Patrick Bade
Culture in the Third Reich

Patrick Bade - Culture in the Third Reich

- Well, I’m back in a very sunny Paris, as you can perhaps see. I spent a highly enjoyable week in Munich with a small group of lockdown alumni from Canada. And during that week, I also had the great privilege really of being present at a very moving ceremony in the Stadt Museum in Munich. The scholars in these German museums are these days very diligent in trying to track down objects in their collection, which were obtained during the Third Reich under dubious circumstances. And they discovered that they had in this collection, this 14th century gothic sculpture, which had belonged to the Rosenthal family. They’re important art dealers in Munich in the 1930s, and in 1935, they were forced to sell all their possessions. So the museum contacted the family and it was a very, very warm, and I would say very moving occasion. In this photograph you can see academics from the museum and members of the family. So ironically, you could say in view of its past or perhaps because of its past of course, I would say Munich is one of the best places in the world today to be Jewish. You are assured of a warm and respectful welcome. So I’m going back today course to uglier times in the 1930s. I’m going to look at culture under the Third Reich. You might think that that is a contradiction in terms. Goebbels famously said, “Every time I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.” In fact, the Nazis had considerable respect for the power of culture, and they wanted of course to control it and to subvert it. What you’re looking at here now is an image of the burning of books in Berlin in 1935, authors such as Freud, Einstein, Stefan Zweig, their books were publicly burned.

This is a design by the modernist architect, and at this point, former director of the Bauhaus, Mies van der Rohe, it was a competition in 1934 for a new Reichsbank. Now, Mies van der Rohe would, like many people, would probably have been perfectly happy to stay in Nazi Germany and work there, if they’d been willing to accept him. Hitler had a great interest in architecture, but he detested modernism, he detested everything that the Bauhaus stood for. So it’s unsurprisingly, this design did not win the competition. In fact, Mies van der Rohe hung around in Germany until 1937 before he realised he was never going to get any further commissions and then went to the United States. So I think not necessarily for moral or political reasons. One of the things that has questions, which has often intrigued me is, how would the history of architecture post-war have turned out if Hitler and the Nazis had embraced modernism, embraced the Bauhuas aesthetic. Instead, of course, they embraced a kind of monumental classicism, and that was rejected after the war. And when European cities were rebuilt after the war, it was the Bauhaus aesthetic that trumped for good or bad. This is the Reichsbank, as it was actually built under the Nazis. As I said, Hitler was very fascinated by architecture and had completely megalomaniac architectural plans for the rebuilding of Berlin. On the right hand side you can see him with his favourite architect Albert Speer, and it was Albert Speer in particular, who was involved in this project for the rebuilding of Berlin.

This is what Berlin would have looked like if the Germans had won the war. It was going to be a new city called Germania, full of these huge, as I said, monumental classical buildings, ‘cause there are similar buildings in other cities, particularly in Italy, but everywhere. Actually in London we have Senate House, in Paris they have the top in 1937 exhibition, even New York, of course, the Rockefeller Centre is not totally distant in style from this kind of monumental classicism. These projects didn’t get very far, because of the outbreak of war. But the one building, very prestigious building, built very, very rapidly. Actually, in about a year, was the new Chancery, the Reichskanzlei completed in 1939, which was the design of Albert Speer, was magnificent. You can see the rich marbles, rich materials and everything overscaled. Everything is designed to make the person entering the building feel small and insignificant. This great gallery clearly inspired by the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles, which of course twice had played such an important role in German history in 1870 with the Declaration of the Second German Reich. And then in 1918, of course, with the Treaty of Versailles. These are rare early colour photographs. Give you some idea of what it looks like. This is Hitler’s office in the, the Reichskanzlei. Another great building project that was completed is the airport at Tempelhof. This is the work of an architect called Earnst Sagebiel. This is what it looked like. What this, as you can see, is a model. This is what it actually looked like, but apart from these huge public buildings, architectural taste in the Third Reich, was very reactionary and rather kitchy. As you can see, this is a house built for the Hitler youth. And well, it’s harmless enough, I suppose. It’s actually not that unlike the house of my grandparents in Bognor Regis, which was in a style that the English call Stockbrokers Tudor. The only modern thing in my grandparent, everything was sort of old oak beams, and so on. Any modern thing, of course, was the bathroom.

