Europe must deny that which in itself remains simian. Racial blackness is this simian element. It is the mimetic faculty of representation that expresses itself in higher racial types such as the European as racial distancing through parody. Racial parody is thus a form of psychological self-disfigurement, or splitting.

62

ANTIMUSIC

The sense of this psychological destruction is the schizoid hell experienced by one attuned to man’s essentially hybrid state: “Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilization. . . . Haller belongs to those who have been caught between two ages, who are outside of all security and simple acquiescence” (22). The lodger ends his account of his relationship with Harry Haller with pronouncements on human life. Dividing human life into standard historical epochs, the editor of Haller’s abandoned text declaims that hell reigns in the hearts of men when two epochs “overlap.” Apparently, when history does not find itself in a culturally hybrid state—and here “culture” is qualified in racial terms—real suffering does not take place, or at least cannot be understood as real suffering.7 Without a separation between notions of race and culture, cultural impurity is a product of racial impurity, and vice versa. To be in between cultures is the cause of genuine human suffering as an affliction of race. The problems of race and hybridity thus plague Harry Haller. To represent race and near-vestigial blackness in Haller, Hesse simply figures his “inner crisis” as that between man (European, German) and animal (black, jazz, recalling that both blackness and jazz were considered bestial before, during, and well beyond the 1920s). By his own admission, he is both man and animal, a hybrid creature guided by human reason and technology, and by the “natural,” instinctive, irrational impulses of the wolf. Haller’s bifurcated state, then, neatly embodies reactionary modernism’s dialectical negotiation between technology and irrational nature, with which jazz is also figured. Beneath the veneer of historical authenticity and progressive narrative iteration, Hesse discovers the impossibility of authenticity for a culture (always racially defined) that claims to be essentially beyond its antecedents. Within the space of the irreconcilable remainder, older cultural and religious practices survive their deaths and haunt institutions that claim to be, not original, but divorced from their evolutionary ancestors. Thus, Hesse’s second example of the dispossessed bring the situation to the contemporary

The Monkey’s Trick

63

fore. Haller’s dilemma is akin to the savage transplanted to the middle “of our civilization,” instigating what Schwarz calls his “Rück-Bildung” (Schwarz 198). Once again, it is not Hesse’s contention that the two civilizations are wholly distinct and somehow temporally disjointed. In the first example, one could claim that an evolutionary historical model is still in force, and that the force of this model is precisely its reliance on teleology. But in the second example, this logic no longer applies. As is clear by Hesse’s use of the word “savage” throughout the novel, he is referring to African tribal societies. Hesse attempts to bring to light by this geographic displacement spaces of tribal culture that are in themselves temporally, and so evolutionarily, behind advanced Western society. In other words, he racializes cultural evolution. Hesse thus offers a racialized geographical and historical mapping of cultural displacement that accords well with the claim of the “inner crisis” reflected in jazz. In this crisis, the African savage is not merely a distant ancestor of contemporary, cultivated European man. Indeed, the rise and development of Western civilization occurs as a reaction against the savage’s continued presence in the European psyche—an idea Hesse adapts from Freud’s 1912 Totem und Tabu. According to Haller, the psychical reaction against primitive savagery, or simply blackness, has become weakened by the decline of the West, allowing for the return and proliferation of this repressed racial identity in jazz. The two positions, that of blackness and what he refers to as “classical man,” are becoming indistinguishable. In fact, Harry Haller occupies the collapsed positions of both classical man and the black savage. How he fills the role of classical man in an administered society is clear enough in the novel. The part he plays as savage, or rather the extent to which Haller is, in his words, no better than a “Negro,” is far less clear. And yet, it is because Haller consists of these two natures, and only these two natures, that he is so hopelessly out of step with his time. In other words, Haller occupies the space of racial hybridity that also shelters the authentic engine of history: the monkey’s trick. However, the present epoch subverts the historically productive civilized/savage dichotomy in the same way it rejects the traditional function of the simian field

64

ANTIMUSIC

of representation. Embodying the monkey’s trick, Haller is not merely the excommunicated outsider unable to find a productive place in society, he is society’s dialectical mirror image of its failing racial imaginary. As such he must stand outside of society to reflect it in its illusory totality. The task Haller is faced with is, then, one of integration—not merely psychical but racial-cultural.8 To reconcile his material and spiritual circumstances with his surroundings, Harry must fuse his two racial natures, that of classical man and the savage, in order to negotiate the cultural terrain of monkey’s trick.

II. THE TRACK OF THE DIVINE In the novel’s second narrative, the Steppenwolf, now speaking for himself, confirms that he leads an existence alienated from the reifying commercial forces of modern life. At times able to articulate solely the perspective of one of his “natures,” we are faced with Classical Harry when Haller relates: I cannot understand what pleasures and joys they are that drive people to the overcrowded railways and hotels, into the packed cafes with the suffocating and oppressive music, to the Bars and variety entertainments, to World Exhibitions, to the Corsos....And in fact, if the world is right, if this music of the cafes, these mass enjoyments and these Americanised men who are pleased with so little are right, then I am wrong, I am crazy. I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray who finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him. (30–31) “The track of the divine” does exist in the administered world, and its traces are well covered. In searching for the divine, Harry is forever caught in its tumultuous wake. He is only able to glimpse the divine while reading poetry and philosophy from the early modern period and before. Modern literature and thought hold nothing for him but frustration and personal despair.

The Monkey’s Trick

65

Haller is able to ascertain of the divine that its privileged site of self-concealment and unveiling is music. The proper rite of the divine’s manifestation is the musico-aesthetic realm. Der Steppenwolf outlines, then, a plan of action for uncovering the traces of the divine in the modern world through music. The as-yet not fully decomposed corpse of the dead godhead is to be found in music with the aid of a classical, humanistic education. The lingering scent of the sacred corpse is not powerful enough to the untrained nose to contend with the sanitizing effect of reification. Given the Hegelian teleology already introduced in the editor’s preface, it is clear that elements of the godhead’s corpse to be found in the spiritual-aesthetic realm can still be recovered in modern art. Haller searches for traces, or echoes (Harry’s family name of “Haller” is in no way incidental, and it echoes that of the lyricist Hermann Haller, whose music was later condemned by the Nazis), in what appears to be mere noise.9 This means that within the scene of modern life, in the sounds of the dance halls and the cabarets, the divine still makes itself manifest as the trace of a primitive divine incarnation. “Primitive” does not only mean unsophisticated, non-Western and black in this case, it refers also to the living plenitude of the godhead whose time has passed. In other words, it means “archaic.” Cutting against the grain of aesthetic primitivism, Hesse’s Haller will have to find the divine echoes of Mozart and Goethe not in jazz’s primitivism, but rather in its archaic aspect. This shift to the archaic lends jazz an element of “nobility” that remains that of Rousseau’s noble savage. Unfortunately, Haller’s task of harmonizing archaic jazz with classical music becomes even more difficult (from his perspective) than before. The transmission of the aesthetic being as archaic trace of the divine is ultimately independent of the composer’s, musician’s, or listener’s virtuosity. For Haller, to catch a glimpse of the archaic dead deity in the work of art, one must be able to enjoy the work in its immediacy, to feel pleasure in its synchronous experience. This is something that cannot be taught within an academic-institutional framework. A savage experience is instinctual and need not be taught. Connoisseurship can be learned through given paths of academic study. But an archaic experience entails a restrained, innocent

66

ANTIMUSIC

pleasure that is neither instinctual or intellectual. It is a matter of the spirit or faith. “Innocent” pleasure is the crucial prerequisite for the perception of the divine in the aesthetic realm. For archaic religiosity, or faith, is the vehicle that transmits over time and across epochs the faculty of true aesthetic apperception and judgment. This faculty is completely independent of the conditions in which the godhead is revealed. Thus, Haller must hear Mozart in the instinctual jazz because, as part Classical man, he could not take pleasure in jazz otherwise. Likewise, for Mozart to be enjoyed in his contemporary moment, Haller must have faith in his sacred presence when unavoidably hearing his music’s jazz qualities without “profaning” him. For another man of different tastes, the prerequisites to aesthetic pleasure would be different. To find his proper threshold of such pleasure, Haller must first reduce himself to a primitive state, and then climb back up the evolutionary ladder. He must trace the primeval godhead to its aboriginal source, before it underwent its archaic civilizing process, by following its labyrinthine traces forward from the beginning, through Mozart and Goethe, to jazz. This can be done because the entire recapitulative history of “man” is contained in the racial-cultural unconscious.10 In Der Steppenwolf, all authentic pleasure begins unconsciously; the unconscious, both individual and collective, is the living core that allows the savage blackness to survive, as a parodic representation, epochal shifts in aesthetic taste. Each epoch translates this pure image of a primitive divinity into the specificities of its historical-cultural situation, which in turn debase it. Only when someone trapped “in-between” is able to grasp the greater disjunction between savage (also construed here as “sacred”) and civilized (at turns called “profane”) regimes of parodic representation is it possible for this problematic to be addressed. There is, then, a primary, black, savage image at the heart of aesthetic culture that at different epochal moments is made visible through bestial, parodic modes of representation. At the same time, this image is destroyed through the denial of the bestial-parodic ground that conditions it. Each epoch, then, effaces the visible, inhuman face of “the black” to anthropomorphize it in the “civilized” or “white” man’s image.

The Monkey’s Trick

67

Disjointed and out of time, Haller perceives this sacrilege because he is able to see the inhuman black face of previous epochs as the monkey’s trick. Still a product of his time, Haller is unable to pierce the veil of modern cultural institutions; he can only sense that there is a veil. Of the contemporary cultural products generated in this manner, the Steppenwolf not surprisingly singles out jazz as the most harmful. But jazz is at the same time the debased form of “divinity” with the greatest possibility of offering personal and cultural redemption through the recuperation of representational racial authenticity. It does so by allowing for an unambiguous, violent European reaction against it.11 For the monkey’s trick is finally being performed by monkeys and so presenting itself nonparodically in its authentic racial activity. This makes it once again a clear, unambiguous target to overcome. This jazz contradiction at the heart of the novel generates a negative redemptive clarity at the heart of racial-cultural ambivalence. Haller’s potentially redemptive ambivalence toward jazz becomes evident very early in the novel as he walks by a cabaret and is caught by a blast of sound: “From the dance hall there met me as I passed by the strains of lively jazz music, hot and raw as the steam of raw flesh. I stopped a moment. This kind of music, much as I detested it, had always had a secret charm for me. It was repugnant to me, and yet ten times preferable to all the academic music of the day. For me too, its raw and savage gaiety reached an underworld of instinct and breathed a simple honest sensuality” (37). Rather than describing the music as an assault on the senses, Haller describes jazz’s qualities as “lively,” “hot,” “raw as the steam of raw flesh.” These impressions are far from the adjectives one would expect from a man of Classical culture whose ear has been trained to hear and take pleasure in Mozart’s finest subtleties. Haller is here not describing an intellectual music, a form of art to be savored by the mind. He presents instead a music that is viscerally of the body, or viscerally embodied. Jazz is the vapor that rises from raw flesh. It is not just the music of the cabarets but also dancing, cannibal bodies taking pleasure in the lively sounds of slaughter. Jazz becomes for Haller a type of orchestrated primal scream that, to him at this point in the novel, has nothing to

68

ANTIMUSIC

do with the life of the mind, the life of Mozart and Goethe. Jazz is primal music befitting the degeneration and barbarism of the age. And yet, Haller admits that jazz “holds a secret charm” for him. The half-man, half-beast who has filled the pages leading to this event with nothing but scornful words for mass culture and its soul-destroying products now confesses to experiencing a secret, barely perceptible trace of pleasure on hearing jazz. Haller goes so far as to say that he prefers jazz ten times more than the academic music of his day, the twelve-tone row and other innovations of modern music that Adorno so cherished. To justify this position, Haller insists that jazz is not only raw, but savage. It possesses a “savage gaiety” that “reached an underworld of instinct and breathed a simple honest sensuality.” Once again, jazz emits vapors. It breathes. It is a living organism that is both savage and noble in its simplicity. As he attempts to intellectualize it, jazz takes on for Haller the characteristics of the archaic noble savage and as such offers a simple sensuality productive of “natural” sexual pleasure. With regard to this pleasure, Haller has already intuited that which brings jazz on a level playing field with the aesthetic magnificence of the Classical age. The savage godhead, or rather primitive blackness, can be sensed in the simple pleasure that jazz makes available not to the intellect but to instinct. Jazz is above all black gaiety, a type of childlike simplicity and childish pleasure-taking in simple things. It is a gay science. Jazz laughs with the innocence of a child and the barbarism of a savage. Because of this, jazz possesses the simple heart of a great idea, of a profundity that can only be grasped in its fleeting totality by the intellect. This Nietzschean idea of laughter is crucial to the novel’s overall philosophico-cultural arrangement, and it must always be born in mind that, in Der Steppenwolf, it is in jazz that one hears and is moved by laughter. For it allows Hesse to take up Nietzsche’s reading of Bizet in The Case of Wagner while still addressing popular culture: This music is cheerful, but not in a French or a German way. Its cheerfulness is African; fate hangs over it; its happiness is brief, sudden, without pardon. I envy Bizet for having the courage for

The Monkey’s Trick

69

this sensibility which had hitherto had no language in the cultivated music of Europe—for this more southern, brown, burnt sensibility.—How the yellow afternoons of its happiness do us good! We look into the distance as we listen: did we ever find the sea smoother? And how soothingly the Moorish dance speaks to us? How even our instability for once gets to know satiety in this lascivious melancholy! (159). Haller’s jazz “savagery,” then, is of the order of the ethnological-racist sense of the 1920s and not of the “classical” ideal still found in Nietzsche and represented in the foreign Bizet. Nevertheless, like Bizet’s music to Nietzsche’s ear, Haller is part “Negro,” insofar as the “Negro” sounds the deep, hollow echo of European man before the advent of Western civilization and culture. Hesse is working within a rigidly hierarchical scale of biological-cultural evolution, placing the “Negro,” and his jazz, in his privileged and derogatory place of the primary and primal man-animal, the monkey-god. It is this savage, divinely bestial body that wears the clothes of culture and the makeup of the false white face and performs the monkey’s trick in its pure form. Relegated to the aesthetic side of European primitivism and reformed partially by an archaic nobility, the Negro is the living embodiment of the regime of aesthetic representation as a function. He is the agent of the apparatus that represses the presence of the primitive sacred in art. Because jazz offers nothing but obscured absence as the limit of human possibility, one can only laugh with its parody. For to laugh at jazz is to have already consciously and readily fallen for its monkey’s trick.12 Thus, the reason Harry sees jazz as a music of decline is because it is only ostensibly at odds with the images of the sacred of previous epochs, to which he is still inherently connected. In fact, jazz is of great value, as it makes the deceptive nature of aesthetic achievement palpable as something to be, once again, overcome.13 Jazz is excluded from the historical aesthetic field because it does not misrepresent itself. In this sense, jazz is not art but rhythmic historiography. Jazz testifies to the radical break that has taken place in the historical order of sacred images. Just like Harry, the music of decline is hopelessly

70

ANTIMUSIC

split. It is in this schism that Haller’s “blood-raw” music finds its victims: “I stood for a moment on the scent, smelling this shrill and blood-raw music, sniffing the atmosphere of the hall angrily, and hankering after it a little too. One half of this music, the melody, was all pomade and sugar and sentimentality. The other half was savage, temperamental and vigorous. Yet the two went artlessly well together and made a whole. It was the music of decline. There must have been such music in Rome under the late emperors” (37). The Steppenwolf sniffs the air and finds his rightful prey. “Blood-raw music”—sacrificial and pharmakological in every sense—attracts the Steppenwolf at the same time as it repulses Classical man. In effect, the Steppenwolf ’s rightful prey is music. Music becomes the actual stuff of bodily sustenance, the thing in itself. To (cannibalistically) consume music is taken literally. Harry is not merely a connoisseur, he is a consumer, a cultural cannibal seeking the best means of simian sustenance to enhance his otherwise vulpine constitution. In fact, he does not hear jazz at all. Harry seems incapable of actually listening to jazz as he consumes it. Following jazz discourse in Weimar Germany, there is no musical description or attempted musicological analysis of jazz in Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf. It is not only that such a description would have to take jazz on some level as seriously as serious music or Kunstjazz, but it would also thwart the Steppenwolf ’s idea of jazz as nothing other than an orchestrated, saxo-centric primal scream. Either way, there are two odors, and not sounds, emanating from jazz. One is confectionary and indicates the music’s commodification. The other is that of blood and raw flesh. The first saccharine scent and the second “savage” and “vigorous” one “artlessly” combine to confirm jazz’s status as nonmusic, as organic matter devoid of form and sophisticated organization. Together the two scents or tastes form “the music of decline.” On the one hand, one smells the saccharine stench of Americanization, of Fordism and the death of vitalism. On the other hand one hears only unstudied, spontaneous, black improvisation. The two are perfectly, if not meaningfully, blended, like the syncopated sound of the factory machine accompanying the labored grunts of the factory worker in Brecht. The music of decline is, then, music without middle ground (in Brecht, Grundhaltung). It is music that can create a pleasing, if not pleasurable,

The Monkey’s Trick

71

effect while at the same time inciting a violent primal hunger. As in Brecht, jazz is not music, it is critique. But in Hesse, jazz critique is abject and has no revolutionary political potential. It is the music of debasement, one that Harry is not above.14 Despite all this, there is something deeply uninteresting about jazz. Indeed, amid his primitivist cannibalistic fantasies, the Steppenwolf feels a sense of profound boredom. It is the music of decline’s ability to bore one to savagery that is its great power, its inestimable worth. Because these two opposed aspects exist in dialectical tension in jazz, the music is able to create a fully unstudied response in the listener literally bored to tears. One scents one’s own beginning and end, one’s primal ancestry, and the final moments in the decline of one’s race (always white). The last Roman emperors had their jazz, their period of literary decadence. Hesse once again draws nebulous parallels between the necessary similarity between Classical man and the art of black savages with regard to degenerative cultural effects. The last phase of Roman literature is often presented in mere caricature or parody as having produced nothing original and as having been the companion of cultural decay. It is at these moments that jazz savagery erupts in reaction against the death in boredom, regardless the historical epoch. Jazz is transhistorical in that it is the art that reveals the recurring structure of cultural decay. Every epoch ends in its own jazz. All “our” culture is tainted by an aesthetically, racially debased character, or so Haller believes. Offering no ostensible grounds for this critique, Haller determines two realms of racial-cultural achievement, the authentic and the inauthentic. Modern (white European) culture falls within the realm of the inauthentic. Haller bemoans its commodification of the work of art and the instrumentalization of culture, of which this last his condition is but a symptom. Of course, he is aware that Mozart had patrons and commissions. What Haller detests is the democratization not only of culture, but also the technological means of reproduction that promote literacy and mass cultural participation.15 The work of art has become diluted or, in the exalted sense in which Haller considers its ideal, impure. The works of Mozart and Goethe, no matter how popular, remained in the hands of the

72

ANTIMUSIC

highly cultured. Although both were superstars in their time, the literate and cultured public capable of patronage and appreciation was far smaller than that of Haller’s world. Technology’s democratization of culture throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth debased, if not the essence of the work of art itself, then the prevailing critical appraisal of an artist’s aesthetic achievement. Here the role radio plays is decisive. As Landgren writes, “In der Tat ist die Bedeutung des Radios zentral, in dem es im Roman zu einem Symbol für das menschliche Leben schlechthin wird. Wie das Radio Händel vergewaltigt, so ist auch das Leben der Menschen” (Landgren 224).16 As music came into mass circulation, as it was reproduced by gramophone and radio, it became lost to itself, to its own authenticity. Hesse stops short of assigning a political value to technological reproducibility or jazz culture in general. Despite its “radio-ability,” jazz is something of a diamond in the rough, free of propaganda and politicization.17 Prey to all the trappings of the music market’s sugar-coated simulacra, jazz retains the kernel of its “originary” authenticity. This is its archaic nobility, it’s innocence. At bottom, the music is honest. This honesty can be accredited to jazz’s “Negro” genealogy. Because of its African origin, jazz is originally outside of culture; its essence is one of the inculpability of the instincts. But because of its introduction into culture, jazz in its historicity serves as the defining dialectical negation of Western aesthetics. There is also “something of the American” in jazz. Hesse is careful here to place the African American firmly outside the space of the American proper. A term like “African American,” or “Aframerism”—a term African Americans applied to themselves in the ’20s to designate their Africanness and their Americanness—holds no meaning for Hesse. African Americans exist in a state radically ecstatic to the sphere of Euro-American cultural exchange and heritage. And while people of African descent are ecstatic to the West, as clearly evidenced by the debased “primitive” ecstasies provoked by their music, they are also, as we have already seen, integral to the evolutionary development of European culture. Blacks stand at once outside of Europe and yet at its center. To appropriate this radically foreign primitive

The Monkey’s Trick

73

nature as a means to cultural renewal, Hesse will have to show that blacks in truth actually need not be appropriated because their Western, German analogue already exists; that this analogue or white negro has always been there; and that jazz does not so much introduce a foreign element into European culture as awaken and release a long-dormant, indigenous inner white savagery. Hesse has taken the first step toward conceptualizing the existence of a racially and culturally pure German jazz tradition. Ultimately, however, he retains jazz’s black essence, but relativized. All peoples stem from this black savage origin and retain this black savage inheritance. Jazz develops out of it—but jazz will develop differently depending on the historical-cultural context. The Romans had their evolutionary blackness, and so their jazz. Germans have their jazz. Jazz means racial-cultural decline due to the inevitable, atavistic return of evolutionary blackness in culture. In fact, the existing barbarism of modern culture must be met with the savagery of jazz, which can be controlled by force (commodification) to achieve victory over a seemingly analogical but far more dangerous and uncontrollable inner “white” savagery, or inner crisis. That is to say, that “black” savagery (jazz) substitutes for “white” savagery (the reason for the development of genius in Classical man) because it can be controlled. This secondary racial parody, the “white” monkey’s trick, brings a primitive harmony to the dismal state of affairs akin to Classical man in harmony with himself and his classical surroundings. Without this fighting fire with fire, this parody of parody, the “sprachlich suggerierte Kohärenz, gebunden an die Tradition pietistisch-bürgerlicher Erziehung, entspricht nicht mehr Harry Hallers Erfahrungen. Er ist, wie der Herausgeber in seinem Vorwort betont, der ‘Neurose’ seiner Zeit verfallen” (Knufermann 279).18 Through jazz parody, Haller becomes identifiable as neurotic. His “natural” disposition as loner neurotic becomes universal and representative. The neurotic white parody of black parody lays bare the West’s descent into barbarism in legible terms. The seemingly simple yet utterly neurotic binaries on the surface of which Der Steppenwolf functions—man/animal; civilization/savagery; white/ black—are destroyed by the Steppenwolf ’s ontological condition. Here a bipolar personality shatters into schizophrenic subjectivity. Where there can

74

ANTIMUSIC

be no unity of two poles that define their systems through their separation, the novel presents a way to combine divergent social and personal elements, recomposing a psychical whole out of the spare parts of a fragmented mental system. And it does so in aestheticized racial terms coded to music.

III. JAZZMAN MOZART The novel’s third narrative, the treatise, conjectures: Suppose that Harry tried to ascertain in any single moment of his life, any single act, what part the man had in it and what part the wolf, he would find himself at once in a dilemma, and his whole beautiful wolf-theory would go to pieces. For there is not a single human being, not even the primitive Negro, not even the idiot, who is so conveniently simple that his being can be explained as the sum of two or three principle elements; and to explain so complex a man as Harry by the artless division into wolf and man is a hopelessly childish attempt. (57) When we examine the most simple forms of human consciousness and subjective composition, that of the Negro and the idiot, we find that even they, the Negro and the idiot, possess complex psychological attributes. Even the Negro and the idiot share in the essentially human characteristic of a foundational schizophrenic psyche. Hesse has introduced now in the treatise the quasi-Freudian discourse from Totem und Tabu that characterizes the psychological processes of “savages” as the primal and primary manifestation of the human psyche. The Negro and the idiot are in fact the first and abiding stages of all human ego development, and as such they come to personify the fundamental models of all mental disturbances. It is not that the Negro is the “white” unconscious and that, as such, he presents a human type that is unburdened of the full psychical armature of ego, super-ego, repression,

The Monkey’s Trick

75

and so forth. But rather, it is the case as in Freud that the psychical apparatus in the Negro is not fully developed, thus his symptomatic responses to disruptions in the Oedipal cycle of normative human behavior manifest themselves almost unadorned. The bipolar conflict that characterizes the Steppenwolf does not resolve so much as simply end with, not a reversion, but a reduction equivalent to the psychic life of the Negro (and the idiot). The Steppenwolf is reduced to convergence of a multiplicity of psychical beings who take turns wearing the white mask of civilization. This reinvestment in the multiplicity of being carries enormous consequences for the novel’s meditation on blackness. Where there were once two stable, coherent personae in conflict with one another, the treatise on the Steppenwolf theorizes a primary (primal) signifying subjectivity that in itself has no meaning. The mask neither possesses nor produces any necessary, essential content in any necessary, essential way. It is the medium and means that make the content of civilization visible. It is Bloch’s color “Black.” In this mode of self-representation, the mask is not African but blackness; it functions precisely like jazz. Formally, Hesse has indeed written a jazz novel. Precisely as Bloch conjectured on the nature of blacks in Spuren, Hesse believes that the “Negro” is the personification of what remains in whites as a defining subjective mechanism. The Negro is, not a neurosis or psychosis, but the basis of the psychical process. In this regard, the Negro becomes as multiple as the human psyche described by the treatise. One of its incarnations is as the subjective process that divides the burgeoning subjective agent into multiple, constitutive parts. Thus, Western schizoid subjectivity appears as the product of the “inner” Negro as crisis: “We need not be surprised that even so intelligent and educated a man as Harry should take himself for a Steppenwolf and reduce the rich and complex organism of his life to a formula so simple, so rudimentary and primitive” (58). Classical man has somehow ignored or failed to realize the obvious. But this short-coming in itself is the mark of the black savage. This is not to say that Classical man “goes primitive” in his actions. Rather, his apperceptive

76

ANTIMUSIC

faculty functions in the same basic manner as that of the savage. To be clear: the “Western mind” is here thought to be more highly evolved than the “savage mind.” But the two brains function at bottom in the same way and with the same basis for psychical construction. The commensurability between the two minds is crucial to the “primitive” logic of the text. Education and culture change the outward appearance and demeanor of the European, but he retains the savage mind at the level of basic cognitive function. At bottom, one still thinks like a black savage, even if one has a much richer, deeper conceptual treasure chest with which to adorn one’s ideas. This is why “The Steppenwolf, too, believes that he bears two souls (wolf and man) in his breast and even so finds his breast disagreeably cramped because of them. . . . Although he is a most cultivated person, he proceeds like a savage that cannot count further than two. . . . Harry lies twice over when he employs this niggardly wolf-theory” (60). These “two souls” are a product of the perception of function as content. The savage soul is not a separate entity but the basic procedural apparatus of the civilized soul. The notion of two souls, like that of the binary savage/civilized, is always already the fiction that jazz overcomes. The treatise thus insists that the duality of man/wolf is false because there can be no clear demarcation of the qualities that define its poles. Classical man is as savage as he is classical. The distinction between the two is strictly formal. This explains how the savage core of the work of art can survive its epochal shifts, and how Classical man can still exist in the modern world. It is not that the temporality that the novel determines as historicity is false, but that the shifts within it are not essential to its form. Classical elements and savage traits persist but are reconfigured in a new hegemonic constellation in each epoch yet remain formal properties of art regardless of their distribution. Haller’s failure of thought is that of his age: he believes in the binary logic that insists in the first place that Classical man is dead and that there is such a thing as an overcome black savagery. Thus the age, the jazz age, itself is savage or “black” in its understanding of evolutionary historicity and collective subjectivity, insofar as “savage” is here understood as “uncanny,” or the return of the repressed. Epochal thinking can be classified as an illusory

The Monkey’s Trick

77

idealism, one that marks the Steppenwolf as the sign of his times. Jazz puts the future of this illusion in doubt. The problem, then, of Der Steppenwolf is not the Steppenwolf, but Haller’s attempt to limit himself historically to the Steppenwolf or primal savage and its defining opposition, Classical man. This self-limiting is understood in the novel as the inability to grasp temporality properly.19 It is not the case that the manifest content of an epoch translates symbolic meaning. Temporality in Der Steppenwolf is to be experienced allegorically. All facts and events continue to exist; they persist into and as the present. The linear progression of temporality hides an allegorical or hieroglyphic meaning, that of blackness. The temporal depth of an epoch shifts beneath a stable yet artificial, reflective surface. Time wears a false white face. As Haller explains: I told her that the omnipresence of all forms and facts was well known to ancient India, and that science had merely brought a small fraction of this fact into general use by devising for it, that is, for sound waves, a receiver and transmitter which were still in their first stages and miserably defective. The principle fact known to that ancient knowledge was, I said, the unreality of time. . . . We might as well look for the day when, with wires or without, with or without disturbance of other sounds, we should hear King Solomon speaking, or Walter von der Vogelweide. (103) The present conceals an historical plenitude. Past epochs exist spectrally in the present. This describes the present’s transience and its intransigent essence. Temporality takes on the geometrical grammar of the graph, not the metrics of verse. The present moment is a type of nexus that can, if perceived properly, help to summon the living presence of past events and their human incarnations. Haller thus unbinds the epochal logic presented in the editor’s introduction, as well as his own binary opposition of Classical man/black savage. What Haller himself fails to realize in this professorial moment is that subjectivity functions like temporality and is conditioned by the hieroglyphic movement of “real” history, which is here “real” suffering.

78

ANTIMUSIC

To make his point, Haller draws on his background as sinologist, schematically detailing a simple aspect of Indian philosophy and using it to decipher the whole of Western temporal experience. The unreality of time “has as of yet escaped the notice of Western science,” which Haller sees as technological instrumentalization. Temporality falls outside of technology’s field of vision. This reconciliation allows Haller to think technology with primitive, irrational blackness. Haller is able to imprint his reactionary modernist tendencies onto the radio, and by extension jazz, without contradiction. The radio and the phonograph are brought to bear witness to this. More importantly, Haller understands the state-of-the-art in terms of music, and more specifically, as music’s transmission. Music’s technological reproducibility opens the art of sound to popularization, democratization, Americanization. And yet the radio—whether or not Haller realizes this remains to be seen—destroys the very logic of instrumentalization he abhors. For, with the radio it can no longer be said that an essential connection exists between the event of the concert and the musical score. Technology diffuses musical “essence”; it shatters the coherence of the sign as it strips the score of its auratic being. Crucial, however, is to note that technology becomes a destructive force only to serious music. It enhances and indeed is a part of jazz and jazz experience. Indeed, the theoretical limits of technological reason are revealed in the invasion of the new “Parisian” sound, jazz. An authentic Negro band plays the Odeon, making it the best club in small-town Germany. But as we have seen, one need not go to the Odeon (hearing, of course, the classical undertones of the name) to experience the “Negro jazz.” This “new” sound pervades the airwaves, contributing to the multiplication and dissemination of distortions in subjectivity and the normative perception of time. As a symptom of technological enframing, jazz becomes, by its wide acceptance, confounded with disease and poison (Pharmakon). Without this occlusion and occultation, the radio could very well be seen as the instrument par excellence for the revelation of the unreality of time (103). Alexander the Great gets his own radio talk show. Haller is of course speaking metaphorically. But the metaphor allows for the opening of jazz to

The Monkey’s Trick

79

its redemptive potential. As we have seen, jazz carries within it the very agent of its own subversion. Jazz is a double agent. The “new” “Negro” element in jazz ensures the survival of elemental authenticity. In fact, because of the technological dissemination of jazz, Western culture comes that much closer to closing in on its “true” self, to laughing at its mistakes while perceiving time’s synchronicity. This is why Goethe appears to Haller as he slumbers in a jazz club. It is as if Goethe could appear in no other way and, more importantly, in no other setting than the jazz venue. Fallen culture is found in the dance hall. Indeed, jazz contains the sum total of Haller’s reflections on culture. If Goethe is to appear to Haller, he must do so in connection to jazz and in jazz time. Jazz is Goethe’s preferred music and moment of revelation. The Negroes are conquering Europe, and it’s about time. Indeed, they have not so much invaded Europe as have been revealed as having always been there, just as the jazz initiate, Hermine, has always been a part of Haller, despite his having only just made her acquaintance. Haller meets the flapper prostitute Hermine, aka Hermann, in a jazz club he wanders into while on the verge of suicide. Hermine captivates him in a way well beyond mere sexual attraction.20 Not only does she remind him of a childhood friend, Hermann, with whom Haller was infatuated throughout the rest of his life, but she also listens to his intellectualized ravings and homilies, appearing to understand them. Haller and Hermine make a type of devil’s pact. She will help him to overcome the duality of his existence, and in return he must fall in love with her and kill her. In fact, both aspects of the transaction are geared toward Harry Haller’s redemption. Hermine exerts power over him because she functions like a jazz differend in his life and in the narrative structure of the story. She performs the monkey’s trick as it pleases her, parodying various subject positions at will, to the point of complete bodily transformation. She is at once the prostitute Hermine, the young boy Hermann, and even, near the end of the novel, a black woman. She embodies all of the jazz stereotypes of the day, including its emasculating effects, its inherent homosexuality, drug use, human sacrifice, and blackness in the figure of the “little nigger girl” type. Hermine is thus Harry’s physical introduction to jazz, which acts like poison and panacea to his ailing

80

ANTIMUSIC

system. This viral jazz is Pharmakon to Harry’s ills, as “the novel depicts an alchemical progression” that “is in its philosophical manifestation a discipline that presents a path toward individuation and psychological wholeness” (Rockwood 53). It begins externally as a type of jazz spiritual fitness training. In the case of Harry Haller (and in that of Klaus Mann’s Hendrik Höfgen), he must teach his body to dance (45). This is exactly the lesson the laughing Mozart will try to teach Harry, namely, that Mozart was a jazzman before there was jazz, because there has always been jazz. Mozart’s appearance alone shows that the integrity of Classical man as a discrete subjective singularity is nothing but the illusion of a perverse historicism.21 But Harry will receive help along his way to jazz enlightenment from an even greater source of difference and indeterminacy than either Mozart or the magical Hermine. He meets Herr Pablo while practicing his jazz dances. Pablo’s origin is suspect in its lack of racial determinacy (120–21).22 Fashioned out of the Jonny tradition, Pablo is primarily a saxophonist but he is also considered a master of all instruments. And while he can speak in jazz vernacular, he commands “every language.” His jazz communicates everything at all times. Pimp-like, he disseminates the text’s women, having the power to offer Harry their services at a moment’s notice. Pablo also controls the flow of narcotics in and into the text, displaying his character as another Pharmakon to Harry’s malaise, “als ein Traum, als eine Halluzination, durch Alkohol oder Drogen ausgelöst” (Beresina 43). At the end of the novel, it is Jonny-like Pablo who guides Harry through the psychedelic vision of his own mind, bringing Harry close to an unintellectualized, “Eastern” awareness of true temporal being. This awareness is of course the key to Haller’s self-becoming and the sword that cuts the Gordian knot of Harry’s impoverished, dialectical soul. Thus, just as jazz corrupts the spirit it replenishes inner fortitude and reveals the fragmented character of a delusional epoch. Pablo circulates among his intimates and his adoring jazz public, becoming whatever the sick individual and perverted collective requires in order to find its internal, immortal laughter.23 Pablo represents the absent center of Der Steppenwolf as novel and sign of the times.24 He haunts the novel as Haller’s jazz potential and creolized doppelgänger.

