The career of Furtwängler’s young rival, Herbert von Karajan, showed how quickly an artist could rise if he combined superb technical skill with political opportunism. Born in Austria in 1905, von Karajan joined the Nazi Party in April 1933 in order to smooth his path as an up-and-coming conductor. At that time he was working at the state theater in Ulm, a relatively undistinguished post, but in 1935 he became chief conductor at the Aachen opera. At age twenty-seven, he was the youngest general music director in Germany. He came to the attention of Heinz Ti-etjen, who brought him to Berlin as guest conductor of the Philharmonic in 1938. His Berlin debut was such a success that he was made a Kapellmeister at the State Opera in the following year. In addition to Tietjen, he cultivated the patronage of Göring, who hoped that his new wunderkind would eclipse Furtwängler in Berlin. Like a Gustav Gründgens of music, von Karajan made excellent use of his contacts. Soon he was challenging Furtwängler for supremacy in Berlin’s musical scene. He might have prevailed in this contest were it not for the fact that Hitler considered him an “arrogant fop.” Berlin proved barely big enough to accommodate both of these supremely egoistic musicians, and their bitter rivalry pointed up the politi-cization and Balkanization of the city’s cultural life.
In addition to misusing Berlin’s renowned musical ensembles for purposes of prestige and propaganda, the Nazi regime founded an orchestra of its own, the National Socialist Symphony Orchestra of the Reich, or NSRSO, as a vehicle to advertise its commitment to high culture. Dressed in brown tailcoats personally designed by Hitler, the NSRSO performed a traditional repertoire of the German Masters. This was a Nazi version of the Boston Pops: easy listening with a message. The band enjoyed much greater popularity in the provinces than in Berlin, whose major soloists refused to perform with it.
While the Nazis’ attempt at “popular” orchestral music never made much headway in Berlin, a very different kind of music, jazz, managed to survive in the capital during the Third Reich despite the Nazi leaders’ contempt for it. As we have seen, jazz had become well established in the city during the Weimar era—so much so that when the Nazis attacked the perversions of the Kurfürstendamm they included “the death of music in the jazz band.” The fact that jazz was an integral part of the invasion of American “nigger culture” made it all the more offensive in Nazi eyes, as did the great popularity in Germany of Jewish-American jazz musicians like George Gershwin and Benny Goodman. Goebbels, who liked to impress his starlets by tinkling on the piano, considered jazz an obscenity. His flunky at the Reichs-musikkammer, Peter Raabe, promised to “remove completely foreign jazz and dance music and to replace it with the works of German composers.”
But it was one thing to rail against jazz, quite another to eliminate it—especially in Berlin. After all, the Olympics were coming up in 1936, and it would not do for the German capital to be seen as parochial. Rather than banning jazz outright, the Nazi authorities sought to tame it by expelling the most innovative players (who were often foreign) and by censoring performances in the various jazz venues that were allowed to stay open. Agents of the Reichsmusikkammer combed through the clubs in search of Jews, illegal aliens, and any players lacking the requisite license issued by the chamber. To counter the popularity of jazz broadcasts beamed in from foreign countries, Goebbels allowed some local groups to air their music on the radio. For example, in late 1934 the propaganda minister sanctioned broadcasts by a Nazi-sponsored band called the Golden Seven, which searched for a golden mean between real jazz and the sort of innocuous treacle that prompted young Berliners to break the knobs off their “People’s Receivers” dialing back to the BBC. Not surprisingly, the search failed: the Seven’s music proved too ersatz for most listeners but “too American” for the authorities, and it went off the air in 1935.