The Nazis were prepared to embrace modernist design under certain very special circumstances. I mean, this looks really very Bauhaus, doesn’t it? With its tubular metal furniture. It’s actually the interior of the Zeppelin, the Hindenburg, which of course was the great pride of the German fleet in the 1930s. This is a photograph I show you to show the incredible scale of this thing. And you see little, tiny, tiny people underneath it. And this shows you how big it is compared to a modern airliner. And compared to the biggest ocean liner of the 1930s, the Queen Elizabeth. Here it is floating over the Olympic stadium in 1936 in Berlin and arriving gracefully and beautifully. It’s a very sleek object, isn’t it? Very Art decker, this sort of shiny streamlined shape, rather phallic, you could say, floating over New York, minutes before of course, it’s disastrous end. Whenever there’s moving footage of this, you can see it if you want, on YouTube and hear the horrified commentary of the journalist who is filming the arrival of the Hindenburg. And you can actually see people dropping out of the flaming airship, astonishing really, that anybody survived. But in fact, quite a number of people did survive this disaster. Well, here is Adolph Hitler in 1934 speaking at the 1934 Nuremberg rally. And in this he addressed modern culture and he denounced all forms of modernism in the visual arts. And Germany had been so rich, so exciting, you know, from the beginning of the century with the Brooker, with the Blue Rider, Munich of course, Kandinsky, all the German expressionist. And all the way through the 1920s, Berlin was a serious, serious rival to Paris as the most exciting artistic capital in the world. All that shut down overnight.

Many artists driven into exile, particularly of course if they were Jewish, but also many “Aryan artists” went into exile, or if they didn’t, they went into what the Germans called inner exile. They just had to completely disappear from view. And many of them had bans, they were forbidden to create and forbidden to exhibit. So I’m going to play you this. I hope this won’t upset you too much. It’s the voice of Hitler. Very, very calculated. You can see there’s a very calculated crescendo, starting off, sounding reasonable even. But just gradually building up in a crescendo into absolute insane hysteria once he gets to mentioning the names of the various art movements, cubism, futurism, expressionism, he just goes completely apeshit hysterical. You probably heard enough, so I’m going to move on. The most notorious event as far as a visual arts are concerned in the Third Reich was the Entartete Kunst exhibition. It started in Munich in 1937, and then it toured various German cities over the next year. In some ways it was very brilliant in its presentation. While denouncing dada and expressionism and futurism, it actually made use of methods devised by these, as you can see really in the wall behind Hitler here, the use of the script and the interaction between text and image. So the theme of the Degenerate Art Exhibition was that all modern art movements showed signs of mental and physical degeneration. And so they’re comparing the distortions of expressionist artists with the faces of people suffering from various illnesses and so on. This is the kind of art of course that they’re presenting instead. And I suppose in a certain way, it’s reassuring how bad it is, how banal, how incredibly feeble. This painting, actually, I saw last week.

They put it up in the Pinakothek Der Moderne in Munich with screeds of text next to it, you know. I think the Germans right up until now, they’re incredibly nervous about showing this kind of art. You know, I mean, all these paintings that won medals and were exhibited during Nazi period, of course immediately in 1945, they went, they were tucked away in cellars and underneath the museum. And they’re only now rather nervously beginning to bring them out. I mean, they’re harmless enough in a way. Ideal nudes, sort of back to nature, back to the land with these pictures of happy peasants, happy families presenting family values. I mean, you’d say, well, what’s wrong with family values? It’s really the use that is made of the term and the philosophy by unscrupulous politicians. Sculpture was literally big in the Nazi period. I mean, big in the sense that the Nazis put enormous emphasis on sculpture more than on painting. And it’s also big in terms of size. This is the studio of one of the top Nazi sculptors, Josef Thorak. And as you can see at the bottom it says, engrosen atelier der welt, the biggest studio in the world. It needed to be to create these monster sculptures. Here is Thorak working on one of his works. Perhaps his most famous works were the two horses that were outside the Reichskanzlei. And they disappeared after the war. Many assumed that they’d been melted down, but in fact they had been hidden and they were discovered, they were offered on a kind of black market in 2015. And they were, there was a police raid and they were confiscated. And there was a huge fuss in the papers. And as always in these situations, a controversy. What do you do with these things? Do you melt them down? Do you, you certainly don’t want them on the art market. You don’t want them to be misused and should they be exhibited.