The Monkey’s Trick

81

Indeed, Harry refers to Pablo as Creole, thus problematizing Pablo’s alchemical nature to the point of illegibility (120). Harry can only grasp Pablo as a riddle (124). He relates this enigma to the gramophone: “Just as the gramophone contaminated the esthetic and intellectual atmosphere of my study and just as the American dances broke in as strangers and disturbers, yes, and as destroyers, into my carefully tended garden of music, so, too, from all sides there broke in new and dreaded and disintegrating influences upon my life that, till now, had been so sharply marked off and so deeply secluded” (128). The gramophone binds itself to the structure of aesthetic and intellectual existence at the cellular level. His exposure to jazz as virus causes Haller to begin to undergo a genetic mutation, evolving in a circular pattern from man of classical learning, to jazz man, and eventually back again, stronger but less integrated than before. Where Haller’s life already presents itself as shattered and thus alienated from the totality of social relations is the point at which his disintegration as sign of the times begins. Because music is the guiding force of Haller’s existence, changes in modes of musical reproduction and consumption cause upheavals, or crises, in his inner life. Exposure to jazz has left him, for the moment, the distorted, disfigured, representative of the age. Indeed, the intensity of the jazz experience is much sharper than that of the appreciation of a work of so-called high art. Maria’s effusions over Pablo overpower anything Haller has seen before regarding the emotion a great artist in the classical sense has inspired in someone. Indeed, Maria is able to enthuse over Pablo and his music to a far greater extent than Haller can over, say, Mozart’s music, because Pablo, as the voice of his time in all of his epoch’s contradictions, diversions, and dementia, speaks authentically. Mozart’s authentic voice, the “real” Mozart that “really” suffered, can only be accessed through jazz mediation, by the awakening of the dormant spirit that haunts the German Geist. In other words, Haller thinks of culture as a phenomenon that is always understood through the historical mediation of its contemporary products in a national or imperial setting. After jazz, all music can only be heard through jazz. Thus, when he speaks, which is very seldom and never unconditionally, Pablo as jazz embodiment voices the historical totality of aesthetic experience. He plays all instruments, speaks

82

ANTIMUSIC

all languages, and is all artists in the historically conditioned living present, including Goethe and Mozart. Historical mediation and contemporary cultural definition, according to Herr Pablo, is music’s true calling. Although learned in and deferential toward serious music, due to its academic ossification Pablo doesn’t see the point of it: On making music, Herr Haller, on making music as well and as much as possible, and with all the intensity with which one is capable. That is the point, Monsieur. Though I carried the complete works of Bach and Haydn in my head and could say the cleverest things about them, not a soul would be better for it. But when I take hold of my mouthpiece and play a lively shimmy, whether the shimmy be good or bad, it will give people pleasure. It gets into their legs and into their blood. That’s the point and that alone (132). Music is not about a learned experience, a confirmation of the use-value of one’s acquired cultural knowledge; music is its own end. The moment one seeks to create or enjoy music for the sake of an experience outside of music, one steps outside of music altogether. The fox trot and its musical accompaniment desire nothing outside of music’s essence. Jazz musicality communicates with the blood. History and connoisseurship have layered Mozart’s work with the burden of the spirit, with the intellectualized, philosophical proof of a people’s inner crisis. Formal reflection on the musical work has given the score and its event a mask, indeed a mirrored surface with which to reflect the contingent elements of an epoch’s contradictions. This mask as mirror obscures the blood-simple truth of all musical endeavor. Jazz reveals this. Thus, the academic apparatus conditioning serious music performs the same destructive task that the novel overtly assigns to the technologized commodification of jazz. In this sense, Classical man and Steppenwolf are equally guilty of the misapprehension of the work of art. In their overdetermined yet Manichean apprehension and cultural paranoia, they fail to perceive that the face that stares back at them from the work of

The Monkey’s Trick

83

art is their own, and not that of a black man. Bloch’s train passenger never realizes it is not he who stares back at him in blackface. Pablo as riddle is solved when the man in the mirror sees that he and the black other are one and the same. This sphinx-like knowledge of Herr Pablo amounts to musical vitalism. Although Bach and Haydn are at Pablo’s fingertips, this man as musical Pharmakon chooses to play jazz because, as he makes clear, jazz is the music of the present. Jazz speaks to mediation between the blood and disembodied desire; it moves the untutored body; it boils over in a frenzy of authentic pleasure. Just as Haller and all those living in between epochs are affected with “real” suffering, the overcoming of false dichotomies presented as false faces, the raw purity of jazz’s Africanicity gives rise to “real” pleasure. In fact, the jazz experience is far more “real” than that of the contemporary, academic experience of Mozart—something of which Mozart himself is aware. Mozart actually enters the scene of Hermine’s murder with radio in hand, setting up the device in order to hear a broadcast of Handel’s Concerto and discourse with Harry on the nature of modern, popular music. Inadvertently offering his best Beethoven impersonation, Haller cries, “Must this be, Mozart?,” to which Mozart replies with laughter: “And in fact, to my indescribable astonishment and horror, [Mozart’s] devilish tin trumpet spat out, without more ado, a mixture of bronchial slime and chewed rubber; the noise the owners of gramophones and radios have agreed to call music” (212). An incredible image, Mozart plays jazz, this “mixture of bronchial slime and chewed rubber; the noise the owners of gramophones and radios have agreed to call music.” “My God,” I cried in horror, “what are you doing, Mozart? Do you really mean to inflict this mess on me and yourself, this triumph of our day, the last victorious weapon in the war of extermination against art? Must this be, Mozart?” How the weird man laughed! Yet the weird, laughing, jazzman Mozart is still able to discern “inspiration” in how the basses “stride like gods.” Admitting that the “crazy funeral” mutilates the music of the masters, Mozart nevertheless contends that there exists in music an eternal core, or nature of glory, that survives and transcends the distortions and perversions of mechanical

84

ANTIMUSIC

reproduction (212–14). In defending the everlasting quality of music—that essential, productive aspect of the score itself that passes through time and the historical material circumstances that shape it—Mozart diagnoses succinctly the disease afflicting Harry’s age while at the same time representing the highest form of any age. Or, as Pfister writes, “Wenn Form gleichzeitig auch Sinn meint, dann repräsentiert zweifellos Mozart die höchste aller Formen” (Pfister 110).25 Presumably, no one would know more about this than Mozart. Yet it is a Mozart channeled completely through Haller’s abiding mistrust of popular forms of entertainment, and through his unswerving sense of duty to cultural elitism. Music is not for the masses; the radio’s and the gramophone’s greatest sin is not the garbling of godly music but the brutal sacrifice of music made on the altar of the ignorant. This musical offering, given in the living rooms of the uncouth, of the artistically bankrupt or grotesque, survives its own ritual destruction. Furthermore, this sacrifice is necessary for the experience of the true, abiding glory of music. In the age of mechanical reproduction, the inauthentic, the artificial, is in fact the authentic, “real” means of accessing so-called high art. Thus, the apprehension of serious music requires an even more rigorous tyranny and discipline in the appreciation of the arts than ever before if high art is to be preserved as such. Paradoxically, the radio demands even greater vigilance and an even more extreme form of elitism than ever before. The connoisseur Heller can only exist as such in the jazz world of the gramophone. Unknown to him, his love of music, as it manifests itself and shapes his being, is wholly conditioned by the very apparatus and music he despises. Haller exists always already in jazz negation. This is why the moment of Mozart listening to the radio is a far more apropos image for the novel’s musicological-philosophical program than all others. Mozart can no longer be heard without the radio, not even in the concert hall. Mozart is now impossible without the technical reproduction jazz represents. The “pure image” of Mozart becomes “magic,” in the sense that “Magie erscheint einerseits als Synonym der totalen Krise, genauer gesagt: des ‘Untergangs’ des ‘wissenschaftlichen Denkens’”

The Monkey’s Trick

85

(Moritz 309–10).26 The once sacred Mozart is lost to unmediated experience, replaced by the empty, vacated sign of the Fall of Enlightenment culture. At the same time and as an effect of this, jazz and the radio are ubiquitous: “Everywhere it obtrudes its mechanism, its activity, its dreary exigencies and vanity between the ideal and the real, between orchestra and ear. All life is so, my child, and we must let it be so; and, if we are not asses, laugh at it. It little becomes people like you to be critics of the radio or of life either” (213). Hesse raises the radio to the height of the ideal. It becomes the sign of the times, the standard bearer for an age lost to mechanism, the automatism of a soulless lack of spontaneity and improvisation. Here the radio is more than a means of mechanical reproduction. The radio encompasses every aspect of modern existence and exigency; everything is in some way contingent on that which the radio represents. The radio becomes a magic fetish object. And jazz is the true voice of the radio. Whereas the classical concert is reproduced, and so disrupted, distorted, and mostly destroyed by its recording and radio transmission, jazz comes to live first and foremost as the black art of mechanical reproduction to be transmitted via haunted radio waves. The “training” that one undergoes to listen in order to “appreciate” jazz happens away from the scene of its “original” manifestation. Thus jazz, like film for Benjamin, is the auraless “pure” product of technological advancement. Jazz has no originary moment outside of its broadcast because it is always heard first, no matter what the circumstances of one’s first encounter with jazz, as if it were a radio program. For Haller, jazz in its very conception and creation was made for and by the radio. The very structure of jazz is that which the radio, as master sign for a technologically “enframed” type, perfectly delineates. This disjunction that imposes itself on the public is that “between the ideal and real, between orchestra and ear.” A plenitude of meaning transmitted itself directly, unmediated before the advent of the radio. The suggestion here is that hearing was as good as playing, composing, and creating. The “reuse” of music could be apprehended by the senses and the intellect without recourse to a third term. Nothing stood in the way of the balance between

86

ANTIMUSIC

orchestra and the unaided hearing of the ear. The ear of the auditor was an organic part of the orchestra, conditioned in its musical apperception by nothing but the transcendental structure of its training, “nature” and ability. The rupture between orchestra and ear in the age of the radio determines a third structure external to the organic connection between the ideal and the real. Artificiality filters the ideal, perverting it without wholly destroying it while redefining the real’s parameters. The ideal and the real are transformed in terms of the capacity to grasp the totality of their organic continuum. In this sense, both the ideal and real, because of their essential connection, are alienated not only from each other, but from themselves. The listener cannot come to “know” herself through art. Like Hermine, she is annihilated by the machine that doubles her and her lifeworld, and then discards her as irrelevant. Haller’s dual nature is the effect of mechanical reproduction, and the alienation from the self and ideal other that is its byproduct. Everyone is necessarily a Steppenwolf; Haller is merely the one who can articulate this experience directly. It is because of this Blochian duplication—the reproduction of the self as alien other or simply, in the jazz scenario, as black—that Haller kills Hermine. She is his jazz double; she is Haller’s dialectical radio image, his mechanically reproduced self. Instead of laughing at the parodic instances of himself to be found in his image and using them to recover his own sanctimonious beauty, Haller sacrifices Hermine in an act of virtual suicide. Mozart takes him to task for this. Far from condemning Haller for murder, however, Mozart upbraids Harry for not having learned to laugh, for missing the humor in racial-cultural parody. “Learn what is to be taken seriously, and laugh at the rest,” Mozart insists. Because it is the pure articulation of mechanical reproduction, jazz is not serious music; it is the music of laughter and forgetting—something Hermine, too, attempted to make clear to Haller in various ways. Learning to laugh in/at his own time is Haller’s task, and jazz plays a crucial role in this particular and peculiar quest. Understood correctly within the complex temporal-ontological framework of the novel, Mozart makes clear that to hear him in the contemporary world of mechanical reproduction is also to hear jazz. Mozart can no longer

The Monkey’s Trick

87

be understood outside of the space of the radio, outside of jazz. Goethe suffers the same fate.27 Instead of lamenting this fact, of deriding jazz and detesting the doubled self, one must embrace the static inauthenticity of the age and laugh with it as the only possible form of mediation between the ideal and the real. Mozart and Goethe will not be legible unless one first learns to read the language in which their art is encoded in contemporary culture. Whereas in a bygone era this may have meant training the ear in the classical tradition, today it is the case that the ear must undergo a double training, in the classical and jazz idioms. Jazz is then much more than the black mark that makes visible the white page of classical music. It is not the product of an orchestra of apes parodying Mozart just well enough to suggest the master and just badly enough to make the entire spectacle into a perverse, yet harmless, joke. Jazz is nothing less than inner crisis and racial-cultural ruin. As such, it is also a politics.

FOUR

The Music of Fascism

F

Adorno on Jazz

Figure 4.1. Weintraubs Syncopators, at a rehearsal with ballet dancers in Berlin, circa 1931. Ullstein Bild, Getty Images.

F Adorno gave direct indication, in Zeitlose Mode and the Introduction to the Sociology of Music, that in his early essays on jazz he may have misapprehended aspects, if not of the music, then of the sociological nature of its origin in the United States, its commercial production, and its global consumption. This reconsideration did not, however, change his fundamental position on the music his earlier works eviscerate, namely German jazz, which, at the time of their composition, Adorno did not differentiate adequately from popular 89

90

ANTIMUSIC

music and what he felt to be the myth of the music’s African American origin. Indeed, any approach to Adorno’s thought on jazz has to situate it in this context. For, as Robinson wisely reminds in his excellent critical survey of Adorno’s jazz writings: Our first step must to be remove two misconceptions associated with Adorno’s use of the term “ jazz”: first, that it referred to what we regard today as jazz, and second, that the music it referred to was American. Neither was the case. Because of the peculiar manner in which American popular music was introduced into Weimar Germany, Adorno could not have known that when he took up his pen to polemicise against jazz he was writing about a specifically German brand of music. Adorno’s jazz writings, although post-dating the Weimar Republic, must be read within the context of Weimar Germany’s commercial music as a whole, a context largely forgotten today and, due to the predations of history, extremely difficult to reconstruct. (Robinson 1) Robinson correctly and decisively adds that “Adorno’s ideas on jazz, however tempered by his experiences abroad, never entirely left the Weimar Republic and can only be understood in that context. His very use of the term jazz . . . requires further analysis and differentiation if we are to understand these writings in their full significance, and particularly if we are to understand the burden of all his thoughts on jazz: its fascist propensities” (Robinson 3–4). This chapter attempts to reconstitute the critical-theoretical assumptions primarily of Adorno’s “On Jazz,” and as paradigmatic of the work’s, and his jazz oeuvre’s, symptomatically reflected and stated historio-philosophical indices. For example, one of these indices in this chapter will be the history of the German reception of the saxophone, and the instrument’s status and signifying matrix in Weimar Germany, as Adorno represents it. Exemplifying the German disdain for the saxophone as an instrument of foreign military

The Music of Fascism

91

orchestras, Adorno equates jazz with martial music. With the march and hindsight as the mediating factors, Adorno finds repressive militaristic jazz elements in the history of “serious” music since Beethoven, in particular in Wagner’s operas.1 For Adorno, it is not until the new music of the early twentieth century avant-garde that composition begins to evade the reifying effects of the bellicose, dictatorial culture industry by reflecting its own autonomy as art. Jazz is antithetical to this reflection. As a “pure” product of mechanical reproduction, jazz is incapable of dialectical participation in critical reflection on art and thus offers no redemptive, utopian moment from the position of art’s autonomy. For Adorno, jazz is anti-music; it functions as an anti-utopian, antidialectical opiate of the masses, a fetish object for political primitivism. The political value of jazz is, then, that of seduction into an anesthetized state primed by the culture industry for authoritarian rule. Furthermore, due to its origin in military music, jazz propaganda is most effective as a subliminal form of warmongering. Jazz surreptitiously primes the masses for the battlefield, making it the (anti-)music of fascism. Thus, whereas Brecht saw jazz as “fun,” Adorno understands jazz Gebrauchsmusik as totalitarian, and the notion of autonomous Kunstjazz as laughable (Kodat 3). And having seemingly ignored Hesse’s Mozart, Adorno’s assumes that to philosophize jazz will bring catcalls from all quarters worth taking seriously. Yet he does not let his self-imposed limits, which he takes to be self-identical with those he observes when approaching serious music, deter him. Adorno begins his essay “On Jazz” with the idea that mockery greets any challenge to the notion of jazz’s definitional simplicity: “The question of what is meant by ‘ jazz’ seems to mock the clear-cut definitive answer. Just as the historical origins of the form are disappearing within its ambivalent use at the present moment. For the purpose of providing a crude orientation, one could concede that it is that type of dance music . . . that has existed since the war and is distinguished from what preceded it by its decidedly modern character” (470). Adorno situates his treatment of jazz historically in order to understand jazz’s unmediated, unparalleled success, its undeniable presence in the present.

92

ANTIMUSIC

I. JAZZ AT WAR The first obstacle to the historical consideration of jazz in the present is that the music’s origin has been lost in the fog of war. Indeed, jazz’s contemporaneity as a postwar phenomenon obscures its immediate effects. What is known of jazz’s origin is that it gave rise to the music’s contemporary and historical expressions only after World War I, as its German variant. Adorno’s interwar and immediate postwar jazz “genealogy” depends largely on the history of jazz in Germany, as practiced by Germans. As Robinson again reminds us, when approaching these essays, we must “transfer his remarks to the commercial music of Weimar Germany, where jazz . . . followed a completely different line of development. Confronted with a music played by whites, heard, purchased and danced to by whites, and mass-produced and marketed by whites, Adorno may be excused for concluding that any black American features that may have existed in jazz had been utterly eradicated in the course of its social evolution” (Robinson 13–14). While the interest here is neither in condemning nor excusing the racial aspects of Adorno’s jazz essays, Robinson’s more specific historical point is of crucial importance for understanding Adorno’s work on jazz. Adorno separates black jazz from white, African American from German, and in so doing he clearly understands that the German variant can be used to totalitarian ends. In Adorno, as in Germany at the time, there is not one unified sense of jazz and jazz history, there are two: one African American and one German. Adorno speaks exclusively to the latter. To accept, however provisionally, Adorno’s genealogy of German jazz, or jazz as it has been commodified by the culture industry in Germany, one must recognize to whom this jazz belongs, which is also to ascertain for whom this jazz exists (Brown 24–29). In situating jazz’s first appearance, its Urauffuhrung on the German cultural scene as coterminous with the singularity of a specific jazz program, Adorno defines German jazz in its totality from the point of view of a single, hegemonic perspective, separate from jazz’s African American variant. The jazz of which Adorno speaks is that of a strictly German origin from within the culture industry.

The Music of Fascism

93

Thus, Adorno positions the beginnings of jazz in a European framework. Although he mentions African American expressive culture’s role in the formation of jazz, this turns out to reinforce the historical-origin narrative of jazz in Germany. Adorno does this to undermine the potential Aryan mythologization of jazz as a German music form. It is also why he insists that jazz does not come into being, Athena-like, just after World War I as an African American expressive form but is instead a German invention with its roots in the war itself. Adorno is fully aware that the potential for fascism’s appropriation of German jazz rests on the very hierarchical, discursive logic fascists use to generate and condition belief in jazz as the product of a racially inferior culture. In removing African America from jazz history, Adorno seeks to critique fascism’s claims to jazz without offering a corrective. In his jazz essays, Adorno is interested exclusively in attacking the culture industry as collusive with fascism, and after the war with totalitarianism more generally. He has no interest in speaking to race or the sociopolitical condition and cultural contribution of African Americans in Europe and America. Adorno’s reason for this is obvious. He has clearly identified the political danger in reactionary modernists’ desire for a German jazz original. His critique of jazz is brought to bear exclusively to combat this burgeoning fascist tendency. This is why for Adorno jazz as such does not exist until it enters German culture through the culture industry.2 For Adorno, then, the very idea of black jazz is the fundamental fallacy that enables the instrumental logic he condemns, for to include it in his evaluation of jazz would obscure fascism’s appropriation of the Negerfabel. Put plainly, Adorno would have had a very difficult time raising the alarm against the fascist use of jazz if the music continued to be seen through the lens of racial blackness. Jazz was at the level of mass culture so strongly associated in the German racial imagination with blackness that it took an Adorno to see how fascism and the culture industry were gradually inventing a “racially pure” Aryan jazz fable to replace jazz’s Negerfabel, a process so aptly but incompletely rendered by Bloch. Before Adorno launches this attack, he must first dismantle the Negerfabel that stands in the way of proper critical reflection

94

ANTIMUSIC

on German jazz, with its reification of blackness and visions of Negervitalität. Like so many of his contemporaries, Adorno singles out the saxophone as the jazz instrument, using it as the point of entry of his historicized critique. He writes, “In Europe the saxophone is considered representative of this sound, the instrument against which the resistance has concentrated its forces. In truth, the instrument to which so much modernistic infamy is attributed and which is supposed to perversely subject the over-stimulated Western nerves to the vitality of blacks [Negervitalität], is old enough to command respect. It was already discussed in Berlioz’s treatment on instrumentation” (471). Because of the perceived elemental character of syncopated noise produced by the saxophone, jazz infuses European culture with Negervitalität to perverse effect.3 The cultural-epistemological basis from which Adorno seeks to formulate a critique of jazz as black vitality is the revelation that the key instrument producing this effect was itself a purely Western invention that produces purely Western sounds. We recall that in Germany the saxophone before jazz had been seen as the instrument of foreign armies and French theater. Adorno’s use of Berlioz is instructive in this light. The nature of Adorno’s genealogical procedure becomes evident: he wishes to take each aspect of jazz previously understood as “black” and show that it is instead of European origin. This is not an example of Adorno’s “ethnocentric cultural elitism” (Nye 70).4 To Adorno, it is the necessary genealogical work he must do to separate African American jazz from its politically suspect German variant and see it for the danger it poses.

II. THAT OL’ WAGNERIAN RAG Once Adorno has divested jazz of the culture-industry-induced illusion of blackness, he is free to place it “within the context of [a] broader critique of musical and cultural production as well as [an] understanding of the way cultural products relate to society and to individual consciousness” (Thompson 37–38). As “black” music, jazz does not belong to the history of an “essentially bourgeois art” that begins with Beethoven. Beethoven ends the

The Music of Fascism

95

classical era, or aristocratic music, and inaugurates hegemonic bourgeois art production and reception in this “last instance of . . . reconciliation” (Adorno, quoted in Cooper 100).5 Adorno’s understanding of music becomes clear only over and against the critical-historical constraints of serious music.6 Adorno’s critique of mass culture cannot be understood without his theory of the avant-garde, just as his work on jazz must be set against his conception of the history of serious music. Adorno believed that, after Beethoven, music finds itself both alienated from and autonomous to bourgeois society, necessarily reflecting and critiquing failed humanistic ideals. Wagner becomes, for Adorno, the example par excellence of the victory of culturally reifying, rapacious bourgeois praxis over aesthetic humanism.7 And under these terms, Adorno draws a direct line of musical development between Wagner and jazz. As Cooper writes: The comparison of Wagner and jazz was drawn by Adorno himself; he claimed that the meaning of the “swooning-yearning manner” of the Wagnerian hero was realized in the regressed, intersexual character of the jazz subject and his saxophone, neither brass nor wind. But there was a difference: “the moment of his ‘progress’ which the Wagnerian totality still fixed as its temporal telos is cut off [in jazz].” Wagner’s ideal of gesellschaftlichen Interdependenz won from reified elements was replaced in jazz with the barren principle of arbitrary exchange. (Cooper 107) What Adorno found particularly “ jazzy” in Wagner’s music was “steady rhythm.” And, as Steinert shows, “In the case of jazz, one of the elements of the culture industry and thus music’s ‘fascist’ adaptability is identical to that which he found in Wagner: the ‘gesture of beating.’ A steady rhythm, far from being simply that which makes a music into dance-music, means, for Adorno, the subjugation of the individual to the social” (Steinert 92). Wagner and the rest of the nineteenth century’s composers of this “essentially bourgeois art” become readable only through their negation of Marxist-utopian ideals and under the guise of absolute music. 8 Wagner is

96

ANTIMUSIC

part of an inexorable development determined by the dialectic of music in bourgeois society. Indeed, Adorno never backed off of the theses that Wagner contained “the seeds of National Socialism” and those of the German appropriation of jazz, or what I call Wagnerian jazz.9 From this point on in the discussion, when I refer to jazz, I mean Wagnerian jazz, unless I explicitly state otherwise. To be absolutely clear: following the first chapter’s historical outline, there are two conceptions of jazz at work in Adorno, and in Weimar and Nazi culture more generally. The first and most common is African American jazz, which is repudiated on racist grounds by the second, more-dangerous variant, that of the German fascist model. This jazz comes into existence as an expression of fascist racism that allows for the popular enjoyment of racially acceptable jazz and later, under the Nazis, swing. It is believed to have antecedents in aspects of the German musical tradition, especially in Wagner. The Wagner jazz parodies and Verjazzungen are in fact mere exaggerations of a racially valid German jazz tradition. It is with this variant of jazz that Adorno is almost exclusively concerned. Included in this variant is not merely, or even primarily, music, but also and most importantly a critical frame for understanding jazz based on fascist ideological cultural precepts, which Adorno will establish for his argument. Wagnerian jazz is not just music, it is also a way of listening to music and of hearing jazz of either kind, black or white. I also call this critical discursive practice Wagnerian jazz, and it is also what is under discussion throughout the rest of the chapter unless otherwise noted.10 Adorno connects Wagner and jazz as a direct condemnation of the reactionary modernist embrace of irrational nature and myth-making combined with a valorization of the totalizing work of technological advance. The two negative attributes effectively name the critical paradox of understanding jazz as both technologically advanced product (mechanical soulessness) and primitive seduction (licentious decadence). Their combination generates a sexual response in the jazz audience. Determined in its psychological expression by the mediation of the culture industry, jazz becomes saturated with perverse, fetishistic sexuality. Again, Adorno is not concerned here with African American jazz but with Wagnerian jazz and how its experience, as

The Music of Fascism

97

well as the critical discourse surrounding it, is wholly determined by fascist appropriation. In other words, fascism finds itself in jazz. Compositionally, the tensions created in jazz provoke a sexual response, but the nature and expression of that sexual impulse will be decided by the political industrial culture in which it is expressed and experienced. The point is not one of jazz in the musicological sense, but of how the culture industry under fascism determines affective response. Thus Adorno can write: “Jazz is not what it ‘is’: its aesthetic articulation is sparing and can be understood at a glance. Rather, it is what it is used for, and this fact clearly brings up questions whose answers will require in-depth examination. Not questions like those pertaining to the autonomous work of art, but rather like those brought to mind by the detective novel” (354). Because it is always already instrumentalized, no autonomous element pertains in jazz; or, as Lacoue-Labarthes writes, “pour Adorno, il n’y a pas d’art sans aura” (Lacoue-Labarthes 140). It is for this reason, Lacoue-Labarthes rightly reminds us, that “Adorno . . . y dénie au jazz le droit al l’existence artistique” (Lacoue-Labarthes 131). Without an element of aesthetic autonomy, jazz lacks the utopian function that characterizes Adorno’s theory of art. For Adorno, as Kuspit writes in regard to the aesthetic-utopian principle, “A condition of the work of art is that it exist in a state of perpetual non-reconciliation with what it mimics or reflects” (Kuspit 327).11 Music’s utopia lies in the ability of a composition to negotiate and reconcile subjective agency and objective materiality. As Rosen puts it, “The question for modern music, then, becomes how to construct a musical objectivity which will once again permit genuinely rational subjective expression” (Rosen 163).12 In this sense, “music is the Other, not the other of silence, but the other of nonmusic and the anti-music of social relations. Music registers itself as a difference, as it were, as an alternative to nonmusical life—nonmusical life meant both as neutral fact of existence and, more to the present concern, as a dystopian reality in which music is, in ironic actuality, virtually inescapable” (Leppert 97). Wagnerian jazz destroys the dialectical dynamism of music as art in that it creates a space of stasis in which all such movement is suspended. As Witkin writes, in Adorno’s conception of jazz, “Something unchanging—the beat

98

ANTIMUSIC

or the tone, is ornamented with changes. The elements that would normally develop out of each other sequentially, each bearing a necessary relationship to its antecedent and consequent, are instead strung out beside each other, a juxtaposing of co-incidentals. For Adorno, such forms, from which all dialectical relations have drained, are images of totalitarian control. Collective oppression, massification, authoritarianism thus appear, to Adorno, in the inner relations among the elements of jazz compositions” (Witkin 146). No aspect of jazz functions for-itself but rather reflects the totality to which it adheres. This is Wagnerian jazz’s great illusion and ideological potency. As a constituent form of a wider, bankrupt musicality, or musicologico-cultural gesture, jazz has no inherent being. It possesses no formal logic outside of its use-value. Jazz is pure mechanical reproduction. This means that it falls outside of the realm of the aesthetic and is instead deeply embedded in instrumentalized culture. Therefore, jazz’s political value can only be estimated by the imposition, and not the immanence, of cultural critique. Autonomous immanence, the annihilating yet liberating power of the negative dialectic, has no voice where jazz is concerned, at least insofar as jazz’s ability to generate the necessary negativity from within is at issue.13 Hence, jazz does not move in the same sphere as the twelve-tone row; it offers no inherent critique of the culture industry and the politics of reciprocity with which it engages as political power. Whereas Schoenberg’s music speaks the language of crisis, jazz is the unified voice of the crisis. Bowie writes that “The sense that Schoenberg exemplifies a crisis in music that results from a disintegration of a shared ‘language’ of tonality, the seeds of which are sown in the deconstruction of forms in Romantic music from Schubert to Mahler, is undeniable, as is the fact that the development of this music is connected to the social and political crises of modern Western history” (Bowie 255).14 On the contrary, Wagnerian jazz rises from the originary ground of its own destruction of art. Jazz is, for Adorno, an effect of a mechanized, reifying cultural practice, and nothing more. In itself, jazz has no value except as unalloyed use-value, which is the measure of popular culture’s uselessness. But it is exactly this uselessness that makes jazz so effective as social diversion. As harmless “fun,” jazz presents itself as a corrective to

The Music of Fascism

99

the prison house of serious, bourgeois autonomous art. Here Adorno quietly yet effectively attacks Brechtian jazz politics and its faith in mass culture.15 Adorno seems to be addressing Brecht directly when he writes: If one attempts, as has been the case often enough, to consider the use value of jazz, its suitability as a mass commodity, as a corrective to the bourgeois isolation of autonomous art, as something which is dialectically advanced, and to accept its use value as a motive for the sublation of the object character of music, one succumbs to the latest form of romanticism which, because of its anxiety in the face of the fatal characteristics of capitalism, seeks a despairing way out, in order to affirm the feared thing itself as a sort of ghastly allegory of the coming liberation and to sanctify negativity—a curative which, by the way, jazz itself would like to believe. This is the leftist political delusion caused by faith in jazz and jazz dance, in which the music is seen as a revolutionary cultural form that promises liberation. Of course, the radical aspect of jazz is countered by the music’s true function. Because jazz’s revolutionary moment is mere Schein, mere appearance, it reinforces the power it purports to overcome. Jazz does not liberate from the alienating effects of capitalist culture; it is their intensification.16 Thus, the now commodified romantic myth of revolution and selfdetermination through aesthetic experience first clearly articulated in Wagner finds in jazz its ghostly afterlife. The Wagnerian jazz beat is phantasmagoric; it is the syncopated sound of the culture industry’s tell-tale heart, itself concocted to decompose composition.17 Because of this, jazz does not emancipate, it enslaves. As Lacoue-Labarthes writes, “Le jazz . . . ne signifie pas l’irruption d’une sauvagerie salutaire au sein de la société réifiée, il n’est pas l’indice d’une rébellion ouverte ou d’une révolte, mais au contraire, en tant que ‘phénomène de masse,’ il exprime et manifeste la docilité et la soumission. (Traduit en clair: c’est un art d’esclaves.)” (Lacoue-Labarthes 134–35).

