Saturday Afternoon: Music of the Third Reich

Published by carolyn on Sat, 2014-11-01 18:53

Nov. 1, 2014

Margaret Huffstickler returns after too long of an absence with a wide range of music styles and performers that personify the cultural life during the National-Socialist period. We begin with composer-conductor Richard Strauss and singers Jussi Björling, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Heinrich Schlusnus, plus Gerhard Huesch and Rudolf Schock (pictured at right in top hat).

We play two degenerate composers to give you an idea of what the Third Reich didn't allow in its concert halls or on it's record labels ... by the Jew Schoenberg and the communist Hindemith. For the intermission, we play the full 11 minutes of Wilhelm Furtwaengler conducting Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" on the Fuehrer's birthday when he is in the audience.

Following that we feature Erna Berger, Hermann Prey and Hans Albers with more popular-type music, ending with Heinrich Spitta singing a Hitler Jugend song. As an encore, the incomparable Zarah Leander.

Much appreciation to Margaret Huffstickler for bringing this musical show to us. 2hr9min


Why would you call Schoenberg's music degenerate?
He had great affinity for the German composers. His Theory of Harmony treatise was based on Bach's music.  To dislike is one thing, degenerate is unfair.  He had great knowledge and was an experimental composer.  This is why sometimes I become disillusioned with revisioists, not all so called Jews are bad.

To "Jim" on Schoenberg (taken from my blog
Hitler’s views, and mine and Margi’s, is that Schoenberg’s music [Photo] is simply horrible-sounding! 
But Adolf Hitler also banned White, Gentile, Aryan composers for the same crime. Music affects the psyche on a deep level, either producing harmony, strength, joy, happiness and courage, OR inducing chaos, lower animal lusts, confusion, anger and rage.  Look at how young people ACT after listening to rap! Music is important to the health of a society…
Over 100,000 Jews served in the German military under Hitler: he was NOT blindly anti-Jewish!
A major Establishment book appeared not long ago, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, by Frederick Spotts, and written as a smear of Hitler, with constant references to the Holocaust.
However, it contains a gold mine of facts about how passionate Hitler was about painting, art, music and architecture and really just how Hitler’s own nature was individualistic and artistic.
Hitler was fundamentally NOT a general (he was never promoted above corporal despite four years of combat in WWI and winning two Iron Crosses) or a politician and shmoozer — in fact, he was uneasy with people, shy and ill at ease doing small talk, which is why he tended to do monologues.  He was not good at give-and-take and chitchat.
Hitler was deep, very deep, and most of all, he was the heir to the very German view, expressed by Friedrich Schiller in his essay “On the Esthetic Education of Mankind,” that high art changes behavior at a deep level.
Stands at the Zeppelin Field for the Nuremberg NSDAP rallies: the Spotts book, though tediously, relentlessly hostile to Hitler, makes it clear that HITLER designed these buildings, not Speer!
The book shows that no ruler since the Italian popes in the Middle Ages or the Medici family in Florence did more for the arts than did Adolf Hitler.
Scan of the last page of the Spotts book

"Over 100,000 Jews served in the German military under Hitler: he was NOT blindly anti-Jewish!"

Hitler was completely anti-Jewish when it came to German society. Most of those so-called "100,000 Jews in the German military" had so little jew in them they didn't even know it themselves. And they weren't "under Hitler." He did not pick them out, but it was a Wehrmacht process. The Wehrmacht selected from all of society and they were part of German society. Many were following family histories of military careers.

In the SS it was a different story - backgrounds were checked carefully and those with Jewish blood were rejected out of hand, unless they could show very special circumstances. Do your catering to Jews somewhere else, John.

By the way, your pictures didn't show up; I didn't remove them. Best to link to whatever pictures one wants to use to augment one's comment.

Margaret has a master's degree from Catholic University in Washington DC, which has a very strong music program. (Unlike the fraud and defamer Rodney Martin, she -- and I -- can fully document our academic credentials!) 

 Here is Margaret singing a beautiful Irihs art song (from 12:25 on!)

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