I enter the ringing halls of the Palais Meran—the top floor of which now houses the Institute for Jazz Research of the University for Music and Performing Arts Graz.1 Coming from the United States,2 the mere concept that this institution is housed in the private residence of the Styrian Habsburg Archduke John already embeds a level of formality and extravagance to which I am unaccustomed. This is a building in which he died; this is a building that his heirs inhabited until 1939, a mere year after Germany's annexation of Austria. It is in the bones of this building itself that Austrian history has been written, shattered, and written over and over again.I was guided to this collection by my colleague Dr. Lawrence Davies. After hearing me speak on the mythology of Joséphine Baker in Paris during the Second World War, he told me that as a postdoc at the institute, he was provided an office that had a painted portrait of former Luftwaffe officer Dietrich Schulz-Köhn hanging on its walls. Dr. Davies remarked on the unease he and his other colleagues at the Kunst Uni Graz felt about this portrait, with a contradictory aura of menace and the innocuousness of the everyday that was cast upon their daily experience in the Palais Meran. In a palace where a reigning Habsburg died, a painted portrait of a high-ranking officer remains. Schulz-Köhn, often referred to casually as Dr. Jazz, was a leading figure in Germanic jazz scenes until his death in the late 1990s. He was a senior lieutenant in the Luftwaffe3 but was redeemed in German social consciousness largely around narratives claiming he saved beloved musician Django Reinhardt from Nazi peril. Social historian Carolyn Steedman reminds us that “you think, in the delirium: it was their dust that I breathed in.”4 Uncomfortable history seemed to hang in the palace's air.Dr. Davies directed me to some not-so-commonly known materials that exist in the Schulz-Köhn collections housed at the Kunst Uni Graz. Schulz-Köhn's library and record collection are meticulously catalogued and kept in the main rooms of the Institute for Jazz Research. However, when I arrived last January, Dr. Davies directed me toward what was commonly known as the “fishbowl.” The fishbowl exists outside of the institute proper. Once you enter the towering doors of the institute, the rooms of the library, the record collections, and subsequent offices open into each other. The fishbowl can be found on the top floor, just before entering the institute. Sandwiched between the restrooms, a copy machine, a hallway of offices, and the employee kitchen, the fishbowl is a corner protected by a half wall of glass. Inside the glass walls, there is a large study table and eight cabinets full of bits and pieces of uncatalogued materials from a few different collections. No one seemed to work in this space, especially in the winter, when the hallways themselves are not actively heated. On more than one occasion, I was encouraged to grab some materials and work in the library so I would not catch a cold.What I found, uncatalogued in the fishbowl, seems to me to be the richest and most productive materials in the archive. It was filled with random boxes and even grocery bags full of professional and candid photographs, collected or taken by Schulz-Köhn himself. Autographed Charlie Parker portraits were stored alongside National Socialist membership documentation, with notes and newspaper clippings that Schulz-Köhn had in his possession until his death in 1999. These documents were not part of his formal collections, but they do signal that they were pieces that he held onto until his passing and deemed worthy of donation and historization. Random and scattered—some artifacts with detailed descriptions, others with no notes at all—I began to sort through the thousands of photographs and correspondences. In doing so, I found the strangest connections between Schulz-Köhn and some of the most virtuosic jazz musicians of his time. I spent most of my days in the fishbowl unable to lock down or identify which artifacts held the greatest significance. Among the countless stacks of unlabeled photos and vague handwritten notes, each seemingly mundane piece connected to the next, and to the whole. Each unnamed face had a story in their eyes. And I did catch a cold.Referencing a recent debate around the phrase Menschen mit Nazihintergrund (people with a Nazi background) in German culture, American literature and memory studies scholar Michael Rothberg reminds us, “To be German requires remembering the Holocaust and confronting the Nazis’ genocidal practices. Yet such a confrontation risks simply repeating the original problem if it does not challenge the very notion of Germanness that made genocide possible in the first place.”5 As an American scholar with German heritage, I bring a distinct vantage point to this research. While my family's complicated relationship with our heritage risks reifying the original problem of the notion of