100

ANTIMUSIC

The product of slave culture, jazz remains enslaved and enslaving. The liberation, or romantic longing for emancipation, that gave rise to black spiritual striving and so to jazz, as Adorno will later, after the war, reluctantly discuss, is actually the pure expression of the longing to be a slave.

III. SLAVE TO JAZZ For Lacoue-Labarthes, it is not clear if, in Adorno, “Cette servilité du jazz. . ., on ne sait pas s’il faut l’imputer au jazz lui-même . . . ou à la loi du marché, al l’impératif de la commercialisation” (Lacoue-Labarthes 136). Adorno seems to suggest that slaves gave birth to the musical expression of their longing to be slaves. The consequence of his bifurcated historical argument is that Adorno is constantly called on to diffuse the, for his argument, potentially destabilizing link between jazz and blackness. Having already established jazz’s origin in the fog of war, Adorno cannot accept plantation slavery as the scene of jazz’s earliest iteration as the Spiritual. Instead, he uses slavery as the common element between both forms of jazz and as the junction where they irrevocably separate. Vacated of the specific content its historical-racial origin in plantation slavery, jazz nevertheless retains the structural necessity of coerced servitude. Slavery as a formal category of jazz remains, robbed of its historical specificity yet still effective as an expression of slave culture. This would seem to contradict jazz’s democratic potential for Germany, the positive sense of Americanization so valued by the New Objectivitists and by Brecht in the latter ’20s. In jazz culture, particularly on the dance floor, classes appear to mix, such that the proletariat begins to perceive itself as equal to the bourgeoisie. This apparent equality, like the democratic function of jazz itself, is again mere Schein: Jazz is pseudo-democratic in the sense that it characterizes the consciousness of the epoch: its attitude of immediacy, which can be defined in terms of a rigid system of tricks, is deceptive when it comes down to class differences. As is the case in the current

The Music of Fascism

101

political sphere, so in the sphere of ideology, reaction is the bedfellow of such a democracy. The more deeply jazz penetrates society, the more reactionary elements it takes on, the more completely it is beholden to banality, and the less it will be able to tolerate freedom and the eruption of phantasy, until it finally glorifies repression as the incidental music to accompany the current collective. The more democratic jazz is, the worse it becomes.18 The appearance of society’s democratization in jazz hides the music’s antirevolutionary impetus. In appearing to achieve the goals of revolutionary democracy and social equality at all levels of political economy, jazz acts as countermeasure to the revolution it purports to accomplish. Because of this, Adorno finds a “complicity between jazz and totalitarian cultural politics.”19 Jazz, then, defeats the democratic principle it disseminates by accommodating “reactionary elements,” or reactionary modernism. Even individualistic jazz improvisation is in league with totalitarian oppression. Carefully regulated by syncopation, in which the soloist is ultimately trapped, the jazz improvisation destroys the revolutionary potential it seems to promise. As an all-pervasive cultural form, jazz’s reactionary-political effect is decisive. The glorification of repression, so crucial to the propaganda of the dictatorial state apparatus, is made possible in part by the proliferation of the jazz effect. Adorno’s jazz is the reality beneath a political fantasy of primitive vitality, the anti-utopian music that undoes the revolutionary masses. Indeed, the primitivist view of jazz is virtually identical to that of the reactionary modernist sense of technology. Specifying “technology” as jazz, which was a permissible technological specification at the time, we find that both primitivism and reactionary modernism attribute to their object an inherent and a vital, irrational yet productive technological force that has the power to reorder and rejuvenate culture and society. Irrationality is valorized as the “natural” antidote (Pharmakon) to a rationalized world. Jazz is believed to overcome the instrumentalizing discourse that alienates society from its masculine rigor. Through jazz we are reintroduced to our authentic, primal

102

ANTIMUSIC

humanity.20 By unleashing primal forces within us, jazz tears away the veil of rationalized social existence. It reveals to us man in a state of nature. For as alluring as it is, Adorno sees that this conception of jazz shares in the same mythologizing tendency as fascist aesthetics. And when viewed as a mere extension of avant-garde expressionist primitivism, jazz’s inherent savagery and primal forces are in fact fascistic, rationally conceived irrationality on the part of the listener. Adorno intervenes by insisting that there is nothing inherently irrational in jazz except for its politics. Adorno again demystifies a claim for the primacy of blackness in jazz as an ordering principle as a means of identifying jazz’s Wagnerian variant. Negervitalität is a projection of the listener, guided by the fascistic culture industry, into the music. This inauthenticity is shaped by the “unsystematic” irrationality of the administered world. He writes: Just as the reality within which the hit song is heard is not ordered systematically . . . so the consciousness of those who receive it is unsystematic, and its irrationality is a priori that of the listener. But this is not a creative irrationality; rather, it is destructive . . . [T]he extent to which jazz has anything at all to do with genuine black music is highly questionable; the fact that it is frequently performed by blacks and that the public clamors for “black jazz” as a sort of brand-name doesn’t say much about it, even if folkloric research should confirm the African origin of many of its practices. Today, in any case, all of the formal elements of jazz have been completely abstractly pre-formed by the capitalist requirement that they be exchangeable as commodities.. . . Psychologically, the primal structure of jazz [Urjazz] may most closely suggest the spontaneous singing of servant girls. Society has drawn its vital music—provided that it has not been made to order from the very beginning—not from the wild, but from the domesticated body in bondage. The sado-masochist elements in jazz could be clearly connected to this. The archaic stance of jazz is as modern as the “primitives” who fabricate it (477).

The Music of Fascism

103

The control that the Western cultural tradition seeks to exert over nature ends in the scientific mystification. Like that of reactionary modernism, jazz’s irrationality is ideological; it rationally obscures the inherent irrationality of the unsystematic system, which it only apparently critiques. The irrationality ascribed to jazz is Negervitalität, that unknown quantity that can either cure or kill an ailing Western culture. The illusion that jazz connoisseurs purchase is the primal potency of the Negro elixir as the substance of this Pharmakon. For Adorno, all jazz performance in Germany is a type of minstrel show because that is the only way the audience can receive it. Wagnerian jazz always only offers a black face performance of black and white actors alike in Bloch’s sense, and in the dark night of the culture industry. For, no matter its origin, Adorno sees jazz thoroughly as a commodity. Its black, “indigenous” elements have been effaced so that jazz may be bought and sold as “authentic” black culture while still being deeply familiar to the consumer. Indeed, “black” culture could not become salable until it became “naturalized” to “white” culture. Whatever jazz is in Germany, the racial politics of the culture industry mediate and transform it into Wagnerian jazz. This is why the issue of origin and historicism is central to Adorno’s analysis of jazz in the culture industry, and why he never truly abandons the historicist approach.21 His historicism may seem bizarre to us, and it does entail a “missed encounter” with jazz; but Adorno is not concerned primarily with jazz but with jazz reception as conditioned by the culture industry and the German racial imaginary.22 Granted, for Adorno jazz is not sufficient in itself to meet the rigors of aesthetic, sociological, or philosophical research. If one sees jazz as a product of black expressive culture, it belongs to the realm of folklore. And this is the deeply problematic fate of African American jazz in Adorno: it is confined to musicologically inflected anthropological research. Jazz outside of its commodification is not jazz; it is the production of ritually significant rhythmic patterns by indigenous peoples that are perceived in the West as the approximation of music. In other words, Adorno’s work is obviously not free of certain racist precepts and assumptions. But the racist presumption Adorno identifies but

104

ANTIMUSIC

does not identify with is the idea of Negervitalität. He insists rather that this vitality is built into jazz’s product packaging, its commodity form. Adorno sees blacks as the victims, in some cases willing, of the culture industry. Again indirectly drawing on the sense of Pharmakon, blacks are sacrifices to the culture industry’s jazz machine. Part of this sacrificial destruction is the culture industry’s mythologization of jazz’s black origin. Adorno believes that even if jazz began in some dark black past, what we have today has no essential connection to racial blackness. “Black” is for commodified jazz an empty signifier ready to be filled with whatever political-cultural content is necessary for the cultivation of the fascism produced by the culture industry. As in Bloch, “black” is at bottom just a color. Furthermore, Adorno perceives that even if jazz is a product of the New World plantation, it is still no panacea or Pharmakon (either as drug or sacrifice) for what ails failing European vitality. Because jazz is not the archaic form promised in its packaging, it can never be anything but another unbroken link in the slave’s chain. Seen from the historical perspective of the plantation, jazz is the music of “servant girls.” Adorno’s emasculating “servant girl” comment is thoroughly in line with German thought on African American music at least since 1904. The condemnation of jazz as effeminate was not Adorno’s refusal to give jazz even a mild critical appraisal.23 He has instead devoted more thought than anyone else until Klaus Mann to how fascism and the culture industry have understood and perverted jazz. Adorno is not condemning jazz as effeminate; he does not believe that jazz as such exists outside of anthropological concerns and in isolated, and even segregated indigenous communities. His charge is levied against fascism and the culture industry that fosters it. Adorno may not understand jazz, but from his perspective there is no jazz to understand, there is only the fascism of the culture industry. Adorno can make this argument only if jazz is not black, otherwise jazz is exactly what the people say it is. Duke Ellington is the only black jazz composer Adorno mentions by name. Ellington is credited with being an artist. But he is only considered an artist in relation to impressionists such as Debussy and Ravel, and so only from within the field of serious music, here limited to non-German

The Music of Fascism

105

composers. As Cunningham has written, “ jazz deprives [impressionism] of its formal sense; the impressionism which it appropriates is at the same time depraved.” Because Ellington has adapted aspects of musical impressionism to jazz, Adorno appears to applaud him for his high-brow jazz variations, or for what Baresel and others called Kunstjazz (Cunningham 68). But this applause is derisive; the jazz time-structure is incapable of supporting in form and content impressionism or any serious music form. The attempt of jazz to do so is “depraved.” The dynamic circularity of impressionist motifs is held in place by a center that itself manifests impressionistically, that is, as an intensification of a sense of lost time. Impressionism disorders musical temporality only to recapture it just as it is about to fall off the precipice of eternity. This recapturing of lost time orders the totality of divergent musical elements. In jazz, static repetition of loosely related themes welded together by a stable gravitational core make impressionistic effects impossible. Their appearance in jazz is a perversion of impressionism, a parody. Because he works within the culture industry, Duke Ellington necessarily parodies Debussy and Ravel. Ellington is part of the Verjazzung tradition that lampoons Wagner and Liszt and the rest of the great composers, even and perhaps especially when Kunstjazz and not parody is intended. Any fleeting resemblance jazz may have to serious music, to the impressionism of Debussy and Ravel, is mere parodic technological special effect. Jazz as commodity both overshadows the musical achievements of serious composers and undercuts the liminal autonomy of its own propaganda. Underscoring its own archaic authenticity, that of Negervitalität, jazz devolves into its closest evolutionary relatives, salon music and the march, the very types of music traditionally associated with the saxophone. Adorno writes, “The former represents an individuality which in truth is none at all, but merely the socially produced illusion of it” (485). Jazz is akin to the sound of the salon in that it manipulates individuality at the level of sociability; the music introduces the illusion of intersubjective social discourse.24 As background music to everyday life, as Gebrauchsmusik, salon music and jazz create an illusory space of social connectedness and individual intervention that veils the state of cultural ruin.25

106

ANTIMUSIC

IV. SACRIFICIAL JAZZ Both forms of music obliterate the thing they herald. But jazz’s historical complicity with the march makes it, for Adorno, by far the more insidious of the two: The effectiveness of the principle of march music in jazz is evident. The basic rhythm of the continuo and the bass drum is completely in sync with march rhythm, and, since the introduction of sixeight time, jazz could be transformed effortlessly into the march. The connection here is historically grounded; one of the horns used in jazz is called the Sousaphone, after the march composer. Not only the saxophone has been borrowed from the military orchestra; the entire arrangement of the jazz orchestra . . . is identical to that of the military band. Thus jazz can be easily adapted for use by fascism. (486) The means of jazz production call into service the martial nature of its decidedly European origin. The missing link between jazz and the march is the displaced saxophone. Adorno is here obviously relying on the German convention of associating the saxophone with jazz bands and foreign military bands, but this time due to their perceived similar, saxo-centric orchestral configurations. Furthermore, for Adorno the musicians and instruments of the two orchestras are arrayed together in almost the exact same spatial arrangement. Because of the traditional connection in German thought between the saxophone, foreign military music, and jazz, Adorno is able to combine all three. He militarizes jazz in a way befitting its origins in Wagner and then later, World War I. For Adorno, jazz has as its historically closest musicological relative the military march. Because of their close relations, jazz via the march can be easily adapted to fascist aesthetics. The musicological connection between jazz and the march qualifies jazz as the popular music of fascism, insofar as the march belongs a priori to this political realm.26 Adorno realizes that

The Music of Fascism

107

this connection reinforces the idea of jazz as foreign, while still retaining its European origin. This is why Adorno insists that jazz is beloved in Italy, where it is, at this time, openly accepted, and why it has been banned in Germany: “In Italy it is well liked. . . . The ban against it in Germany has to do with the surface tendency to reach back to pre-capitalist, feudal forms of immediacy and to call these socialism. But, characteristically enough, the ban is a powerless one. The struggle against the saxophone has been appeased by the musical organizations and the instrument industry; jazz continues vigorously under other names, on the radio as well” (485). Jazz is undeniable to its true constituency, Italian and German fascists.27 The German ban pretends to have as its reason racial and national grounds found in the music itself. But the ban has nothing to do with jazz or with a distaste for the music among the masses, but instead with the Nazi ideological insistence on recapturing a precapitalist mode of social existence. By this, Adorno understands that the mythologizing tendency in Nazism seeks precapitalist, and prenation-state modes of historical definition. Jazz is too modern, and so it is too intricately entwined with the nation-state. Here, the Nazi argument undercuts nationalism historically construed in favor of a mythologically grounded race-based idea of nation. Jazz as emblem of the modern, foreign nation-state obstructs that view. Because of this, Adorno does not, and cannot, submit that the Nazi ban on jazz is due to the music’s origin as Negermusik. If Adorno were to do so, he would have to renegotiate his historical narrative and anthropological thought. He opts instead to say that the Nazi ban is brought about because of jazz’s connection to the modern nation-state. The music is not feudal enough. In truth, he need not have offered any explanation at all, as the ban on jazz held little weight, unless a jazz club became politicized. Adorno understates the matter, then, when he writes that only hot jazz was not allowed to escape the Nazi ban. In pointing this out, Adorno does not acknowledge a certain validity of this form of jazz as an autonomous aesthetic product or as a leftist political force, as hot music was particularly beloved of Neue Sachlichkeit artists. The strict interdiction of hot music is the necessary illusion that validates the overall ban itself. As Adorno

108

ANTIMUSIC

understands, one strain of jazz, a particularly politicized, pernicious form with pretensions to the avant-garde, is sacrificed to allow the other, actually more racially explosive, militarized strands to survive and flourish in the Nazi body politic. Indeed, Adorno sees an inherent connection between formation marching and jazz dancing. He writes: “Insofar as dancing is synchronous movement, the tendency to march has been present in dance from the very beginning, thus jazz is connected in its origins with the march and its history of lays bare this relationship” (486). To Adorno, it is a short step or two from the fox trot to the goose step. The sign of triumphant individuality, the lead dancer or singer in the jazz performance shares a similar fate to that of hot jazz. As Pharmakon, he is sacrificed. Adorno writes, “the lead singer or principal dancer is nothing other than a . . . human sacrifice” (488). The standard-bearer for the illusion of individuality and so the focal point of collective jazz hysteria, the front man is sacrificed to the public. He is liquidated in the idea and ideology he serves. The jazz public receives his sacrifice. The jazz ritual completes itself with the death of the individual. This is why, according to Adorno, Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps is the closest approximation to jazz serious music has to offer. Stravinsky’s rite acts as commentary to and critique of the jazz aesthetic of human sacrifice. As sacrifice, jazz disappears into its bellicose origin; for the rhetoric of sacrifice was prominent during World War I. Sacrifice (Pharmakon) becomes the key term in a hidden propaganda campaign meant to facilitate the masses’ “identification with their oppressor.” Adorno writes, “The elements of its weakness are inscribed in the ‘parodic’ or comic elements which are peculiar to the hot sections—without however anyone knowing what exactly is being parodied. . . . Only this ironic excess is suspect in jazz, and this is indicated by its hatred for squeaks and dissonance—but not the adaptation of syncopation; only it is eliminated within fascism, but not the model of its rhythmic development” (491). The jazz parodic, the ironic twist that seems to set the subject above the transparency of the institutions of an administered world, is an empty gesture. The parodic musical phrase is prescripted. Yet it conceals its author and intent. No one knows who or what is being

The Music of Fascism

109

parodied, and by whom, much in the way no one could clearly define jazz due to racial confusion. Bloch’s “black” is all-encompassing. This parodic aspect of jazz is the only sound that cannot be heard in the fascist variant. Fascism and Nazism edit out the parodic in jazz for obvious reasons. Selfparody is not part of the fascist ideological-musical program, and to claim that racial parody is a constituent element of all jazz might beg the question of which race, exactly, the Aryans parody. Hence, to make his case for the totalitarian nature of jazz, Adorno advances in his interwar jazz essays a rigorously Eurocentric aesthetic theory that forecloses on the possibility of “authentic” blackness as the music’s origin and abiding features. After the war, when a neat separation between anthropologically indemnified, indigenous music and Wagnerian jazz was no longer easy or even possible, Adorno’s conception of racial blackness in his 1953 essay does grant jazz “African elements.” He maintains, however, an anthropological aspect to his approach to black jazz, writing: “However little doubt there can be regarding the African elements in jazz, it is no less certain that everything unruly in it was from the very beginning integrated into a strict scheme, that its rebellious gestures are accompanied by the tendency to blind obeisance, much like the sado-masochistic type described by analytic psychology” (122). After the defeat of fascism there can be no doubt that African elements, whatever they may be, exist in jazz. These elements, however, have been transformed, and in their new state they no longer perform the function they did in their “indigenous” setting. For, what the African—and not the African American, as that conceit might frustrate Adorno’s anthropologically inflected critique of postfascist jazz—has lost by assimilating jazz to the culture industry’s sado-masochistic conformist drive is precisely the insurrectionary impulse that gives rise, negatively, to masochism. The African paradoxically makes the new jazz conformism possible by lending to the music rigorous primal disruptions in order that jazz may overcome them. The unspoiled African is rebellion; the Negro, and here Adorno presumably means African American, is irredeemably unfree. This is why, for Adorno, “The Negro spirituals, antecedents of the blues, were slave songs and as such combined the lament of unfreedom with its

110

ANTIMUSIC

oppressed confirmation. Moreover, it is difficult to isolate the authentic Negro elements in jazz” (122). Having already become “American” and so having lost, in part, the African, the Spiritual’s song of unfreedom still maintains the possibility of arousing the primitive insurrectionary consciousness—if only as a negative potential. The culture industry obscures, however, even these black elements as jazz once again succumbs totally to the totalitarian impulse (Turnheim 235–39). Here, then, is Adorno’s postwar, postfascism racial progression: African “culture” is wild and rebellious; a hybrid of the African and the American, “Negro” slave “culture” contains the insurrectionary impulse as negative critique and not positive political praxis. Still a black phenomenon but existing outside of the economy of slavery and controlled by the culture industry, the blues loses its dialectical potential, becomes jazz, and supports the new slavery. In a bizarre turn of events, the Emancipation Proclamation condemns African Americans to undialectical, and so unlimited, unfreedom. Where the culture produced by and in slavery, although unfree, maintained the dialectical possibility of slave revolt, black jazz culture renounces true liberation. Captured in the culture industry, black spiritual strivings obscure the new slavery. Antebellum forced labor, because of its undialectical character, opens itself to the critique of the negative dialectic autoperformed by black spirituals. This is so because its syncopation allows, Adorno believes, “Jazz [to set up] schemes of social behavior to which people must in any case conform. Jazz enables them to practice those forms of behavior, and they love it all the more for making the inescapable easier to bear. Jazz reproduces its own mass-basis, without thereby reducing the guilt of those who produce it. The eternity of fashion is a vicious circle.” Having lost its African elements and enslaved context, without a history, jazz invents one. The myth of jazz describes a vicious circle that continues to revolve with no possibility of revolution. Postwar jazz does not create the obedient subject of totalitarianism, it reinforces the subject’s resolve to dissolve into the nuts and bolts of the culture machine. Where once the African essence of insubordination and terrible revolt sounded its primal voice, jazz interrupts and forecloses on revolutionary disruption. No longer insisting on jazz’s World War I origin,

The Music of Fascism

111

Adorno writes, “The recollection of anarchic origins which jazz shares with all today’s ready-made mass movements, is fundamentally repressed, however much it may continue to simmer under the surface” (128). As “anarchic origin,” African blackness becomes the faint echo of jazz’s immediacy, its echoless, ahistorical now. Lost in the moment, jazz aficionados make up the fascist crowd: unquestioning, obedient parts of the postwar totalitarian culture machine.

FIVE

Jazz-Heinis

F

Klaus Mann and Jazz Ontology

Figure 5.1. Karin Boyd and Klaus Maria Brandauer in Mephisto, 1981. Corbis Historical, Getty Images.

F The title Klaus Mann’s of Mephisto: Roman einer Karriere is, perhaps, misleading. It indicates that the novel chronicles a single career. And yet, the protagonist Hendrik Höfgen appears to lead two careers, one as an actor and one as a Nazi. However, the two are conflated and combined, such that 113

114

ANTIMUSIC

they comprise one, single telic career. And the two are joined by a single figure, Juliette Martens, the “Black Venus” dominatrix prostitute with whom Höfgen is putatively in love. Höfgen learns from Juliette what the novel posits as the essence of acting in the Nazi regime, jazz movement and dance. Thus, from Juliette Höfgen learns the very attributes that eventually attract the Nazi elite to his performances and lead to his ascendance in the party. The Nazi elite “intuitively” recognize in Höfgen’s appropriation of jazz movement and dance their own reflection as “black savages.” Thus, Juliette Martens is the novel’s visible, embodied, politicized jazz matrix. As such, she combines jazz and the aesthetic attributes of Höfgen’s Nazism into a coherent representation of the Nazi’s “inner crisis.” For, whether or not Klaus Mann admired, reviled, understood, or misrepresented jazz, he was aware of the fascist political potential in the music that Adorno identified. Mann’s politicized jazz confronts the reader in at least two ways. First, Mann insists that jazz can be representative of the barbarism at the heart of Nazism. Second, he posits that, as representative of the hidden basic psychological substance of Nazism, jazz undermines Nazism’s ideological claims to biological and cultural superiority. For as close as Mann’s thought on jazz is to Adorno’s, he does not follow Adorno in separating blackness from jazz in Germany. He is not concerned with Wagnerian jazz as a manifestation of the culture industry, but instead as the sign of the Nazis’ “inner crisis” to which Max Merz referred when considering jazz. His targets are the Nazi racial hypocrisy and parody brought to bear to solve this inner crisis. Mann wishes to restore excluded blackness to German jazz in the Nazi era in order to condemn barbaric Nazi culture. Mann thus reunites jazz and blackness. To do so he uses clearly stereotypical, racist primitivist notions of blackness as a means of parodically condemning Nazi barbarism. Mann was, of course, anything but a racist, as his sophisticated, penetrating 1945 German-language review of Richard Wright’s Black Boy makes abundantly clear. The views therein expressed stand in stark contrast to the schematic, primitivist exoticism Thomas Mann attributes to his son in the 1925 novella, Unordnung und frühes Leid, in which he calls jazz, of which “Bert” (Klaus) is a fan, a “Wildes, parfümiertes Zeug, teils

Jazz-Heinis

115

schmachtend, teils exerzierend, von fremdem Rhythmus, ein monotones, mit orchestralem Zierrat, Schlagzeug, Geklimper und Schnalzen aufgeputztes Neger-Amüsement” (Unordnung 647).1 However, Mann’s mature work evinces a serious and often brilliant engagement with music and music theory to rival that of his father. For example, Mann follows an incomplete version of Adorno’s theory of jazz for his novel about music, theatricality, and the politico-demonic, just as his father will rely imperfectly on Adorno’s philosophy of Schoenberg’s music for Doktor Faustus, to equal or greater effect. Indeed, Doktor Faustus and Mephisto are inverse images of each other that use the same basic structures and mechanisms to achieve similar effects. The two novels work at two different ends of the cultural spectrum in order to come to many of the same conclusions. Mephisto, however, is much more blunt in its expression and critique, and its use of jazz as opposed to the twelve-tone row serves to make the culpability of the novel’s antihero a foregone conclusion. Collusion and guilt are not questions but presumptions that support a sense of political inevitability in which each actor has a hand. In this sense, Mephisto seeks to avoid the charge of political bad faith, the general accusation with which Thomas Mann’s novel opens. This is not to condemn either Thomas or Klaus Mann as a closet Nazi, or their novels as exemplars of Nazi aesthetics at work despite themselves. Each after his own fashion writes propaganda. But Klaus Mann’s work announces itself as such, whereas Doctor Faustus remains openly wedded to the very idea of artistic autonomy and ambiguity found in Adorno. The propaganda character of Mephisto is so strong that, as Donat puts it, “[d]er auktoriale Erzähler in Mephisto berichtet nicht nur über die Figuren und Geschehnisse, sondern kommentiert und bewertet sie in einer Weise, die dem Leser kaum Spielraum für eigene Interpretationen lässt” (Donat 209).2 This opinion falls in stark contrast to Halliwell’s belief that “The novel is marked by an ambivalent narrative voice, which, at times, displays sympathy towards the protagonist and, at others, mocks his vanity and shallowness” (Halliwell 189). If political and aesthetic ambiguity in part define the novel, then how is it that such divergent understandings of narrative voice can arise? One can respond that the novel’s greatness stems from

116

ANTIMUSIC

its overriding ambition to address politics directly with a voice modified by aesthetic embellishments and wholly unconcerned with aesthetic theory and autonomy, without being exempt from them.3 Mephisto then begs the question it performs: “Haben Genies politische Narrenfreiheit?” (Danne-Weyer 51). Its answer, and the narratological presuppositions it follows, are not as black and white as some critics assume, or as Mann himself professes in the 1936 “Haben die deutschen Intellektueller versagt?”, and again in his 1941 “Die Aufgabe des Schriftstellers in der gegenwärtigen Krise”, two essays in which the author posits a notion of responsibility over propaganda, and reserving special vehemence for Mephisto’s roman à clef core, Gustaf Gründgens, for a criminal lack thereof. It could very well be that, as Mann suggests in the essay “Kunst und Politik” (1947), writers and intellectuals bear direct responsibility for the rise of Nazi barbarism. But what of the works themselves?

I. THE INNER CRISIS The novel explores this question in a tropological function operative within it that is often overlooked or ignored. Astoundingly, the role of jazz in Mephisto and that of its “authentic” black practitioner, Juliette Martens, receive very little sustained critical attention. And yet, despite Martens’s presence and obviously central role, Mann’s novel offers no cogent musicological or historical understanding of Africans, African Americans, or jazz. It reads blackness as received under the sign of barbarism by the anthropology of German nationalism, which it then associates with Nazi barbarism. In Mephisto, barbarism has racial specificity: it is Aryan and is represented in the novel through jazz as reverse racial parody. Mephisto does not read jazz for itself but purely as it is perceived by and in Nazi culture and political thought. Jazz here is not jazz; it is the Nazi idea of jazz, which is fully determined by heavy-handed racist stereotypes and deployed to mask Nazi barbarism. Because of their inability or unwillingness to recognize their own barbarism as such, the Nazis project it onto the so-called inferior races. Mann is concerned with what the effect of antiblack racism is and how it

Jazz-Heinis

117

relates to the Nazi sanctioning of savage brutality. He finds that Nazis call “black” that atavistic violence that is their own and that defines them. But because it is “essential” to them, the Nazis cannot excise jazz from the body politic. The inability either to embrace or deny jazz reflects an inherent contradiction in Nazi racial-cultural ideology and policy that leads to a form of racist hypocrisy that allows them to disavow and ban jazz while simultaneously enjoying it publicly. Such is the case in the novel’s opening pages, where the Nazis openly listen to jazz at Göring’s forty-third birthday party.4 Mann writes: “In fact, all it was playing was a bold hodgepodge of military marches and jazz— forbidden in the Reich as a product of Negro immorality—which the great dignitary didn’t want to deprive himself of on his birthday” (5). This “bold hodgepodge” is not as random as the narrator seems to insist. First, Mann is aware of the Wehrmacht’s and Luftwaffe’s love of jazz. Second, the great dignitary’s selection of music reflects well the Adorno’s genealogy of jazz qua military march. The representation of the military march supplements and supports jazz improvisations without the slightest distortion or disorientation. Jazz and the march form the successive unity of Nazi cultural ideology and military might, not despite but because of the fact of jazz’s interdiction. Jazz is here the expression of the Nazis’ inner life (Göring feels otherwise “deprived” of jazz). The musical hodgepodge is not a bric-a-brac of sound, or “cacophony,” as Göring would officially call jazz. The two modes of musical production, the march and jazz, do not compete or contrast in this setting; they form two variations on a single theme. The line that divides their reception is a purely statutory one, and this line may be crossed, depending on the listener’s status or position in the chain of Nazi command that determines the law’s structure. Jazz here thus professes inner and legal corruption, a “constitutional” barbarism that cannot be contained by bans such as the Verbot der Negermusik. This corruption is paradoxically enhanced by the law because the transgression involved in the music is part of the law’s inherently hypocritical structure. In this instance linked to jazz, transgressing the law is the rule of barbarism that informs Nazi legal-cultural edict while remaining necessarily outside of

118

ANTIMUSIC

it. Jazz’s culpability, its criminality, pervades the hierarchy of Nazi power at its uppermost echelons without resistance. Thus Mann determines, through jazz, that cultural hypocrisy and criminality are the defining principles of Nazi ideology and the Nazi rule of law. In Mephisto, jazz as the cultural expression of Nazi criminality informs a unified field that shifts its theatrical gesture, its Janus face, according to the legal-cultural context. The birthday party as suspension of the law, as the “real” of the state’s imaginary, allows both faces to present themselves on the same occasion. However, such events are few and far between. The rigid differentiation between the rule of law and the inner Nazi is rarely suspended in an official setting, and this is done here for what is “officially” a private affair: a birthday party. For example, jazz clubs continue to flourish in Nazi Germany, so long as they remain unpolitical, thus avoiding “official” gaze. Sexual relations with blacks may occur but must remain private affairs; jazz must be publicly disavowed. The law’s self-representation may only be effaced at sanctioned moments that serve at once as cathartic racial parody and necessary self-revelation. The “making present” of the Nazi inner crisis articulated in jazz may only take place within a carefully delimited, controlled space. This representation must have the force of authenticity while retaining the character of a harmless entertainment (fun). Therefore, all public forms of Nazi “blackness” take place in the novel in a theater or theatrical setting. Göring’s “private” party is presented to us as theater, and the highest officials in the Nazi party come across as “actors.” This is not to say that every facet of Nazi life is not theatrical, but that jazz is allowed a public hearing only at the moments of pronounced, intended theatricality, in the space of the theater itself. Hence, when Nazism reflects on itself it does so exclusively as theatrical spectacle and in the space of the theater. It is during these occasions that jazz announces itself as Nazi barbarism, even if jazz as such does not appear. The trace of jazz, of blackness, is at such moments unavoidable, even desirable. Jazz, then, as Nazi inner crisis and ironic self-revelation, brings into relief the theatricality and the parodic character of Nazi racism. For Mann, jazz reveals the Nazi’s “essential” character as theatrically parodic of racial blackness, seeing it as barbaric. Nazi barbarism is definitionally the same

Jazz-Heinis

119

as what the Nazis take to be black barbarism, excluding of course the racial designation. It makes itself manifest, at times unconsciously, at other times consciously, as a projection onto the black other by whatever means of signification are available, including jazz. Its manifestation creates the opportunity for its denial, evasion, or even exile. As established by the novel, in the realm of Nazi “culture” the combination of theater and dance movement has exemplary value. As a mode of bodily perfection, the ability to dance well has a political meaning. The good dancer is considered a fine physical and cultural specimen, an example of Aryan biological superiority, and an effective Nazi.

