The darkest years Music in the Third Reich by Eric Levi Published by Macmillan (303pp) £40.00

Up until now, the most widely publicized German-based musical celebrities of the Nazi era have been Richard Strauss, Wilhelm Furtwangler and Herbert von Karajan, with others (and there were plenty of them) seen merely as 'bit-part' extras. Erik Levi's concisely written and admirably objective survey attempts to place everyone in context, starting with ideological struggles between Alfred Rosenberg (founder of the "Fighting League for German Culture") and the Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels, then working through the "War Against Modernism", to the Nazi influence on radio, recording, music publishing, the opera house, the symphony orchestra and the written word. Inevitably, the period's blackest, most highly charged obstacle was its fanatical, all-pervasive anti-Semitism, something that even the more enlightened 'collaborators' failed to defuse, and a subject that Levi himself treats in some detail. A large part of the book sorts through a tangled web of Nazi bureaucracy. 'Purification' was of course a central concept: the 'cleansing' process involved recommissioning A Midsummer Night's Dream music, re-writing Mozart and Handel librettos (Da Pointe was Jewish, not to mention Judas Maccabeus), snipping out Old Testament references in the Mozart Requiem and banning all musicians of Jewish descent. Jazz of course posed countless problems: although 'degenerate', it was also immensely popular, and the Nazis were careful not to alienate themselves by banning it completely. Then there were the infinitely complex dealings between the authorities and such musicians as Furtwangler and Hindemith, both of whom were, at one time or another, either in or out of favour. Even foreigners like Stravinsky were willing to confirm their Aryan descent.

There are countless quotations from contemporary press features and some interesting statistics. For example, the most popular operatic composer in Nazi Germany (1939-40 period) was not, as one might have expected, Wagner, but Verdi, while during the early 1930s, Bizet's Carmen topped the bill for popularity. The orchestral works of Strauss, Reger, Pfitzner and Sibelius were repertoire mainstays, and Levi additionally gives information on a number of lesser mortals whose works are nowadays more or less forgotten—Paul Graener, for example, or Max Trapp and Hermann Unger. There is also fine reportage of the regime's more helpful aspects, its subsidies and guarantees of employment, and the invaluable explorations into early music that took place during its tenure. And if you weren't 'impure', 'decadent' or 'degenerate', then there were certainly plenty of opportunities to hear major artists in major works—including that most decadent, degenerate and impure of all operas, Richard Strauss's Salome. Therein lies a painful and unavoidable paradox: the grating irrationality of it all—Jewishsounding music that wasn't by Jews, or 'German' music that was, or music and musicians whose proscribed racial origins were either suppressed or overlooked (Johann Strauss and Victor de Sabata being significant cases in point).

One might also point out, with some justification, that a powerful strain of anti-Semitism was already rife in the Weimar Republic, and that the Nazis couldn't easily have exploited something that wasn't there in the first place. Even some Jewish critics of the period (Karl Kraus being among the most brilliant) were openly hostile to certain varieties of Jewish creativity. And then one inevitably looks towards other cultures and cancerous regimes— the Soviets, for example, whose random killings and crimes against culture lasted way beyond the "thousand-year Reich". In fact, Levi's study could usefully prompt a whole wave of literature that deals with the dangers of cultural retrenchment and policies that serve either to stifle or pollute the creative process. And if you look back at the Nazi era (or the specifically non-racist aspects of it) as from the wrong end of a telescope, you can trace suspiciously familiar patterns that even we, in our politically correct age, hardly baulk from—a parallel fear of the new, for example, and a corresponding glorification of the old. Is this merely 'human nature', or is it a sign that our own culture is seriously in need of a tonic? Fortunately for us, books such as Levi's serve to remind us of the danger signs. Robert Cowan