So there was this huge, huge fuss about them. Here they are. And then rather astonishingly, it turned out that there had been an exact replica of one of these horses from Thorak Studio that was standing there in the courtyard of a school in Bavaria. And it had been there, you know, ever since the war with nobody even noticing it, or taking any notice. Here it is in the middle of a school in Bavaria. But the most famous Nazi sculptor was undoubtedly Arno Breker. He was the favourite of Hitler. He was, I think technically, certainly quite a gifted sculptor. He was the pupil of the great French sculptor Aristide Maillol. And I mean, that’s a story I’ve told before. I think about when Maillol’s favourite model, Dina Vierny, she was Jewish and she was captured by the Nazis and destined for a concentration camp. And Maillol went to Breker and pleaded with him. Breker was actually able to save her. I dunno whether you think that’s, well it’s certainly a point in his favour, but whether it makes up for much, I’m not sure. Here he is in his studio again with these monstrous, oversized sculptures. I think he was quite a gifted portraitist and actually was able to continue his career as a portraitist after the Second World War. And here he is making a portrait bust of Albert Speer. This is a goodwill visit of French artists to Berlin in 1941. And they were taken round Breker’s studio. Maillol didn’t go, but many distinguished French artists, Dora, Vlaminck, Vandongen, Belmondo. They did go and they went to Breker’s studio. So there was a huge emphasis in Nazis sculpture on the ideal nude, the ideal body. It’s an obsession with the Nazis. And it’s, kind of a bit of a joke really when you think about it, 'cause oh, and a big, big element I would say of homoeroticism in Nazi art. This is, again, very ironic when you think that homosexuals were persecuted by the Nazis.

Many went to concentration camps, many died in concentration camps. They wanted to weed out homosexuality as they wanted to destroy the Jews. But there is, when I wrote my book and I was watching lots of movies from the period, I was aware of a very, very strong undertone of homoeroticism in German movies of the Nazi period and in the propaganda museums and in the art of the period. Somebody who picked up on it was the Dada artist Willi Baumeister who did this mocking graffito I think you could describe it as over illustration of a sculpture by Arno Breker. So here, this is the ideal Aryan nude. And it is a bit of a joke really when you think of what the Nazi leadership actually looked like. I mean, they weren’t going to win any male beauty contests, Goebbels, Goring, Hitler, and Himmler. They were pretty unlikely specimens of ideal Aryan manhood. This cult of the body, of course had its apotheosis in 1936 when Germany was awarded the Olympic Games. This is the stadium that was built for those games. And it didn’t turn out quite as Hitler wanted. The Germans did very badly. The only category in which the Germans won gold medals was in the equestrian categories though, the riding. Certainly they didn’t do very well in the athletics. And to Hitlers great chagrin , the hero of the 1936 Olympics was of course Jesse Owens who won four medals. Here you can see him refusing very pointedly, the two Black athletes here are the only ones not doing the Nazi salute. And well, I’m glad to say I’m a little bit relieved, maybe proud to say that the British team refused to do the Nazi salute in 1936, whereas the French team did give the Nazi salute. Now I’m going to move on to music. And of course, Germany prided itself as being the land of music. And they called England, they called Das land ohne musik, the land without music.