II. THE NAZI PRINCESS If it is the case that one’s ability to dance well is of the essence to the successful Nazi, then it stands to reason that how one learns these skills, and in which style, are questions of great importance. Henrik Höfgen, the man ultimately charged with determining the Nazi cultural program, comes into political favor by the force of his talents as an actor who dances in an enchanting fashion. The novel offers no concrete information on Höfgen’s training as an actor, intimating that he possesses a natural aptitude for artificiality and dissimulation. In terms of his apprenticeship in dancing, however, the novel is explicit (Kreutzer 31–35). Höfgen is trained in this absolutely crucial skill for the Nazis by Juliette, aka Princess Tebab, the Black Venus and jazz dance instructor. If, as Halliwell notes, “Mephisto is full of symbolic transformations and metamorphoses which fuse social and cultural elements in a moralistic tale warning of excessive individualism and careerist overreaching,” Höfgen’s relationship with Juliette is no exception (Halliwell 190). It is for Höfgen transformative in at least one basic way: while he is able to realize with her an already developed sexual proclivity for sadomasochism, she trains him in jazz dance. Again, this is of the utmost importance for the novel; for as we shall see, it is how Höfgen moves as a dancer that first gains him notice by the upper echelon of the Nazi hierarchy, and that enables his rise to the top.

120

ANTIMUSIC

Princess Tebab is biracial: “She was black only on her mother’s side, but that inheritance had proved stronger than the white from her father. She looked not like a half-caste, but like a pure-blooded black” (48). Her presence in the novel is first announced by the scent of “cheap perfume” mingled with something “gamier,” as well as “a yell that sounded like a roar from the jungle” (48). Despite her dual heritage, Mann leaves no doubt that Juliette is a “pure-blooded black.” In effect, Mann effaces Juliette’s “Germanness” through a perverse insistence on the Princess’s unruly blackness. The effaced, or repressed, Aryan father serves the novel’s purposes of explaining Juliette’s presence in Germany and her flawless German, which is reminiscent of the linguistic-parodic aspect of the Jonny paradigm. But despite this, Juliette remains wholly outside of German society. She has no one; except for her clients, she is completely isolated. She exists simultaneously at the heart of the novel and at its margins; she is as close as the text comes to presenting a pure idea as opposed to collections of sociohistorical facts and roman à clef personalities, that of the undeniable blackness of jazz. The dominance of her African blood over the Aryan suggests that the taxological representation of blackness overdetermines the paratactical, paradoxical inner core of Nazi ideology. Her African inheritance has not so much conquered that of her German one as it has allowed certain aspects of the German legacy to reveal themselves as they truly are. Juliette’s racial identity is not an either/or; it is both at the same time, given that there is no essential difference between the bloodlines. This is what makes Juliette so unique, and places her in a position of power over Höfgen She is the free-floating, yet embodied, Nazi spirit before it articulates itself as barbaric Nazi culture. To put it in Adornian terms, Mann revises Adorno in positing that Wagner was always already black, anyway. Because of blackness’ dominance in rhythmic expressive cultural forms such as jazz dance, only Juliette and jazz can teach Höfgen to dance the properly Nazi way. What one sees, then, when gazing on Mann’s over-the-top racial parody of Africa is barbarism labeled “blackness.” Her eyes, a brilliant white exhibiting a demonic intelligence, flash forth from an almost comically pitch-black mask. The whiteness of her eyes is predictably matched by that of her teeth.

Jazz-Heinis

121

Add to this construction, or rather, subtract from it a nose (her nose is so stereotypically flat that it only suggests itself as two holes in her face), and one has Mann’s intentionally grotesque vision of wild Tebab. Her primitivist, mask-like head is a forcefully, demonstrably racist image, an improbable collection of racially determined grotesques that combine to form, to Höfgen, an undeniably attractive mélange. Juliette is nothing if not a white man’s sexual fantasy, a dream of bestial sexual strength ready to chastise the white male masochist in his pleasant slumber while affirming his masculine strength, power, and potency. Echoing the jazz discourse of the day, Mann’s Juliette emasculates the men who enjoy her as they please. In this sense, as an exaggerated representation of a racist stereotype, Juliette is also an accurate rendition of Nazi propaganda images, in particular those surrounding jazz. She is Mann’s parody of already parodic racist Nazi imagery. In this way, Mann holds up a mirror to images such as the 1938 Entartete Musik exhibition poster to show that there is nothing behind them but Nazi invention. Juliette, then, represents an encounter with the nothingness at the center of Nazi ideology. She is a nonpresence that is nevertheless the gravitational core of the novel, a textual black hole. As such, Juliette gravitationally consumes the book’s various ideological and aesthetic constellations. For, as Höfgen himself tells us, he is nothing without her, or at least without the blackness he imagines her to possess. The concept of blackness Mann distills in Juliette is a description of directed evil. It envisions a primeval world of lawless instinct in which murder is reflex and necessity, bearing no consequences; a primitive world where the criminal suffers only insofar as his conscious allows it. Indeed, as Brittnacher writes: “Klaus Manns Beschreibung aber hat die Züge der nach Aussagen von Zeitgenossen aparten Mulattinnen zu einer Maske finsterer Alterität verschmolzen—die Prinzessin Tebab wirkt wie ein barbarischer afrikanischer Fetisch, deren Einzelheiten sich der Autor in der exotischen Trivialliteratur der Kolonialismus und dem jahrhundertwendetypischen Faible für das Unverbraucht-Primitive—man denke an Carl Einstein Begeisterung für ‘Negerplastik’—zusammengesucht und ohne Rücksicht auf innere Stimmigkeit miteinander kombiniert hat” (Brittnacher 86).5 Although this is without question the case, it would

122

ANTIMUSIC

be wrong to reduce Juliette solely to a reference to early twentieth-century primitivism. For, while Mann’s gestures toward a cliché primitiveness akin to that of Hesse, his understanding of racial blackness is ultimately as a political fact that draws its power from an internal, Germanic source, an inner crisis to which jazz was a siren-call response. Furthermore, as we saw in Adorno, primitivism was far from politically “innocent.” That is to say that Mann’s use of primitivist representations of the African is a condemnation of Nazism as a form of political life supported and practiced by the unconscious racial parody of the racial other. Said differently, Mann’s novel shows how Hesse’s monkey’s trick has become emblematic of the Nazi culture. Juliette Martens exists in the novel as a counter-discursive voice given as the embodiment and sum total of all the Nazis’ fears of racial-cultural corruption. By pushing her representation to parodic extremes, Mann uses her to parody Nazi racism and highlight the criminality that makes it possible. To insult a Nazi by calling her an African might have force as far as the Nazi is concerned, but it does the African a great disservice. Mann is clearly aware of this. And he has enough compassion for Juliette to make it obvious to any reader unswayed by the allure of reading with racial stereotypes to realize that she is victimized as Pharmakon by everyone in the novel, including the caustic third-person narrative voice. When we read that Juliette’s hair is “[d]ull blond and surprisingly smooth . . . arranged simply with a part in the middle. The dark lady liked to maintain that she had done nothing to alter its appearance—she had inherited the color from her father, Herr Martens, the Hamburg engineer,” we are meant to understand the artificiality and absurdity of Aryan racial purity as much as we are anything negative about Juliette (49). It is not clear where Juliette learned jazz dance. The novel tells us merely that she learned to dance at “home,” leaving the reader to decide what that could mean. Juliette’s task is to instruct Höfgen in the art of the jazz dance, which means here black jazz dance (and not that of, say, Vernon and Irene Castle). The soon-to-be minister of culture under the Nazi regime owes his prestige, in part, to his ability to dance jazz dances as if born to them. Through his unnamed, properly obscured jazz dance movements, Höfgen

Jazz-Heinis

123

impresses Nazis at the highest levels. Indeed, he climbs the Nazi political hierarchy with great ease due largely to his mastery of jazz dance skills. The irony is not lost on the reader. Nor is the “degenerate” quality of Höfgen’s dance skills unremarked by his Nazi counterparts. These so-called degenerate elements are recognized, tolerated, and even applauded by the Nazis—but only in theatrical space. Certain jazz flourishes can be tolerated in the theatrical production that treats explicitly pro-Nazi themes, but a pure jazz production is forbidden. For example, Mann stages the belief held by Adorno and others that Wagner’s music contains proto-jazz elements by having a presentation of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger that includes brief yet overt, pronounced jazz flourishes much in the way serious, nonparodic Verjazzungen of the German music tradition were performed during the Weimar period. The Wagner Verjazzungen is not only appreciated but desirable and highly complementary to Wagner’s music. For, the source of the Die Meistersingers’ authentic racial brilliance is also that of jazz. Jazz and Juliette, then, form part of the German musical tradition, both in its serious sense and with regard to popular images of blacks and black music. Juliette is the highest cultural development of “das kleine Niggergirl,” and in “Calkwalk-Lied,” the singer is taught to dance by his “brown,” showgirl lover. In cliché fashion, then, Höfgen meets her in a strip club, a dive cabaret, where Juliette Martens (jazz) is the main attraction, earning her three marks a night. She dances under the name Princess Tebab, already pandering to, while simultaneously parodying, the primitivist desire for the exotic, and profiting very little from her efforts. To supplement her income, she works as a prostitute, and Höfgen becomes her most reliable client. “The black girl,” writes Mann, echoing that popular standard, “Das kleine Niggergirl” and reminding the reader of stock character in the German racial imagination, “was the ‘teacher,’ the monitress and ruler; the pale man stood before her as the ‘pupil,’ obedient and groveling, who accepted with equal submissiveness constant punishment and scant, grudging praise” (50). Juliette fits the bill provided by “Das kleine Niggergirl” to such an extent that what was implied but never stated in the stereotype—namely that a black woman is a dominatrix who initiates men into perverse, effeminate jazz culture—

124

ANTIMUSIC

is Juliette’s main feature. The teacher continues to call herself Princess Tebab in “private”; her private sessions and personal relationship with Höfgen are also theatrical. Juliette falls in love with Höfgen, who, in his turn, is sexually and emotionally dependent on his Black Venus. One could go so far as to say that he is in love with Juliette, which makes his betrayal of her all the more pathetic.6 The effect of this betrayal will eventually be to articulate the instance of Juliette Martens’ virtual disappearance from the novel and its racial parodic economy. Before this happens, the novel accrues a massive amount of parodic elements. For instance, Juliette retains the title of “Princess” because, she insists, her mother was of royal African blood, the heir of a king devoured by cannibals early in life. No back story would have been adequate to the Black Venus without cannibals, a bit of primitivist racism so laughable that when Juliette suddenly takes on a tragic dimension in the novel, albeit for only a brief moment, she undermines the propagandistic discursive strategies that had to this point defined her. In a novel at times condemned for being nothing but propaganda, Juliette Martens reveals an aesthetic dimension that has little to do with politics, primitivism, or parody. This is to say that, while Mephisto is propaganda, it also proposes an aesthetic experience that undermines propagandistic discourse and that is embodied in Juliette Martens. The subsequent reaction or aversion to the affective, prepropagandistic identification in the work of art with Juliette leads, ironically, both in the Nazi culture of the novel and potentially in the novel’s readers, to its repressive suppression. After having been rigorously represented as nothing but a Nazi male fantasy, with the sudden humanization of “Juliette” Mann grants to jazz blackness what Adorno was unable to allow it: the status of autonomous art. Because Mann’s concern is not singularly concentrated on the culture industry, he is unwilling to separate jazz and blackness. He instead seeks to capture jazz’s surviving, racially determined revolutionary potential— something that will become of great importance to the postwar generation. To return to Juliette Martens and the base Nazi male fantasy defining her, we see that she possesses two forms of ostensible power. The first is her body, in terms of its intense musculature and ferocity. What attracts

Jazz-Heinis

125

Höfgen to his Black Venus the most is the fact that she is built like a man, and in particular “the muscles of her chocolate-brown legs” (50). Here Mann has recourse to yet another racist cliché. African women are prized either for their Hottentot qualities, or for their resemblance to men, with sometimes no clear separation between the two types. In the masculine instance, the supposition is that the man who seeks to possess the African man-woman is a closeted homosexual, which in the case of Mann’s Höfgen would bring him close to the character’s historical model, Gustaf Gründgens, in this roman à clef.7 It also makes him the exemplar of Mann’s belief, from as early as the essay “Homosexualität und Faschismus” (1934), that homosexuality was at the heart of Nazism. But while Gründgens names a specific referential field, he acts also a general type or Idea in the novel. He suggests that racial and sexual hypocrisy go hand in hand in the typical Nazi.8 Thus, enthralled with her manly beauty, Höfgen “submits” to Princess Tebab, giving in to homosexual desire and essentially proving the Kaiser right in his 1912 pronouncement on jazz dance.9 In fact, Höfgen insists that she teach him to dance, saying that “These days an actor must be trained like an acrobat” (50). Höfgen equates dancing with acrobatics. Dancing is thus the primary, essential art that the actor must master to be an artist of the highest rank. Höfgen’s ability to act is directly related to his ability to perform jazz dance. This means that any accolade Höfgen receives in the novel for his acting and any privilege he is honored with in the Nazi hierarchy as a direct result of his acting is actually an effect of his skill as a jazz dancer. In this sense, Höfgen’s ability to rise in the Nazi party is directly related to his lessons in black jazz movement. To possess, or rather to be possessed by Princess Tebab is tantamount to being the recipient by proxy of the embodied psychological basis of Nazi power. Thus, although the Black Venus as individual is utterly powerless, the “blackness” she represents is all pervasive, all powerful in Nazi Germany. The Nazis’ source of strength is the savage, criminal soul of racial blackness. The Aryan, then, is a slave to his black master. This is the substance of Höfgen’s sadomasochistic relationship with Juliette Martens, which greatly resembles the physical and psychological dynamics of Severin’s relationship to Wanda in Venus in Furs. As Deleuze theorized in his reading of

126

ANTIMUSIC

Sacher-Masoch’s novel, the power relations between sadist and masochist are not simple binaries but a type of reciprocal flow from one party to the other. This type of psychosexual exchange with regard to power is certainly suggested in Mephisto. But ultimately, race plays a role in the relationship for which Deleuze does not account. Juliette may possess the “blackness” (jazz dance) Höfgen desires, but he, by virtue of being male and white in Nazi society, retains the power of life and death over her. Within theatrical jazz space, the masochist exercises his ultimately overriding white dominance over his instructor. As a function of mastery, white slavery finds its stage in the “private” setting of Princess Tebab’s boudoir. Höfgen buys Juliette her “red-braided” whip and insists that she use it on him while wearing green jackboots. With whip in hand and jackboots on, a parody of Nazi power and sexuality, the Princess becomes Höfgen’s god: “The black girl was setting up the gramophone. The blare of jazz filled the room and she said hoarsely, ‘Go to it.’ She bared her almost too white teeth and moved her eyes menacingly. This was exactly the expression he had longed to see. Her face reared up before him like the awesome mask of a strange god, a god enthroned in a secret place in the deepest jungle and crying out for human sacrifice” (52). Through his fetish objects, Höfgen slips into a fantasy of black savagery, imagining Juliette standing before African slaves deep in some hidden, macabre African temple. In a parody of Thomas Mann’s Schnee chapter in Der Zauberberg, Juliette the witch queen presides over human sacrifice. To the accompaniment of “wild drums,” she dances rhythmically, gyrating her “majestic torso.” The “sacred” ritual degenerates into orgy and ends in an exhausted, collective sigh. Juliette the god rules over her black slaves, among whom Höfgen in whiteface can be counted. In the end, he is, in fact, her only slave; this fantasy of savage excess serves Höfgen’s identification as both ends of the sacred chain. He is abject black Pharmakon sacrificing himself to Juliette. At the same time, this black god is of his invention and obeys his commands. He controls the fantasy and so nature of his deity. In this sense, his desire for Juliette is also his desire to be Juliette, or rather, his desire to awaken and become the Juliette inside of him and so resolving his Nazi “inner crisis” through racial self-fashioning.

Jazz-Heinis

127

Thus in the face of jazz Höfgen, just as Harry Haller, is internally riven. He is both masochist and sadist, slave and master. The master demands the sacrifice Höfgen is willing to make of himself. At the same time, the master also commands that the slave survive. There must at all times be a worshipping congregation to complete this parody of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. The master not only desires the slave’s submission, she insists on his death despite his capitulation. The slave here exists only as sacrifice, with no higher destiny than to die for the master. The black slaves Mann describes desire to serve their god by dying for her in self-sacrifice. The dialectical identification and recognition are not here confined to the labels of master and slave; they are also between god and worshipper, state and citizen, and in terms of race, black and white. In the mind of the consummate actor in a political milieu where all the world is a stage, Henrik Höfgen can actually be a black slave. He need only put on blackface to become the role. Bloch’s “black” remains paradigmatic for the structure of the German racial imaginary. Both Bloch’s and Mann’s psychology of the actor is the analogue of the Nazi’s mental profile as “inner crisis.”

III. STOP, THIEF As he becomes both actor and Nazi—for in this racial parody of the Bildungsroman they are mirror processes—Höfgen tells Juliette, “I shall always love you....You are strong. You are pure” (54). The substance of Höfgen’s love is of course debatable. He adumbrates the reasons for his everlasting affection; Juliette is strong and pure. She is pure in that she represents to Höfgen untainted blackness, despite being biracial. This, for Höfgen, is a fantasy of black power. Juliette is strong in that she, as a black dominatrix, plays the role of a muscular, sexually predatory woman just as she plays the role of cruel African goddess. But these are just roles that she plays, parts that Höfgen experiences as if they were real in the moment of the encounter. And yet, Höfgen always possesses the power to say stop, to send her into exile, to have her killed. Therefore, he is, as we have seen, the stronger of

128

ANTIMUSIC

the two. One could attempt to shift the erotic balance of power in favor of Juliette by insisting that he is sexually dependent on Juliette. But this is not in fact the case. Höfgen returns to Juliette several times in the novel, indicating the existence of a dependency. But once he is fully integrated in the Nazi party, he sends Juliette away for good, replacing her with the racially more appropriate parody of Juliette, Nicolette.10 As Höfgen climbs higher in the Nazi hierarchy, he learns to repress his African “heritage” by finding sanctioned yet parodic substitutes for it. That is to say that the Nazi party, along with Nicolette, will meet the same need for Höfgen that Juliette did, confirming its status in the novel as savagery figured as blackness and expressed aesthetically (theatrically) through jazz. As far as Juliette’s purity is concerned, we already know that, despite appearances, she is not “pure.” She is half German. Again, Juliette’s purity is a product of Höfgen’s racial imagination. As he lauds her purity, he stares at her breasts, the point being that he is interested not in an ambiguous purity of spirit, but that of the black sensuality of her body. In imagining this vague purity, Höfgen actualizes the fact of Juliette’s mixed heritage. Her “pure” body becomes real for him only in fantasy, while play acting. She is the “pure product” of the Nazi male fantasy. In imagining Juliette’s strength and purity, Höfgen affixes these qualities to himself and by extension to the Nazi party. The Nazi regime is an acting troupe composed of part-time prostitutes that theatrically actualizes real atrocities through the strength and purity of its inner “African” (savage) core. Höfgen’s “career” is the record of this political reality.11 Jazz is merely the musical expression of the Nazis’ essential African character that must be simultaneously acknowledged and repressed. This is why jazz and jazz dance are both essential and degenerate, why jazz can be played at private, “unofficial” Nazi functions, and why thinly veiled, semicrypto jazz dance can be seen in the official State theater and lauded. For her part, Juliette is aware of Höfgen’s capacity for self-delusion: “Ah, that’s just talk.. . . Lots of people are like that. They just have to imagine things like that. Otherwise they can’t feel good” (54). It is people like Höfgen, actors and Nazis, who require such illusions to sustain themselves. Juliette

Jazz-Heinis

129

possesses a greater faculty for psychological, if not social, analysis than any other of the novel’s characters. This psychological acumen, and honesty, is an essential part of the idea she represents. The being that enables one to act well cannot be acted for, cannot be fooled. Juliette thus represents the primitive power of dissimulation that in itself does not dissimulate. She is the real to Höfgen’s racial imaginary. And this is why even Juliette must be overcome if Höfgen is to be a successful Nazi. To appropriate Juliette as she is, as the African who seeks to win the love of the German, would be to destroy any and all illusion Höfgen possesses. And to engage Juliette in an “honest” relationship would undermine not only his social status as a Nazi, but his ontological status as a Nazi/actor. If given public voice, Juliette’s honesty would prevent and destroy Nazi perversion by negating their “primitive” essence. To recognize Juliette in all her human complexity would be to subvert the Nazi’s ability to lie to himself successfully. The barbarism essential to the Nazi character would be lost along with the Negro’s essential characteristic, his singular talent for mimicry, the monkey’s trick. This is why Höfgen forbids Juliette to come to the theater and watch him perform. So dangerous is an appearance by Juliette in public as Höfgen’s lover that when Juliette first mentions playfully her desire to see him perform, Höfgen reacts violently. Late in the novel, she can almost successfully use his fear of it to attempt to extort his love (not money, but love) by threatening to come to his performances and create a scene. Even her earlier suggestion that she be anonymous and hidden in the theater during a performance is out of the question. He insists that she, under no circumstances, view his performance in “official” theatrical space. Höfgen’s concern is not first and foremost that she will be seen, but that she will see. What Höfgen fears is that Princess Tebab will collapse into one another two seemingly disparate scenes, that of the theater and that of the bedroom. The two spaces, and more importantly the two modes of mastery and servitude, must be kept strictly separated. To maintain the integrity, “truth” and future of an illusion, the reality on which it is based must be kept apart from its repressed other at all times. In theatrical space proper, Höfgen the director and actor is dictatorial, indeed sadistic to his colleagues. He is aware of his artistic superiority

130

ANTIMUSIC

and power and never ceases to remind those around him of it. The presence of his goddess and dominatrix in the theater would subordinate Höfgen’s will by activating the “inner crisis” in the space of its repression. Juliette in the theater is blackness unbound, an independent agent no longer subject to Höfgen’s fantastical will coupled with his racial imaginary. The Nazis in Mann’s novel find themselves, of course, in an analogous position. The state theater is already a second space of theatricality, the state itself being the first. While it may seem self-evident, it is nevertheless important to note in this context that if overt elements of black jazz culture were to be represented on the state’s official stage, they would shatter the effect of theatricality and create a “real event.” Likewise and equally obvious, if jazz is to be played at an “unofficial” state function such as Göring’s birthday party, black jazz cannot be present in any capacity without destroying the theatrical distance between audience and object. The jazz at Göring’s birthday party was labeled as “German,” hence its mix with the military march. It is Wagnerian jazz, but only on the surface. Mann ultimately and rightly does not believe in the split; the difference between the two is an issue of political packaging. Following Kracauer and many others, Mann understands all jazz to have racial blackness as its origin. This, for Mann as for Bloch, is not an empty signifier, a mere color. Race is real in Mephisto. But in totalizing Nazi dictator culture, blackness is an empty vessel for Nazi subjectivity. The audience in the theater, just as the guests at Göring’s birthday party, are always in black jazz theatrical space as they themselves conceive of it. This space is delimited by a hierarchy and a distance that allow the audience self-detachment and self-alienation in racial parody. It generates an unexpected improvisation of Brecht’s alienation effect that must be subsequently contained and repressed. Mann’s theater is Brechtian, with the proviso that alienation and racial parody are overcome, leading to fascist political intervention and control. Mann, then, retains elements of what Adorno saw as reactionary primitivism where Brecht does not. For Mann, it is an a priori fact of Nazism that can only be described by recourse to and parody of primitivist discourse, of which Baudelaire’s poetry forms a part. For, in order to convince Juliette,

Jazz-Heinis

131

and himself, that he loves her, Höfgen quotes the Black Venus a line from Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil: “Do you come from the distant heavens or rise from the lower depths, O Beauty?” (54). Recalling Baudelaire’s own relationship with an actress of African descent, Jeanne Duval, the line, given the scene of its utterance, is a parody of romanticism and the morbid exoticism it would engender in decadence (Brittnacher 86).12 Höfgen undercuts and ironizes his own attempt to make his intentions toward Juliette clear by placing his “inner crisis” in theatrical space at the level of the utterance. And Höfgen has tremendous cultural resources for constructing and enhancing his racial imaginary. Here he uses literary decadence, biography and allusion—his love is Baudelaire’s; the mention of the acrobat in its context is a reference to Huysmans’s À rebours (1884); and his similarity to SacherMasoch’s Severin could not have been lost on him—to produce a picture of Juliette that functions much like that of the little nigger girl from 1904. She is a black body, the sexual object par excellence, mindless and yet containing hidden depths of soul and secret desires. This racial-sexual ambiguity, as old as “das kleine Niggergirl” if not older, is, in Mann’s text, the basis of all fascist hypocrisy, political and personal. It collapses the difference between fascist public and private space, in that it posits a hypocritical subjectivity that is governed by no overriding sense of logical boundaries or limits. The ability to lie to oneself in one’s most intimate being transcends intimacy and prefaces every aspect of one’s life. This is why Höfgen cites a question and not a statement. It is not that he thought he chose Baudelaire’s most beautiful line on Beauty. Rather, Höfgen sought, unconsciously, to affirm the ambiguity of his situation and the power over Juliette and his political reality that this ambiguous nature gives him. Mann is not just aware of Baudelaire’s famous liaison with Jeanne Duval but also of the “diabolical” inspiration the affair provided Baudelaire for Les Fleurs du mal. Sprengel writes: “Die Baudelaire-Zitate, mit denen Höfgen seine Ausschweifungen beschliesst, machen zugleich das kulturkritische Anliegen des Autors deutlich, der die Gestalt der farbigen Geliebten der Biographie Baudelaires entnimmt—sind als Hinweis auf die Verbindung von ‘satanischem’ Ästhetizismus und A-, ja Immoralität

132

ANTIMUSIC

zu lesen” (Sprengel 427).13 This “satanic” aestheticism cannot be limited to Höfgen’s knowledge of Baudelaire’s biography. It must also be brought into dialogue with the narratological and political context of its utterance. The “satanic” in Baudelaire’s and Höfgen’s use of the Jeanne Duval name feminized blackness as the element of Nazi aesthetic taste that wins Höfgen party favor for his portrayal of Goethe’s Mephistopheles. In this respect, like Baudelaire, Höfgen too has a black actress to give him strength and provide him with an aesthetic advantage. But where Baudelaire receives satanic poetic inspiration from his Black Venus, Höfgen learns the essence of political evil. In identifying, consciously or unconsciously, his black starlet with Baudelaire’s black muse, Höfgen performs the same aestheticization of race as Baudelaire, but only insofar as he experiences aesthetics as politics and not poetry. Mann here sets up Baudelaire’s African affair, and of course Les Fleurs du mal, as authentic experience and as autonomous art. Conversely, Höfgen’s transmogrification of the black other, the racial-aesthetic equivalent to alchemy or Haller’s Pharmakon, is a second-order monkey’s trick performed for Nazis. Höfgen draws on Baudelaire’s oeuvre and biography to swear a dubious poetic yet a clear political allegiance. What he accomplishes, then, by this moment of poetic inspiration is far more perilous for Juliette than her fate of Parisian exile at the end of the novel. For Höfgen has effectively dehumanized her, atomized her into the constituent parts of a Nazi male fantasy of racial-sexual power, and enhanced his fantasy with poetic trappings. The actor finds his muse in himself as represented in the aestheticized female black body, and then murders the muse in art, much like Haller kills Hermine. Juliette has been all but liquidated, submerged into a now-poetic reverie of Nazi male potency. In this sense, Juliette is not even a primitivist fantasy, she is atavistic power consolidated in the mind of the Nazi and sublimated as the work of art. She is the reverse of Benjamin’s concept of art’s technological reproduction in which fascist appropriation empties the work of art of its aura. She is pure ideological content that finds an empty aesthetic form, the black body. Juliette is nothing more than the ideological raw material of the artwork; her body is the otherwise empty form in which is placed whatever racist content

Jazz-Heinis

133

the Nazi chooses, primitivist or otherwise. It is not here a matter of conceptualizing and aesthetically representing a priori black racial inferiority, but instead of using the concept of black savagery to represent, say, Mephistopheles. One could say with Halliwell that “in Mephisto, the angels are not so much choric figures or catalysts for Höfgen’s interest in magic, but barometers of his passions and aspirations” (Halliwell 196–97). This inclusion, though, would have to delimit his barbarism and savagery as well. For in reducing Juliette to a routine, a jazz practice, Höfgen eradicates what little humanity he saw in her and transforms her into “ jazz” as the internal music of Nazism. Juliette is jazz made human, the manifest destiny of a savage, degenerate art form that is nevertheless the basis of Nazi power and the heart of Nazi performativity. Where one reads Juliette, one must read also jazz, which in Mephisto is the true music of Nazism. In the duration of a sigh, Höfgen has moved from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal to satanic political evil, from the poetics of modernity to the aesthetics of state-executed mass murder. Höfgen is the black jazz singer performing Mephistopheles in white face. Höfgen’s rise to stardom and eventually to the position of minister of culture is not without obstacles.14 Mephisto is his destiny, but the role both is and is not simply handed to him as soon as he masters jazz dance.15 The future Nazi star begins his career as a regional actor with communist leanings. He is well known in Hamburg, but a nonentity in Berlin. Eventually, he is backed by his well-connected new bride, Barbara. The namesake of the saint sacrificed by barbarians receives a metaphorically similar fate at the hands of a husband incapable of loving the highly cultured daughter of a famous left-wing intellectual—but not before Barbara uses her well-placed contacts to advance Höfgen’s career all the way to Berlin. Once there, it is up to Höfgen alone to conquer an audience not easily impressed. He does so in a bit part that he is able to turn into a minor cause célèbre due to his spectacular dancing abilities. The substance of the character is slight; Höfgen plays a stumbling, mumbling, drunk peasant. But his stumbles are those of an actor trained in a form of dance that lends grace and realism to a peasant savage. In the end, the audience does not recognize Höfgen’s jazz moves as dance but as great acting in embodied disorientation.

