US-involvement with Nazi Germany and World Wars
David Clay Large, Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936. W. W. Norton & Company, 2007.
Martin J. Medhurst, Introduction: From the Preparedness Debate to the Evil Empire Speech: Hearts and Minds in Wartime Rhetoric /
1. Mary E. Stuckey, The Great Debate: The United States and the World, 1936-1941
2. Randall L. Bytwerk, The Great Battle of Dialectics and Rhetoric: Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler, 1937-1939
3. James J. Kimble, The US Home Front: Archetypal Opposition and Narrative Casting as Propaganda Strategies in World War II
"This book analyzes the intellectual side of the American war effort against Nazi Germany. It shows how conflicting interpretations of "the German problem" shaped American warfare and postwar planning. The story of how Americans understood National Socialism in the 1930s and 1940s provides a counter-example to the usual tale of enemy images. The level of German popular support for the Nazi regime, the nature of Nazi war aims, and the postwar prospects of German democratization stood at the center of public and governmental debates. American public perceptions of the Third Reich - based in part on ethnic identification with the Germans - were often forgiving but also ill-informed. This conflicted with the Roosevelt administration's need to create a compelling enemy image. The tension between popular and expert views generated complex and fruitful discussions among America's political and cultural elites and produced insightful, yet contradictory interpretations of Nazism"-
Prologue: Thomas Wolfe and the Third Reich
Chapter 1. Memories of World War I: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Germany
Germany in American Popular and Elite Imagination Before World War I; Patrician's View of Germany: Roosevelt's Early Expertise Reconsidered; Preparing for the First War Against Germany; Propaganda and Atrocities; Different Lessons: Wilsonian Peacemaking and Its Discontents; Interwar Revisionism of "Internationalists" and "Isolationists"’ Germany in American Popular and Elite Imagination Before World War I; Patrician's View of Germany: Roosevelt's Early Expertise Reconsidered; Preparing for the First War Against Germany; Propaganda and Atrocities; Different Lessons: Wilsonian Peacemaking and Its Discontents; Interwar Revisionism of "Internationalists" and "Isolationists"
Chapter 2. News from the New Germany: Conflicting Interpretations, Contested Meanings, 1933-1940
The Basis: Journalistic Reporting; Edgar A. Mowrer, Nazism as Collective Religion; John Gunther, Psychopathology of a Dictatorship; William L. Shirer, The Germans Are Behind Hitler; Dorothy Thompson, Nazism Is a Disease with More Than Germanic Roots; Persecution: "Not an Exclusively Jewish Problem”; Sympathetic Views: Anticomraunist, Anti-Roosevelt, Antiwar Voices; What Americans Thought
Chapter 3. The Prospect of War, 1933-1941 p. 26
Nazi Germany in the President's Sources; From Disease and Gangsters to the Irreconcilable Contrast; Conspiracies: The Threat of Domestic Subversion; The Great Debate and the "Unbelievable" Nazi Blueprint
Chapter 4. "The Principal Battleground of This War Is American Public Opinion"
Public Opinion Analysts at Work; Liberal Propaganda Versus Domestic Unity; Roosevelt's Post-Pearl Harbor Statements; North Africa 1942: Military Action as Morale Booster; Unconditional Surrender as a War Aim
Chapter 5. The Office of War Information: "Explaining Nazism to the American People Is No Easy Assignment"
The Strategy of Truth and Its Challenges; Further Probes into Images of Nazi Germany; The Rejection of "Racial" War; "Explain What Nazism Would Mean in Terms of Everyday American Life"; Consequences of the Strategy of Identification with the Germans
Chapter 6. Why We Fight: The Nature of the Enemy Seen Differently
Why We Fight: The Movie; Geopolitics and the Nazi Plan for World Conquest; Public Opinion Begins to Shift; The State Department Weighs in on Nazi Ideology; Henry Wallace: The Götterdämmerung Has Come for Odin and His Crew
Chapter 7. Germans and Nazis Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
"The Most Labyrinthine Issue of Our Time"; Mr. Hyde, the Automaton Valhalla in Transition: Are the Germans Behind Hitler?; Sympathy with Germans or Their Victims? Beyond Belief: The Murder of the Jews; Nazi Youth: A Time Bomb; What to Do with Germany? A National Debate; If the American People Made the Peace
Chapter 8. The German Disease and Nazism as Gangsterism
The Attraction of Psychological Approaches; The Paranoid Trend in German History; The Sociopsychological Precariousness of the Lower Middle Class; The Teutonic Family Drama; Official Support for the Therapeutic Approach; Nazism as Gangsterism; The Hitler Gang and the Conspiracy Against Humanity
Chapter 9. German Peculiarities: Vansittartism in the American Wartime Debate
Lord Vansittart; Vansittartism in the American Debate; Who Supports Hitler? Emil Ludwig: A Vansittartist with Access to the President; Germany's Special Path on Screen; Containing the Monsters in Time and Space
Chapter 10. What Do You Do with People Like That?
