As for the fate of any ordinary German musician, Jewish or not, trying to make a living in this maelstrom, the statistics are daunting. By 1933, there were over ninety-thousand active musicians working or trying to find work in Germany. Fewer than half of these artists were devoted to the so-called classics, or serious music. As for musical venues, Berlin had three opera houses, forty theaters, twenty cabarets, and several concert halls. There were locales for variety revues, the most famous being the Scala, capable of seating three-thousand customers for each show. Hamburg and Munich were close runners-up in musical activity. But because of the 1929 crash, musicians had been cast out into the streets in droves. By 1933 even some members of the well-endowed Berlin Philharmonic had suffered salary cuts of 40 percent. Jewish musicians of the highest caliber were gradually decertified in increasing numbers during the thirties as unacceptable by the RMK. To make the dreadful story as short as possible, a German musicologist in the early 1980s estimated that, of the above-numbered working musicians in 1933 Germany, a mere 465 musicians were able to emigrate to the United States during the Hitler period—most of them Jews.

Within the Nazi imagination the enemies of German Seele (“soul”) in music were various and legion, and they had to be dealt with energetically. One might start, as did Professor Kater in his first volume, with the most un-German of all manifestations of modernism—jazz. Simply put, to the Nazis, jazz was detrimental to the future of German music, and it had to be rooted out of German musical life. The younger generation of German “classical” composers influenced by jazz—Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Ernst Krenek—were thus automatically beyond the pale. But jazz had been a godsend to German modernists of all genres. It was going to rejuvenate classical music, which had lately gone stale. It was the “music of this decade” and the “incarnation of American vitalism.” It was non-hierarchical, a musical emancipation from stodginess—a “school of democracy for Germans.” The Bauhaus had its own student jazz band. George Grosz and Paul Klee adored jazz. Hindemith’s teacher, Dr. Bernhard Sekles, instituted a jazz course at the Frankfurt Conservatory in early 1928, teaching rhythm, improvisation, and ensemble playing.

But for the followers of the National Socialist movement, jazz was a doubly nefarious genre, since its practitioners constituted, in the words of Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi’s chief ideologue, a “Jewish-Negro plot against German culture.” In a startling scholarly find, Kater carefully describes the poster for the infamous “Degenerate Music” exhibit in Dusseldorf in 1937, “featuring a monkeylike Negro, decorated with the Star of David, tooting on a saxophone.” (It is worth noting that, according to Kater, the Marxist philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, later a scourge of all things authoritarian, in the 1930s “enthused over the prospect of the Nazi authorities forbidding [jazz] altogether.”) Jazz got all the blame—serialism, atonality, and (Hindemith’s) New Objectivity were the fault of the all-pervasive jazz culture. Josephine Baker, Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer, The Blue Angel with music by the immensely popular Weintraub Syncopators (soon wisely to exile themselves from Germany with their pianist Franz Waxman, later of Hollywood fame), all brought on fits of Goebbel’s wrath. The Nazis had the idea that a jazz player or fan was unreliable. As one storm trooper exclaimed after the failed attempt on Hitler’s life, “Anything that starts with Ellington ends with an assassination attempt on the Führer!”

As early as 1932, the Von Papen regime had banned the employment of any “colored” musician, and the decree was enforced. When, in January 1935, the American black tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins was scheduled to tour Germany with the English “sweet” dance band led by Jack Hylton, the regime forbade his presence in German dance halls. Hawkins was marooned in Holland for the duration of the band’s tour in Germany, and so we have Von Papen and Goebbels to thank for the splendid recordings he made with the innocuous Dutch band called “The Ramblers Dance Orchestra.” As for the numerous Jewish musicians within and without Germany in the realm of “light music,” the restrictions were ever more stringent, but with a few amusing slips. Benny Goodman, “jazz musician, director of a jazz band in London,” was of course listed in a February 1937 list of forbidden Jewish musicians, but his erstwhile competitor on the jazz clarinet, Artie Shaw (born Arthur Arshawsky), was not because “the Nazis believed him to be the son of ‘former Irish music critic’ George Bernard Shaw!” Connections always helped, some muddled through, but there was the constant threat of dismissal or worse—a knock on the door. It is only fair to note that Richard Strauss, otherwise serene in his Garmisch redoubt, was eased out of the RMK presidency in 1935 because he would not decertify or dismiss any Jewish musician.

