Challenging the Modern: Conservative Revolution in German Music, 1918–33 by Nicholas Attfield

Abstract

Reviewed by: Challenging the Modern: Conservative Revolution in German Music, 1918–33 by Nicholas Attfield Daniel F. Boomhower Challenging the Modern: Conservative Revolution in German Music, 1918–33. By Nicholas Attfield. (British Academy Monographs.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, for the British Academy, 2017. [222 p. ISBN 9780197266137 (hardcover), $105.] Illustrations, index. The Weimar Republic, the dynamic but ill-fated social experiment couched between the bitter end of World War I in 1918 and the overthrow of democratic institutions by the Nazi Party in 1933, continues to fascinate many imaginations in many realms. Emerging from the rubble of the militaristic plutocracy of Kaiser Wilhelm II and his adjutants, Weimar Germany convulsed with populist yearnings for security and self-determination from all corners of the political spectrum. In the midst of nearly constant political and economic upheaval, a seemingly unbridled wave of creativity surged through Germany, made manifest on a collective scale by the achievements of the Bauhaus and on an individual level in masterworks by Max Ernst, Hannah Höch, Otto Dix, Käthe Kollwitz, Alfred Döblin, Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, and many others. Peter Gay brilliantly summarized not only artistic but also political currents in his Weimar Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1968) by characterizing the social phenomenon of "the outsider as insider" that resulted from the toppling of the Wilhelmine order. Suddenly, individuals who previously had no voice in society now wielded tremendous influence. Even though artistic innovations that would become synonymous with Weimar culture had already emerged before World War I, the liberalism of Weimar society allowed for an unprecedented popular affirmation of the creative arts in a multitude of genres. The possibility of access to an expanded audience extended not only to innovators but also to those steeped in artistic traditions. Nevertheless, the aptness of Gay's characterization of the cultural situation stems from the reality that outsiders remained outsiders, even in those instances where they found themselves, often only temporarily, as insiders. Michael H. Kater looms nearly as large as Peter Gay in studies of German music during the 1920s and 1930s. Fittingly, Kater appropriated Gay's contrast of the "revolt of the son" and the "revenge of the father," as the two final chapters of Gay's Weimar Culture are titled, in a brief article contrasting progressive and conservative composers of the 1920s ("The Revenge of the Fathers: The Demise of Modern Music at the End of the Weimar Republic," German Studies Review 15, no. 2 [May 1992]: 295–315). Nicholas Attfield, in Challenging the Modern: Conservative Revolution in German Music, 1918–33, takes what he considers Kater's reductionist interpretation of musical conservatives as a point of departure for his introduction, "Weimar Culture and Its Others," arguing the need for a more nuanced evaluation of the full breadth of musical life in an era primarily associated with innovations. In his first chapter, "Music and the Idea of a Conservative Revolution," Attfield strives to relate musical conservatisms with broader considerations of a "conservative revolution" occurring in the years following World War I (p. 17). [End Page 436] The core of Attfield's book consists of four case studies through which he seeks to exhibit a diversity of conservatisms during the period. He writes: "In part, I have chosen these specific examples because, though in some ways characterized by what might be called 'cultural pessimism' or 'anti-modernism,' 'irrationalism' or 'traditionalism,' they also resist the stereotype discussed above by simultaneously placing a powerful accent on rebirth, regrowth, and rejuvenation; this is an accent, indeed, often couched in the most revolutionary rhetoric" (p. 10). The first case study, "'Sympathie mit dem Tode': Thomas Mann, Hans Pfitzner, and the Further Reflections of a Non-Political Man," concerns Pfitzner's turn from opera and his aspiration to reach a wider audience through populist oratorio. The second case study, "'Innerer Betrachtung gewidmet': Alfred Heuss, the Zeitschrift für Musik, and the Music Journal as Community," considers Heuss's series of editorials "dedicated to inner reflection" that ran over a nearly two-year period and in which the views of his mentor Hermann Kretzschmar are extolled and extended (p. 78). Much like Pfitzner, Heuss had established...