Germanness, I have begun to see Germanness not in my hair color or genealogy, but in the ways I perform Germanness itself. Rothberg emphasizes that histories of violence persist ideologically and materially, as well as psychically. I realized that even when speaking English in Austria, I soften my hard Rs, adjust my syntax, and swallow my words. It was then that I began to realize that my performance of Germanness has been fostered within me my whole life, most predominantly as I have mimicked and performed the codes of rigor and virtuosity in the institutions of Western music. Music and musicology in the United States have a long legacy of German supremacy; performing Germanness is the key to becoming audible in such institutions, and this violence of exclusion psychically reverberates in invisible ways.The Third Reich itself had a very ambivalent relationship with jazz. While the music was banned for its connotations with Blackness, sexual promiscuity, and American democracy, it was later nationalized by Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels. State-sponsored orchestras such as Charlie and His Orchestra, the German Dance and Entertainment Orchestra (Deutsches Tanz- und Unterhaltungsorchester, or the DTU), and the Golden Seven produced jazz standards in line with the Reichsmusikkammer's musical restrictions and changed lyrics for propaganda efforts.6 The music was restricted in its amount of syncopation, and tempos were not allowed to be too fast nor too slow, as it would negate an Aryan sense of discipline and moderation. Scatting, riffs, plucking of violin strings, and drum breaks were all forbidden. Major keys were preferred, and orchestras were advised to replace all saxophones with a violoncello, viola, or suitable folk instrument.7 However, even the musicians in the state-sponsored orchestras would often push the boundaries into hotter forms of the music.However, these musical restrictions and underlying metonymical fears were not limited to the Third Reich; many philosophical and political ideologies of the era were grappling with the music and not only how it was being produced and consumed, but, more importantly, how it was perceived as shifting social and national consciousness. In all such cases, fears and fetishization of Blackness itself placed Black musicians in the crossfire.German Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno's writings on jazz shared many of the same prejudices against the music, particularly in his racialized theorizations of syncopation as a tool of coercion and control in late capitalist society.8 While I certainly do not condone the ways in which Adorno's scholarship places the burden of the failures of late capitalist society on Black music, it is in fact difficult to brashly critique a Jewish philosopher living on the brink of the Holocaust—a Jewish philosopher who only witnessed the ways in which jazz was being appropriated and reproduced in bourgeois European society. Fumi Okiji bluntly writes, “[Adorno's] inability to see past the figure of the bourgeois is depressing.”9 It is unyieldingly frustrating as a jazz scholar, particularly as a swing scholar—as someone who takes commercial music and its use value as survival in marginalized cultures seriously—to allow intellectual space for his ruthless critique of the music, yet it remains impossible to separate Adorno's theories on jazz from his own fight for survival.Similarly, jazz critics such as Charles Delaunay, in authoritarian and antisemitic Vichy France, echoed anxieties of hot jazz as commercialized American decadence. He strived to rebrand French jazz as an ascendance from the American form, championing French musicians’ grace, genius, and purity. Across Europe and its political polarities, jazz fans boasted their elevated intelligence and sensitivity from their American counterparts. In France, “real jazz fans” were cultured and elite,10 while in Germany and Austria, “anyone who [was] interested in jazz [could] not be a Nazi.”11 In all such cases, an outward refusal of the Black American creation of jazz was tactically necessary to justify its place and value in the European social consciousness. Lauded for its connotations of freedom and revolution, yet stripped of its Blackness, it came to pacify political anxieties during the looming rise of the authoritarian regimes. In contemporary scholarship, terms such as “incubation,” “infected,” “hot jazz virus,” and “high-grade hot jazz fever” are still being used to describe Schulz-Köhn and his fellow hot jazz fans, without any consideration of their implied anti-Blackness or their historical embeddedness.12 Writing on the anti-Black racial imaginary in the early twentieth century, ethnomusicologist Ronald Radano notes, “The vast repetition of [B]lack music as a fever, drug, disease, and intoxicant indicate that the threat of [B]lack music related above all to fears of miscegenation, through which hot rhythm becomes a metonym of the [B]lack male