But so many of the leading German composers went into exile for instance. And actually apart Strauss is the great exception. 'Cause right at the end of his life, he was still really at the end of the Second World War and after he was producing some of his greatest music and he remained in Germany, but in a sense he wasn’t in Germany 'cause he was really in his own little bubble, really oblivious of what was going on around him. And otherwise, there’s remarkably little music, written under the Third Reich, that has survived. I would say actually there’s rather more English music, with, you know, music of Benjamin Briton, Michael Tippet, William Walton, and many others, which is still not just in the British repertoire, but in the international repertoire. I stressed in my last two lectures, of course, the immense loss to German musical life, with huge immigration. And I showed you this photograph of Toscanini visiting Berlin in 1931 with the four great German conductors, Bruno Walter, Erich Kleiber, Otto Klemperer and Wilhelm Furtwangler. Of those only Furtwangler was still in Germany by 1935. So the Germans tried to harness, tried to organise or the Nazis, I don’t mean the Germans, the Nazis tried to harness and organise German musical life with Reichsmusikkammer. And Goebbels diary is interesting really for its commentary on German musical life. Here is Strauss, who was briefly appointed the president of the Reichsmusikkammer. Didn’t last very long, because the Nazi authorities opened a letter that he had written to Stefan Zweig. They intercepted a letter in which he expressed his utter contempt for Nazi ideas about musical creativity.

Germany still had a lot of musical talent as far as performers were concerned, but it was a bit of a case of dead men’s shoes with so many great conductors leaving the country, not just the ones I mentioned, but many, many others. There were opportunities for ambitious and unscrupulous young conductors like Carl Bohm and Herbert Von Karajan, who you see either side of Furtwangler in this image. They were incredibly blessed in a way, I use that word rather carefully. And they were in the sense that, as I said, they were given these opportunities by the… Suddenly the whole generation of all the conductors has disappeared. So that gave them… Their careers got a huge leg up in the thirties. There was a very brief period at the end of the Second World War when Bohm and Karajan were both forbidden to perform. And it could have been the end of their careers. What came to their rescue a second time, of course, was the Cold War. And suddenly Russia is the enemy, that particularly the Americans are worried about. And really under pressure from America all these old collaborators and Nazis were very quickly forgiven. Furtwangler, I’m going to devote a whole talk to him, coming up soon. And it’s a very, very complicated case. I think one can say clearly that he wasn’t a Nazi and didn’t sympathise with Nazi ideas. But for whatever reason, naivety, ambition, he allowed himself to be used by the Nazis. And in particular the Berlin Philharmonic, they became the most important cultural ambassadors for the Third Reich. Contrary to what was said in that documentary, the maestro and the cellist of Auschwitz, Furtwangler was actually very strict about where he would conduct and where he wouldn’t, and he refused to conduct in occupied countries.

But on the other hand, he did take the Berlin Philharmonic to neutral countries, like Sweden. So the Germans wanted to maintain, they hugely supported classical music, opera, cultural life. And they wanted to keep it going to the very last minute in the Second World War, unlike the British who shut down the two opera houses in London, immediately that war broke out. Covent Garden was used as a dance hall. And Sadler’s Wells was used as a sort of hostel for people who’d been bombed out. But the Germans tried as far as possible to keep all their opera houses going. There were three Berlin houses here, Staatsoper, the Stadtische Oper, and the Charlottenburg Opera. Here is the Staatsoper unter den Linden. And despite the loss of so many great singers that I talked about before, Friedrich Shaw and Lota Scherna and so on, Evert Janssen, the standard of the Berlin Opera was the musical standard. The performing standard was extremely high. Here we see Thomas Beecham on the right hand side on a tour of Germany. He was courted by the Nazis. I know you’ve had talks already, I think from Helen about the sympathies of the British aristocracy in upper classes, poor Hitler and the Nazis. The Nazis, I think, overestimated Beecham’s importance and his influence.

