Challenging the Modern: Conservative Revolution in German Music 1918–1933 by Nicholas Attfield

Abstract

Reviewed by: Challenging the Modern: Conservative Revolution in German Music 1918–1933 by Nicholas Attfield Pamela Potter Challenging the Modern: Conservative Revolution in German Music 1918–1933. By Nicholas Attfield. Oxford: The British Academy for Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 222. Cloth $105.00. ISBN 978-0197266137. Nicholas Attfield's book is a welcome addition to an ongoing discussion about the problems and limitations of the concept of "Weimar culture," the well-worn refrain of which suggests that the liberal policies of the republic created an open society allowing cultural activity to enjoy a brief heyday. For at least fifty years, "Weimar Culture" has continued to be identified with modernism, the avant-garde, cosmopolitanism, experimentation, and all other progressive movements that would allegedly meet their abrupt end in 1933, as the Nazis terrorized Weimar's artistic community and transported German culture back to the nineteenth century. An outgrowth of this narrative was to imagine the existence of two distinct camps of "progressives" and "conservatives," who opposed each other in both their aesthetic and political loyalties. It would not be long before the cracks in this simplified construction would show, especially when it came to neatly lining up politics with aesthetics. In the case of music, the most glaring paradoxes came to light when Adorno and others tried to uphold the liberal and populist sensibilities of a pathbreaking composer such as Arnold Schoenberg, even after his embarrassing expressions of nationalist impulses were discovered. Such discoveries continued to reveal the futility of trying to assign progressive political leanings to musical iconoclasts, while trying to ferret out the avant-garde musical sympathies of left-leaning activists. The messiness of Weimar culture has been evident for some time now, yet Attfield's work is timely nonetheless because it further problematizes the shortcomings of the standard narrative in a discipline that has been particularly resistant to entertaining [End Page 164] alternative interpretations. As suggested by the title, Attfield aims to demonstrate the existence of a "conservative revolution" in music, citing the work of Jeffrey Herf, Louis Dupeux, Roger Griffin, and others, but also noting how music has been left out of most discussions. Following an introductory chapter that lays out the historiography and stresses the need to question accepted wisdoms about progressives and conservatives, Attfield dedicates the remainder of his study to cases in which close analysis reveals the intermingling of what many regard as "conservatism" and "progress." His investigation of the complex and changing relationship between Thomas Mann and composer Hans Pfitzner highlights not only the problems with documenting Mann's political conversion, but also explains the seemingly paradoxical alignment of conservatism with revolution. Attfield then extends his reach into music journalism by focusing on the venerable Zeitschrift für Musik, founded in 1834 by Robert Schumann to give a voice to those defying the musical establishment, but transformed into a vehicle for the crusade to preserve German values under the stewardship of editor Alfred Heuss. With no desire to check his xenophobia and antisemitism, Heuss lashed out at the Jews Franz Schreker, Paul Bekker, Adolf Aber, and any others he saw as coming under "foreign" influence; but he also launched attacks at Pfitzner, demonstrating further how there was no readily identifiable united front of conservatives. The next case study reveals how Ernst Kurth, a Jew whose advocacy for Bruckner's mystic Catholicism and core Germanness has been conveniently overlooked, was very much at the center of the conservative revolution, even going so far as to reject any suggestions that he was a champion of musical modernism. Turning to the musical arm of the youth movement (the Jugendmusikbewegung), Attfield brings to light another entity supposedly fraught with contradictions because of its embrace of fiercely conservative motives alongside socialist goals, particularly in the figure of August Halm. The epilogue to the book further reveals that most accounts have overlooked how many of these projects begun in the 1920s continued without interruption beyond 1933. Adopting the notion of "conservative revolution" as a central trope does not always serve Attfield's purpose: he does not consistently draw attention to the persistence of any of the revolutionary impulses he had laid out in the early parts of the...