body, and specifically, Negro semen or blood.”13While Adorno seemed to demand of jazz a revolution against alienation, capitalism, and fascist propagandistic control, Okiji pushes back on Adorno's concept of syncopation, claiming the rhythmic structure was never meant to be an act of revolution. She states, “Rather it calls white purity into profound doubt. It complicates and disturbs racial logic and distinction. . . . Syncopation should not be seen as an opposing pole to the main beat but as a shaking of that beat, a loosening of the soil around its roots, preparing the ground for its displacement.”14 She concludes, “Can we not say that jazz—and syncopation and swing more specificially—speaks the truth about the irreconciliation of modern life?”15 The engulfing anxieties and hypocrisies surrounding such irreconciliation are theorized by historian Julian Jackson, as he writes, “People who made different choices [during the war] often did so in defense of similar values . . . antagonists might share as many assumptions with their enemies as with those on their own side.”16 Jazz, and Black American jazz in particular, speaks truth to these anxieties and calls the racialized logics of both the Axis and Allies into profound doubt.Dietrich Schulz-Köhn, while at once an Oberleutnant in the Luftwaffe, also shared a passion for hot jazz. Covertly, throughout the war, he would attend gigs, collect and preserve banned records, and exchange secret jazz newsletters with enthusiasts throughout Europe. In many ways, he did immeasurable work to preserve the music throughout the war, which has been well-documented by scholars. However, referencing the selective memory surrounding Schulz-Köhn's wartime activities after the war, Andy Fry posits that these were “complexities of the wartime period people no longer wanted to hear.”17 While Schulz-Köhn was an avid collector and enthusiast of hot jazz that was banned in the Reich, there remains visual evidence of musicians and jazz narratives that he effectively purged from institutional memory.I will read one photograph in his collection as the punctum that begins to unravel the altruistic persona created around Dr. Jazz. It is an image of Django Reinhardt, Schulz-Köhn, a Jewish man named Henri Battut, and four Black musicians who have remained nameless in nearly all of the many-published reproductions of this image (see Copyright restrictions prevent the display of the image here. It may be viewed in the PDF display.). It should be noted that while the physical photograph in the archive itself does not identify any subjects, discourse and scholarship in jazz continued to reproduce these erasures to the present day. The photograph was taken outside La Cigale jazz club in occupied Paris in late 1942. While the focus of this article is on these four Black men who have been effectively lost for seventy-nine years, it is not my intent to downplay the racism and violence experienced by Reinhardt as a Roma musician, nor Battut as Jewish. Scholars such as Fry have written on the fraught existence of Reinhardt in Paris throughout the war, as well as how his music and image were deliberately whitened to satisfy Vichy ideology.18 “In its horror and glory,”19 this photograph encompasses a multitude of mysteries and racialized dynamics of power that played out through jazz music in occupied Paris, and it disrupts the narrative built around the figure of Dr. Jazz as the heroic savior of jazz musicians in the Third Reich. While it seems he may have had genuine relationships with some Black American jazz musicians and helped perpetuate their careers in postwar Europe, it remains unclear as to when and how he used the cloak of his uniform to protect himself in the Third Reich, as well as when and how he remained loyal to his oath to the fatherland. However, his active fetishization of Black musicians can be read through this photograph, which was distributed and published widely during and after the war. Here, nameless Black musicians visually contribute to Schulz-Köhn's cultural capital, while being granted neither a name nor a voice. This article contemplates the role that such Black swing-era musicians played in the formulation of the persona of Dr. Jazz in Germanic consciousness and jazz consciousness more broadly.Entering the archive with the knowledge of this photograph, I spent my time not searching for audible traces, but instead listening for silences. While the aim of this research is to tangibly locate and memorialize the lives taken, lost, or miswritten, it becomes imperative to critically contemplate silence, to take seriously the agential voices of our historical interlocutors, and to refuse to be separate from the wealth of knowledge available to us in the unknown and the unknowable. How might we productively consider the silencing impulse of Dietrich Schulz-Köhn, the allegedly altruistic and “most distinguished promoter of jazz in the Third Reich”?20 This article leads a reader through