But Goebbels went all out to lead him on. He arranged debuts for Beecham’s mistress, Dora Labbette in all the leading German opera houses, and ensured that she got rave reviews and he lent Beecham the Berlin Philharmonic for the first ever complete recording of Die Zauberflote, the Magic Flute. This is a recording, well, as I’ve known it since I was a child. And in many ways it’s a wonderful performance. But I find it extremely frustrating. The original plans, when it was His Master’s Voice wanted to record it, initially with Reisha Tauba as Tamino with Kit Niss as Sorastro, with Herbert Janssen as the speaker. But by the time it came to be recorded in 1937, all three of those could not go back to Nazi Germany. We got instead we got, well some, still some fine singers. Gianna Latinetz, who is really a red hot Nazi and Rose Wanger who I talked about before, who was certainly a collaborator, if not necessarily a Nazi believer. So radio, 'cause radio was a new thing. Really, it’s only since the early 1920s that radio stations had operated. But Goebbels was, I know, I think David’s talked about Goebbels’ genius for publicity for propaganda. And Goebbels realised the importance of radio and these maps, they’re from a French proper collaborationist museum during the Second World War, show how German radio stations are all over the place and can be received all over the place. And there were special radio sets. You see one on the right hand side that were called Reichsempfanger, the Reich receivers. And you can only tune in to German stations. You could not tune into foreign stations on these receivers. And I’m going to play you, first of all, the introduction to a concert from the late 1930s. It’s a concert of Operetta, the works of Lehar that I just play you the introduction that shows you the importance and how these radio programmes were received all the way around the World.

CLIP BEGINS

• [Radio Presenter] Reichsenders are broken. And the Reichsenders, Breslau, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munchen, the Deutschlandsender and the Deutsche . Ladies and gentlemen, the Reichsenders of Britain presents a concert of works by Fran Lehar, the member of the German Opera House in Berlin, and member of the State Opera in Berlin. The orchestra of the Reichsenders of Britain, conducted by Franz Lehar is playing for you. We have pleasure in greeting the listeners of the and the listeners of the broadcasting companies of the following countries, the British Broadcasting Corporation, London, Italy, were the stations of the second programme, Hungary, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Lithuania, France with Radio 37 in Paris, Finland, the Flemish broadcasting section in Belgium, the Swiss station, Belminster and Station sat up in Montevideo, Uruguay. We wish you a good reception of our programme. Reichsenders are broken.

CLIP ENDS

• So this, ooh, I think I’ve got my images in the wrong order, but nevermind. This is Carl Orff. He is of course a rather controversial figure. I mentioned before that there was remarkably little new music of any quality, music that has lasted since the Second World War that came out of Nazi Germany. There are really only two pieces of music that gained universal currency after the war. That, and I’m setting aside Strauss, as I said, as his own, his own little bubble. And they are Orff’s Carmina Burana and the song Lili Marlene of Norbit Schultzer, which somehow jumped enemy lines and was adopted by every country. But I don’t want to spoil Carmina Burana for you, ‘cause, you know, so many people love it. And in its way it’s an incredibly effective piece. But it is definitely a piece I think that expresses the aesthetic of the Nazi period. When it was premiered in 1937, it was ecstatically greeted by the of the Olbachter with the leading Nazi propaganda magazine. And it was proclaimed as the clear ardent and disciplined music required for our time. Popular music was also very important to the Nazis and they wanted to control it. And they wanted to use it. And in particular, both Hitler and Goebbels loved Operetta. Here you see Goebbels with Franz Lehar bedecked with medals. Now, Lehar had a complex and difficult relationship with the regime. His wife was Jewish, they had been living in Berlin, but when the Nazis took part, they returned to Austria. But then of course, in 1938, the Nazis caught up with them. And I think Lehar by this time was very old and he didn’t want to leave his house and leave everything behind.