Hitchcock's Lifeboat: A Parable; Conflicting Postwar Plans: OSS Academics and the Larger Picture; The State Department's Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy; Rehabilitating Germany like a Delinquent Youth; The Case for Dismemberment; A Public Critique of the State Department
Alex Ross, “The Hitler Vortex - How American Racism Influenced Nazi Thought” (blog)
Eugenics
R. A. Soloway, “Feminism, fertility, and eugenics in Victorian and Edwardian England,” Political Symbolism in Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of George L. Mosse, ed. Seymour Drescher, David Sabean, and Allan Sharlin (New Brunswick, N. J.: Transaction Books, 1982).
Nazi Concentration Camps
Auschwitz
Susan Eischeid, The Truth about Fania Fénelon and the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Ebook
Emilio Jani. My Voice Saved Me: Auschwitz 180046. Milan, Centauro Editrice, 1961. You would need to order this Interlibrary loan.
Gabriele Knapp, “Music as a Means of Survival: The Women’s Orchestra in Auschwitz” trans. Katherine Deeg, Anette Bauer, and Liane Curtis, from “Musizieren als Überlebenshilfe. Das Frauenorchester in Auschwitz,” in Feministische Studien 1 (1996): 26-35. Course website.
Richard Newman, with Karen Kirtley, Alma Rosé: Vienna to Auschwitz.
Rosé directed a women’s orchestra in Auschwitz, the only women's musical ensemble in the Nazi camps. The orchestra provided its young musicians with a way to survive. The orchestra women maintained high standards and discipline to play music for the pleasure of their Nazi captors; in exchange they remained alive. Alma saved the lives of some four dozen members of the orchestra; not one was sent to the gas, though she herself died in the camp of sudden illness.
Hans Vanderwerff,. "Bach in Auschwitz and Birkenau," 14 Mar. 2010. http://www.cympm.com/orkest.html.
Primary sources
Visual History Archive
https://fortunoff.library.yale.edu
Shmerke Kaczerginski, Songs of the Ghettos and Concentration Camps. New York: CYCO - Bicher Farlag, 1948.
Shoshana Kalisch, Yes, We Sang. NY: Harper and Row, 1985.
Eleanor Mlotek, We Are Here: Songs of the Holocaust. NY: The Workman's Circle, 1983.
Anton Gill, The Journey Back from Hell: Memoirs of Concentration Camp Survivors. New York: Harper Collins, 1994.
Szymon Laks, Music of Another World, trans. Chester A. Kisiel. Northwestern University Press, 2000. Mélodies d'Auschwitz. Paris: Cerf, 1991.
Rejected for publication in Poland because its portrayal of the Nazis was "too sympathetic", Music of Another World presents us with a disturbing description of a phenomenon about which little has been written: the presence of music among the crematoria of Auschwitz.
