(Ger.: ‘degenerate music’).
The term ‘entartete’ was coined in the 19th century by the doctor and criminologist Cesare Lombroso with reference to an abnormal condition akin to moral and spiritual deterioration. Adopted by the Nazis during the 1920s, it became a loosely defined technical concept with which to condemn modern culture that, according to Hitler, manifested symptoms of national decline. Thus atonal music, jazz and above all works by Jewish composers were branded as ‘degenerate’, though in fact during the Third Reich reactionary critics applied the term indiscriminately to a wide variety of styles from the avant garde to popular operetta, particularly if the composer was deemed politically or racially unacceptable to the regime.
Following the example of the notorious Entartete Kunst art exhibition in Munich in 1937, Nazi cultural politicians mounted an Entartete Musik exhibition the following year in Düsseldorf in connection with the first Reichsmusiktage (‘National Music Days’). Among the exhibits were portraits of ‘defamed’ composers (Schoenberg, Webern, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Weill, Krenek, Reutter), under which were printed crude slogans attacking the character and racial origin of each, theoretical works and articles by Schoenberg, Hindemith, Weissmann and others, scores by Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Weill, Krenek, Schreker, Eisler, Berg, Toch and Reutter, discredited modern music journals such as Melos and Anbruch, and books on jazz. In addition, special listening booths were installed in the middle of the exhibition hall to allow the general public to hear recordings of some of the music that was being publicly ostracized.
Essentially the brainchild of Hans Severus Ziegler, the director of the Weimar National Theatre, the exhibition was assembled rather hastily and without an accompanying catalogue. Nonetheless, Ziegler published an inflammatory pamphlet entitled Entartete Musik–eine Abrechmung (Düsseldorf, n.d.) as an adjunct to the exhibition, describing the event as a ‘veritable witches’ sabbath portraying the most frivolous intellectual and artistic concepts of Cultural Bolshevism … and the triumph of arrogant Jewish impudence’.
Although it received far less public attention than Entartete Kunst, the Entartete Musik exhibition aroused controversy in the musical world and did not meet with the unequivocal approval of Peter Raabe, the president of the Reichsmusikkammer. Ziegler later moved the exhibition to Weimar, but it was never revived in other German cities.
In 1988, fifty years after its inauguration, the musicologist Albrecht Dümling and impresario Peter Girth reconstructed the Entartete Musik exhibition in Düsseldorf, in order to remind later generations of the evils perpetrated by fascist cultural politicians (catalogue ed. A. Dümling and P. Girth, Entartete Musik: eine kommentierte Rekonstruktion, Düsseldorf, 1988). The exhibition was shown in several countries throughout the world, and was instrumental in inspiring the Decca record company to issue their Entartete Musik series devoted to the work of many composers who were proscribed by the Nazis.
See also Nazism.
ERIK LEVI