And he relied very heavily on the protection of Goebbels to save his wife. In fact, there were two occasions when the Gestapo turned up intending to take away his wife. Goebbels had given Lehar his private telephone number. So when this happened, he was able to ring up Goebbels directly and get him to talk with the officers who’d come to arrest. Oops, I’ve set off. This is Marcel Victories. This is actually from that concert that was announced earlier. This is Marcel Victory, a favourite tenor of Hitler in the Merry Widow. in marvellously languorous fashion by the composer himself, Franz Lehar. I suspect that Hitler really preferred the Merry Widow to or Tristan is older. Just before the outbreak of war, there was a run of the Merry Widow in Berlin with the Dutch tenor, Johannes Heesters, who you see on the right hand side. And Hitler attended no less than six times, six performances of the Merry Widow with Johannes Heesters. I said popular music and Operetta was a problem to the Nazis because so many of the composers were Jewish. So amongst all five of these leading operetta composers left Germany in the Nazi period. Oscar Strauss, Paul Abraham, who else is there? There’s Ralph Benatzky, Robert Stolz, and Emmerich Kalman. In fact, Stolz and Benatzky were not Jewish. Benatzky’s wife was, but Stolz left simply because he was utterly disgusted by the Nazis. I think probably Oscar Strauss and Paul Abraham were beyond the pale as far as the Nazis were concerned. But certainly the Nazis went to great lengths to try and lure Robert Stolz back again. And they even offered honorary Aryan status to Emmerich Kalman when he was in Paris on the way to America as a refugee. So this left really these two composers in the area of Operetta.

And they, this is Eduard Kunneke and Paul Lincke. And I’d like to play you a little excerpt of Kunneke, who’s music I like actually very much. It’s an interesting story. He joined the Nazi party immediately that the Nazis took power in 1933, probably more as, well, partly maybe to aid his career, maybe as a precaution. He was actually expelled the following year in 1934, because he refused to divorce his Jewish wife. So my guess is he may have thought that joining the party would be some kind of protection for her. In fact, they both survived the war. Although he came into difficulty with the Nazis again at the end of the war when his daughter, Evelyn Kunneke, who was a popular singer, was arrested and imprisoned for anti-Nazi activities. His most popular Operetta, Der Vetter aus Dingsda. That in fact the Operetta itself predated the Nazi period, but it was turned into a film in 1934. And here is a song from Der Vetter aus Dingsda sung by Peter Anders. So in 1937, the axis was formed between Italy and Germany. In some ways it was very unexpected because they had rival ambitions in the Alpine area. There were German speaking parts of Italy that Germany coveted and so on. In fact, Hitler and Mussolini were driven into each other’s arms by the actions of the British and the French. In 1936, Italy had invaded Abyssinia and the French and the British took sanctions against them, boycotted Italy. And I think of this when, you know, I wonder really, I mean South Africans will probably have something to say about this, some listeners, whether you think that boycotts ever work, or whether they are actually sometimes counterproductive.

They certainly were in this case. And so 1937 Mussolini goes to Germany and he’s received with open arms. And this is unter den Linden, all got up to receive Mussolini in 1937. And as a goodwill gesture between the two countries, Mussolini sends the opera company of La Scala to Germany and they travel from Milan to Munich. Here they are leaving the station in Milan on the way to Munich. They arrive, they perform in Munich, and then they go on to Berlin and the entire company of La Scala are given a guided tour of Berlin. And they are taken to render homage to the statue of Wagner. So what do these wonderful Italians do? They spontaneously burst into a rendition of the chorus of the Hebrew slaves from Nabucco. I’d love to have seen the expressions on the faces of the Nazis present at that moment. And a gala performance of Aida was given at the Staatoper attended by Goebbels and Hitler. Goebbels is absolutely ecstatic about it in his diaries about how wonderful this performance was. And here we can see the audience all doing the Nazi salute performance. Here is the conductor, Victor de Sabata, who taken over from Toscanini being introduced to Hitler. His Jewish ancestry, conveniently forgotten throughout this period. And he conducts a completely thrilling performance of Aida. It’s an absolute white heat intensity all the way through. And we can tell because there is… The performance was broadcast and has been preserved. And you can actually get it on CD, I’m sure you can hear it on YouTube and I’ll play you an excerpt of the climax of the Nile Duet with Beniamino Gigli and Gina Cigna, really going at it hammer-and-tongs.

