A Nazi Pilgrimage to Vienna? The French Delegation at the 1941 “Mozart Week of the German Reich”

Abstract

From 28 November to 5 December 1941, National-Socialist authorities in Vienna presented a “Mozart Week of the German Reich” to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the composer’s death. Culminating on the exact day of the anniversary (5 December), the Mozart Week constituted the climax of an entire year of Mozart-related celebrations coordinated throughout the Reich, the Axis, and the occupied territories by Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.1 All of these events—ranging from concert series and opera performances to full-blown festivals lasting several days—pursued the same goal: displaying the Reich’s cultural greatness, its affluence in spite of the war, and ultimately, its supremacy over the “new Europe.” This broad operation of cultural propaganda corresponded to a turning point in the evolution of the war. When the Mozart Week was conceived in the first months of 1941, the German Reich was at the peak of its power, and was already considering breaking its Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union in order to gain even more territory and overpower Great Britain.2 After the actual invasion of 22 June 1941, the situation changed drastically: it soon became clear that the Wehrmacht would not be able to crush its new opponent in a Blitzkrieg, as it had planned to, and that the battle against the Soviet Union would be a long, difficult, and hazardous one. By September 1941, the German Reich’s ambitious military objectives in the Soviet Union had become unattainable,3 and eventually the increasingly difficult situation on the Eastern Front developed into one of the central causes of the Reich’s defeat in 1945.4