The Twisted Muse, Kater’s second volume, trod on more familiar ground, but here too he presented an abundance of fresh material. Particularly depressing is the spectacle of a whole raft of mediocre composers given inordinate attention all because of their political reliability. Has anyone today ever heard a note of music by Paul Graener or Max Trapp? They were the white hope of German music, while all music related to the so-called “Second Viennese School” (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern) was utterly verboten, yet another aspect of the sinister plot to destroy Holy German Music. And there is the spectacle of the constant jockeying for Der Führer’s attention on the part of such otherwise distinguished conductors as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Clemens Krauss, and Hans Knappertsbusch. Professor Kater also explores the figure of Herbert von Karajan with not especially pleasant results. Richard Osborne, the author of a recent biography of Karajan, has severely criticized the accuracy of Kater’s portrait of the conductor. Still, one senses that Kater has given us cool, not at all vengeful, treatments of the likes of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Karl Böhm, Hans Rosbaud, and the pianists Wilhelm Backhaus, Edwin Fischer, Wilhelm Kempff, and Walter Gieseking. There are innumerable other, major and minor, figures.

There are terrible things to be seen in these pages—the spectacle of Anton Webern reading Mein Kampf as late as 1940, finding it “exhilarating,” and following “every German victory on the Western front with great enthusiasm.” After all, Webern was a composer denigrated mercilessly by the Nazis as “degenerate.” Equally absurd and depressing is the spectacle of Lorenzo da Ponte’s role as librettist for Mozart’s operas being expunged from the musical scores published in the Reich, or the rewriting of Handel’s superb oratorio Judas Maccabeus to rid it of “Biblical, Jewish” trappings and sending it back into the Nazi concert halls under the title Commander! And what to make of Carl Orff knowingly composing a score to supplant the incomparable incidental music composed by Felix Mendelssohn for A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Orff’s pounding, heavily rhythmic music, as exemplified in his big “hit” of 1937, Carmina Burana, was precisely the kind of music the Nazis wanted.

Of particular interest in The Twisted Muse is the fourth chapter, “Music in the Institutions.” This has to do with the decline of Hausmusik, the emphasis on archaic impulses and new uses for the recorder, the guitar, and joy-in-nature choral singing fostered by the Hitler Youth (obligatory for all youths between ten and eighteen by 1939). The aim was twofold: to utilize music, with its ideological and character-building potential, in order to raise better leaders—a kind of perverted paideia—and to infiltrate the existing musical establishment and turn them into political singing groups. “With one fell swoop, [such renowned choirs as] the Thomaner-Chor of Leipzig, the Dresdner Kreuzchor, the Wiener Sängerknaben, and the Regensburger Domspatzen were collectively taken over by Hitler Youth, without so much as being asked.” By 1944, there were some nine-hundred Hitler Youth musical aggregations.

On a final note of musical sacrilege, the organist at Bach’s church in Leipzig, Günther Ramin, who is now remembered as the mentor of Karl Richter, the famed director of the Munich Bach Choir, took part in many Nazi celebrations, not the least of which was as organist at the Nuremberg rally of 1936. He played on a modest instrument of 16,000 pipes, 220 registers, and five manuals, all amplified by giant loudspeakers—Albert Speer’s empty architectural bombast in the form of a “musical” instrument.