And when there’s a pause in the music, you can hear the audience goes absolutely crazy with enthusiasm. And the audience really sounds like a Nuremberg rally. As I said, the Germans kept their opera houses going right up until the declaration of total War in the summer of 1944, then the theatres were closed down. And the Berlin State Opera was actually destroyed twice during the war. On a very early bombing raid it was almost accidentally set on fire and destroyed, a British bombing raid in 1941. And so important was it considered that in the midst of the war it was painstakingly rebuilt and restored. And it was opened, actually with rather disastrous, reopened, with rather disastrous timing at the end of January, 1943, of course, at the turning point of the war. And apparently that was supposedly a festive occasion that was really rather dampened by the knowledge of everybody in the know, all the top Nazis, that in fact Stalingrad was on the point of falling to the Russians, which it did just a few days later. And this is the second destruction of the Opera House in 1945. So Berlin suffered over 360 bombing raids. So this is what Berlin looked like by the end of the war. Just a heap of ruins. So my next little excerpt is a performance of Rigoletto that’s recorded in Berlin in November, 1944. You think, well where did they even find a recording studio?

Where did they find a building with a roof on in Berlin 1944. And the Germans were, the Nazis were so keen to continue broadcasts of opera right into 1945. It shows you how important they thought it was. Another point I’d like to make is that actually Verdi was far more performed than Wagner was in the Nazi period. And the Nazis may have claimed to love Wagner and they made him into a hero and a kind of proto Nazi. But actually I think they found him quite difficult. And I think the problem is the ring in particular is so complicated, it’s so ambiguous. It’s so full of contradictions, moral contradictions. And I think the Nazis actually had quite a hard time with these. Verdi, you know, of course it’s much more black and white, isn’t it, much more straightforward. Anyway, this is the final scene of Rigoletto sung in German with the wonderful Erna Berger. I met her when she was 89 years old and we had long, long conversations. One day we talked for seven hours nonstop. There were certain questions at that point, I didn’t dare. These days I would perhaps press her a bit more and ask her more questions about what it was like in the Nazi period. But I suppose I didn’t really dare to do it then. But I mean, she was somebody you couldn’t dislike. She had a kind of innocence about her and a kind of sweetness. And you had to really do a double take, think this is a woman who had been, who was a favourite singer of Hitler and had sung in his birthday concerts and so on.

But here she is the absolute embodiment of sweetness and innocence in the final scene of Rigoletto. And one of the great mysteries of the Second World War is, why did the Germans keep fighting when it was so clear, it was absolutely crystal clear, really from Stalingrad onwards, that’s the beginning of 1943, that they were going to lose the war. A great regret is of course, that the bomb plot of the summer of 1944 didn’t kill Hitler. I mean, if the war had stopped in the summer of '44, if that plot had succeeded, the whole of Hungarian Jewry would’ve been saved, millions of lives would’ve been saved. And also talking from a strictly sort of, cultural point of view, the major destruction to the German cities would have been involved. Well, one of the tactics that Hitler used to keep the German populace in the war was the promise of the wonder weapons. 'Cause German technology was extraordinary. They developed the jet engine too late really to make a very significance, well to the war. And Hitler was promising German technology was so fantastic. They had colour photography before anybody else did. They had magnetic tape before anybody amongst the allied nations had magnetic tape. And Hitler was promising people that he had all these magical wonder weapons that was going to completely change the course of the war. Of course the one thing he did that prevented that happening was rejecting nuclear physics as Jewish science.

If the Germans had kept their Jewish scientists, and if they developed a nuclear bomb ahead of the Americans, then they might really have changed the outcome of the war. I’m saying all this because I want to play you a remarkable recording that was made at the end of January, 1945. So this is really the end of the war. It’s the moment that Auschwitz is liberated and discovered. And here is the very fine pianist, Walter Gieseking participating in an experimental stereo recording of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. And so again, where did they find a studio with a roof on that they could do this experimental recording? But the quality of the sound is a decade ahead of anything else in the world. I mean, it wouldn’t be till what nearly, well no, it wouldn’t be till the end of the 1940s that stereo recording was introduced outside of Germany. And so crystal clear, is this recording. I hope some of you have got really good sound equipment. You’ll be able to hear this, that in the cadenza you can actually very, very clearly hear the anti-aircraft fire in the distance. Right well, I’m going to move on now and see what you’ve got to say and ask.