my process to locate the identities of the four unnamed musicians, and it concludes with their miraculous discovery seventy-nine years later, in a small archive in Guadeloupe. Throughout the process, I show that even musicians who were photographed and celebrated extensively by Schulz-Köhn were still stripped of their agential voice. Furthermore, this work asks us to puncture the ways our attention moves through an archive, and it dreams of a world in which the voices and agency of the silenced can be restored.21“They are out there.”23They are out there; they have to be out there. I repeated Daphne Brooks's revolutionary archival theories to myself. I simply could not accept a reality in which these musicians could be lost to history. I entered the archive in Graz with the knowledge that many of the photographs taken by Schulz-Köhn at gigs contained not only information on the musicians, set lists, and instrumentation, but also often contained darkroom data and camera settings; he seemed to be so meticulous. The archives house four copies of this photograph, so it was my hope that I could find such information, yet the backs of all four images were left completely blank. It rings of Moten's text as it alludes to the congruency of the absence of memory with the dis(re)membering of historical Black subjects. To this day, the photograph circulates in contemporary transatlantic jazz scholarship and in the racial imaginary of Blackness in wartime Europe. It is a photograph taken by a German soldier per the request of Schulz-Köhn outside La Cigale jazz club in occupied Paris in late 1942.24 I became obsessed with this photograph for two years, simply because the names of all four Black musicians were not only omitted from the original photograph, but these omissions also have been uncritically reproduced in jazz scholarship. In 1985, Mike Zwerin was able to identify the musician to Schulz-Köhn's left as Guadeloupean trombonist Al Lirvat,25 but future scholarship on jazz in the Third Reich would revert to all four being unidentified.26 After two years of research, sifting through thousands of documents, photographs, news clippings, and texts, and going down hundreds of rabbit holes, I have finally been able to identify all four Black musicians in this photograph as trombonist and guitarist Al Lirvat, alto saxophonist and clarinetist Robert Mavounzy, pianist and guitarist Claude Martial, and whom I believe to be either trumpeter Harry Cooper or double bassist Henri Godissard. The following will lead the reader through my research process and its limitations.The stories that remain around the circumstances that produced this photograph are vague and conflicting. Very few Black musicians remained in Paris under occupation. However, this is not an uncommon theme in the historiography of jazz in the Third Reich. When considering a lack of primary source material, we must first consider the reasons for which Black musicians would want or need to remain under the radar in occupied Paris, but also consider the lack of recording and performing opportunities afforded to them due to both the French and German ambivalent relationships with American jazz. Many Black American musicians had fled Paris in anticipation of occupation, while others such as Joséphine Baker,27 who had left for the south of France, was allowed to return to the city for entertainment purposes.28 Musicologist Andy Fry writes of the conflicting histories of jazz in Paris during the war: “As soon as the conflict was over, irreconcilable tales began to circulate. . . . The first take shows that jazz was removed all together from occupied France; banned by the authorities, it fled the city along with its American performers prior to or early in the war. The few musicians who did not heed warnings were arrested and interned after the United States entered the conflict.”29Multiple Black American performers remained in Paris, even if our scholarly attention has not yet fully accounted for their presence, and not all of them were interned. While Arthur Briggs, Freddie Johnson, Maceo Jefferson, and Valaida Snow were interned, Joséphine Baker, Harry Cooper, and Charlie Lewis are known to have remained free in Paris during the war.30 At this point in my research, these are the only Black American names I have found, but my gut tells me that given their vague and conflicting narratives, there is a significant possibility that there were more. Historian Clarence Lusane notes that while we might expect contradictory reports from journalistic sources, even scholarly articles have published conflicting information on Black American jazz trumpeter and bandleader Valaida Snow. “Questions surrounding her year of birth, who her father was, whether she was mixed-race, and even her name are debated as fiercely as the issues surrounding her horrific experiences during the war.”31 He then makes particular note of the role of the whitening of historiography itself, which plays a large role