Compassionate yet detached, ironic yet pitilessly honest, Szymon Laks, who became kapellmeister of the Auschwitz orchestra, recounts the inconceivable spectacle of SS guards growing teary-eyed at the sound of familiar melodies and in the next moment giving themselves up to the furies of extermination. Music led to the salvation of some; for others it led the way to the gas chambers. That Laks and others were capable of making music at Auschwitz is almost beyond belief. Yet they did so with meager resources and full knowledge of what it would mean if they did not. Music of Another World is a testament not only to the human spirit but also to the music itself, the beauty of which Laks and others honored even as the lives of so many were destroyed. He writes: “Since for a long time I was a member of the orchestra at Auschwitz II and during a certain period its conductor, I regard it as my obligation to relate and in some way to commemorate this strange chapter in the history of music, a chapter that will probably not be written by any professional historian of this branch of art.”
Primo Levi, “The Drowned and the Saved,” Survival in Auschwitz. 1958; rpt as Survival in Auschwitz; and, The reawakening: two memoirs, trans. Stuart Woolf. New York: Summit Books, 1986. Course website (pp. 87-100).
Piesn Obozowa (Camp Song), lyrics by Zbigniew Koczanowicz; music by Ludwik Zuk-Skarszewski. http://www.holocaust-trc.org/campsong.htm
Other Nazi concentration camps
Guido Fackle, “Music in Concentration Camps 1933–1945,” Music & Politics 1, no. 1 (2007).
Joshua Jacobson, “Music in the Holocaust.” The Choral Journal 36:5 (December, 1995): 9-21.
Kalisch, Shoshana, 1985. Yes, We Sang!: Songs of the Ghettos and Concentration Camps, New York, Harper & Row.
Willoughby, Susan. Art, Music, and Writings from the Holocaust. Chicago, IL: Heinemann Library, 2003.
Hitler
Eye of the Third Reich: Walter Frentz, directed and produced by Jürgen Stumpfhaus. TR849.F73E90 2004
Frentz, personal photographer to Hitler. Reveals the man who was largely responsible for the world’s cinematic record of Hitler, and in the process sheds new light on the workings of the Nazi propaganda machine. Includes interviews with Frentz and Leni Riefenstahl.
Nazi language and philosophy
David Deutsch, “Antisemitism and Intimacy in the Writing of Goebbels,” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 26, no. 1 (2013)
Memoirs & primary sources
Walter Kempowski, Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary from Hitler's Last Birthday to Ve Day
Under the Third Reich, the official language of Nazism came to be used as a political tool. The existing social culture was manipulated and subverted as the German people had their eithical values and their thoughts about politics, history and daily life recast in a new language. This Notebook, originally called LTI (Lingua Tertii Imperii) - the abbreviation itself a parody of Nazified language - was written out of Klemperer's conviction that the language of the Third Reich helped to create its culture. As Klemperer writes: 'it isn't only Nazi actions that have to vanish, but also the Nazi cast of mind, the typical Nazi way of thinking, and its breeding ground: the language of Nazism.
Friedrich Reck, Diary of a Man in Despair, trans. Paul Rubens (New York: New York Review of Books Classics), 2013. Electronic source.
Reck expressed his anti-Hitler and anti-Nazi views in his diary entries from 1936 to 1944, when he was sent to the Dachau concentration camp.
World War II
Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939-1945: Citizens and Soldiers. New York: Basic Books, 2015. DD256.5.S7511 2015
Abstract: As early as 1941, Allied victory in World War II seemed all but assured. How and why, then, did the Germans prolong the barbaric conflict for three and a half more years? In The German War, acclaimed historian Nicholas Stargardt draws on an extraordinary range of primary source materials-personal diaries, court records, and military correspondence-to answer this question. He offers an unprecedented portrait of wartime Germany, bringing the hopes and expectations of the German people-from infantrymen and tank commanders on the Eastern front to civilians on the home front-to vivid life.