134

ANTIMUSIC

Höfgen is also called on to dance in a more recognizable fashion. The nature of the traditional dance is not specified, but the unspoken assumption is that because he is a master of primitive jazz dance and trained by an “authentic” jazz practitioner, he has a priori mastered the fundamental core of all dance. It matters little which dance Höfgen’s is asked to perform. The essence of dance was taught, or rather granted to him by Princess Tebab. His (jazz) dancing is what truly marks him as a rising star, a Dionysian force to be reckoned with in some near future. This dance turn is precisely the move that Höfgen must make if he is to become a Nazi cultural icon. Indeed, the seductive quality of Höfgen’s jazz movement is Mann’s analogue for Hitler’s cult of personality. For Mann, both dance on a stage. The public, political presence of the party leader is the incoherent mumbling of the peasant inebriate. The true power and devastating allure of Nazi rhetoric is not its substance but its bodily artifice, exemplified in movement and gesture as dance. Mann uses his actor’s corruption to condemn the aestheticization of politics. Mann writes: “Das individuelle Problem Gründgens interessierte mich nicht. Aber das Problem des ‘kultivierten’ Mitläufers, des talentvollen Opportunisten, der gesinnungslosen Begabung—das schien mir denn doch des Interesses wert!” (Naumann 150).16 In the novel, the aestheticized politics of the Nazi movement are barbarism made visible and consumable by jazz dance. It is not long before Höfgen is noticed by Berlin’s film industry and begins collecting roles and unqualified successes. Success, however, does not come without its artistic price. Because of his overwhelmingly convincing portrayal of a villain in a, of course, crime film called Stop Thief, Höfgen is typecast. His signature role in the Krimi is defined by a pervasive blackness embodied in a sympathetic villain “who hardly ever removes his black mask.” Höfgen essentially performs in blackface until, “In the course of [a] dramatic scene the Black Devil unmasks. Between his stiff black hat and his high-necked black shirt, his face is of a frightening pallor, aristocratic even in its depravity, and not without a trace of tragic grandeur” (139). In this film, made shortly before 1933, Höfgen’s thief is a good German, an aristocrat and officer, who has nevertheless fallen into barbarism. His Aryan background

Jazz-Heinis

135

makes his rapid and complete descent into Nazi savagery all the more pathetic and powerful. The post-1933 Mephistopheles, however, can never reveal his true face. His deeds are always those of the devil, but the “darkness of his soul” is never truly revealed to the audience by the very fact that he has no mask to take off. Because Mephistopheles does not wear his blackness on his face like a second skin, there can be no secret whiteness, no aristocracy, no goodness to reveal to the audience. That is to say that the blackness of Höfgen’s thief is, in part, a sham, and that the kitsch-drama invoked by the thief ’s transformation into fallen angel is achieved through the realization that his soul is not beyond salvation, is not as black as his clothes. The thief wears his soul as a prop, as if he were not evil enough to be convincing as what Mann calls a “Black Devil.” Mephistopheles has no need of such props; he is black evil incarnate. Reminiscent of the forceful significance of Bloch’s blank color “black,” Mann offers, then, a stark and blatant color contrast between Höfgen’s early role as a character marked by villainy, and his later roles as Mephistopheles who, although clearly a representation of evil, also carries within him the romantic ideal of the promethean antihero, and who wears white face, or a type of mask of his own face. Given the humanity expressed by Höfgen’s otherwise monstrous thief, revealed by a “frightening pallor,” an “aristocratic” (re: pale) depravity, the thief and Mephistopheles do not comprise two sides of the same coin, but are in effect the same role whose inversion is determined in its visual representation by political circumstances. His white face does not hide the black devil’s self-presentation, it defaces it. Both characters, in their own way, “forge banknotes,” “smuggle drugs,” rob banks, and commit “several murders.” For the thief, these are horrible but atonable crimes. Mephistopheles’s crimes are understood as heroic, Promethean revolutionary acts designed to overturn a corrupt political order (Weimar democracy). Black and white here name, not the character of a soul, but fascist moral relativism.17 The thief, despite his crimes against society, is a reactionary; he seeks to return to aristocratic order. Mephistopheles commits crimes against humanity; his crimes are those of the seemingly oxymoronic revolutionary yet reactionary modernist, who seeks to create a new order of man (Halliwell 190).

136

ANTIMUSIC

When Höfgen’s Weimar film career and rise to superstardom are interrupted by the Nazi seizure of power, the actor goes by his own volition into Parisian exile. However, unable to bear life outside the spotlight, Höfgen returns to Germany by using the affections of an old contact, who is now the great dignitary’s lover. He is allowed to resume his life in Berlin and permitted limited activities in the National Theater. It is not long before Höfgen, by virtue of his political contacts and his jazz dance, again rises to prominence in the art world and, against the wishes of the State Theater’s director is given the prize role of Mephistopheles in the company’s production of Faust. Although the defense minister has intervened several times on behalf of Höfgen, he is not convinced of either Höfgen’s talent or his loyalty to the Nazi party—not until he sees Höfgen realize the role of Mephistopheles: “What caught and fixed [the great dignitary’s] eye was [Höfgen’s] dancer’s agility, the mischievous grace and wicked charm of Hendrik Höfgen’s Mephistopheles” (177). The great dignitary is convinced of Höfgen’s Nazi Party loyalty above all by his agility as a (jazz) dancer, taught to him by the Black Venus. Through this black jazz agility, Höfgen is able to convince skeptics that he is a true Nazi. Höfgen appears in precisely the same costume he was wearing in his breakthrough film role as the aristocrat turned ruthless thief and murderer. The only difference in appearance between the thief and Mephistopheles is Höfgen’s makeup, as previously mentioned. In other words, Höfgen brings the same attributes to the role of Mephistopheles with which he endowed his jazz thief. And what was most important in his early successful roles applies to Mephistopheles as well. Because Höfgen can dance, can move with the jazz dancer’s “grace,” he is able to translate the necessary expression of unambiguous evil that Mann felt the audiences of Nazi Germany demanded. The agility that Höfgen brings to the stage is in fact the defining characteristic of acting itself in Nazi Germany. Prized by the Nazi audience is not, first and foremost, how well an actor delivers a line, but the ability with which he moves. In this sense, Mann offers a definitive analysis of Nazi stage aesthetics. Mann understands the Nazi aesthetic as essentially devoid of content, an empty form that is appreciated and evaluated

Jazz-Heinis

137

with regard solely to its dynamism. The Nazi aesthetic is an appraisal of the body, a glorification of surfaces in motion. Here, as in a speech by Hitler, it is virtually irrelevant what is said and how it is said as long as it conforms to certain themes and includes oft-repeated catchphrases. Substance and conviction are found in how the body speaks. Body language silences the voice, communicating a nonverbal message that works “unmediated” on the emotions. The Nazi feels Höfgen’s performance, falls ineffably in love with it, is literally moved by it, but in the end cannot sufficiently explain why, except to say that it was beguiling, bewitching.

IV. THE WHITEFACE MINSTREL The Nazi aesthetics of the stage are thus exactly those of Nazi propaganda and the aestheticization of politics. Höfgen’s unalloyed movement carries a content that cannot be debated or resisted; it conquers and transforms the audience and body politic on a level ecstatic to reason. Höfgen’s jazz performance is, then, truly diabolical. His dancer’s agility is a reduction against which there is no defense and which is ultimately black in origin and jazz in expression. The Nazi identification with Höfgen’s Mephistopheles is ultimately a recognition of the self as black savage “evil” on an unconscious level—the very scene played out at the end of Bloch’s fable. To prevent the subliminal from becoming conscious, this African essence must be exiled. Princess Tebab’s fate is that of Nazi Africanicity. In the new Germany, there is no room for African mistresses who wish to come out of the shadows. The Black Venus, much like the jazz still in Berlin after Hitler’s, and Höfgen’s, rise to power, attempts to regain her lover. She appears outside the theater. As the novel’s representative embodiment of jazz, had she remained behind closed doors, so to speak, she might have been allowed to abide a long time in the Nazi dictatorship. But by going to the theater, by becoming public, she suffers the fate of a jazz club that became politicized: she is destroyed. Realizing she poses a grave danger to him, Höfgen turns to his “guardian angel,” Göring. With remarkable insouciance, Göring disclaims that “none

138

ANTIMUSIC

of us are exactly pure angels,” exonerating Höfgen for his walk on the wild side and then devising a plan to get ride of Juliette. That Göring is neither surprised nor offended by a highly placed Nazi’s erotic attachment to a black woman may seem “shocking.” When the guardian angel confesses his lack of purity, his meaning is implicit but palpable. Höfgen’s sexual fascination is Göring’s as well. The guardian angel has himself taken a walk on the wild side; he loves jazz. But “ jazz” indiscretions need to be confined to theatrical space, otherwise they become “real.” The irony is fitting. In a culture that saw no difference between art and ideology, pageantry and propaganda, it is only on stage that one can experience “reality.” In other words, Göring can listen to jazz publicly only if that public space is one of pronounced theatricality. Höfgen can practice jazz movement on stage and could have continued to enjoy Juliette’s favors if she had remained in her room. But if the connection between Höfgen’s movement and blackness is made publicly, it would mean ruin not only for Höfgen, but for the state theater and the minster of culture as well. Thus, there is no room for Juliette outside of private theatrical space. She belongs in private service, where she plays out the white male fantasy of the exotic, half-animal hypermasculine black woman. Juliette is Göring’s jazz as much as she is Höfgen’s. In essence, there is no separation between Höfgen and Göring, and Juliette and jazz. Both pairs are conditioned by the same source and structure of vital barbaric power. Juliette is abducted by SS officers and kept for several days in abject silence (148). Her questions are not answered when she is taken and for the duration of her captivity. Disavowed, she is, without charge or warrant, kept in a bare cell. The protestations she expresses become mute as her strong will fades. Eventually, she succumbs. The Black Venus, the willful, omnipotent German African goddess of blood and murder, is reduced to her bare life of nothingness, of a mere color. The only visit she is allowed and the one person with whom she speaks is Höfgen, whose face is “very pale.” It is as if Höfgen’s Mephisto makeup has indelibly imprinted itself on his skin. The pale face is Höfgen’s whiteness asserting its ferocious need to obscure a once-more-powerful blackness than the one driving his “inner crisis.” The meeting between Juliette and Höfgen in the Nazi holding cell is not a confrontation. Juliette’s

Jazz-Heinis

139

will is broken. She accepts that her Germany does not want her and will kill her if she does not go into exile, if she does not allow the repression of their shared blackness. Höfgen’s white face has succeeded in mastering its essential negritude and that of the Nazis. The manner in which this is achieved, in which Juliette is broken, is crucial. She is sequestered in silence, isolated beyond sight and voice. Importantly, she is not killed. Given the choice between life and death, like Hegel’s slave she concedes. But this concession is qualified. Juliette, by remaining alive, continues to haunt Höfgen and Mann’s text. Höfgen supports her financially in her exile, albeit with a pittance. She returns, uncannily, again and again—not physically, but as a rumor that doesn’t die. Höfgen’s dirty black secret becomes the trace of a hauntology, a lovely ghost that both torments him and gives him strength. But the power that she endows him with is now latent; it is the fundamental basis on which another, greater power lies. Juliette’s dominance was always virtual. She existed as a phantom. To follow her fantastical image was to become initiated in primitive blood rites and to belong to a powerful race of demigods.18 To maintain its structural integrity, Nazi power sequesters and silences its originary fantasy. Just as Juliette is locked away in a solitary jail cell, so too blackness; just as Juliette is forced into silence and exile, so too blackness—in order that the Nazi state may survive. She is exiled to Paris, where she continues to dance, and where she spends several hours a day staring at a picture of Höfgen’s white face, still in love with her white master, still empowering him through the voodoo enchantment of his effigy.

F

Conclusion

Figure C.1. Duke Ellington and Marianne Lutz-Pastre rehearsing in Frankfurt, 23 October 1959. Bettmann, Getty Images. The original caption reads: “Real Jazzy. Frankfurt, Germany: It’s a far cry from chamber music, but German chambermaids seem to be enjoying the performance as American Jazz great Duke Ellington and dancer Marianne Lutz-Pastre rehearse a number on the terrace of the Frankfurter Hof Hotel in Frankfurt. Frau Lutz-Pastre, who danced to Ellington’s music at the recent Berlin Festival, is slated to make a concert tour in the U.S.”

F Kater has suggested that the GDR’s censorship of jazz was similar to that which the music experienced in Nazi period (Kater 2, 110). Certainly, as Thacker has written, the two totalitarian regimes used a similar “analytical vocabulary . . . in their political understanding of musical modernism and jazz. Both parties, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei 141

142

ANTIMUSIC

and Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, used ideas of decadence and degeneration very freely in their analyses of music. Terms linked with organic decay and with hygiene were used to signify poles of good and evil, of acceptability and unacceptability. Above all when a vocabulary of criticism and defamation was needed, both parties drew on a eugenicist discourse, forever associated now with the worst horrors of Nazism” (Thacker 105–6). And yet, despite these real similarities, the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands was able to condemn “the West German hit music industry as a continuation of the cynical wartime production of Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry” (Thacker 106). Indeed, the situation may not have been as easily discernible as the simple equation of two totalitarian regimes adding up to the same or even analogous results. The picture, perhaps, becomes clearer when, instead of considering East Germany in isolation with the Nazi regime, one includes West Germany in the comparative frame as well. For ultimately, in approaching jazz, “both East and West German opponents and promoters...relied on the same concepts—such as decadence and disdain for a capitalist music industry—in arguments for their respective causes” (Poiger 228). While the legislation of jazz differs markedly between the two German states, the conceptual apparatuses for theorizing and presenting jazz politically stem from the same source. In the time immediately following the war, jazz is still the object of the same sort of political derision in Germany, East and West, that it was during the Nazi regime, and the music continues to be a cause for racial-cultural concern. Indeed the idea that Germans directly after the war took to African American jazz as an antifascist, democratic music is political fantasy (Hoffmann 214–15). Pronouncements on jazz reception conditioned by sentiments such as, “Das Kriegsende bedeutete für viele Deutsche einen äußerlichen wie innerlichen Neubeginn. Sie mussten eine neue Identität finden, Wege, ihre jüngste Vergangenheit zu akzeptieren, ohne das Vertrauen in den Aufbau einer neuen Gesellschaft zu verlieren” perceive the situation through overly optimistic, retorqued hindsight (Knauer 78).1 The discussion surrounding jazz in the immediate postwar period is, however, concerned with pragmatic and difficult questions about future, cultural worth, and

Conclusion

143

national identity (Fuchs 239). As such, jazz discourse became an integral part of the attempt to define “Germanness” culturally after National Socialism and at the onset of the Cold War. Because of this, as the ’50s wore on, the East and West German states came to see jazz as art music, or Kunstjazz— a status denied the music in Germany at any time until this point (Poiger 219). But not all jazz was considered art. To articulate a political response to the German cultural appropriation of jazz, both sides distinguished between “authentic” and “commercial” jazz (Poiger 219). The distinction between the two was determined by the way in which East and West Germany encountered jazz in the postwar environment. Ironically true to the rhetoric of the saxophone as the instrument of foreign military power, many of the immediate postwar currents in jazz were translated in American military clubs or in conversation with military personal engaged in the jazz scene (Knauer 78).2 These conversations did not simply display the pattern of a communicative network premised on jazz formalism. The overtly political nature of postwar German jazz reception, and the American exportation of democracy through jazz in general during the early phase of the Cold War, were conditioned by US segregation in every aspect of the music, including composition. Segregation ideology was disseminated in the physical space of the jazz clubs themselves, which were separated racially black from white. The twain theoretically met in German “Hot Clubs,” most notably in Cave 54 in Heidelberg, and Der Jazzkeller in Frankfurt (Knauer 78). However, it was because of this potential for race mixing that, particularly in the polemics surrounding German “Hot Clubs,” the Nazi and pre-Nazi notion of racial degeneracy through jazz continued in West Germany (Poiger 218). A case in point is the Frankfurt jazz scene, which already had a long, positive history with the music, having offered jazz courses in its prestigious conservatory during the Weimar era. In the postwar period, the city’s jazz experience serves as a standard example for jazz segregation in Germany. At the end of the ’40s into the early ’50s, “authentic” swing and Bebop played in black clubs; “light” swing and pure dance music could be heard in white clubs (von Essen 88). By the mid-’50s, jazz in Frankfurt and throughout West Germany attracted a mass audience, as witnessed in

144

ANTIMUSIC

part in the Ami-Clubs, which were no longer dominated by an American audience mixed with a few self-selected Germans, but by German jazz fans (von Essen 89). The segregation, however, remains and is now philosophical as much as it is logistic.3 By the mid-’50s, two separate, unequal, racially defined jazz traditions take shape in Germany. The first, black tradition is associated with jazz’s beginnings as a regional, rural, Dixieland phenomenon. The second is seen as white, cerebral, and urban; according to its theorist Berendt, it comes into being in US cities and in particular in Chicago with the white appropriation of jazz during the great migration (Poiger 220). But this new, white jazz variant does not stop its migration in the American city. Racially riven, Dixieland or black jazz stagnates in Europe as part of the Americanization of the interwar period culture industry. Dynamic, avant-garde white jazz arrives after the war as the counterpoint to black, Oldtime jazz, which is condemned as commercialized and aesthetically and politically reactionary; its adherents are labeled as Swing-Heinis, the same name given them by the Nazis (Poiger 223). The irony is that Germans learn this music mainly from black practitioners. By moving beyond its black roots, it became a global music capable of being “authentically” appropriated by any national music tradition, and any race including blacks. Blacks learn intellectualized, avant-garde jazz from white serious music. Ultimately, it is American military power and imperialism that allow for the globalization of avant-garde jazz through white jazz forms and both black and white musicians. Because of its global, network-communicative function, (white) jazz was seen as inherently democratic and antitotalitarian. Furthermore, the more “sophisticated” urban white variant was modernist, autonomous, and so resistant to the commercialization of the culture industry. Black music is perceived as still beholden to the culture industry, here seen as separate from the global American democratic mission. Thus black music continues to be viewed as totalitarian in nature (Poiger 222). In the East Germany of the 1950s, the situation is inverted. Oldtime jazz was by far the most acceptable form of jazz in an environment where the music is treated politically with deep suspicion and censorship, even finding

Conclusion

145

occasionally airtime on television (Truhlar 140). Dixieland is praised as “authentic” jazz precisely because of its racial roots in African America, which is here perceived anthropologically. Oldtime jazz is a form of ethnomusicological evidence of unspoiled, precapitalist expression that is free of coercive capitalist ideology. As an anthropological ideal, Oldtime jazz and Dixieland signify forms of racial identification and solidarity between oppressed peoples in the fight against capitalism and the culture industry. “Modern” jazz is seen as a Western commercial product spreading the ideology of capital. The new jazz such as bebop is a decadent product of cosmopolitanism and formalism. Black bebop musicians are considered race traitors, bought and sold, while a return to “authentic” black folk music is held out as the only hope the music has (Poiger 225–27). It isn’t until the early ’70s that an annual Berlin concert series devoted to newer, avant-grade jazz could be organized, and even this had limited support (Truhlar 140–41). In essence, the two countries subscribe to the same divided racial-cultural jazz history as did Weimar intellectuals and the Nazis. Each maintains the racial designation and basic “anthropological” assumptions for “black” jazz while assuming an intellectually sophisticated, culturally constitutive “traditional” element to “white” jazz. The differences between periods come in assigning a politics to each historical and theoretical value. “Black” jazz is always heard as primitive, ritually significant sound. It is a music heard ethnographically, and it can either instruct in noncapitalist expressive cultural forms to be embraced and appropriated, or it can be a shadow of its own blackness, the shape of which is defined solely by the culture industry. In the former example, black jazz is inherently democratic and instinctually against capitalism and commodification. In the later conception, which is by far the most common one, black jazz serves totalitarian ideologies and cultural designs. This version of black jazz brushes against its white variant, which can be conceived negatively as, alternatively, the culture industry in blackface (Adorno) or, as was the view in East Berlin, as an overtly white historical variation on black jazz invested in modernist obfuscation and avantgarde alienation. As a continuation of Nazi cultural politics, this jazz serves the ideological totalitarian ends of the Western culture industry. No matter

146

ANTIMUSIC

the political value ascribed, in each instance the narrative of jazz history follows the same racially divided and segregated structure, that of “black” and “Wagnerian” jazz. The shared source for this narrative of the reception history of black music in Germany is itself already determined by segregation. Hence, East and West Germany not so much inherit or adapt as freely adopt a single, unified history of jazz as a divided and divisive cultural matrix. As a polarizing polemical discourse on “Germanness” and national identity at every juncture of its German reception, jazz is construed as an object of racial and political conflict. For as long as jazz is in Germany, it undergoes discussion, debate, theorization, and aggressive political appropriation. But whereas this confrontation with jazz is defined by racial parody in the years leading to World War II, jazz of the immediate postwar moment is characterized by racial and political irony. A case in point would be the fact that by the mid-’60s, jazz was played in a West German state-sponsored club in Berlin, and it had become the official music of the country’s army (Poiger 218). The Kaiser’s 1912 jazz nightmare had been fully realized.

Figure C.2. Laughing, naked black woman listening to a gramophone with the “His Master’s Voice” trademark. Photographer: Eduard Schlochauer. Published in Berliner Morgenpost, 8 September 1929. Ullstein Bild, Getty Images.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. I am thinking here of the foundational work done by Rainer E. Lotz. I also have in mind critics such as Ekkehard Jost, Wolfram Knauer, and Bernd Hoffmann. Of great importance is the Jazzinsitut Darmstadt, perhaps the most important jazz archive in Europe, whose Darmstädter Beiträge zur Jazzforschung sets the standard for jazz studies on the continent. While a closer look at recent black German cultural studies directly follows, let me point out here Sara Lennox, Remapping Black Germany: New Perspectives on Afro-German History, Politics and Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), and Patricia Mazon and Reinhild Steingrover, eds., Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture and History, 1890–2000 (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, University of Rochester Press, 2009). There are also a number of works dealing specifically with Afro-German women, such as May Opitz, Katharina Oguntoye, and Dagmar Schultz, eds., Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1991); Ika HügelMarshall, Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany, trans. Elizabeth Gaffney (New York: Peter Lang, 2008); and Tina Marie Campt, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). 2. There has been a great deal of recent critical interest in German colonialism. See, for example, David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism (New York: Faber & Faber, 2011); Firpo Carr, Germany’s Black Holocaust: 1890– 1945 (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012); Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism: A Short History, trans. Sorcha O’Hagan 147

148

Notes to Chapter One

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Völker Langbehn, German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany, ed. Mohammed Salama (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley, eds., German Colonialism in a Global Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Sara L. Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne M. Zantop, eds., The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998); Nina Berman, German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014); George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 3. See also Larry A. Greene amd Anke Ortlepp, eds., Germans and African Americans: Two Centuries of Exchange (Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 2013). 4. See also Martin Pfleiderer, Zwischen Weltmusik und Exotismus (1998). 5. These studies will be addressed in the book’s chapter on Adorno. 6. In this endeavor I have been aided by such major contributions to German Studies as Maria I. Diedrich and Jürgen Heinrichs’s From Black to Schwarz: Cultural Crossovers Between African America and Germany (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011); Michael J. Budds, ed., Jazz & the Germans: Essays on the Influence of “Hot” American Idioms: On 20th-Century German Music (New York: Pendragon Press, 2002). 7. I am deeply indebted to the great work of Uta Poiger, Cornelius Partsch, Andreas Huyssen, Alain Lareau, Theodore F. Rippey, Frank Tirro, Daniel Bell, Susan Cook, Peter Jelavich, Jonathan Wipplinger, and many others.

CHAPTER ONE 1. Published in 1930, Spuren is a collection of philosophical feuilletons originally written for the Frankfurter Zeitung from about 1928 to 1930. Bloch continued to write for the periodical until 1933.

Notes to Chapter One

149

2. Neger was the standard designation in German for a person of African descent in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s. “Schwarze” and “Schwarzer” would have been a rare nominative in the context of race, but obviously not unheard of. 3. The Spuren pieces were examples of the philosophical essayist prose Bloch considered to be “fable thinking.” See Ernst Bloch: “Fabelnd denken.” Essayistische Prosa aus der “Frankfurter Zeitung,” ed. Gert Ueding (Tübingen: Verlag Klöpfer & Meyer, 1997). See also, Weissberg, “Philosophy and the Fairy Tale: Ernst Bloch as Narrator,” New German Critique 55 (1992): 21–44. 4. I write “German” racial imaginary or imagination not to stigmatize contemporary Germans but, obviously, because the historical setting of this book is interwar Germany. This term refers to the history of German thought on blackness, and German antiblack racism. This is not a book about anti-Semitism, although certainly its conclusions could be adapted to reading aspects of anti-Semitic thought. 5. See, for example, his “Germany, 1923: Alain Locke, Claude McKay, and the New Negro in Germany.” Callaloo: Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters 36, no. 1 (2013): 106–24; “Eccentric Modernism, Or: George Grosz’s Gramophone Goes Meschugge,” Colloquia Germanica: Internationale Zeitschrift für Germanistik 46, no. 4 (2013): 366–88; “The Racial Ruse: On Blackness and Blackface Comedy in Fin-de-Siècle Germany,” German Quarterly 84, no. 4 (2011): 457–76; “Bridging the Great Divides: Cultural Difference and Transnationalism at Frankfurt’s Jazzklasse,” From Black to Schwarz: Cultural Crossovers Between African America and Germany, eds. Maria I. Diedrich and Jürgen Heinrichs (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press; Münster: Lit Verlag, 2011), 119–38; “Performing Race in Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf,” Blackness in Opera, eds. Naomi André, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 236–59. 6. The risk one runs in premising jazz reception in Germany on the “aural shock of modernity” as opposed to the more grounded, probably determinative factor of virulent German racism between the wars is in inadvertently making a racist argument. I am not saying that this is what Wipplinger intends—absolutely not. However, “aural shock” seems a poor substitute

150

Notes to Chapter Two

for abject hatred, regardless of the theoretical sophistication. As mentioned above, Wipplinger does acknowledge German racism, but this racism was by far the primary determinate for the reception of German jazz. 7. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or Life Among the Lowly was published in 1852 and became an immediate worldwide sensation. It was translated into German the same year, and by the end of 1852 there were thirteen different German editions of the book. The German interest in the novel was extraordinary. And it has since never been out of print in Germany. See, B. Hofmann, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Germany: A Children’s Classic,” ZAA 53, no. 4 (2005): 353–68. 8. See Jürgen Heinrichs, “Blackness in Weimar: 1920s German Art Practice and African American Music and Dance” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1998). 9. Noted jazz historian Ted Gioia accurately describes the jazz “primitivist myth” as “a stereotype which views jazz as a music charged with emotion but largely devoid of intellectual content, and which sees the jazz musician as the inarticulate and unsophisticated practitioner of an art which he himself scarcely understands” (quoted in Anderson 22). 10. I am relying here on Klaus Theweleit’s now well-known thesis on the protofascist Freikorps’ misogynist fantasy construction, while amending the argument to account for black-white race relations in interwar Germany. Clearly, I am suggesting that the German racial imaginary is premised on the production of violent fantasy about the black other. But when looked at from the perspective of race, misogyny becomes redirected against the self as black other. The black woman is taken for her “masculine qualities,” while the white male is “emasculated” by her. He then acts out misogynist fantasy against himself in the form of sadomasochistic sexual violence. The white male places himself in the position of masochist, not sadist, despite the unavoidable blurring of that line. See Theweleit, Male Fantasies.

CHAPTER TWO 1. See also Dümling 363–64.

Notes to Chapter Two

151

2. On Brecht’s rejection of the “culinary” aspects of music, see Johannes Mittenzwei, Brechts Kampf gegen die kulinarische Musik, 1962. 3. For the development of Brecht’s epic theater, see Reinhold Grimm, ed., Episches Theater (Köln: Kiepenheuer u. Witsch, 1966); and Werner Hecht, Brechts Weg zum epischen Theater Beitrag zur Entwicklung des epischen Theaters 1918 bis 1933 (Berlin: Henschel-Verlag Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1962); see also Manfred Voigts, Brechts Theaterkonzeptionen: Entstehung Und Entfaltung Bis 1931 (München: W. Fink, 1977). For general accounts of music in Brecht, see Hans Eisler, “Bertolt Brecht und die Musik,” in Erinnerungen an Brecht, ed. Hubert Witt (Leipzig: Philip Reclam, 1966), 128; Klaus Völker, “Brecht und die Musik,” in Musik und Bildung 8, 1976, 552–56; Leo Karl Brachtel, “Bertolt Brecht und die Musik,” Neue Zeitschriftfür Musik 127, no. 10 (1966): 393–95; and Albrecht Dümling, Laßt euch nicht verführen: Brecht und die Musik (München: Kindler, 1985). 4. On Weill and his music, see Ian Kemp, “Weills Harmonik: Einige Beobachtungen,” in Über Kurt Weill, ed. David Drew (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 155–61; also see Kim H. Kowalke, ed., A New Orpheus: Essays On Kurt Weill (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); Ronald Sanders, The Days Grow Short: The Life and Music of Kurt Weill (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980); and Ronald Taylor, Kurt Weill: Composer in a Divided World (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992). For a general account of Weill’s music in Brecht, see Gottfried Wagner, Weill und Brecht: Das musikalische Zeittheater (München: Kindler, 1977). 5. As Achberger succinctly and appropriately puts it, “Es existiert für [Brecht] kein Plagiat” (Achberger 275). 6. Weill and Brecht often parodied and ironized easily recognizable canonical musical forms. As Fischbach writes: “Als charakteristisch für das Stück gelten heute einerseits Brechts ironische Imitation biblischer Sprache und barocker Choraldichtung und anderseits Weills Parodie der bürgerlichen Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts und des barocken Oratoriums” (Fischbach 56). (Today, both Brecht’s ironic imitation of biblical language and baroque choral poetry, and Weill’s parody of the 19th century bourgeois music and the baroque oratorio, are considered characteristic of the play.)

152

Notes to Chapter Two

7. As Grosch describes: “Mit dem Kriegseintritt der USA hatte eine Reihe von Initiativen für eine deutschsprachige Rundfunkpropaganda begonnen, für die sich Weill und Brecht, die an den weit entfernten Küsten der USA lebten, vom ersten Moment an gleichermaßen engagierten” (Grosch 138). (With the US entry into the war, a series of initiatives aimed at Germanlanguage radio propaganda were begun. Both Weill and Brecht, who lived on opposite coasts of the US, got equally involved in it from the first moment.) 8. Indeed, as Kater puts it, “Ein Grund, warum Weill den Rundfunk so schätzte, war der, daß er ihn als ideales Instrument für die Verbreitung von politischen Ideen ansah, wie es sich in einer pluralistischen Gesellschaft eben gehörte, unter denen nach Weills demokratischem Verständnis auch sozialistische zu sein hatten” (Kater 56–57). (One of the reasons why Weill appreciated radio so greatly, was that he regarded it as the perfect instrument for the distribution of political ideas, as it was fit for a pluralistic society, including—according to Weill’s democratic understanding—socialist ideas.) 9. As Kowalke reminds us, “Music serves as a pillar so central to many of his theoretical constructs and as a parameter so determinant for the shape, diction and delivery of his texts that Brecht’s legacy cannot be fully understood or properly assessed without reference to music” (Kowalke 242). 10. On “song” in Brecht, see Fritz Henneberg, “Brecht schreibt Lieder: Zu den kompositorischen Arbeiten und Liededitionen der frühen Jahre. Die Zusammenarbeit mit Franz S. Bruinier,” in Notate. Informations— und Mitteilungsblatt des Brecht-Zentrums der DDR. IV, 6 (1981), 5–8; and Bernward Thole, Die “Gesänge” in den Stücken Bertolt Brechts. Zur Geschichte und Ästhetik des Liedes im Drama (Marburg, 1973). 11. As one critic aptly puts it, “Bei Brecht aber soll in der ‘epischen Oper’ die Musik nicht mehr dasjenige ausdrücken, was der Text nicht zu sagen vermag, sondern sie wird vom Autor geradezu als Verfremdungseffekt des Textes eingesetzt, und zwar eben nicht mehr in der Weise eines Erhöhens und Vollendens des Textes, sondern als Autrüttlung des Zuhörers, als Anstoß für den Betrachter, sich in den Text, die historisch-soziale Situation zu vergegenwärtigen, sie zu befragen und zu analysieren” (Schnitzler 92). (With Brecht, however, the music in epic opera was no longer intended to express what the text was unable to say, but it was used directly by the

Notes to Chapter Two

153

author as the alienation effect of the text. This was no longer happening by means of an elevation and perfection of the text but rather as a rousing of the audience, as an impetus for the audience to realize the historical and social situation in the text, to question it and to analyze it.) 12. Regarding Weill’s appraisal of The Threepenny Opera, Chisholm writes: “Weill views music as the dominant cohesive force that gives unity to the opera” (Chisholm 3). As such, music would then also be that which makes the unifying effect on the individual and collective subjects of the opera possible. 13. See Jurgen Engelhardt, Gestus und Verfremdung. Studien zum Musiktheater bei Strawinsky und Brecht/Weill (München, 1984). 14. Furthermore, music, according to Ferran, “is a ‘gestical’ act: it expresses a critical perspective on its given material” (Ferran 266). 15. (The Opera becomes a materialistic art through the elaboration of its epic and critical elements. The gestic music is not only Musica teatralis, but music, which seeks to oppose the deception, the lie and the pulp. Moreover, it is music for a collective rather than an isolated audience because the collective action is articulated in the gestures, in the gesture of the collective unconscious.) 16. (This concept, probably first characterized by Weill, means music which is adapted to the gesture of a process—it reproduces a certain behavior of human beings musically; the gestural music is neither intended to illustrate nor extend the action, but only “to capture and realize the gestural basis of the interrelated situation.”) 17. As Lucchesi has argued, it is also what separates Weill’s music from mere “pop” songs: “Weills Musik spielt mit der Fähigkeit des Hörers, musikalische Bezüge herstellen zu können. Bleiben diese aus, so gerinnt die Musik zum modischen Beiwerk der ‘goldenen Zwanziger’“ (Lucchesi 2007, 328). (Weill’s music plays with the ability of the audience to make musical references. If these are left out, the music becomes the fashionable accessory of the Golden 1920s.) 18. Or, as Kowalke writes, “Within the dramaturgy of a music-theatre which strove to illuminate social relationships between characters rather than internal psychological states, Weill and Brecht both conceived Gestus as a means of making manifest on stage the behaviour and attitudes of

154

Notes to Chapter Two

human beings toward one another. They agreed that music was indispensable in communicating the fundamental Gestus of a theatrical situation. A new ‘gestic’ language, combining dramatic, lyric and epic modes of poetry, would require a ‘gestic’ music in which musical autonomy and expressivity would yield before dramatic and sociopolitical purposes” (Kowalke 250). 19. One could go so far as to say with Nichols, “To spare Mahoganny the fate of being a museum piece, Weill’s music must be considered political. To limit the politics of the opera to the libretto, and subsequently reject the libretto, tears the fabric of the work, rendering it not ‘humanistic’ as the critics want, but devoid of significance for social change” (Nichols 221). 20. It is important to note that the composition aspect of the music used in the epic theater does not mean to exclude Brecht from the conversation. As Morely rightly states, “By comparing . . . early settings with the subsequent ones it can be shown that Brecht’s musical suggestions and contributions were important, that they could be utilized by a sophisticated composer like Weill in such a way that triviality and originality go hand in hand” (Morley 250). 21. For an account of the theater scene in relation to politics, see Günther Rühle, Theater Für Die Republik, 1917–1933 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1967). 22. Eisler’s characterization of Misuk is, in this sense, telling: “Es ist für einen Musiker schwer, Misuk zu beschreiben. Sie ist vor allem nicht dekadent und formalistisch, sondern im höchsten Grade volkstümlich. Sie erinnert am ehesten an den Gesang arbeitender Frauen in Hinterhöfen an den Sonntagnachmittagen” (Eisler 440–41). (It is hard for a musician to describe Misuk. It is by no means decadent and formalistic, but in the highest degree popular. In essence, it reminds one of working women singing in backyards on Sunday afternoons.) 23. As Grosch has observed, “Deutlich wird aber, daß Weills Komposition Sprache in einer Show ergeben hätte, in der die harmonische Sprache des amerikanischen Theaterliedes effektvoll genutzt und gleichzeitig im Sinne des epischen Musiktheaters vielschichtig gebrochen wird” (Grosch 145). (It is clear, however, that Weill’s compositional language would have resulted in a show, in which the harmonious language of American theatrical drama

Notes to Chapter Three

155

was used effectively and, at the same time, was broken in the sense of the epic music theater in many aspects.) 24. With this in mind and within the jazz context, it is important to remember that both Brecht and Weill envisioned, at different times, staging works with all-black casts. See Fuegi, 175–76, and Stern, 168. 25. Indeed, “To a great extent, [Brecht] was influenced by the ideas of his musical collaborators as well as by the traditions and movements they represented. Yet Brecht also had many notions of his own on the subject. Each composer adapted to Brecht’s demands, made artistic demands of his own, and collaborated in the creation of works for the musical stage. It follows that the relationship between each composer and the playwright was unique” (Nadar 262). 26. Brecht’s poetry is not exempt from the jazz influence. As Lucchesi writes, “So weist Brecht im finnischen Exil und später daraufhin, daß seinen Jamben komplizierte Steprhythmen des Jazz zugrunde liegen und daß die unregelmäßigen Versrhythmen für zeitgenössische Vertonungen durchaus brauchbar sind” (Lucchesi 1997, 107). (Thus, Brecht points out in Finnish exile and later that his jams are based on complicated jazz rhythms, and that the irregular verse-rhythms are perfectly suitable for contemporary settings.) 27. For Brecht’s conception of America, see Helfried Seliger, Das Amerikabild Bertolt Brechts (Bonn: Bouvier, 1974). 28. For Brecht, this also meant looking eastward, as in his work “Noh theater meets German Lutheran oratorio in the midst of 1930s German social revolution” (Highkin 162).