Q&A and Comments:

Mies van der Rohe moved to the US when he got the commission to build a Seagram Building in New York City, thanks to the pleading of Phyllis Bronfman Lambert with whom he was having an affair, she convinced her father. That’s a very interesting little sideline on that.

Thank you very much. The family. Yes, of course there are many parallels between the art favoured by the Nazis and the art favoured by Stalin in the 1930s. Those happy peasants could be interchangeable.

This is Karen, looking at the element of homoeroticism, a macho in Nazi art makes me wonder how much of the neo-Nazi movement of the US is driven by. Hmm. That’s a very contentious thing to say, isn’t it? Very, I’m not sure about that. I don’t think you could say that it’s… You might say that there is an element of very suppressed homosexuality in these movements, but I don’t think you can say it’s driven by homosexuality. Under Hitler’s homosexuals were forced to wear pink triangles. Yes, they were persecuted as the Jews were.

My book was called Music Wars and the theme, I’ve written lots of books, but the book I was referring to was about music in the Second World War.

This is Monty saying that his cousin survived Dachau. He and his mates, fellow survivors flourished there. They were so successful in their activities that the Americans eventually gave them an ultimatum. You have to leave, Palestine or the USA, he chose the latter. I’d like to hear more about that actually. I’d like to know what date that was and more about those circumstances. Am I aware that there’s recently a documentary created about the… I’m sure there’ve been lot… I’d like to know more about that too, but I’m sure there must have been many documentaries about the Nazi movie business. And of course I’m going to be talking about it myself on Sunday.

No, the London Opera houses were not shut down because I mean, other theatres were open. The Albert Hall was used, the Queen’s hall, which actually was bomb and destroyed. But luckily not with an audience present.

No, it was just, I don’t think there were, but for the British opera was not high up the list of priorities.

Thank you Sheila. You, gosh, that would’ve been weird hearing the Jerusalem oratorio sing Carmina Burana. Do you know I find that actually really odd, you know, that Wagner should be banned and that Carmina Burana should be performed. Doesn’t make any sense to me at all.

Kami Burana, well, Nazis didn’t mind ribaldry why I say that, because Hitler could be really quite broodish. But, yes, and there’s a lot more to be said of course about Carmina Burana and about Carl Orff. He claimed after the war to have been involved in the German resistance. But apparently that is completely untrue.

Yes, Lehar’s Jewish wife did survive the war thanks to Goebbels. This is Barry. I’m surprised that Hitler did not make all Germans convert to Judaism because of their talent. Well, certainly there are two ways in which the Germans, I would say, tied a hand behind their back in the war. One was that they refused to make use of women in the way that the British and the Americans did. And of course, getting rid of such a talented element in the population certainly made a huge difference. The details of the Aida, it is conducted by Victor de Sabata, it stars Gigli and Gina Cigna. And I think if you put that into Google, or if you put it into YouTube, it should come up. Performance is of June, 1937.

The name of the singer was Erna Berger. Erna Berger, she wrote a very interesting and relatively honest, I would say, autobiography in which she castigates herself in fact for not having done more to find out about the fate of Jewish colleagues who disappeared. I have seen the movie Tar and I appreciated it with some mixed feelings. I’d recommend seeing it, but I wouldn’t give it a total 10 out of 10.

This is, oh, hi Jonathan, your uncle who died before his hundredth birthday last surviving exhibitor in the, well, I don’t suppose he was a willing exhibitor, was he? That he would’ve been exhibited without his choice. I have talked about Theresienstadt. That is a talk that I’ve given several times and yet no doubt it will come up again at some point.

So again, thank you very, very much for listening and thank you very much for your, as always, very interesting comments. And I’ll be back with you on Sunday.