in how these questions and ambiguities are perpetuated. He also points to the ways in which misogyny further obfuscates historical narratives, as scholars have often distrusted historical accounts from women.Given these methodological challenges, locating the actual identities of these four musicians, as well as their reasons for remaining in Paris during this time, proved to be a challenging task. Understanding the complex web of power dynamics and racial relations encircling the hot jazz scene demands consideration beyond the realm of documented facts, and it must account for the ways in which jazz was appropriated to symbolize a wide array of conflicting European nationalist ideologies and political anxieties of the era.The relationship of photographs to hard facts and to scientific evidence is fraught with problematic histories of racism. Art historian John Tagg conceives of the relationship of photography to fact as being deeply problematic and argues that the photograph produces distortions to our perceptions through both materiality as well as the social practices surrounding it.32 Since its invention, the concept of the photograph has alluded to an expectation of measurable and verifiable scientific truth. That notion is not only deceptive but also functions far beyond the curatorial decisions of an individual photographer.Tagg, among others, emphasizes throughout his work the importance of visual representation—that a photograph of an othered body does not represent the body simply as it is, but actively constructs the othered body in the social consciousness of a society. White photographers created the image of the exotic other they desired to see, which fit within their notions of a healthy, orderly society. Art historian Denise Murrell takes this further to address the construction of institutional attention, silence, or blindness: “While nineteenth century European histories rationalized the maintenance and expansion of empire, postcolonial histories of Western art have largely been constructed in a manner that sustains myths of white cultural superiority. This institutional silence, or blindness, can be seen to render depictions of blacks33 . . . as unimportant, unworthy of attention; seeing is both the physical act of looking and the cognitive processes that construct attention.”34 Schulz-Köhn in fact created the image of the exotic other he desired to see, and the institutional silence encompassing their narratives continue to render these four Black musicians as unimportant and unworthy of attention. I am asking of a reader to begin to see these musicians, to shift attention from what it is we have been entrained to see and value as academics in white Western institutions and to contemplate the histories that we keep silent.Looking through Schulz-Köhn's collection of thousands of personal photographs, I found myself in so many moments of awe and utter disbelief. My moments of joy came from seeing jazz musicians in photographs that I had never seen before or seeing figures such as a young Miles Davis in his almost unspoken of swing days. The most stunning moment of all came when I opened a plastic grocery bag full of random documents and found an autographed Charlie Parker portrait sandwiched inside. Do I leave it exactly where I found it? If I had a few years, I could properly organize and catalogue this material, but leaving it in the Absolut Vodka-themed grocery bag in which I found it seemed a betrayal to both Parker and my conservationist archival sensibilities. I tried to imagine the possessions of Schulz-Köhn being hastily gathered up and delivered to their new home at the Palais Meran. It is still unimaginable that this portrait is not more prominently displayed or catalogued. Did Schulz-Köhn forget about it? Did someone miss the relatively small, fading signature? These moments of pure historian bliss, however, were suddenly met with new moments when my disbelief was coupled with inescapable unease.One of the most shocking images was that of Schulz-Köhn posing with Miles Davis, who could have been no more than twenty-two years old, Tadd Dameron, and Kenny Clarke (Copyright restrictions prevent the display of the image here. It may be viewed in the PDF display.). The back of this photograph with Davis, Dameron, and Clarke reads, “Die 3 Neger von links nach rechts” (The three Black men from left to right).35The photograph does not mention, however, the names of the white bodies posing alongside them. The man in glasses is Schulz-Köhn, and the woman hanging onto the arm of Dameron and gazing at him in adoration is Schulz-Köhn's wife, German jazz vocalist Inge Klaus. The expressions on the faces of Davis, Dameron, and Clarke, however, indicate unease and defiance. None of the Black musicians made direct eye contact with the camera, or even hint at a smile. Clarke's wideset stance with his arms linked behind his back reads as the most defiant of them all. The visceral discomfort, juxtaposed with