CHAPTER THREE 1. For general accounts of Hesse and music, see Leo Dorner, Katalog: Hermann Hesse und die Musik. Eine Ausstellung zum 100. Geburtstag des Dichters vom 9. November 1977 bis 31. Jänner 1978 (Vienna: Musiksammlung der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, Wien, 1977), 7–21; Werner Durr, Hermann Hesse (Stuttgart: Silberburg-Verlag, 1957); Marko Pavlyshyn,

156

Notes to Chapter Three

Music in Hermann Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf and Das Glasperlenspiel. Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 15, no. 1, 1979: 39–55. C. Immo Schneider, “Hermann Hesse and Music,” in A Companion to the Works of Hermann Hesse, ed. Ingo Cornils (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), 373–94. 2. (In the Glass Bead Game Hesse seems to be particularly interested in Bach, whom he recovers in a Wagner polemical antagonistic dimension.) 3. (Since Jazz and dance are explicitly mentioned in the narrative text itself, corresponding written references must also be taken seriously in the context of the organization of the novel; as here, Hesse obviously stands at the beginning of a development, which other novelists after World War II take as their starting point.) 4. Esselborn-Krumbiegel goes so far as to state: “Im Steppenwolf geschieht die Textdeutung im Schnittpunkt der unterschiedlichen Perspektiven, die erst in ihrer ‘Interaktion’ das Verständnis sichern” (Esselborn-Krumbiegel 273). 5. (The interrelationships between literature and music manifest themselves not only in the field of the transfer of musical forms and structures into the literature, but also, among other things, in the content level of literary works.) 6. Thus I am in no way following the tack, as Schwarz does, of assuming jazz is present in the novel merely as an element of realism in the service of wider philosophical questions of being and existence. Schwarz writes: “Die Problematik seiner Existenz besteht zwar fort, aber zauberhafte oder zumindest unheimliche Züge haften seinen Erlebnissen an. Um diesen Aspekt seines Romans mit der naturalistischen Szenerie bürgerlicher Wohnhäuser, Weinkeller und Hotelterrassen mit Jazz-Musik und Maskenbällen vereinbaren zu können, hat Hesse sich der an das neunzehnte Jahrhundert gemahnenden schriftstellerischen Konvention eines Herausgebers bedient, der ausdrücklich betont, Harrys Darstellung sei mehr Dichtung als Wahrheit” (Schwarz 194). (The problem of his existence still persists but the magical or at least uncanny features are inherent in his experiences. In order to reconcile this aspect of his novel with the naturalistic scene of bourgeois dwelling-houses, wine cellars and hotel terraces with Jazz music and masquerade balls, Hesse helps himself with the nineteenth-century like literary convention

Notes to Chapter Three

157

of a publisher explicitly emphasizing that Harry’s portrayal is more poetry than Truth.) 7. It is, as Bruhn writes, at such historical moments of collision, that music becomes an aesthetic and ethical problem: “Für den Protagonisten wie auch für seinen fiktiven kastalischen Biografen ist ‘die Musik’ eine gleichermaßen ästhetische wie ethische Kraft” (Bruhn 96). This is not to say that music has nothing to do with ethics until historical crisis, but that music becomes a problem in its aesthetic and ethical dimensions as a sign of cultural and historical crisis. (For the protagonist as well as for his fictitious Castilian biographer the ‘music’ is both an aesthetic and ethical force.) 8. Kiesel doesn’t overstate the matter when he writes: “Diese Erfahrung eines zersplitterten, nicht ganzheitlich zu umfassenden Ichs, ist das eigentliche Thema des Steppenwolfs” (Kiesel 402). (This experience of a fragmented, not holistically comprehensive ego, is the real theme of the Steppenwolf.) 9. “Hallen” in German means to echo or to resound. 10. Hesse is influenced here by the Freud of Totem und Tabu (1912). 11. It is a simplification of Hesse’s jazz dialectic to assume, as Swales does, that “In Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf the crisis stems from the intense Americanisation and commercialisation of culture that is so offensive to Harry Haller. At every turn foxtrot, shimmy, boston and tango are being danced” (Swales 34); or, as Hamann puts it, “Haller ist in seiner Umgebung vor allem deswegen fremd und einsam, weil ‘das Amerikanische’ in die europäische/deutsche Kultur eingedrungen ist” (Hamann 34). (Therefore, Haller feels above all strange and lonely in his environment, because the “Americanism” has had an overwhelming influence on the European/ German culture.) Haller’s relationship to jazz is far more complex and nuanced, coming closer to Delabar’s view of the problem: “Haller verachtet die Tanzmusik seiner Gegenwart, den Jazz, ist zugleich und erst recht später von ihm fasziniert” (Delabar 265). (Haller despises the dance music of his time, the Jazz, yet he becomes—especially later—fascinated by it.) In other words, Haller’s oft-stated fascination for and attraction to jazz has to be taken into account, no matter how difficult it makes the novel to read once the

158

Notes to Chapter Three

unproblematic (and thus critically self-serving) anti-Americanization angle falls to dust. 12. Thus, “Für Pablo hat es also keinen Sinn, über Musik zu sprechen. Die Hauptsache ist, daß er musiziert und lächelt. Jeder Mensch, der nicht lachen kann, ist seiner Ansicht nach arm. Dies betrifft auch Harry” (Kolago, Grzywka 173). 13. As Knufermann writes, “In seinem Disput mit Pablo versucht Haller diesem deutlich zu machen, daß man die ‘göttliche und ewige Musik’ eines Mozart nicht gleichsetzen könne mit der ‘billigen Eintagsmusik’ des Jazz. Das Postulat der Auflösung der Persönlichkeit führt nicht nur zur ‘Umwertung’ der Werte, sondern bestätigt sie Vielmehr” (Knufermann 283). (So, for Pablo, there is no point in talking about music. The main thing is that he makes music and laughs. In his opinion, anyone, who is unable to laugh, is poor. This also affects Harry. In his dispute with Pablo, Haller tries to make it clear to him that the “divine and eternal music” by Mozart cannot be equated with the “cheap one-day music” of Jazz. The postulate of the dissolution of personality not only leads to the “revaluation” of values, but rather confirms them.) 14. As Gess surmises, Haller is “Von Jazzmusik berauscht und mit dem Namen Mozarts auf den Lippen . . . ein Philister, der gegen das Philistertum rebelliert” (Gess 194). (Intoxicated by Jazzmusik and with the name of Mozart on his lips . . . a philistine who rebels against the Philistinism.) 15. See Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken In Der Weimarer Republik (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1978). 16. On other key symbols in the novel, see David Artiss, “Key symbols in Hesse’s Steppenwolf,” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 7 (1971), 85–101. 17. On Hesse and propaganda, see Klaus von Seckendorff, Hermann Hesses Propagandistische Prosa: Selbstzerstörerische Entfaltung Als Botschaft In Seinen Romanen Vom “demian” Bis Zum “steppenwolf ” (Bonn: Bouvier, 1982). 18. (The linguistically suggested coherence, bound up with the tradition of pietistic-bourgeois education, no longer corresponds to Harry Haller’s experiences. He, as the editor emphasizes in his preface, has fallen prey to the “neurosis” of his time.) 19. For Kotin, Haller’s greatest mistake is “dass er die Grenzen des eigenen ‘Ich,’ die Ketten seines Egos nicht überschreiten konnte bzw. wollte”

Notes to Chapter Three

159

(Kotin 144). I agree with this but would add that this Ich is to be grasped temporally in the novel. 20. Indeed, as Völker writes: “Das Verhältnis zwischen Harry und Hermine weist an manchen Stellen des Romans magische Züge auf ” (Völker 50). 21. As Klanska writes: “Als der Steppenwolf sich noch weigert, einzusehen, dass dieser Weg auch für ihn der einzige Ausweg ist und gleichzeitig der Pfad, auf dem er zu den Unsterblichen gelangen wird, verwandelt sich Mozart in den Saxophonbläser Pablo, der dem Steppenwolf ebenfalls Vorwürfe macht, den Humor seines Theaters durchbrochen und seine Bilderwelt mit Wirklichkeitsflecken aus Hermines Blut besudelt zu haben. Er bietet Harry wieder etwas von seinem Rauschmittelvorrat an und versteckt die Figur Hermines in seiner Tasche, wobei er behauptet, dass sich Harrys Fehlschritte wiedergutmachen lassen. Dass es in der Endszene zu einem Zusammenfall der beiden Gestalten kommt, Mozarts, der für die ewige göttliche Musik steht, und Pablo, der seine sinnlichen Eintagsschlagers spielt, ist offensichtlich ein Kunstgriff, der die Versöhnung zwischen Höhenkammkunst und Massenkultur und somit eine zwischen Ideal und dem Leben veranschaulicht” (Klanska 207–8). (As the Steppenwolf still refuses to recognize that this path is also the only way for him, and at the same time this is the path for him to reach immortality, Mozart turns into the saxophone player Pablo, who also reproaches the Steppenwolf for breaking through the humor of his theater, and staining his world of images with the marks of the reality of Hermione’s blood. He again offers Harry some of his narcotics and hides the figure of Hermione in his pocket, claiming that Harry’s misfortunes can be recovered. The fact that in the final scene there is a coincidence of the two figures, Mozart, who stands for the eternal divine music, and Pablo, who plays his sensual one-day hits, is clearly an artistic concept which makes the reconciliation between the art of the colonnade and the mass culture, i.e. the reconciliation between an ideal and ordinary life.) 22. Mileck emphasizes: “Latins were undoubtly [sic] better choices for hot jazz musicians than Germans would have been, and Pablo and Agostino were the appropriately exotic names that Paul and August could not be” (Mileck 173–74). Aside from lumping all “Latins” into one category and

160

Notes to Chapter Four

destroying the ambiguity surrounding Pablo, Mileck also misses that at this time many jazz practitioners in Germany were white. 23. See Horst Dieter Kreidler, “Pablo und die Unsterblichen,” in Materialen zu Hermann Hesses Der Steppenwolf, 1972, 381–88. 24. It is, then, all the more strange to think that Pablo was a late addition to the novel. As Probst reminds us: “Auch Abschnitte und Überlegungen zur Musik fügt Hesse erst in einem zweiten oder dritten Arbeitsgang ein. Insbesondere die Figur Pablos, der Jazzmusiker und Führer durch das Magische Theater, wird erst nachträglich auf den Einlageblättern 23, 23 II und 28 II in ihrer Bedeutung aufgewertet” (Probst 147). (Hesse only includes sections and reflections on the music in his second or third work. In particular, the significance of the character of Pablos, the jazz musician and the guide through the Magical Theater, is only revaluated in enclosures 23, 23 II and 28 II.) 25. Pfister goes on to write: “Und so schließt der Roman im versöhnten Nebeneinander des vordem zutiefst gegensätzlich Erlebten und Gewehrten: blutig grelle Jazzmusik neben hehrer Klassik” (Pfister 110). (Therefore, the novel closes in the reconciled juxtaposition of the two phenomena, which were formerly profoundly opposite and mutually forbidden experiences: jazz music full of life next to the noble classics.) 26. (Magic, on the other hand, appears as a synonym for the total crisis, or more precisely, the “downfall” of “scientific thought.”) 27. Indeed, “Als Goethe dem Steppenwolf dann im Traum erscheint, wird diesem klar, dass es darum geht, seine Vorbilder nicht verbissen ernst zu nehmen, sondern einen spielerischen Umgang mit ihnen zu pflegen” (Niefanger 101).

CHAPTER FOUR 1. Adorno makes explicit comparisons between Wagner and jazz, for instance, in In Search of Wagner, where he compares Wagner’s use of the trumpet to that of the jazz saxophone (67). Other instances are further discussed in this chapter.

Notes to Chapter Four

161

2. Gracyk puts it quite succinctly: “The social function of this music within African American society made no impression on Adorno; by focusing only on its commercial success, he was unaware of its potential significance in a racially segregated American culture” (Gracyk 538). 3. See Townsend, “Adorno on Jazz: Vienna versus the Vernacular,” Prose Studies 11, no. 1 (1988 May): 69–88. 4. See Wilcock, “Adorno, Jazz and Racism: ‘Über Jazz’ and the 1934–7 British Jazz Debate,” Telos 107 (1996 Spring): 63–80. 5. Thus, as Krukowski writes, “When Adorno refers specifically to music as an ‘essentially bourgeois art’ he refers specifically to music from Beethoven on—that is, to music whose development parallels the rise of Western democracies. The specific parallel is between the possibilities of social freedom and musical autonomy” (Krukowski 110–11). Or, as Asiäin describes: “Die musikalische Analyse Adornos bzw. seine philosophische Betrachtung über die Musik will also keine Aufschlüsse über einzelne Werke, Komponisten oder musikhistorische Zusammenhänge liefern. Sie versucht, die Entwicklung der abendländischen Musik in den vergangenen Jahrhundert als Modell für die Entwicklung der Kultur insgesamt darzustellen und so die Parallelen zwischen musikalischen Verfallstendenzen—woran auch immer diese festzumachen sein mögen—und gesamtkulturellen Verfallsmerkmalen aufzuzeigen” (Asiäin 92). (In addition, Adorno’s musical analysis, or his philosophical consideration of music do not provide any information about individual works, composers, or music-historical contexts. It attempts to portray the development of Western music in the past century as a model for the development of culture as a whole and thus to show the parallels between musical decay trends—no matter what they can be linked to—and the overall symptoms of cultural decline.) 6. As Federhofer outlines: “Adornos Deutung setzt dreierlei voraus: Erstens die Befähigung von Musik zur Gesellschaftskritik; zweitens, dass ihr eine derartige Aufgabe zukomme; drittens, dass Sinnverweigerung ein geeignetes Mittel dazu darstelle” (Federhofer 262). 7. See Huyssen, “Adorno in Reverse: From Hollywood to Richard Wagner,” New German Critique 29 (1983): 8–38.

162

Notes to Chapter Four

8. See Dalhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music; and Bonds, Absolute Music: The History of an Idea. Marxists were by no means united in their understanding of music as a sociopolitical force shaping cultural history from Beethoven on. Indeed, “Adorno’s assault on Wagner also appears to have been part of his quarrel with Lukacs and Bloch, and designed to attack Bloch’s more favorable and sympathetic writings on Wagner” (Lillienfeld 140). See also Lee, 924. 9. As Weitzman reminisces: “Adorno received a certain amount of fragmentary attention in this country some years ago when it was revealed that he had attempted, by means of musical and psychological analysis, to show how Wagner’s music nurtured the seeds of National Socialism—a thesis gleaned form his book on the composer. Adorno never retracted this contention, as listeners to his broadcast on Wagner for the BBC’s Third Programme a few months before his death will recall” (Weitzman 293). 10. Wagnerian jazz possesses no autonomy whatsoever. In the contemporary music scene, only the New Music, in its tonal difficulty and intellectual rigor, posed the possibility of utopian individual and societal reconciliation through music. But the Vienna School offered autonomous music’s last gasp instead of its victory. Postwar music found a way to reify the revolutionary elements of dodecagonal composition. Despite its apparent difficulty, the postwar period in music is subject to the culture industry. As Zagorski observes: “Although the atonal surface has been preserved in the postwar period, the psychological anxiety that characterized the ‘great founding works’ of new music . . . no longer informs the dissonance. The musical material, to Adorno, has been neutralized: Its historical essence has been forgotten and its merely rational ordering is falsely attributed with cosmic significance” (Zagorski 691). Adorno’s critique of postwar music begins to sound eerily similar to that contained in his texts on the fascist aspects of German, or rather Wagnerian jazz. 11. As Mahnköpf notes: “Adorno verbindet mit dem Programm einer musique informelle mehrere Funktionen: die des kritischen Eingriffs in zeitgenössische Musikproduktion; des Manifests einer Utopie, wie er sie sich wünschte; des Komplements und (wahrscheinlich:) des Korrektivs des aesthetischen Geschichtsnegativismus seiner Beckett-Lektüre; schliesslich der emphatischen Rettung der Geschichte ihrer selbst mächtiger Musik”

Notes to Chapter Four

163

(Mahnkopf 96). The utopian principle is required for a piece of music to be considered “art.” (Adorno connects the program of the informal music with several functions: the critic of the contemporary music production; the manifestation of a utopia according to his wishes; the complements and (probably) the correctives of the aesthetic historical negativism of his Beckett reading and finally, the emphatic rescue of the history of its self-powerful music.) 12. Christiaens’ description of utopia in music is here also helpful: “For authenticity at the level of sociological critique means that music must simultaneously express the alienation of the individual from society as well as the possibility of reconciliation” (Christiaens 38). 13. Adorno’s critique of jazz could very well be inverted and shown to support why jazz fulfills all of the aesthetic criteria for classification as art. As Nesbitt shows: “In fact, the obsessive focus on Adorno’s own ideas about jazz has hidden the implications his aesthetic theory holds for jazz studies. His unique understanding of the Viennese modernist composers holds surprisingly suggestive implications for modernist jazz musicians as well: Adorno’s aesthetic theory develops a wealth of insights into artistic and specifically musical processes capable of redirection to other musical objects” (Nesbitt 83). 14. Thus, in his jazz critique as elsewhere, Adorno “is not interested in trying to catalogue and explain all the various degrees that lie between the extremes. He goes instead straight for the extremes themselves, insisting that it is in the light of the tension between its opposite poles that the ‘whole’ becomes intelligible” (Paddison 1982, 204). On the relation between musicality and language in Adorno, Gillespie writes: “for Adorno, musicality in language is a grammatical rather than an acoustic category” (Gillespie 57). Paddison posits that “Adorno identifies the fundamental polarity underlying autonomous music’s ‘language-character’ (Sprachcharakter) as that between the internal relations of the hermetically sealed musical work and the external social relations of music’s production, reproduction, distribution and consumption” (Paddison 1982, 267). See also Bowie 2006, 43. 15. See 81–112, Sandner, “Popularmusik als somatisches Stimulans. Adornos Kritik der ‘leichten Musik,’” in Adorno und die Musik, ed. Otto Kolleritsch

164

Notes to Chapter Four

(Graz: Universal Edition, 1979), 125–32; see also, Baugh, “Left-Wing Elitism: Adorno on Popular Culture,” Philosophy and Literature 14 (1990): 65–78. 16. One could rationalize at this point that “When Adorno attacks jazz ...he is responding in part to what he sees as the standardization of jazz” (Heble 47). The underlying suggestion is here that Adorno was not against jazz per se, but how it was used and abused in the marketplace. But Adorno’s attack on jazz is not merely on the level of the ontic; it is primarily ontological. In any event, there is for Adorno no separation between how a work exists in relation to the culture industry and its existence as such. 17. Jazz phantasmagoria has been described by one critic as the “allegorical subject of jazz, as Adorno portrays it [and] an inverse caricature of Kantian genius” (McBride 473). 18. Indeed, Adorno saw quite rightly reactionary tendencies in European primitivism, writing: “Als die Avant-garde zur Negerplastik sich bekannte, war das reaktionäre Telos der Bewegung ganz verborgen” (Adorno, quoted in Reithmüller 429). 19. As Tregear writes, Adorno believes that “ jazz music was ‘structurally prefabricated’ for National Socialism. Jazz . . . was a phantasmagoria of modernity, an illusory ‘counterfeit freedom’” (Tregear 44). 20. Indeed, “Durch Medientechnik partizipiert Musik an neuzeitlicher Rationalisierung, Insgesamt ist der paradoxe ‘Doppelcharakter’ von Musik durch Archaik und Moderne, Rationalität und Irrationalität zu kennzeichnen, der sie exemplarisch macht für Prozesse der Medialisierung” (Käuser 26–27). (The music participates in the modern rationalization through media technology. Overall, the paradoxical “double character” of music is to be characterized by archaic and modernity, rationality and irrationality, which makes it exemplary for the processes of medialization.) 21. See Chadwick, “Matyas Seiber’s Collaboration in Adorno’s Jazz Project, 1936,” British Library Journal 21, no. 2 (1995 Autumn): 259–88. 22. See Schonherr, “Adorno and Jazz: Reflections on a Failed Encounter,” Telos 87 (1991): 85–97. 23. As Pencak makes clear: “Whether Adorno was aware of the best of jazz musicians or not, his failure to make even a minimal effort to understand

Notes to Chapter Five

165

them reveals this critical theorist to be a victim of the very culture he is attempting to explain” (Pencak 27). 24. Adorno’s unrelenting, vitriolic attack on jazz becomes almost nonsensical until we recall that, as Townsend writes: “he has a simple and monolithic model of the relation between art and society which allows no middle case between the absolute opposition of the artist-hero to his society, and the absolute domination of commercial society over all the others. There is either creative intransigence (which has as its archetypes Adorno’s versions of Schoenberg and Bach) or there is complete absorption (in the psychosexual diction of the jazz essay, ‘castration’). No other sort of relationship between art and society is envisaged or, it would seem, allowed” (Townsend 70–71). 25. In “Music in the Background” (1934), Adorno identifies popular music as ruins (Leppert 93). 26. Adorno also “describes how criticism was muzzled by the Nazis and replaced by ‘art appreciation,’ because criticism proved that it could powerfully oppose the more overt form of political slavery” (Muller 112). This is precisely jazz’s function. Jazz is noncritical; it robs the jazz subject of the critical faculty. For Adorno, jazz is a weapon, not an art. 27. See Steinert, “Adorno and the Case of Jazz in Europe in the 1930s,” Found Object 7 (1998): 89–99.

CHAPTER FIVE 1. Translated by H. T. Lowe Porter as, “the wild musky melodies follow one another, now furious, now languishing, a monotonous Negro programme in unfamiliar rhythm, to a clacking, clashing, and strumming orchestral accompaniment” (TMCS 593). 2. (The authorial narrator in Mephisto not only reports on the characters and events, but also comments on and evaluates them in a way that leaves the reader little room for his own interpretations.) 3. See Reich-Ranicki, Die Ungeliebten: Sieben Emigranten, Pfullingen: Neske, 1968.

166

Notes to Chapter Five

4. Mann is giving a faithful account of Göring’s 11 January 1936 birthday extravaganza. 5. (Klaus Mann’s description, however, has transformed the features (which, according to his contemporaries, were unusual) of the mulatto into a mask of darkness. Princess Tebab looks like a barbarian African fetish whose details the author finds in the exotic trivial literature of colonialism and the weakness for “fresh” primitives so typical of the turn of the century—one thinks of Carl Einstein’s enthusiasm for “negroplastics”—sought for and combined without regard for inner consistency.) 6. Höfgen will eventually give up and sell out Juliette for favor in the Nazi Party. Schiller writes: “Mit dem Teufelspakt opfert der nicht nur seine künstlerische Autonomie, er verliert auch das letzte Refugium seiner problematischen individuellen Existenz: die ‘schwarze Venus’” (Schiller 348). (Through this “Deal with the Devil” it not only sacrifices its artistic autonomy, but also loses the last retreat of its problematic individual existence: the “black Venus.”) Schiller’s point is perfectly valid; but it should be noted that this “refuge” is duplicated in the Nazi Party itself, called something else, and then repressed. 7. As Schöller puts it: “In Hendrik Höfgen sind nicht nur biographische Einzelheiten von Gustaf Gründgens dargestellt, es ist auch ein Anteil der tabuisierten sexuellen Wünsche Klaus Manns verpuppt. Man kann, von diesem Verfahren des Sicheinnistens im Gegner ausgehend, das sich im Tagebuch enthüllt, die Ambivalenz solcher Maso-Szenen im Roman besser verstehen. Und noch kommt hinzu: die Homosexualität von Gründgens wird mit der Sado-maso-Erfindung retuschierend geschützt” (Schöller 272–73). (In Hendrik Höfgen, not only the biographical details of Gustaf Gründgens are portrayed; also a part of the tabooed sexual desires of Klaus Mann is hidden there. Seeing this process of turning oneself into one´s opposite revealed in the diary, we can better understand the ambivalence of those masochistic scenes in the novel. And yet, the homosexuality of Gründgen is retouched with the Sado-Maso invention.) For more on Gründgens, see Riess, Gustaf Gruendgens: Eine Biographie (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1965); see also, Lohmeier. “‘Es ist also doch ein sehr privates Buch: Über Klaus Manns

Notes to Chapter Five

167

‘Mephisto,’ Gustaf Gründgens und die Nachgeborenen,” in Text und Kritik. Sonderband Klaus Mann (München, 1993); and Spangenberg, Karriere eines Romans: Mephisto, Klaus Mann und Gustav Grundgens: Ein dokumentarischer Bericht aus Deutschland und der Exil 1925–1981, (Munich: Ellermann, 1982). 8. This is the “type” Mann had in mind: “Klaus Mann oft wiederholte Erklärung, er habe keinen bestimmten Menschen, sondern einen Typus im Auge gehabt, einen symbolischen Typus gar, reibt sich ganz ausserordentlich mit dem Umstand, dass er keine Gelegenheit versäumt hat, die historische Person Gründgens in der fiktiven Figur Höfgen mehr als deutlich erkennbar werden zu lassen” (Lohmeier 101). (Klaus Mann often repeated his explanation that he had intended to portray a certain type of person—a symbolic type—rather than a particular person, rubbing himself quite extraordinarily with the circumstance that he had not missed an opportunity to turn the historical person of Gründgens into the fictitious figure Höfgen more than clearly.) The ideal Nazi type is Gründgens, an actor and dancer. In this sense, Mann’s “defamation” of Gründgens is far more devastating than usually believed, for he posits not only that Gründgens was a Nazi believer, but that he was the ideal Nazi. 9. The configuration of white man/black woman connoted in popular racist discourse latent homosexuality on the part of the man due to the perceived inherently masculine body of the black woman. See Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: Delta Trade Paperbacks, 1999) for the most thorough formulation of this derogatory belief. 10. It is curious to note that “Bei Szabo ist es sogar der General, der Höfgen von sich aus auf seine ‘Rassenschande’ mit dem ‘Negerweib’ anspricht, und der Schauspieler kann kaum mehr tun, als bei seinem Gönner zumindest die sichere Ausreise für sie zu erbitten. Höfgens Skrupellosigkeit wird so erheblich abgemildert” (Strasky 177). (In Szabo, there is even the general who addresses Höfgen regarding his “racial disgrace” with the “negro woman,” and the actor can hardly do more than ask his patron to provide her at least with safe departure. Höfgen’s unscrupulousness is thus considerably mitigated.) The film is now better known than the novel. And yet, even Szabo didn’t know what to do with Juliette, or what she meant for Höfgen’s Nazism.

168

Notes to Chapter Five

11. It is always strange to find a reading of Höfgen as somehow not a Nazi, such as Durrani’s: “Klaus [Mann] wrote his novel with the intention of exposing an individual who allowed himself to slide into the service of the National Socialists. Yet he did not choose the most obvious method. Henrik Höfgen is not a Nazi and never becomes a Nazi; he even tries to help victims of the regime” (Durrani 174). Höfgen is Mann’s figure for the total picture of Nazism. If he appears to be a special sort of Nazi, it is because he contains the whole of Mann’s critique at this point in time. As Albrecht writes, Höfgen’s characterization “kommentiert die Genese des Faschismus und betont deren kleinbürgerliche Komponente. Klaus Mann wusste bereits damals, dass der Faschismus ‘das Regime der totalen, militant-hochkapitalistischen Diktatur’ war, um eine Formulierung aus dem Mephisto aufzugreifen, und er brachte diese Sicht durchaus auch ein” (Albrecht 986). (It comments on the genesis of fascism and emphasizes its petty bourgeois components. Klaus Mann already knew then that fascism was “the regime of total, militant highly capitalist dictatorship”—to use a formulation from the Mephisto—and he stated this view thoroughly.) 12. As Brittnacher writes, “Vorbilder zu Juliette Martens fand Klaus Mann bei Baudelaires Geliebter Jeanne Duval und bei Andrea Mange Bell, zeitwillig eine Lebensgefährtin Joseph Roths, die mit dem Dichter 1934 Deutschland verliess” (Brittnacher 86). (As for Juliette Martens, Klaus Mann used Baudelaire’s lover, Jeanne Duval, and Andrea Mange Bell, a girlfriend of Joseph Roth, who left Germany with the poet in 1934, as a model for this character.) 13. (The Baudelaire quotes, with which Höfgen resolves his excesses, at the same time make the author’s criticism of the culture clear by taking the form of the biographical Baudelaire’s dark-skinned lover, and serving as a reference to the combination of “satanic” aestheticism and A-, yes immorality to read.) 14. See Hoffer, “Klaus Mann’s Mephisto: A Secret Rivalry,” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 13, no. 2 (1989 Summer): 245–57. 15. Mephisto is, of course, a roman à clef. Höfgen stands in for Gründgens, but also for, but to a lesser extent, the dancer Gregor Gregori. As Kreutzer writes: “Dieser [Höfgen] hat einen Vorläufer im Werk Klaus Manns,

Notes to Chapter Five

169

seinen Roman ‘Treffpunkt im Unendlichen’ von 1932, in dem wichtige Konstellationen und Befunde des ‘Mephisto’ bereits exponiert sind. Dem Schauspieler Henrik Höfgen entspricht dort der Tänzer Gregor Gregori” (Kreutzer 34). See also Rieck, “Gregor Gregori und Hendrik Höfgen: Ein Beitrag zur Werkgeschichte von Klaus Manns Mephisto Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Padagogischen Hochschule ‘Karl Liebknecht,’” Potsdam 12 (1968): 697–709. ([Höfgen] has a predecessor in the work of Klaus Mann, his novel Treffpunkt im Unendlichen (1932), in which important constellations and findings of the “Mephisto” are already exposed. The actor Henrik Höfgen corresponds to the dancer Gregor Gregori.) 16. (I have not been interested in Gründgens’s individual problem. But the problem of the “cultivated” fellow-traveler, the talented opportunist, the mindless talent—this is what I have found really interesting!) 17. Donat has written that, “[d]urch das Verfahren der zukunftsgewissen Vorausdeutung wird nicht nur der Ausgang des Romans—die erfolgreiche Karriere Höfgens unter dem Naziregime—vorweggenommen, sondern es erfolgt zugleich eine sehr enge Festlegung der Figuren. Von einer ‘Unbestimmtheit hinsichtlich der Faktoren Thema, Intention des Autors, Wirklichkeitsgehalt und erwartetes Rezeptionssituation bei fiktionalen Texten’ kann im Fall von Klaus Manns Mephisto sicher keine Rede sein” (Donat 210–12). (The process of future-proof prefiguration anticipates the starting point of the novel—the successful career of Höfgens under the Nazi regime—and at the same time it is used as a very narrow definition of the characters. In the case of Klaus Mann´s Mephisto, any ‘uncertainty regarding the factor’s subject, the author’s intention, reality content and expected reception situation in fictional texts’ is out of the question.) While I agree with Donat that Mann’s intentions are by no means an issue here, that doesn’t change the fact that the text is not so black and white as this highly reductive reading would have. Indeed, I hope to have shown that the novel is far more complex and ambiguous than most of the history of its reception, including its legal battles, has given it credit for being. 18. This is, of course, Mann’s parody of Goethe’s “Walpurgisnacht.” Or, as Hedrich writes: “Vor allem: dem äußeren Anstoß zum Trotz ist und bleibt

170

Notes to Conclusion

es Klaus Manns ureignes Verdienst, den Helden und den zeitgenössischen Kontext seines Romans mit dem Faust-Mythos verbunden zu haben, und zwar dem Mythos in jener für Deutschen so bedeutsamen Ausprägung, die bei Goethe erfahren hat” (Hedrich 100). (Above all: in spite of the outward impulse, Klaus Mann’s most inherent merit has consisted in connecting the hero and the contemporary context of his novel with the Faust myth, namely, the myth in Goethe’s expression so important for Germans.)