Visual arts in Nazi Germany
Mary Chan, “Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection Vienna,” MoMA No. 26 (1997): 2-7.
Harold James, The Deutsche Bank and the Nazi Economic War against the Jews: The Expropriation of Jewish-Owned Property. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Howard N. Spiegler, “Portrait of Wally: The U.S. Government's Role in Recovering Holocaust Looted Art.” Holocaust Restitution: Perspectives on the Litigation and Its Aftermath. New York University Press, 2006. 280-285. eBook.
Karl E. Meyer, “Who (Really) Owns the Past?” World Policy Journal. 23.1 (Spring 2006): 85-91.
Petropoulos, Jonathan. “Art Historians and Nazi Plunder.” New England Review 21.1 (Winter 2000): 5ff
Jonathan Petropoulos, Artists under Hitler: collaboration and survival in Nazi Germany. New Haven : Yale University Press, 2014.
NX180.N37 P48 2014.
Chapters:
(1) The Fight over Modernism, p. 19; (2) The Pursuit of Accommodation, p. 59; (3) The Continuation of Modernism in Nazi Germany, p. 49; (4) Walter Gropius, p. 63; (5) Paul Hindemith, p. 88; (6) Gottfried Benn, p. 114; (8) Emil Nolde, p. 154; (9) Richard Strauss, p. 193; (11) Leni Riefenstahl, p. 233; (13) Albert Speer, p. 278.
________. Art as Politics in the Third Reich, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1996.
________. The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany, Penguin Press, London, 2000.
Arts and arts policy in Nazi Germany
Wayne Anderson, German Artists and Hitler's Mind: Avant-Garde Art in a Turbulent Era. Boston: Editions Fabriart, 2007. This book, on the visual artists and theater, would need to be ordered ILL.
Glenn R. Cuomo, National Socialist Cultural Policy. New York: Macmillan, 1995. DD256.5.N317 1995.
_______. Kristallnacht 1938 (Harvard University Press, 2009).
_______. Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany (Harvard University Press, 2006).
Barbara Fischer and Luís Madureira, “The barbarism of representation’: The Nazi critique of modern art and the American New Right's Kulturkampf,” Patterns of Prejudice 28, no. 3 (1994): 37 – 56.
Nazi society
Martin Kitchen, The Third Reich: Charisma and Community. Longman, 2008. DD256.5 .K4756 2008
What was the secret of Hitler’s extraordinary popularity? What was the appeal of National Socialism? Why did the German people stay loyal to the Reich even when it seemed that all was lost? How ordinary people can fall prey to fanatical, irrational, even apocalyptic ideas in times of seeming desperation. In exploring such key concerns as the role of ideology in National Socialism, the cooption of elites, the descent into war over ‘race and space’ and the culminating horror of the holocaust, Kitchen compares Nazism to a ‘secular religion’ whose charismatic leader retained enormous power over the minds and bodies of an entire population even when the military and economic basis of its appeal began to erode
Music
Music & torture
Suzanne G. Cusick, “Music as torture / Music as weapon,” Transcultural Music Review 10 (2006). Course website.
American music & politics
Russian music
Laurel E. Fay, Shostakovich: a life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ML410.S53 F39 2000
Music, society, war
Kate Guthrie, “Soundtracks to the ‘People’s War,’” Music and Letters 94, no. 2 (2013): 324–333. Review of literature on music and World War II.
Jonathan Pieslak, Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. ML3477.P54 2009. Course reserve. Chapter 1—Music and Contemporary Military Recruiting. Chapter 2—Music as an Inspiration for Combat. Chapter 3—Looking at the Opposing Forces. Chapter 4—Music as a Psychological Tactic. Chapter 5—Music as a Form of Soldier Expression. Chapter 6—Metal and Rap Ideologies in the Iraq War
Music in Nazi Germany
Reinhold Brinkmann, “The Distorted Sublime: Music and National Socialist Ideology—A Sketch,” Music and Nazism: Art under Tyranny, 1933-1945, ed. Michael H. Kater and Albrecht Riethmüller. Laaber: Laaber, 2003.