the joy and adoration from Schulz-Köhn and Klaus, indicate a sense of obsession and collection, not genuine admiration. “It turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed,”36 and it insinuates that Schulz-Köhn only valued these men insofar as they were objects to be collected.There was an additional layer of unease I felt upon finding photographs that seemed to imply genuine intimacy between Schulz-Köhn and Black American musicians. In these photographs, Schulz-Köhn seemed to share casual, chummy moments with musicians like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Louis Armstrong. They were not rigidly posed photographs, but instead candid or semicandid moments that implied the musicians were just “hanging out” with their friend Dietrich. Even considering strategic essentialism and cultural ambassadorship, this perceived intimacy with Schulz-Köhn so shortly after the war seemed too egregious to accept. I am aware of the complexities of unfavorable histories such as Davis's treatment of women,37 yet these were still my musical idols. I cognitively understood that they came from a country with violent racial histories and dynamics and that they had to constantly negotiate their way through the music world. But at this moment, I viscerally felt the pain of my idols falling, and I had to personally contend with the notion that these musicians I revered could be ideologically ambivalent and may have been friendly, or even friends, with Dr. Jazz.Accepting Duke Ellington's friendship with Schulz-Köhn, however, did not compare to the pain I felt when opening an autographed copy of Beale Street Blues and seeing a photograph fall out of a smiling James Baldwin hanging out with Schulz-Köhn and Jutta Hipp. Giovanni's Room breaks and mends my heart. The queer, imagined intimacy I shared with Baldwin through his writing felt wounded. I felt a similar pain years earlier upon learning of Du Bois's fond recollections of the time he spent in Germany in 1936.38 My expectation of revolutionaries, however, is a glaring privilege in my time and in my body, and it fails to account for the lived lives of multifaceted human beings. But then I realized that Schulz-Köhn dated this photograph in 1989, two years after Baldwin died from stomach cancer in December of 1987. While there is a chance that this was a mere typo or oversight, the posthumous date on this photograph not only calls into doubt the nature of the relationship between Baldwin and Schulz-Köhn, but also the accuracy of his other documented “facts.” I held these uncertainties as I moved forward in my research.This small photograph (Copyright restrictions prevent the display of the image here. It may be viewed in the PDF display.) was one of the first that I encountered in the archive and was certainly one of the most shocking. The back of this photograph reads, “Schulz-Köhn und Armstrong bei seinem Gastspiel in Zürich, Okt. ’49” (Schulz-Köhn and Armstrong during his guest appearance in Zürich, Oct. ’49). It was easier for me to accept or rationalize the context of photographs when the musicians presented themselves as viscerally uncomfortable posing with Schulz-Köhn. But in this photograph, Armstrong is making direct eye contact with the photographer, his posture is relaxed as he leans to his left, and even his eyes are smiling. Each of these factors suggest he was actually enjoying himself—if anything, Schulz-Köhn's posture is the one that seems stiff, and he smiles much more formally than he would in his candid photographs with Duke Ellington.In this series of casual photographs (see Copyright restrictions prevent the display of the image here. It may be viewed in the PDF display.), the relationship of Duke Ellington to Schulz-Köhn and Klaus extends beyond the realm of a gig. While only Copyright restrictions prevent the display of the image here. It may be viewed in the PDF display. lists its location, it is likely that these images came from a few days in Hannover, Germany, in 1950. Contrasting most images in the collection, they were not at a gig or festival. They were taken during the daytime—on a sidewalk, a train platform, and even in a private residence. These imply the informality of sharing a home, something that notoriously can take years in a German friendship. It could be imagined here that Schulz-Köhn would use du, the friendly and informal form of “you,” instead of the common formal Sie with Duke, which is a significant shift in German culture. Seeing a series of playful interactions, on multiple occasions on a train platform, might even suggest that Duke traveled or vacationed with Dietrich and Inge. Duke even leans his head toward Inge, their bodies touching, as she happily hangs on his arm.The camera we see Schulz-Köhn using alongside a smiling Ellington is a Minox subminiature espionage camera, given the nickname “spy camera.” These cameras were produced between 1937 and 1943 and were designed by Walter Zapp to take high-quality, sponta