Negermusik
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Illustration: Cover of the brochure of the "Entartete Musik" exhibition
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Negermusik ("Negro Music") was a pejorative term used by the Nazis during Third Reich Germany to signify musical styles and performances by African-Americans that were of the Jazz and Swing music genres. They viewed these musical styles in a racist fashion as inferior works belonging to an "inferior race" and therefore prohibitive. The term, at that same time, was also applied to indigenous music styles of black Africans. In post-war 1950s Germany the musical genre of rock 'n' roll still carried this same association.
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Nazi Germany
At the time of the Weimar Republic during 1927, Ernst Krenek's opera of Jonny spielt auf (Jonny Strikes Up) contained jazz musical performances that caused protests among some right-wing ethnic-nationalist groups in Germany at the time. In 1930, the American musician Henry Cowell wrote in the Melos journal that jazz interpreted a mixture of African-American and Jewish elements, stating that:
"The fundamentals of jazz are the syncopation and rhythmic accents of the Negro. Their modernization is the work of New York Jews [...] So Jazz is Negro music seen through the eyes of the Jews."
Such views were readily picked up by the Nazis. Their criticisms have included "gratuitous use of syncopation" and "orgies of drums". More statements from the Nazis included such things as "artistic licentiousness" and "corruption seed in the musical expression" with "indecent dance forms". They went on to scrutinize all modern music of the 1930s as a "political weapon of the Jews". On 4 May 1930, Wilhelm Frick, the Reich's newly appointed Minister of the Interior and Education for Thuringia made a decree called "Against the Negro Culture — For Our German Heritage".
In 1932 the national government under Franz von Papen pandered to the Nazis by banning all public performances by black musicians. After Adolf Hitler gained "seizure of power" in 1933, the Reich's Music Chamber was also created in that same year. This was then followed by a full legal ban on this music on October 12, 1935 across all German national radio. This ban was spearheaded by the Reich transmission conductor, Eugen Hadamovsky, who purportedly publicly stated "Mit dem heutigen Tag spreche ich ein endgültiges Verbot des Niggerjazz für den gesamten Deutschen Rundfunk aus." (in English- "As of today I am speaking from a definitive ban on the Nigger jazz for the entire German Radio."). In addition, it is interesting to note that the archaic German word for Negro/Black person ' Neger ' has phonetic similarity to that of the word ' Nigger '; the ethnic slur used in English.
In 1938, the Nazis organized the 'Entartete Musik' public exhibition in Germany, mainly in Düsseldorf. This exhibition included a poster displaying a caricature of an African-American male playing on a saxophone with the Star of David on his tuxedo lapel. The overall theme of the exhibition was that of a defamation of contemporary American music as "Negro music" and as another Jewish 'plot' upon German culture.
Swing kids
The "Swing Kids" (German: Swingjugend) were a group of jazz and swing lovers in Germany in the 1930s, mainly in Hamburg (St. Pauli) and Berlin. They were mainly composed of 14- to 18-year-old boys and girls. They defied National Socialism (Nazism) by listening and dancing to this same banned music in private quarters, clubs, rented halls and vacant cafés. Jazz music was offensive to Nazi ideology, because it was often performed by blacks and a number of Jewish musicians. The Swing Kids gave the impression of being apolitical, similar to their zoot suiter counterparts in North America.
On 18 August 1941, in a brutal police operation, over 300 Swing kids were arrested. The measures against them ranged from cutting their hair and sending them back to school under close monitoring, to the deportation of their leaders to concentration camps.
The 1993 movie, Swing Kids, gives a fictional portrayal of these same youths in that period in Germany.
World War II
Prior to the D-Day landings, during the German occupation of the Netherlands, Joseph Goebbels's Reich propaganda ministry published pamphlets written in Dutch named 'Greetings from England - The Coming Invasion'. These pamphlets contained statements in-between, such as "old jazz-records" and a further full statement declaring "at the celebration of liberation your daughters and wives will be dancing in the arms of real Negroes". This further equated Jazz music with blackness at that time to stir up racism and anti-Allied propaganda within occupied Europe.
Ironically Goebbels managed to create a Nazi-sponsored German swing band named Charlie and his Orchestra whose propagandistic purpose was to win over support and sympathy from British and American listeners through Shortwave radio.
Additionally counter-propaganda was used by Allied forces which played upon the fears of the Nazi's banned music. One such example is Glenn Miller, who was a White American Jazz musician, that initially provided Jazz music, through radio, to Allied combat soldiers for the purposes of entertainment and morale. His same music was used as counter-propaganda by the Allies to denounce Nazi criminality and fight fascist oppression with even Miller once stating himself:
"America means freedom and theres no expression of freedom quite so sincere as music".-Glenn Miller
Post-War period
Even in the Post–World War II years in 1950's Germany, there were some protests from churches, school authorities and politicians against the "obscene Negro music" of the newly emerging rock 'n' roll genre with such acts like Elvis and Chuck Berry gaining new popularity amongst youth. This attitude also continued right up into the 1960s carrying the same derogatory term that not only maintained its resentment by older generations and conservatives but also was an aggressive defense against a then new contemporary American culture.
See also
Literature
- Michael H. Kater (2003): Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany. Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195165531
- Mike Zwerin (2000): Swing Under the Nazis: Jazz as a Metaphor for Freedom. Cooper Square Publishers, ISBN 978-0815410751
- Clarence Lusane (2003): Hitler's black victims: the historical experiences of Afro-Germans, European Blacks, Africans, and African Americans in the Nazi era. Routledge, ISBN 978-0415932950