Erik Levi, Music in the Third Reich. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
Michael Meyer, The Politics of Music in the Third Reich. New York: P. Lang, 1991. ML275.5.M49 1991.
Karen Painter, Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1933-1945. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. Course website (Chapter 7, “Symphonic Defeat,” excerpt).
_____. “Musical Life in Berlin from Weimar to Hitler,” in Music and Nazism: Art under Tyranny, 1933-1945, ed. Michael H. Kater and Albrecht Riethmüller (Laaber: Laaber, 2003), pp. 90-101. [how should I add the PDF]
Toby Thacker, Music after Hitler, 1945-1955. Aldershot/Burlington: Ashgate, 2007.
Jewish musical life
Website on “suppressed” music of the early 20th century
Popular music & Nazi Germany
Music in postwar Germany
Toby Thacker, Music after Hitler, 1945-1955. Aldershot/Burlington: Ashgate, 2007.
Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic
Reichsorchester: The Berlin Philharmonic and the Third Reich. Film by Enrique Sánchez Lansch (available online). Shows the commemorative speech by Goebbels from the concert podium on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday
Roger Allen, Wilhelm Furtwängler: Art and the Politics of the Unpolitical. Boydell & Brewer, 2019. Selected chapters: Furtwängler and the Nazi State I [1933-1935]; Furtwängler in the Nazi State II [1935-1945]; Reflection and Reaction: Furtwängler in the post-war period [1945-1950].
Beethoven
Reinhold Brinkmann, “In the Time(s) of the ‘Eroica,’ trans. Irene Zedlacher, in Beethoven and his World, ed. Scott Burnham and Michael P. Steinberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 1-26. Influence of the French Revolution on Beethoven.
Esteban Buch, Beethoven’s Ninth: A Political History, trans. Richard Miller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. ML410.B42B8213 2003. Chapter 3—The Ode to joy and the Emperor’s anthem (pp. 45-65): Google books. Chapter 4—Beethoven and the Concert of Europe (pp. 66-86): Google books to p. 68. Chapter 5—The Ninth symphony—Political reception of the Ode to joy (pp. 87-110). Chapter 6—The romantic cult (pp. 111-132): http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/078124.html. Chapter 7—The 1845 ceremony at Bonn (pp. 133-55): Google books to p. 140. Chapter 8—The Ninth in the era of nationalist movements (pp. 156-177)
Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. ML410.B42B84 2000. Course reserve. Chapter 4—Cultural Values: Beethoven, The Goethezeit, and the Heroic Concept of Self.
Lydia Goehr, “The ‘Ode to Joy’: Music and Musicality in Tragic Culture,” in Elective affinities: musical essays on the history of aesthetic theory. New York : Columbia University Press, 2008, pp. 45-78 (Google Books)
Wagner
Wagner, Judaism in Music (1850). Course website.
Jonathan Car, The Wagner Clan: The Saga of Germany's Most Illustrious and Infamous Family
Chapter 2. Legends, Tribes, and anti-Semitism: Ideas and Issues in Wagner’s Work (available on Google Books)
Chapter 3. Racism, Music, and Power: The Nazification of Wagner
Chapter 4. Music, Politics, and Morality: The Beginning of the Boycott in Palestine.
Chapter 5. Toward Germany, Away from Germans
Chapter 6. The 1960s: An End to Forgetting—The Establishment of Symbols.
Terry Teachout, “Why Israel Still Shuts Wagner Out,” Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2009 [add link?]
