For those Germans who lived in the vain hope that the Nazi assault on high culture could be checked, the Hindemith Affair of 1934-35 was ominous. It all began in the spring of 1934 when the regime banned the premiere of Paul Hindemith’s opera Mathis der Maler. The decision was sudden, and of course dispiriting, but the reasons for it were anything but obscure. The opera’s theme—the renunciation of political engagement in favor of an all-consuming devotion to art—could hardly have been expected to delight the Nazis; and the opera’s book-burning scene carried the most obvious implications. Then there was the Führer’s personal feelings of revulsion toward Hindemith, owing to a scene from the composer’s 1929 revue, Neues vom Tage, in which a lady appeared in a bubble bath. Finally, there was the composer’s past: as a member of the Amar Quartet and an eclectic experimenter in directions ranging from jazz to atonal expressionism, Hindemith had acquired some Jewish “associations.”

Perhaps no person inside or outside the Party took the fate of Hindemith’s opera more to heart than the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886-1954). As director of the Berlin Staatsoper he had been the one to accept Mathis for performance, and now he defiantly stood by his judgment. No sooner had Göring announced the ban than Furtwängler arranged a performance of the MathisSymphony (drawn from the opera) with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, of which he also served as director. As expected, the work was received enthusiastically