Subverting the German Volk: Racial and Musical Impurity in Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues

Abstract

Considering that the Nazis relied upon narrowly defined categories of race and art in an effort to cleanse German genetic stock and artistic culture, it is notable that the title of Esi Edugyan’s second novel, set largely in Germany and France at the outbreak of WWII, signals a violation of both racial and musical categories. The title, Half-Blood Blues, suggests the racial mixture of several of the characters (which contravenes dichotomous racial categories) as well as the blending of musical genres in the namesake song, “Half-Blood Blues.” The characters acknowledge that the song is not “true blues” because it lacks “the right chord structure,” but they are unconcerned since “blues wasn’t never bout the chords” (275). Thus the book title alerts the reader that the novel will challenge authoritative classifications by undermining prescriptive definitions of purity. In particular, the novel explores the implications of mixture for the original “pure” categories being violated—specifically, those categories that were understood to define German people and culture. The song “Half-Blood Blues” is the musicians’ subversive interpretation of the Nazis’ own “Horst Wessel” and it therefore constitutes a kind of dialogue between the German (“Horst Wessel”) and that which corrupts the German (jazz) according to National Socialist leadership. Ultimately, the novel’s exploration of racial and musical designations is a simultaneous examination of the customary formulation of Germanness (taken to an extreme under the Nazis). Half-Blood Blues challenges the foundational claims to purity that characterize the long-established conception of Germanness by depicting impure Germanness. By portraying blackness and jazz as unquestionably German and thus demonstrating the Germanness of non-Aryan race and culture, Edugyan’s novel subverts the conventional—and still prominent—understanding of Germanness and gestures toward the growing conundrum of Western European nations: how to reconcile black citizenry with a white cultural, national, and racial “heritage.” Since the novel challenges German notions of purity, it is essential to understand how the concepts of “pure” racial, national, and cultural identity were constructed in Germany. The concepts of volkisch and Volk that the novel challenges are not simply a matter of what North Americans might consider racial or phenotypical whiteness. Translated as “folk” and signifying a people, a nation, and a race or tribe, the terms refer to the nationalist ethnic German identity that existed well before and after National Socialism. That this conception of Germanness has persisted for so long demonstrates its deep roots in German culture and consequently explains, in some small part, how Nazi ideology could arise. As Clarence Lusane explains in Hitler’s Black Victims,