Atonality, 12–Tone Music and the Third Reich

Abstract

These extensively quoted statements, emanating from two of the most vociferous cultural ideologists of the Third Reich, give the impression that the Nazi regime formulated a highly consistent attitude towards ‘modernist’ trends in contemporary music. In reality, however, perceptions of the exact nature of ‘atonality’ and the ‘atonal’ movement in music remained notoriously imprecise. Six months before Rosenberg's address, for example, Hitler's Propaganda Minister Goebbels had erroneously denounced Hindemith as an ‘atonal musician’ who had succumbed to the ‘biting dissonances of musical bankruptcy’. Similarly, in 1938 Hans Severus Ziegler, organiser of the Degenerate Music Exhibition, had singled out the unequivocally tonal music of Hermann Reutter for particular criticism, claiming that it manifested severe symptoms of constructivism.