CONCLUSION 1. (For many Germans, the end of the war meant an outward as well as an inner new beginning. They had to find a new identity, ways to accept their recent past without losing confidence in building a new society.) 2. Another such site of ideological control the US military exerted over the German racial-cultural imagination in the immediate postwar period was, not surprisingly, film, with Rudolf Jugert’s 1949, American-army-backed, German-made Hallo, Fräulein. The German production and reception of the film’s vision of blackness in Germany was not without pushback. See Jennifer Fay’s, “‘That’s Jazz Made in Germany!’: Hallo, Fraulein! and the Limits of Democratic Pedagogy.” 3. See Iain Anderson, This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 9–47.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Achberger, Karen R. “Bachmann, Brecht Und Die Musik.” In Ingeborg Bachmann: Neue Beitrage zu ihrem Werk, edited by Dirk Gottsche and Hubert Ohl, 265–79. Wurzburg: Konigshausen; Neumann, 1993. Adorno, T. W. Essays on Music: Theodor W. Adorno. Edited by R. D. Leppert. Translated by S. H. Gillespie et al. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. —. Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann et al. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970–1986. —. In Search of Wagner. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. New York: Verso, 2005. —. Prisms (1955). Translated by S. Weber and S. Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981. Aitken, Robbie, and Eve Rosenhaft, eds. Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884–1960. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Albert, Claudia. “Adorno und Eisler, Repräsentanten des Musiklebens in den beiden deutschen Staaten der Nachkriegszeit.” Exilforschung 9 (1991): 68–80. Albrecht, Friedrich. “Klaus Manns ‘Mephisto: Roman einer Karriere.’” Weimarer Beitrage: Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft, Ästhetik und Kulturwissenschaften 34, no. 6 (1988): 978–1001. Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972. Anderson, Iain. This Is Our Music: Free Jazz and the Transformation of American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. 171

172

Bibliography

Assiän, Martin. “Euterpe im Labyrinth: Adornos Musikphilosophie zwischen Kritik und Ideologie.” Zeno 29 (2008): 88–123. Avenel-Cohen, Pascale. “Le sauvage tayloriste ou les trompettes de l’apocalypse jazz.” Cahiers d’études germaniques 51 (2006 Autumn): 59–74. Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du mal. Translated by James M. McGowan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Baugh, Bruce. “Left-Wing Elitism: Adorno on Popular Culture.” Philosophy and Literature 14 (1990): 65–78. Bell, Daniel M. “The Saxophone in Germany 1924–1935, A Cultural History.” The Saxophone Symposium 29 (2004): 1–38. Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Rolf Tiedermann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991. —. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1986. —. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Peter Demetz. Translated by Edmund Jephcot. New York: Schocken Books, 1978. Benjamin, Walter, and Theodor Adorno. Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin: The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940. Edited by Henri Lonitz. Translated by Nicholas Walker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Beresina, Ada. “Hermann Hesses Steppenwolf und Goethes Faust.” Begegnungen mit Goethe (2003): 41–62. Berman, Nina. German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. Betz, Albrecht. “Eisler, Brecht, Adorno: Musik, Film, Kulturindustrie.” Brecht Yearbook/Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 24 (1999): 68–79. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. Vol. 2. Translated by Neville Pierce et al. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. —. Spuren. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1959. —. Traces. Translated by Anthony Nassar. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Bonds, Mark Evan. Absolute Music: The History of an Idea. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Bibliography

173

Bowie, Andrew. “Adorno, Heidegger, and the Meaning of Music.” The Cambridge Companion to Adorno. Edited by Tom Huhn, 248–78. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. —. “Interpretation and Truth: Adorno on Literature and Music.” In Adorno and Literature, edited by David Cunningham and Nigel Mapp, 40–52. London: Continuum, 2006. Branscombe, Peter. “Brecht, Weill and Mahagonny.” The Musical Times 102.1422 (1961): 483–84, 486. Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre. 3rd rev. ed. Edited and translated by Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn. New York: Hill and Wang, 2015. —. Brecht: Collected Plays. Vol. 2 (Man Equals Man, The Elephant Calf, The Threepenny Opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, The Seven Deadly Sins). New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2007. Brittnacher, Hans Richard. “Prinzessin Tebab—Die Versuchung des Hendrik Hoefgens oder: Klaus Manns Pakt mit dem Teufel.” Auf der Suche nach einem Weg. (2008): 83–94. Brown, Lee. “Adorno’s Critique of Popular Culture: The Case of Jazz.” Music Journal of Aesthetic Education 26, no. 1 (1992): 17–31. Bruhn, Siglind. “‘Sie entsteht aus dem Maß und wurzelt in dem großen Einen’: Musik als Inhalt, Form und Metapher in Hesses kastalischer Utopie.” Hermann-Hesse-Jahrbuch 3 (2007): 95-119. Bruns, Marita. Musik Und Politik Bei Erich Mühsam Und Bertolt Brecht. Lübeck: Erich-Mühsam-Ges, 1995. Budds, Michael J. Jazz & the Germans: Essays on the Influence of “Hot” American Idioms on 20th-century German Music. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon, 2002. Calico, Joy. Brecht at the Opera. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Campt, Tina Marie. Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Carr, Firpo. Germany’s Black Holocaust: 1890–1945. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012.

174

Bibliography

Chadwick, Nick. “Matyas Seiber’s Collaboration in Adorno’s Jazz Project, 1936.” British Library Journal 21, no. 2 (1995 Autumn): 259–88. Charvat, Filip. “Die Kunst zu Sterben: Thema und Darstellung des IchZerfalls in Hermann Hesses Steppenwolf (1927) und Karel Capeks Obycejny Zivot (1934).” Aussiger Beiträge: germanistische Schriftenreihe aus Forschung und Lehre 1 (2007): 21–37. Chisholm, David. “Brecht’s and Weill’s Views of ‘Mahagonny: Musicaltextual Tensions.” Mahagonny.com (2004): 183–92. Christiaens, Jan. “The Sound (Of) Dialectics: Notes on Adorno’s Philosophy of Music.” Phrasis 49 (2008): 31–41. Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. New York: Delta Trade Paperbacks, 1999. Conrad, Sebastian. German Colonialism: A Short History. Translated by Sorcha O’Hagan. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Cook, Susan C. “Jazz as Deliverance: The Reception and Institution of American Jazz during the Weimar Republic.” American Music 7, no. 1, Special Jazz Issue (1989 Spring): 30–47. Cooper, Harry. “On Über Jazz: Replaying Adorno with the Grain.” October 75 (1996 Winter): 99–133. Cunningham, David. “A Time for Dissonance and Noise: On Adorno, Music, and the Concept of Modernism.” Angelaki 8, no. 1 (2003, April): 61–74. Dahlhaus, Carl. The Idea of Absolute Music. Translated by Roger Lustig. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Danne-Weyer, Kerstin. “‘Die Du Verlassen, Sie Atmen Noch’: Klaus Manns ‘Mephisto’ und die Verantwortung des Künstlers.” Zbliženia interkulturowe 6 (2009): 51–59. Danzi, Michael, and Rainer E. Lotz. American Musician in Germany, 1924– 1939: Memoirs of the Jazz, Entertainment, and Movie World of Berlin during the Weimar Republic and the Nazi Era, and in the United States. Schmitten: N. Ruecker, 1986. Delebar, Walter. “Von der Radiomusik des Lebens: Hermann Hesses literarische Verarbeitung der gesellschaftlichen Modernisierungsprozesse.” Zum Steppenwolf: Hermann Hesse und die literarische Moderne (2004): 256–70. Dentith, Simon. Parody (The New Critical Idiom). New York: Routledge, 2000.

Bibliography

175

Derrida, Jacques, “Plato’s Pharmacy.” In Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson, 61–172. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Donat, Sebastian. “‘Mephisto’ (Klaus Mann—István Szabós).” In Spannungsfeld zwischen Fiktion und Wahrheit. Literaturverfilmungen (2005), 206–14. Dörfel, Michael. “Poetry and Jazz: The Records of Jazz Meets (sic) Literature in the GDR.” In Jazz Behind the Iron Curtain. New York: Peter Lang, 2010, 295–309. Dümling, Albrecht. “‘Im Stil Der Lehrstücke’: Zu Entstehung Und Edition Von Eislers Musik Für Brechts Gorki-Bearbeitung ‘Die Mutter.’” Der Text im musikalischen Werk (1998): 361–81. Durr, Werner. Hermann Hesse: Vom Wesen der Musik in der Dichtung. Stuttgart, Germany: Silberburg, 1957. Durrani, Osman. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Klaus Mann’s Input into Doctor Faustus.” Oxford German Studies 34, no. 2 (2005): 173–79. Ebert, Günther. “‘Ohne Musik Geht Die Welt Nicht’: Hanns Eisler, Gesprache Mit Hans Bunge: Fragen Sie Mehr Über Brecht.” Neue Deutsche Literatur 26, no. 9 (1978): 115–20. Eisler, Hams. “Bertolt Brecht Und Die Musik.” Sinn und Form 9 (1957): 439–41. El-Tayeb, Fatima. Schwarze Deutsche: Der Diskurs um “Rasse” und nationale Identität, 1890–1933. Frankfurt: Campus, 2001. Ernst, Ulrich. “Musikalische Komposition als narrative Makrostruktur: Hermann Hesse - Anthony Burgess - Jonathan Littell; Analysen zur medialen Kontextualisierung des modernen Romans.“ Zeitschrift für vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft 2 (2010): 295-317. Esselborn-Krumbiegel, Helga. “Strategien der Leserlenkung in Demian und Der Steppenwolf.” Hesses Antwort auf die moderne Textkontingenz Hermann Hesse und die literarische Moderne (2004): 271–84. Fay, Jennifer. “‘That’s Jazz Made in Germany!’ Hallo Fräulein and the Limits of Democratic Pedagogy.” Cinema Journal 44, no. 1 (2004 Fall): 3–24. Federhofer, Helmut. “Das negative Kunstwerk in der Musikphilosophie Adornos.” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 47 (1990): 247–63. Fehrenbach, Heide. Race After Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

176

Bibliography

Ferran, Peter W. “Musical Composition for an American Stage Brecht.” In Brecht Yearbook / Das Brecht-Jahrbuch. Vol. 22: I’m Still Here/Ich bin noch da, edited by Maarten van Dijk, 253–81. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Fischbach, Fred. “Brecht-Weill et l’opera Wagnerien.” Études germaniques 47, no. 1 (1992 Jan–Mar): 49–67. Freud, Sigmund. Totem und Tabu. Einige Übereinstimmungen im Seelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotike. Frankfurt am Main, Fischer Verlag, 1991. —. “Das Unheimliche.” In Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 12 (1917–1920), edited by Anna Freud, 229–68. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. Friedrichsmeyer, Sara L., Sara Lennox, and Susanne M. Zantop, eds. The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Fuchs, Ralf-Peter. “‘Synkopen am laufenden Band . . .’ Die fremdartigen Wirkung des Jazz auf Jugend und Kulturexperten im westlichen Nachkriegsdeutschland.” Rheinisch-westfälische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 47 (2002): 237–59. Fuegi, John. “Most Unpleasant Things with the Threepenny Opera: Weill, Brecht, and Money.” A New Orpheus: Essays on Kurt Weill. Edited by Kim H. Kowalke. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986.157–82. Gess, Nicola. “Musikalische Mörder: Krieg, Musik und Mord bei Hermann Hesse.” Literatur und Musik in der klassischen Moderne (2006): 189–205. Gilbert, Michael J. T. Bertolt Brecht and Music: A Comprehensive Study. Dissertation Abstracts International 46 (4). 1985 Oct. 992A. —. “The Musical Dimension of Brecht’s Work as a Poet.” International Brecht Society: Communications from the International Brecht Society 15, no. 2 (1986): 11–16. Gillespie, Susan. “Translating Adorno: Language, Music, and Performance.” Musical Quarterly 79 (1995): 55–65. Gilliam, Bryan Randolph, ed. Music and Performance During the Weimar Republic. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 1–12. Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

Bibliography

177

Gracyk, Theodore A. “Adorno, Jazz, and the Aesthetics of Popular Music.” The Musical Quarterly 76, no. 4 (1992): 526–42. Greene, Larry A., and Anke Ortlepp, eds. Germans and African Americans: Two Centuries of Exchange. Oxford, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2013. Grosch, Nils. “‘Vom Weib des Nazisoldaten’: Musik, Propaganda und Aufführung eines Brechts-Songs.” Lied und populäre Kultur 50/51 (2006): 137–61. Grzywka, Katarzyna. “‘Du müßt mir das bald wieder spielen, für mich allein’: Zur Rolle der Musik in der Erzählung ‘Eine Sonate’ von Hermann Hesse.” Studia niemcoznawcze 23 (2002): 161–67. Grzywka, Lech, and Katarzyna Kolago. “Zur Rolle der Musik im Roman Gertrud von Hermann Hesse.” Acta Philologica 25 (1998): 105–18. Halliwell, Martin. “‘Mephisto’ and the Magician: Klaus Mann, Myth and Nazi Germany.” Proteus (2005): 187–99. Hamann, Christof. “Born to Be Not Wild: Maßnahmen gegen den Amerikanismus in Hermann Hesses Roman Der Steppenwolf.” Jahrbuch zur Kultur und Literatur der Weimarer Republik 9 (2004): 33–61. —. “‘Wie der Dampf von rohem Fleisch’: Hohe Kultur und Fremde Körper in Hermann Hesses Roman Der Steppenwolf.” Von Siddhartha zum Steppenwolf (2004): 25–51. Hamilton, Carol V. “All That Jazz Again: Adorno’s Sociology of Music.” Popular Music and Society 15, no. 3 (1991 Fall): 31–40. Harding, James M. “Adorno, Ellison, and the Critique of Jazz.” Cultural Critique 31 (1995 Fall): 129–58. Hartung, Günther. “Zur Epischen Oper Brechts Und Weills.” Gesammelte Aufsätze und Vorträge 3 (2004): 83–109. Heble, Ajay. “Capitulating to Barbarism: A Case Study of Jazz And/as Popular Culture.” In Pop Can: Popular Culture in Canada, edited by Lynne Van Luven and Priscilla L. Walton. Scarborough, ON: Prentice Hall Allyn and Bacon Canada, 1999. Hedrich, Dorothee. “Der Mythos als Waffe: Bemerkungen zu Mephisto von Klaus Mann.” Cahiers d’études germaniques 30 (Spring 1996): 95–107.

178

Bibliography

Hegel, G. W. F. (1807). Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1977. Heinrichs, Jürgen W. W. Blackness in Weimar: 1920s German Art Practice and American Jazz and Dance. Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences (DAIA) 59.4 (1998 Oct): 985–86. Henne, Thomas. “Klaus Manns ‘Mephisto’ und die Publikationsverbote der deutschen Gerichte: Zur gerichtlichen Karriere des Romans und seines Münchener Verlegers Berthold Spangenberg.” In Thomas Mann in München, edited by Dirk Heißerer, 27–65. München: Peniope, 2004. Herf, Jeffrey. Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Hesse, Hermann. Die Gedichte 1892–1962. 2 vols. Edited by Volker Michels. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977. —. The Glass Bead Game. Translated by Clara Winston and Richard Winston. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969. —. Sämtliche Werke. 20 vols. Edited by Volker Michels. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 2001–2007. —. Steppenwolf. Translated by Basil Creighton. New York: Modern Library, 1963. Highkin, John G. “Words Make You Think, Music Makes You Feel.” Intersections (1996): 159–77. Hinton, Stephen. “Harry Smith: Musical Visions of Urbanity: Mahagonny as Conceived by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht and by Harry Smith.” In Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular, edited by Andrew Perchuk and Rani Singh, 155–71. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2010. Hoffer, Peter H. “Klaus Mann’s Mephisto: A Secret Rivalry.” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 13, no. 2 (1989 Summer): 245–57. Hoffmann, Bernd. “Broadcasting House/Musichalle, Hamburg 36, der Ango-German Swing Club.” In Anglo German Swing Club. Dokumente 1945–1952, edited by Horst Ansin, Marc Dröscher, Jürgen Foth, and Gerhard Klußmeier, 507–21. Hamburg: Dölling & Galitz, 2003.

Bibliography

179

Hoffmann-Maxis, Angelika. “Mozart Wartet: Das Modell “Zauberflöte” und die Momente des Magischen: Eine Spurensuche in Hermann Hesses Steppenwolf Modell.” Zauberflöte: Der Kredit des Möglichen (2007): 247–75. Hollis, Andrew. “Political Ambivalence in Hesse’s Steppenwolf.” The Modern Language Review 73, no. 1 (1978): 110–18. Honeck, Mischa, Martin Klimke, and Anne Kuhlmann, eds. Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250–1914. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Hosokawa, Shuhei. “Distance, Gestus, Quotation: Aufstieg Und Fall Der Stadt Mahagonny of Brecht and Weill.” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 16, no. 2 (1985): 181–99. Hufner, Martin. “‘Composing for the Films’: Adorno, Eisler, and the Sociology of Music.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 18, no. 4 (1998 October): 535–40. Hügel-Marshall, Ika. Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany. Translated by Elizabeth Gaffney. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Hurley, Andrew. Into the Groove: Popular Music and Contemporary German Fiction. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2015. —. The Return of Jazz: Joachim-Ernst Berendt and West German Cultural Change. New York: Berghan Books, 2009. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Huysmans, J-K. Against Nature (À rebours). Translated by Margaret Mauldon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Huyssen, Andreas. “Adorno in Reverse: From Hollywood to Richard Wagner.” New German Critique 29 (1983): 8–38. —. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Jelavich, Peter. Berlin Cabaret. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Jost, Ekkehard. “Getanzte Freiheit: Swingkultur zwischen NS-Diktatur und Gegenwart.” In Jazz under the Swastika, 24–32. Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 2002.

180

Bibliography

Kartomi, Margaret. “Berlin to Bondi: The Flight of the Weintraub Syncopators.” HEAT 8 (2004): 15–33. Kater, Michael H. Different Drummers. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1992. —. “Forbidden Fruit? Jazz in the Third Reich.” American Historical Review 94, no. 1 (1989): 11–43. —. “Weill Und Brecht: Kontroversen Einer Künstlerfreundschaft Auf Zwei Kontinenten.” Brecht und seine Komponisten (2000): 51–73. Kaur, Raminder, and Partha Banerjea. “Jazzgeist: Racial Signs in Twisted Times.” Theory, Culture and Society 17, no. 3 (2000): 159–80. Kiesel, Dagmar. “Das gespaltene Selbst: Die Identitatsproblematik in Hermann Hesses Steppenwolf und bei Friedrich Nietzsche.” Nietzsche Studien: Internationales Jahrbuch fur die Nietzsche-Forschung 39 (2010): 398–433. Kłańska, Maria. “Einmal würde Ich das Lachen lernen.” Mozarts literarische Spuren (2008): 195–210. Knauer, Wolfram. “Jazz, GIs und German Fräuleins.” PopScriptum 8— Afroamerikanische Musik in Deutschland. Jazzforschung 34 (2002): 77–88. Knufermann, Völker. “Sprache und Neurose: Zu Hermann Hesses Steppenwolf.” Études germaniques 34 (1979): 276–83. Kodat, Catherine Günther. “Conversing with Ourselves: Canon, Freedom, Jazz.” American Quarterly 55, no. 1 (2003 March): 1–28. Kotin, Andriej. “Der literarische Außenseiter als Grenzübergänger: Michail Lermontows Ein Held Unserer Zeit und Hermann Hesses Der Steppenwolf.” Wschód-Zachód. Dialog kultur. Studien zur Sprache und Literatur (2010): 139–45. Kowalke, Kim H. “Brecht and Music: Theory and Practice.” The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, edited by Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks, 242–58. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Krauser, Andreas. “Medialität Und Musikalität: Plessner und Adorno.” Literatur und Musik in der klassischen Moderne (2006): 19–32. Kreutzer, Leo. “Theater und Karriere: Klaus Manns Mephisto im Lichte von Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren am Theater.” Deutschunterricht:

Bibliography

181

Beitrage zu Seiner Praxis und Wissenschaftlichen Grundlegung 35, no. 1 (January 1983): 31–35. Krukowski, Lucian. “Form and Protest in Atonal Music: A Meditation on Adorno.” Bucknell Review: A Scholarly Journal of Letters, Arts and Sciences 29, no. 1 (1984): 105–24. Krick-Aigner, Kristen, and Marc Schuster, eds. Jazz in German-Language Literature. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013. Kucher, Primus-Heinz. “‘Das wahre Programm der Zeit hieß: Jazz’: Zum Stellenwert des Jazz als (musik)kulturelle und literarische Chiffre in der österreichischen Zwischenkriegszeit.” Journal of Austrian Studies 47 (2014): 69–92. Kurz, Jan. “‘Swinging Democracy’: Jungendprotest im 3. Reich.” Geschichte der Jugend 21. Münster: Lit-Verlag, 1995. 1–26. Kuspit, Donald B. “Critical Notes on Adorno’s Sociology of Music and Art.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33, no. 3 (1975): 321–27. Kusser, Astrid. Körper in Schieflage: Tanzen im Strudel des Black Atlantic um 1900. Bielefeld: transcript, 2014. Kvam, Wayne. “Grundgens, Mann, and Mephisto.” Theatre Research International 15, no. 2 (1990 Summer): 141–50. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2002. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. “Remarque sur Adorno et le jazz: (D’un désart obscur).” In Rue Descartes no. 10, 131–41. Paris: Albin Michel, 1994. Landgren, Gustav. “‘Sie sollen die verfluchte Radiomusik des Lebens Anhören lernen’: Zur Funktion der Technik in Hermann Hesses Roman Der Steppenwolf (1927).” Sprache, Literatur, Kultur (2010): 221–31. —. Hermann Hesses Rosshalde, Klingsors letzter Sommer und Steppenwolf im Kontext von Kunstkritik, Kunstlerkrise und Intermedialitat. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University, 2011. Langbehn, Völker. German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany. Edited by Mohammed Salama. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Lareau, Alain. “Jonny’s Jazz: From Kabarett to Krenek.” Jazz and the Germans. Hillsdale, NY.Pendragon Press 2002. 19–60.

182

Bibliography

Lee, Kyung Boon. “Gestische Musik Bei Brecht.” Brecht Yearbook/Das BrechtJahrbuch 24 (1999): 208–25. Lee, Sherry D. “‘Alles, Was Ist, Endet’: On Dramatic Text, Absolute Music, Adorno, and Wagner’s Ring.” University of Toronto Quarterly: A Canadian Journal of the Humanities 79, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 922–40. Lennox, Sara. Remapping Black Germany: New Perspectives on Afro-German History, Politics and Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016. Leppert, Richard. Music “‘Pushed to the Edge of Existence’: Adorno, Listening, and the Question of Hope.” Cultural Critique 60 (2005): 92–133. Levi, Erik. Music in the Third Reich. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. Levin, Thomas Y. “For the Record: Adorno on Music in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” October 55 (1990): 23–47. Lilienfeld, Robert. “Music and Society in the 20th Century: Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, and Theodor Adorno.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 1, no. 2: The Sociology of Culture (1987): 310–36. Lindstrom, Fred B., and Naomi Lindstrom. “Adorno Encounters Cu-Bop: Experimental Music as a Task for Critics and Their Audiences.” Sociological Perspectives 29, no. 2 (1986): 284–304. Lohmeier, Anke-Marie. “Es Ist Also Doch Ein Sehr Privates Buch: Uber Klaus Manns Mephisto, Gustaf Grundgens und die Nachgeborenen Text.” Kritik: Zeitschrift fur Literatur (January 1987): 93–94. Lotz, Rainer E. Black People: Entertainers of African Descent in Europe and Germany. Bonn: Birgit Lotz Verlag, 1997. —. Hot Dance Bands in Germany: A Photo Album. Vol. I: Pre-History Up to 1920. 3 vols. Bonn: Rainer E. Lotz, 1979–83. —. Der Jazz in Deutschland. Vom Cake Walk zum Jazz. Hambergen: Bear Family Records, 2008. —. “The ‘Louisiana Troupes’ in Europe.” Black Perspective in Music 11 (1983 Fall): 133–42. Lotz, Rainer E., et al., eds. Black Europe. 2 vols. Holste-Oldendorf, Germany: Bear Family Productions, 2013.

Bibliography

183

Lotz, Rainer E., and Horst J. P. Bergmeier. Hitler’s Airwaves: The Inside Story of Nazi Radio Broadcasting and Propaganda Swing. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Lucchesi, Joachim. “Geschärfte Musik: Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill, Die Dreigroschenoper.” Diskussion Deutsch 25, no. 193 (1994): 323–28. —. “‘Ihr Hauptleut, Lasst Die Trommel Ruhen’: Unbekannte Musik Zu Brecht-Stucken.” Brecht Yearbook/Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 34 (2009): 151–70. —. “The Proof of the Pudding: Zum Musikdenken Brechts Im Finnischen Exil.” Auf den Spuren Brechts im finnischen Exil (1997): 106–11. —. “‘Starb Wie Ein Tier in Wurzeln Gekrallt’: Brechts und Weills Vom Tod Im Wald.” Brecht and Death (2007): 327–32. Mahnköpf, Claus-Steffen. “Adornos musikalische Utopie: Selbsteinschränkung der Geschichtsphilosophie durch radikal immanentistische Musikästhetik?” Ästhetik & Kommunikation 21 (1992): 95–102. Mann, Klaus. (1941). “Die Aufgabe des Schriftstellers in der gegenwärtigen Krise.” In Zweimal Deutschland. Aufsätze, Reden, Kritiken 1938– 1942. Edited by Uwe Naumann and Michael Töteberg. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1994. —. (1936).“Haben die deutschen Intellektueller versagt?” In Das Wunder von Madrid. Aufsätze, Reden, Kritiken 1936–1938, edited by Uwe Naumann and Michael Töteberg. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1993. —. (1934). “Homosexualität und Faschismus.” Uwe Naumann and Michael Töteberg, eds. Zahnärzte und Künstler. Aufsätze, Reden, Kritiken 1933–1936. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1993. —. Klaus-Mann-Schriftenreihe. Vols. 1–6. Edited by Fredric Kroll. Wiesbaden: Edition Klaus Blahak, 2006. —. (1936). Mephisto. Translated by Robin Smyth. New York: Penguin Books, 1983. —. Mephisto: Roman einer Karriere. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2007. —. (1945). “Richard Wright’s Buch Black Boy.” Auf verlorenem Posten. Aufsätze, Reden, Kritiken 1942–1949. Edited by Uwe Naumann and Michael Töteberg. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1994.

184

Bibliography

Mann, Thomas. Disorder and Early Sorrow. Collected Stories. Translated by H. T. Lowe Porter. New York: Random House, 2001. 567–603. —. Doktor Faustus. Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian. Leverkühn erzählt von einem Freunde. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1990. —. (1925). Unordnung und frühes Leid. In Gesammelte Werke in dreizehn Bänden. Band VIII. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Velag GmbH, 1960/1974. 618–57. —. (1924). Der Zauberberg. Roman. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1991. Marina, Racu. “‘Geist Der Musik’ Oder ‘Kulinarische Kunst’? (Nochmals Zum Problem ‘Brecht Und Die Oper’).” Communications from the International Brecht Society 23, no. 2 (1994 November): 67–76. Martin, Peter, and Christine Alonzo, eds. Schwarze Teufel, edle Mohren: Afrikaner in Geschichte und Bewusstsein der DeutschenHamburg. Hamburg: Junius, 2001. —. Zwischen Charleston und Stechschritt: Schwarze im Nationalsozialismus. Dölling und Galitz Verlag, Hamburg, 2004. Matassi, Elio. “Hermann Hesse und die ‘neupythagoreische Musiklehre.’” Hermann-Hesse-Jahrbuch 3 (2007): 121-131. Mazon, Patricia, and Reinhild Steingrover, eds. Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture and History, 1890–2000. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009. McBride, Douglas Brent. “Romantic Phantasms: Benjamin and Adorno on the Subject of Critique.” Monatshefte fur Deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur 90, no. 4 (1998 Winter): 465–87. Mileck, Joseph. “Names and the Creative Process: A Study of the Names in Hermann Hesse’s Lauscher, Demian, Steppenwolf, and Glasperlenspiel.” Monatshefte 53, no. 4 (1961): 167–80. Moritz, Julia. “Inbegriff der Kunst: Die Verwandlung von Zeit in Raum durch die Musik; Metamorphosen des Chronotopos und Paradoxien der Sujet-Gestaltung bei Hermann Hesse.” Hermann Hesse und die literarische Moderne (2004): 305–21.

Bibliography

185

Morley, Michael. “‘New Tunes for Old’: Brecht, Weill and the Language of Music in Four Unpublished Songs.” German Life and Letters 35, no. 3 (1982 Apr.): 241–52. Nadar, Thomas Raymond. “Brecht and His Musical Collaborators.” A Bertolt Brecht Reference Companion Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. 261–77. —. “Brecht’s and Eisler’s Impact on Film Music in America.” Brecht Unbound. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995. 135–46. —. The Music of Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler and Paul Dessau in the Dramatic Works of Bertolt Brecht. Dissertation Abstracts: Section A. Humanities and Social Science 35. 1975. 7319A. Nagl, Tobias. Die unheimliche Maschine. Rasse und Repräsentation im Weimarer Kino. München: Edition Text + Kritik, 2009. Naranch, Bradley, and Geoff Eley, eds. German Colonialism in a Global Age. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Naumann, Uwe. Klaus Manns “‘Mephisto’: Der Roman, Der Film, Die Theateraufführung, Das Hörspiel—Ein Vergleich.” Hörspiel (2009): 149–60. Nesbitt, Nick. “Sounding Autonomy: Adorno, Coltrane and Jazz.” Telos: A Quarterly Journal of Radical Social Theory 116 (1999 Summer): 81–98. Nichols, John N. “Saving the Fallen City of Mahagonny: The Musical Elaboration of Brecht’s Epic Theatre.” Essays on Twentieth-Century German Drama and Theater (2004): 219–24. Nieder, Christoph. “Bertolt Brecht und die Oper: Zur Verwandtschaft von Epischem Theater und Musiktheater,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 111, no. 2 (1992): 262–83. Niefanger, Dirk. “Harry Haller und die großen Männer: Hermann Hesses Steppenwolf im Kontext der Biografien-Mode.” Hermann Hesse: 1877– 1962–2002 (2003): 87–102. Nordau, Max. Entartung. Berlin: C. Duncker, 1896. Nye, William P. “Theodor Adorno on Jazz: A Critique of Critical Theory.” Popular Music and Society 12, no. 4 (1988 Winter): 69–73.