Composers of the Nazi Era is, in many ways, a summa of the problems that have obsessed Kater for the past decade. Although he touches on many issues already discussed, he also offers many new insights and scholarly discoveries. For instance, it is a matter of record that Richard Strauss signed a defamation against Thomas Mann, on the basis of Mann’s pondered consideration of the work of Wagner, which became the lecture “Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner,” delivered in Munich in 1933 and subsequently in Amsterdam, Brussels, and Paris. In many ways, this work was Mann’s adieu to Germany—he emigrated, first to Switzerland, then to the United States, shortly afterwards. The screed against Mann was probably authored by the arch-nationalist conductor Hans Knappertsbusch, an old hand at Munich intrigues, and Strauss has always been severely criticized for joining in the anti-Mann fray. But here we have Professor Kater, who, in his researches in the Strauss archive in Garmisch, has come up with documentation, “which I have found only recently,” suggesting that Strauss had not read Mann’s text, and that he foolishly signed the protest less for ideological than for personal reasons; he had always harbored a visceral dislike of Mann, considering him “a boring patrician.” There is evidence of a possible retraction, but it was too late. The long story told by Kater shows the results of such diligence. Needless to say, the matter is still hardly flattering to Strauss.

Kater also gives us a portrait of Paul Hindemith, “The Reluctant Emigré,” which contrasts notably with that given us by the composer’s colleague at Yale during the war years, Luther Noss, who in Paul Hindemith in the United States (1989) painted a placid picture of the exiled German composer, energetic teacher, and reformer, content and productive in New Haven until his sudden resignation from Yale in 1948. Kater has a completely different take on Hindemith, his relationship to German Kultur, and the decision to leave Yale so suddenly. Kater senses a musical mind indelibly bound to Germany and its culture, a participant in the RMK under Richard Strauss, who in turn admired the younger upstart for his wide-ranging knowledge, all-round musicianship, and incredible proficiency on the major instruments of the orchestra, but who didn’t care for the younger man’s music. It turns out that Hindemith was reluctant in the extreme to emigrate, and did so only after no other possibilities were open to him, well after Furtwängler had defended him and even Strauss had offered to take the libretto of Hindemith’s opera Mathis der Maler to Goebbels, to show the opera’s suitability for the aims of the new regime. Kater does not even think of Hindemith as an émigré, though geographically he most certainly was one.

Kater’s conclusions are implicit: “One and all—musicians and singers, composers and conductors, all of whom had to make a living as artists in the Third Reich— emerged in May 1945 severely tainted, with their professional ethos violated and their music often compromised: gray people against a landscape of gray.” Although Kater implies no ur-cause to so much immorality in the realm of music, it seems to lie evident throughout all three volumes—the chauvinistic, increasingly narrow definitions of “what is German” converted into a paranoiac, exclusionary musical myopia, which in turn was enforced by sanctioned governmental violence. All this stems from insane hauteur and hubris on the matter of music and Germany. As Wagner once said: “the German has the exclusive right to be called ‘musician.’” Oh?

In his last chapter, “Composers in the Postwar Era,” Kater treats us to a searing critique of the “denazification” proceedings as they were to apply to particular composers from among the eight under consideration, where outright fabrications, lies, and guile ruled the defense case in each particular proceeding. The self-portraiture by Carl Orff and Werner Egk as resistance fighters against the Nazis is particularly galling. Not surprisingly, given the rush to “get things over with” impelled by the new threat from the Soviet Union, the ineptness of the prosecutions only compounded the whitewash, and so it is understandable, even inevitable, that all concerned got off light and easy, no problem.

Today Archibald MacLeish’s exhortation to writers of the Thirties seems quaintly innocent, no matter how foolish. But, the diktats emanating from the German Propaganda Ministry regarding music are obviously retrogressive commands to go back in time to the primitive bark and shout. At its worst, they wanted a version in sound of what Jorge Luis Borges called “the game of energetic barbarism.” Michael Kater has given us a careful prose description of this sinister musical atavism.