Bruckner
Richard Strauss
Bryan Gilliam, “‘Friede im Innern’: Strauss's Public and Private Worlds in the Mid 1930s,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 57, no. 3 (2004): 565-597. course website. This essay focuses on the years 1935-36, a time of significant change in the history of the Nazi regime. This period also saw significant changes in Strauss's life and worldview. Strauss lost a prized librettist (Stefan Zweig) in 1935, the same year that their opera, Die schweigsame Frau, was banned. Strauss was then fired from the presidency of the Reichsmusikkammer and within twenty-four hours was negotiating reluctantly with a new librettist of modest abilities (Joseph Gregor). On a broader level, this period saw the formation of the Nuremberg Race Laws, a reconfiguration of the Reichskulturkammer, and Hitler's four-year plan for war. As the Nazis expanded, Strauss grew inward, turning to his late nineteenth-century roots in German Romanticism and Innerlichkeit informed by Goethe and Nietzsche. The relationship between Strauss's public and private worlds is explored through discussions of his completed works as well as a fragmentary cello concerto and works for male chorus in a sketchbook from this time.
Music in World War II
Resistance
McDonough, Frank. Opposition and resistance in Nazi Germany. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Nazi Occupation
Biography & memoir
Goldsmith is the former host of National Public Radio’s Performance Today.) In 1936, his parents, Günther Goldschmidt and Rosemarie Gumpert, were young German Jews with musical gifts—his in the flute, hers in the viola. They met in one of the Jewish orchestras the Nazis allowed in the wake of laws prohibiting Jewish participation in Germany’s general cultural life. Love ensued—as did the inexorable erosion of Jews’ rights and livelihoods.
Nazi architecture
Lydia Goehr, “The Pastness of the Work: Albert Speer and the Monumentalism of Intentional Ruins,” in Elective affinities: musical essays on the history of aesthetic theory. New York : Columbia University Press, 2008, pp. 135-170 (Google Books). Goehr is a philosophy, and this reading is challenging.
Leni Riefenstahl
Post-1945 memory, commemoration, education
Michaela Dixon, “The Unreliable Perpetrator: Negotiating Narrative Perspective at Museums of the Third Reich and the GDR,” German Life and Letters 70, no. 2 (2017): 1468–0483.
Thomas D. Fallace, "The Origins of Holocaust Education in American Public School," Holocaust and Genocide Studies (2006) 20 (1): 80-102.
Luke B. Howard, “Motherhood, ‘Billboard,’ and the Holocaust: Perceptions and Receptions of Górecki's Symphony No. 3,” Musical Quarterly 82, no. 1 (1998): 131-159.
Gilad Margalit, Guilt, Suffering, and Memory: Germany Remembers Its Dead of World War II. Indiana University Press, 2010. D804.3 .M365713 2009 Course Reserve
Chapter 1: Coping with Guilt: The Germans and the Nazi Past 11
Chapter 2: Remembering National Suffering in World War II 43
Chapter 3: German Memory and Remembrance of the Dead from 1945 to the 1960s
Chapter 4: Memorial Days in West Germany and Their Metamorphosis, 1945-2006
Chapter 5: The Bombing of Germany's Cities and German Memory Politics, 1945-1989
Chapter 6: Flight and Expulsion in German Political Culture and Memory since 1945
Chapter 7: The Resurgence of the German Sense of Victimization since Reunification Karen Painter, “Requiem for the Reich: Tragic Programming after the Fall of Stalingrad.” Tragedy and the Tragic in German Literature, Art, and Thought, ed. Stephen Dowden and Thomas P. Quinn. Camden Press, 2014, pp. 216-228. PT148.T69 T73 2014 (Wilson Library)
Amy Sodaro, “Memory, History, and Nostalgia in Berlin’s Jewish Museum,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 26 (2013): 77-91.
George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman. New York: Atheneum, 1967. 801 St35. Course reserve.
James E. Young, “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today,” Critical Inquiry, 18, no. 2 (1992): 267-296.
Morality and philosophy
Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House, 2007. Zimbardo led the controversial 1971 Stanford prison experiment, in which students took authoritarian roles as mock prison guards. BF789.E94 Z56 2007. Course reserve.
Neo-Nazis and Nazism in pop culture