186

Bibliography

Opitz, May, Katharina Oguntoye, and Dagmar Schultz, eds. Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991. Paddison, Max. “The Critique Criticised: Adorno and Popular Music.” Popular Music 2: Theory and Method (1982): 201–18. —. “The Language-Character of Music: Some Motifs in Adorno.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 116, no. 2 (1991): 267–79. Partsch, Cornelius. “Hannibal Ante Portas.” Jazz in Weimar Dancing on the Volcano: Essays on the Culture of the Weimar Republic, edited by Thomas W. Kniesche and Stephen Brockmann, 105–16. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994. —. Schräge Töne: Jazz und Unterhaltungsmusik in der Kultur der Weimarer Republic. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2000. —. “That Weimar Jazz.” New England Review: Middlebury Series 23, no. 4 (2002 Fall): 179–93. Pencak, William. “Signifying Music: The Profoundly Paradoxical Criticism of Theodor Adorno.” Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis 8, no. 1 (2003): 23–42. Petrescu, Mihaela. “Domesticating the Vamp: Jazz and the Dance Melodrama in Weimar Cinema.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 46, no. 3 (2010 September): 276–92. Pfister, Stefan. Bildersaal der Seele: Funktion und Bedeutung des magischen Theaters in Hermann Hesses Der Steppenwolf. Frankfurt am Main: Pfister, 2001. Pfister, Werner. “‘Und Alle Zeit Ward Gegenwart’: Hermann Hesses Verhältnis zur Musik, Gespiegelt in seinen Züricher Winterjahren, 1925–1932.” “Höllenreise durch mich selbst,” Hermann Hesse (2002): 97–112. Plesske, Hans-Martin. “Hermann Hesse Und Die Musik.” Aufbau: Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Recht, Freiheit und Frieden 13, no. 7 (1957): 60–70. Poiger, Uta G. “American Jazz in the German Cold War.” In Music and German National Identity, edited by Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, 218–33. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Bibliography

187

—. Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Plato. Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper et al. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997. Probst, Rudolf. “Zur Entstehung von Hesses Der Steppenwolf.” Höllenreise durch mich selbst. Hermann Hesse: Siddhartha, Steppenwolf. Ed. Felix Graf, Andres Furger, Regina Bucher. Zürich: Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 2002. Reithmüller, Albrecht. “Der Fortschritt in der Musik: Gesehen von Bloch, Lukács und Adorno.” Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste Jahrbuch 4 (1990): 410–31. Rieck, Werner. Gregor Gregori und Hendrik Höfgen: Ein Beitrag zur Werkgeschichte von Klaus Manns Mephisto Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Padagogischen Hochschule ‘Karl Liebknecht.’ Potsdam 12 (1968): 697–709. Rienäcker, Gerd. “‘Haltet euch aufrecht, fürchtet euch nicht’: Zur Rolle Des Chorals in Brecht-Weills Oper Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny.” Mahagonny.com (2004): 211–21. —. “The Invigorating Effect of Music? Making Music About Music in Brecht and Eisler’s ‘Song of the Invigorating Effect of Money.’” Hanns Eisler (1995): 91–102. —. “Musik Oder Musik: Anmerkungen Zu Brechts Musik-Verstehen.” Brecht 100 (1999): 203–15. Rippey, Theodore F. “Rationalisation, Race, and the Weimar Response to Jazz.” German Life and Letters 60, no. 1 (2007 Jan): 75–97. Robinson, J. Bradford. “The Jazz Essays of Theodor Adorno: Some Thoughts on Jazz Reception in Weimar Germany.” Popular Music 13, no. 1 (January 1994): 1–25. —. “Jazz Reception in Weimar Germany: In Search of a Shimmy Figure.” In Music and Perfomance During the Weimar Republic, 107–34. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Rockwood, Heidi M. “The Function of Pablo in Hesse’s Steppenwolf.” South Atlantic Review 59, no. 4 (1994): 47–61.

188

Bibliography

Rollka, Bodo. “Anmerkungen Zur Stereotypen Rezeption Der Schwarzen Minoritat Amerikas in Der Alten Und Neuen Welt.” Amerikastudien/ American Studies 31, no. 4 (1986): 413–24. Rosen, Philip. “Adorno and Film Music: Theoretical Notes on Composing for the Films.” Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 157–82. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. A Discourse on Inequality. Translated by Maurice Cranston. New York: Penguin, 1984. Sacher-Masoch, Leopold. Venus in Furs. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Penguin, 2000. Sander, Wolfgang. “Popularmusik als somatisches Stimulans. Adornos Kritik der ‘leichten Musik.’” In Adorno und die Musik, edited by Otto Kolleritsch, 125–32. Graz: Universal Edition, 1979. Schiller, Dieter. “Antifaschistischer Kampf als moralisches Zentrum: Zu Voraussetzungen der Exilromane Klaus Manns ‘Mephisto’ und ‘Der Vulkan.’” Weimarer Beitrage: Zeitschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft, Asthetik und Kulturwissenschaften 34, no. 2 (1988): 251–68. —. “Der Komödiant und die Macht: Klaus Mann und sein ‘Mephisto’— Roman.” Im Widerstreit geschrieben (2008): 339–52. Schmidt-Rost, Christian. “Freedom Within Limits: Getting Access to Jazz in the GDR and PRP between 1945 and 1961.” Jazz Behind the Iron Curtain. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. 223–38. Schnitzler, Günther. “‘Das Dilemma der “epischen Oper”’: Brechts und Weills Dreigroschenoper, mit einem Seitenblick auf Benns Opern Äesthetik.” Gottfried Benn—Bertolt Brecht (2009): 91–112. Schoeller, Wilfried F. “Unerwünschte Zeugenschaft: Klaus Mann.” In Schriftsteller vor Gericht: verfolgte Literatur in vier Jahrhunderten, edited by Jörg-Dieter Kogel, 266–80. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996. Schonherr, Ulrich. “Adorno and Jazz: Reflections on a Failed Encounter.” Telos 87 (1991): 85–97. Schumacher, Klaus. “Ekstasen der Sachlichkeit: Zur Dreigroschenoper (1928) von Bertolt Brecht und Kurt Weil.” John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, 17282004. Adaptations and Re-Writings. Ed. Uwe Böker, Ines Detmers, and Anna-Christina Giovanopoulos. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2006. 193-218.

Bibliography

189

Schwarz, Egom. Hermann Hesses Steppenwolf. Konigstein: Athenaum, 1980. —. “Zur Erklärung von Hesses Steppenwolf.” Monatshefte 53, no. 4 (1961): 191–98. Singer, Robert. “Faust in a Uniform: Klaus Mann’s Mephisto and Its Cinematic Adaption.” Modern Myths (1993): 77–88. Smith, David. “Third Reich Music: State Intervention and the Problem of Historical Disjunction and Continuity.” SAMUS 14 (1994): 35–47. Snowball, David. “Controlling Degenerate Music: Jazz in the Third Reich.” In Jazz and the Germans: Essays on the Influence of “Hot” American Idioms on 20th-Century German Music. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press. 149–66. 2002. Spangenberg, Eberhard. Karriere eines Romans: Mephisto, Klaus Mann und Gustav Grundgens: Ein dokumentarischer Bericht aus Deutschland und der Exil 1925–1981. Munich: Ellermann, 1982. Sprengel, Peter. “Teufels-Kunstler: Faschismus- und Asthetizismus-Kritik in Exilromanen Heinrich, Thomas und Klaus Manns.” Exilliteratur, 1933– 1945. Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1989. 424–50. Stegmann, Vera Sonja. “Brecht Contra Wagner: The Evolution of the Epic Music Theatre.” A Bertolt Brecht Reference Companion (1997): 238–60. —. Das epische Musiktheater bei Strawinsky und Brecht: Studien zur Geschichte und Theorie. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. —. “An Opera for Three Pennies, a Violin for Ten Francs: Brecht’s and Stravinsky’s Approaches to Epic Music Theatre.” Brecht Unbound. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995. 119–34. —. “Strawinsky, Brecht Und Weill: Stationen Des Epischen Musiktheaters.” Revolution 1989: Whither Brecht? The Brecht Yearbook, 16. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. 75–96. Steinert, Heinz. “Adorno and the Case of Jazz in Europe in the 1930s.” Found Object 7 (1998 Winter): 89–99. Steinmetz, George. The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. Edited by Elizabeth Ammons. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.

190

Bibliography

Swales, Martin. “New Media, Virtual Reality, Flawed Utopia?: Reflections on Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg and Hermann Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf.” Hermann Hesse Today (2005): 33–39. Taylor, Millie. “Music in Theatre: Towards a Methodology for Examining the Interaction of Music and Drama in Theatre Works of the Twentieth Century.” (PhD thesis, Exeter University, 2000). Thacker, Toby. “‘Anleitung und Kontrolle’: Stakuko and the Censorship of Music in the GDR, 1951–1953.” Censorship and Cultural Regulation in the Modern Age (2004): 87–110. Theweleit, Klaus. Männerphantasien. 2 vols. München: Piper 2000. Thompson, Michael J. “Th. W. Adorno Defended Against His Critics, and Admirers: A Defense of the Critique of Jazz.” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 41 no. 1 (2010): 37–49. Tirro, Frank. “Jazz Leaves Home: The Dissemination of ‘Hot’ Music to Central Europe.” Jazz and the Germans (2002): 61–82. Townsend, Peter. “Adorno on Jazz: Vienna Versus the Vernacular.” Prose Studies 11, no. 1 (1988 May): 69–88. Tregaear, Peter. “Sounding Fascism: T. W. Adorno and the Political Susceptibility of Music.” Renaissance & Modern Studies 42 (1999): 36–48. Trexler, Roswitha, and Fritz Hennenberg. “Was Der Sanger Von Brecht Lernen Kann Oder Meine Auffassung Von Weill.” Brecht Yearbook/ Das Brecht-Jahrbuch (1979): 30–45. Truhlar, Antonín. “Jazz im Osten.” Jazzforschung 5 (1973): 140–46. Villwock Peter. “‘History of Jazz’: Brecht, Dieterle Und Die Musik in Hollywood.” Text 10 (2005): 73–86. Völker, Ludwig. “Die Gestalt der Hermine in Hesses Steppenwolf.” Études germaniques 25 (1970): 41–52. von Eschen, Penny. Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Von Essen, Reimer. “Geschichte des Jazz in Frankfurt (bis 1972).” Jazzforschung 5 (1974): 86–101. von Maltzan, Carlotta. “Masochismus und Macht in Klaus Manns Mephisto: Roman einer Karriere.” Acta Germanica: Jahrbuch des Germanistenverbandes im Sudlichen Afrika 1 (1990): 145–63.

Bibliography

191

—. “Der verschlingende und der verschleierte Blick: Das Schau-Spiel der Macht in Klaus Manns Mephisto.” Twelfth International Conference on Literature and Psychoanalysis (1996): 237–43. von Seckendorff, Klaus. Hermann Hesses propagandistische Prosa: Selbstzerstorerische Entfaltung als Botschaft in seinen Romanen Von Demian Zur Steppenwolf. Bonn: Bouvier, 1982. Wagner, Gottfried. Weill und Brecht: Das musikalische Zeitalter. Munich: Kindler, 1977. Wanneberg, Klaus. “Metropolenrhythmen-Musik Als Interventionistisches Leitmedium Im Theater Piscators Und Brechts?” Mahagonny.com (2004): 239–50. Weiner, Marc A. “Undertones of Insurrection: Music and Cultural Politics in the Modern German Narrative. 1993. —. Urwaldmusik and the Borders of German Identity: Jazz in Literature of the Weimar Republic.” German Quarterly 64, no. 4 (1991 Fall): 475–87. Weissberg, Liliane. “Philosophy and the Fairy Tale: Ernst Bloch as Narrator.” New German Critique 55 (1992 Winter): 21–44. Weitzman, Ronald. “An Introduction to Adorno’s Music and Social Criticism.” Music & Letters 52, no. 3 (1971): 287–98. Wilock, Evelyn.“‘Adorno, Jazz and Racism’: ‘Über Jazz’ and the 1934–7 British Jazz Debate,” Telos 107 (1996 Spring): 63–80. Winckler, Lutz. Klaus Mann: “Mephisto: Schlusselroman und Gesellschaftssatire.” Exilforschung: Ein internationales Jahrbuch 1 (1983): 322–42. —. “‘. . . Ein richtig gemeines Buch, voll von Tucken’: Klaus Manns Roman Mephisto.” Klaus Mann: Werk und Wirkung, edited by Rudolf Wolff, 46–80. Bonn: Bouvier, 1984. Wipplinger, Jonathan Otto. “The Aural Shock of Modernity.” Germanic Review 82, no. 4 (2007): 299–320. —. “Bridging the Great Divides: Cultural Difference and Transnationalism at Frankfurt’s Jazzklasse.” From Black to Schwarz: Cultural Crossovers Between African America and Germany, edited by Maria I. Diedrich and Jürgen Heinrichs,119–38. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press; Münster: Lit Verlag, 2011.

192

Bibliography

—. “Eccentric Modernism, Or: George Grosz’s Gramophone Goes Meschugge.” Colloquia Germanica: Internationale Zeitschrift für Germanistik. 46, no. 4 (2013): 366–88. —. “Germany, 1923: Alain Locke, Claude McKay, and the New Negro in Germany.” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters 36, no. 1 (2013): 106–24. —. The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany. Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences (DAIA) 67, no. 7 (2007 Jan): 2596. —. “Performing Race in Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf.” Blackness in Opera, edited byNaomi André, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor, 236–59. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. —. “The Racial Ruse: On Blackness and Blackface Comedy in fin-desiècle Germany.” German Quarterly 84, no. 4 (2011): 457–76. Wires, Richard. “The Opportunist as Hero: Klaus Mann, Mephisto, and Gustaf Grundgens.” West Virginia University Philological Papers 32 (1986–1987): 109–18. Witkin, Robert W. “Why Did Adorno ‘Hate’ Jazz?” Sociological Theory 18, no. 1 (2000): 145–70. Witt-Stahl, Susann. “‘Die Lust des dunklen Niggers, den jeder Weiße in sich trägt.’” InTestcard: Beiträge zur Popgeschichte, 8–13. Mainz: Ventil-Vert, 2004. Zagorski, Markus. “Nach dem Weltuntergang: Adorno’s Engagement with Postwar Music.” Journal of Musicology 22, no. 4 (2005): 680–701. Zwerin, Michael. Swing under the Nazis: Jazz as a Metaphor for Freedom. New York: Cooper Square, 2000.

INDEX

Page numbers in boldface refer to illustrations. Adorno, Theodor W.: academic music

Aitken, Robbie, xv

preference of, 68, 91; avant-gard-

Albrecht, Friedrich, 168n11

ism and, 91, 95, 102, 108; black-

Alter, Nora M., 11

ness and, xxv–xxvi, 29, 93, 100,

Althusser, Louis, 9

102–4, 120; on culture industry,

American culture, German percep-

xxii–xxiv, 13, 91–93, 94, 103–4,

tions of, 17, 23, 25, 54

110, 145, 162n11; on fascism

Americanization, xiv, xvii, 23, 58, 64,

and music, xxvi, 15, 90–91,

70, 78, 100, 157n11

92–93, 96–97, 101–2, 104, 106,

Anbruch, 20

109–11, 161n5, 164n19; on jazz,

antiblack racism, xvi, xviii; Adorno

xvi–xvii, xxiii, xxiv, xxv–xxvi,

and, xxvi; Mann and, 116–17.

13–16, 29–30, 50, 89–111,

See also blackness; German racial

113, 115, 117, 163nn13–14,

imaginary; jazz: blackness and;

164nn16–17, 164–65n23–24,

primitivism; vitality

165n26; on primitivism, 91, 96,

anti-Semitism, xviii, 149n4

101–2, 110, 122, 130, 164n18

Armstrong, Louis, 19

WRITINGS: Introduction to the

Aryan jazz. See white German

Sociology of Music, 89; “Jazz:

(“Wagnerian”) jazz

Zeitlose Mode,” 89, 109; “Music

Asiáin, Martin, 161n5

in the Background,” 165n24;

Astaire, Fred, 52–53, 56

“Über Jazz,” 13–16, 90–91

Auftakt, 20

advertising industry, xv–xvi, xxvi African savage trope, xxvi, 63, 114,

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 58, 82–83,

127–28. See also primitivism

165n24 193

194

Index

Baker, Josephine, 19, 31

references to, 25, 27, 30, 75, 83,

Baresel, Alfred, 20, 21, 58, 105

86, 93, 103, 104, 109, 127, 130,

Baudelaire, Charles, 130–32, 133,

135, 137

168nn12–13

Bowie, Andrew, 98

Bechet, Sydney, 18–19

Branscombe, Peter, 32

Beethoven, Ludwig van, 83, 91, 94–95

Braun, Eva, xiii,

Bell, Andrea Mange, 168n12

Brecht, Bertolt, xxiv, xxv, 23, 31–56,

Benjamin, Walter, 11; Adorno and,

58, 70–71, 91, 100, 155nn24–

13–16; on film, 14–15, 85; jazz

25; Adorno and, 99; alienation

and, 14–16; Jetztzeit concept, 55;

effect in, 39, 52, 130, 152n11;

reproduction technology and, 132

cabaret and, 38, 40, 46–48; epic

Benn, Gottfried, 52

theater of, 31, 32, 33–40, 44,

Berendt, Joachim-Ernst, 144

46, 48, 51, 54, 152n11, 154n20;

Berlioz, Hector, 94

jazz and, 31–56, 155n26; poetic

Bertrand, Paul, 20

theater of, 36–37; poetry of,

Bizet, Georges, 68–69

155n26; refunctionalization and,

black effeminacy vs. German mascu-

42–43

linity, 21, 24, 26, 27

COMPOSITIONS: Hauspostille,

black Germans, history of, xiv–xvi

23; Mann ist Mann, 37; “Suraba-

blackface, xxi–xxii, 17, 145; in Bloch,

ya-Johnny,” 21; The Threepenny

2, 6–7, 10, 83 blackness: Adorno and, xxv–xxvi,

Opera, 37, 38, 51, 153n12 ESSAYS: “The Epic Theater and

29, 93, 100, 102–4, 120, 124;

Its Difficulties,” 54; “On Gestic

as commodity, 10; as difference,

Music,” 40–45; “On Rhymeless

6; Mann and, 114, 116, 118,

Verse with Irregular Rhythms,”

120–22, 124–27; scapegoating

52; “On the Use of Music in an

and, 6; as social construct or

Epic Theater,” 33, 37, 38, 47–48,

performance, 3, 7, 10–11. See

50; “The Radio as an Apparatus

also German racial imaginary;

of Communication,” 34; “A Radio

jazz: blackness and; primitivism;

Speech,” 36

vitality blau Engel, Der, 30 Bloch, Ernst, “Der Schwarze”: analysis of: xxiv, 1–7, 10–11; later

Brittnacher, Hans Richard, 121, 168n12 Bruhn, Siglind, 157n7 burlesque and striptease, 46, 123

195

Index

cabarets and jazz clubs, xxv, 15, 18,

Duval, Jeanne, 131–32, 168n12

23, 28; Brecht and, 31–32, 35, 38, 40, 46–48, 56; Hesse and,

Einstein, Carl, 121

67, 78–79; in Nazi era, 118; in

Eisler, Hans, 24, 154n22

postwar era, 143–44, 146

Ellington, Duke, 104–5, 141

Castle, Irene and Vernon, 18, 122

El-Tayeb, Fatima, xv

Chaplin, Charlie, 34

Entartete Musik exhibition, xiii, 28;

Charlie and His Orchestra, 29

catalog cover, xviii, xxii, 22, 121

Chisholm, David, 153n12

Ernst, Ulrich, 59

Chocolate Kiddies, 11–12

Esselborn-Krumbiegel, Helga, 156n4

Christiaens, Jan, 163n12

expressionism, 36, 43, 44, 51, 102

classical music, xviii, xxiv, xxvi, 21, 27, 44, 162n10; Adorno and,

Fanon, Frantz, 9

91, 94–95, 104–5; Brecht and,

Federhofer, Helmut, 161n6

32–33, 43, 50; Hesse and,

Ferran, Peter W., 153n14

58–59, 61, 65–67, 82, 87

Fischbach, Fred, 151n6

Cooper, Harry, 95

Frick, Wilhelm, 27, 28

Cunningham, David, 105

Fordism, 17, 23, 25, 70

Curry, Howard, 18

Four Black Diamonds, 19 Freud, Sigmund, 63, 74–75, 157n10

dance forms, 20, 108, 125, 157n11 Dawes Plan, 17, 21

Gay, John, 45

Debussy, Claude, 104, 105

German culture industry, xiv, xxi, xxiv,

Delabar, Walter, 157n11

xxv, xxvi, 7, 9–11, 96, 103–4,

Dentith, Simon, 8–9

144–45. See also under Adorno,

Derrida, Jacques, 6

Theodor W.

Deleuze, Gilles, 125–26

German racial imaginary, xv, xxi, xxii,

Diamond, Samuel, 18

7, 9–10, 12, 16–18, 27, 61, 103,

Dietrich, Marlene, 30

149n4, 170n2; blackness and, xiv–

Dixieland music, 18, 144–45

xvi, xviii, xxi, xxiii, 25–26, 150n10

Dolly Sisters, xxii

Geschärfe Musik, 10

Donat, Sebastian, 115, 169n17

Gess, Nicola, 158n14

Dümling, Albrecht, 32

gest and gestic music, 38–46, 48–49,

Durrani, Osman, 168n11

52, 153n14, 153n18

196

Index

Gillespie, Susan, 163n14

critique, 59–64, 67, 69, 73, 79,

Gioia, Ted, 150n9

122, 132

Girard, René, 6

WORKS: Glasperlenspiel, 58; Der

Goebbels, Joseph, 28, 142

Steppenwolf, xxv, 57, 58–86, 91,

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 52,

127

65, 66, 68, 71–72, 79, 82, 87,

Hindemith, Paul, 21

160n27; Faust, 132, 136, 169n18

Hitler, Adolf, 134, 137

Gracyk, Theodore A., 161n2

Hoffmann, Bernd, 147

Göring, Hermann, 117–18, 130,

Holländer, Friedrich, 20, 30

137–38

“hot” dance music, 18, 20, 107–8

Gregori, Gregor, 168n15

Hutcheon, Linda, 8

Grosch, Nils, 152n7, 154n23

Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 131

Grosz, Wilhelm, 21 Gründgens, Gustaf, 125, 134, 166–67nn7–8, 168n15

impressionism, 36, 43, 104–5 “inner crisis,” jazz as, 28, 82, 87; in Nazism, 114, 118, 126, 127; in

Haller, Hermann, xiii, 65

Der Steppenwolf, 59, 62, 63, 73

Halliwell, Martin, 115, 119, 133

Irwin, May, 18

Hallo, Fräulein! (film), 170n2

Italy and jazz, 107

Hamann, Christof, 157n11 Handel, George Frideric, 83

jazz: as anti-music, xxiv, 91, 97;

Harlem Renaissance poetry, 21

blackness (African American

Hartung, Günther, 40

origin) and, xxi–xxiv, 4, 10,

Haydn, Joseph, 82–83

16, 18, 24–26, 29, 51, 62, 73,

Hedrich, Dorothee, 169n18

90, 93, 102–4, 109–11, 120,

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 4,

124, 130, 145–46; audience

65, 127

for, 28, 36, 51; as “cacophony,”

Herf, Jeffrey, 25–26

52, 117; complexity of, xvii, 50;

Hesse, Hermann, 57–87: “Classical

degeneration and, xxiv, 26, 51,

man” trope, 56, 58, 62, 63, 67,

55, 58, 61, 71, 123, 128, 142;

70–71, 73, 75–77, 80, 82; jazz

development and reception of

and, xxv, 48, 58, 61, 67–87,

in Germany, 10, 11–12, 16–30,

156n6, 157n11; “monkey’s trick”

92–93, 103, 123, 142, 149n6;

197

Index

drugs and, 5, 6–7, 20, 48; fascist

Kollo, Walter, 17

appropriation of, xiv, xvi, xxv, 15,

Kolischer, Hans, 21

29–30, 93, 96–97; “fun” quality

Kool, Jaap, 22

of, 34, 46, 56, 68, 91, 98–99; as

Kotin, Andriej, 158n19

gestic music, 38–40; improvi-

Kowalke, Kim H., 152n9, 153n18

sation in, 45, 49, 101; liberating

Kracauer, Siegfried, 25, 130

appeal of, xxiii, 23, 48, 53, 99;

Krenek, Ernst: Jonny spielt auf,

postwar German politics and,

xx, xxi–xxii, 19, 20, 22; “Ra-

xxvi, 141–46; racist iconography

dio-Blues,” 21; Zeitoper, 19

of, xxi–xxiii, 12, 146; sexuality

Kreutzer, Leo, 168n15

and, 6, 96–97; syncopation in,

Krukowski, Lucian, 161n5

14–15, 110; threat and danger

Kunstblatt, Der, 20

of, xxi, xxiii–xxiv; as urban

Kuntsjazz, 20, 33, 51, 52, 53, 70, 91,

phenomenon, 34, 35; vulgarity of, 44–47. See also white German

105, 143 Kuspit, Donald B., 97

(“Wagnerian”) jazz Jerger, Alfred, xx, xxi–xxii

Lacan, Jacques, 9

Jonny character, xx, xxi–xxii, 1, 19,

Lacoue-Labarthes, Philippe, 97,

20–22, 80, 120

99–100

Jost, Ekkehard, 147n1

Landgren, Gustav, 72

Judaism: blackness and, xxiii; jazz and,

Lennox, Sara, 147n1

xviii, xxii, xxiii, 26

Liszt, Franz, 27, 105 “little nigger girl” figure, 17, 21, 24, 79,

Kater, Michael, xvii–xix, 27, 141, 152n8

123, 131 Lotz, Rainer E., 147n1

Kiesel, Dagmar, 157n8

Lucchesi, Joachim, 153n17, 155n26

Kłańska, Maria, 159n21

Lutz-Pastre, Marianne, 141

Klink, Hermann, 17 Knauer, Wolfram, 147n1

Mahnkopf, Claus-Steffen, 162n11

Knufermann, Völker, 158n13

Mann, Klaus: African savagery and,

Koebner, Franz Wolfgang, xxii, 25

xxvi, 114, 127–28; blackness

Koepnick, Lutz, 11

and, 114, 116, 118, 120–22,

Kolischer, Hans, 21

124–27; dance and 114, 119,

198

Index

Mann, Klaus (continued)

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 58–59,

120, 122–23, 125, 133–34,

65–68, 71–72, 80–87, 91,

136–37; jazz and, 114–19,

158nn13–14, 159n21

122–23, 128, 130, 133, 137; propaganda and, 115–16, 124

Nazis: “inner crisis” of, 114, 118, 126,

WRITINGS: “Die Aufgabe des

127; jazz and, xiv, xvi, xxii–xxiv,

Schriftstellers in der gegen-

27–29, 107–8, 109, 114–19,

wärtigen Krise,” 116; “Haben

122–23, 128, 130, 138, 141–42;

die deutschen Intellektueller

in Mephisto, xxvi, 114, 116–39,

versagt?,” 116; “Homosexualität

168n11; Wagner and, 96, 162n9

und Faschismus,” 125; “Kunst

Negerfabel, 30, 93–94

und Politik,” 116; Mephisto, xxvi,

Negerkultur, xxiv, xxvi, 27, 28

80, 113–39; “Richard Wrights

Negermusik, 21, 107

Buch Black Boy,” 114; Treffpunkt

Negervitalität. See vitality

im Unendlichen, 169n15

Nelson, Rudolf, 17, 19

Mann, Thomas, 114–15, 126

Nesbitt, Nick, 163n13

march music and jazz, 91, 104, 105,

New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit),

108, 117, 130

23, 58, 100, 107

Martin, Peter, xiv–xv

Nichols, John N., 154n19

Matassi, Elio, 58

Nick, Edmund, 21

Mehring, Walter, 23

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 68–69

Mephisto (film version), 113, 167n10

Nigger-Jazz-Band, 12

Merz, Max, 28, 114

Nordau, Max, 55

Mileck, Joseph, 159n22

“nut jazz,” 29–30

minstrelsy, 10, 17, 103. See also blackface

Ohio Lido Venice Band, 12

Mischlinge (occupation children), xvi

Oppenheimer, Max, 30

“Misuk,” 32, 154n22

Ordinance Against Negro Culture, 28

modernity, 11, 16, 25; reactionary

Original Dixieland Jazz band, 18

modernism, 25–26, 96, 101,

Original Jazz Orchestra, 19

102, 135; in Der Steppenwolf,

Original Memphis Five, 19

64–65 Morely, Michael, 154n20

Paddison, Max, 163n14

199

Index

parody, 7–9, 41, 105, 108–9; Brecht

Rienäcker, Gerd, 39

and Weill and, 33–34, 151n6;

Robinson, J. Bradford, 90, 92

Hesse and, 60, 66, 73. See also

Rosen, Philip, 97

racial parody

Rosenberg, Alfred, 29

Pencak, William, 164n23

Rosenhaft, Eve, xv

Peukert, Detlev, 27

Ross Brothers, 18, 19

Pfister, Werner, 84, 160n25

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 65, 68

Pharmakon concept, 5–6, 46–49, 78, 80, 83, 101, 103, 104, 108, 122, 126 Plato, 5–6 primitivism, xiii, xiv, xxiii, xxvi, 24, 25, 30, 51, 150n9; in Adorno, 91, 96, 101–2, 110, 122, 130, 164n18;

Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 125–26, 131 sacrifice and scapegoating, 6, 108, 126–27 saxophones, 21–22, 95, 105–7, 143,

in Hesse, 58, 66, 69, 71, 72–73,

160n1; disdain for, xviii, 22,

75–76, 78, 122; in Mann, 114,

90–91, 94

121–22, 123, 124, 130 Probst, Rudolf, 160n24

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 4 Schiller, Dieter, 166n6 Schoenberg, Arnold, 21, 33, 98, 115,

racial parody, 9, 10, 12, 13, 21, 26–27,

165n24

61, 109; Mann’s reverse racial

Schöller, Wilfried F., 166n7

parody, 116, 118–22, 124, 127,

Scholz, H., xiii

130

Schulhoff, Erwin, 20

racial supremacy. See white supremacy

Schumacher, Ernst, 32

radio, xvi, 17, 28, 31–32, 34–35, 72,

Schwartz, Egom, 63, 156n6

78, 83–86, 152nn7–8

slavery, xv, xxvi, 99–100, 109–10

ragtime, 18, 20, 26

Southern Syncopated Orchestra, 19

Ravel, Maurice, 104, 105

spirituals, 100, 109–10

Reese, James, 18

Sprengel, Peter, 131–32

Reichskulturkammer, xvi

Stefan, Paul, 23

reproduction technology, 24, 34–35,

Stegmann, Vera Sonja, 32

72, 78, 83–86, 91, 132

Steinert, Heinz, 95

Revue nègre, La, 19

Steinerdancer, Jenny, 19

Rhineland occupation, 16–17

Stravinsky, Igor, 32, 108

200

Index

Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz, 20

Weill, Kurt: Brecht and, 21, 23,

Swales, Martin, 157n11

32–35, 37, 153n12, 153n18,

Sweatman, Wilbur, 19

155n24; composition style of,

swing music, 28, 29, 143

153n17, 154n23; jazz and, 21,

Szabó, István, 167n10

32, 34, 43; Happy End, 21; Jonny songs by, 21; Mahagonny Song-

Tauber, Richard, xiii

spiel, 23, 154n19; radio and, 34,

Thacker, Toby, 141–42

152nn7–8

Thewelweit, Klaus, 150n10

Weiner, Marc A., xix, xxi, xxiii

Townsend, Peter, 165n24

Weintraubs Syncopators, 30, 89 Weitzman, Ronald, 162

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), xv, 32, 150n7 utopianism, 23, 91, 95, 97, 101, 162–63nn10–12

white German (“Wagnerian”) jazz, xvii–xviii, xix, xxi, xxiv, 17, 28, 29–30, 92, 130, 162n10; Adorno and, 93, 96–99, 103, 105, 109; in

Verbot der Negermusik, 28, 117

postwar era, 144–46

Verjazzungen, 27, 96, 105, 123

Whiteman, Paul, 27

vitality, xxiii, 70, 101; Negervitalität,

white supremacy, xiv, xv

xxvi, 94, 102, 103–4, 105 Völker, Ludwig, 159n20

Wilhelm II, 18, 21, 24, 27, 125, 146 Wipplinger, Jonathan Otto, 11–13, 15, 16, 149n6

Wagner, Richard, xxiv, 27, 32, 105;

Witkin, Robert W., 97–98

Adorno and, 91, 95–96, 99,

Wooding, Sam, 12, 20

106, 120, 123, 160n1, 162n8;

Wright, Richard, 114

Hesse and, 58; Mann and, 123; National Socialism and, 96,

Zagorski, Marcus, 162n10

162n9. See also white German

Zemlinsky, Alexander, 21

(“Wagnerian”) jazz