Anonymous Deceit
L. Botstein · The Musical Quarterly · 2006
Every once in a while strange events occur that are worth remembering and repeating, even though their significance may be minor at best. While in Düsseldorf rehearsing for performances of Brahms’s German Requiem, I found myself walking around the city and visiting bookstores. In one of Düsseldorf’s largest, there was an antiquarian department. The Internet has greatly facilitated the location of out-of-print and rare books and has also driven down the price. There is some cost to this progress, since the fun of the chase and the fun of discovery have been lost. No matter what one is looking for, one will ultimately locate it electronically. One rarely has the joy of chancing on something of real interest. Nonetheless, I perused the music shelves and stumbled on a paperback that cost me five euros. It was the 1944 edition of Geschichte der deutschen Musik, published by Josef Müller-Blattau in Berlin. Müller-Blattau figures somewhat prominently in Pamela Potter’s monograph, The Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). Finding Nazi publications is getting harder with the passage of time and the natural erosion of materials, and is aggravated in part by the poor quality of paper available during the war years. But perhaps more telling is the quite widespread voluntary destruction by individuals, beginning in 1945, of printed material. Ordinary citizens, whether sympathizers or party members, were eager to hide any evidence of a Nazi allegiance or past, not only from occupation authorities but also from family and friends. The successful re-creation and reformulation of one’s life in the postwar period depended not only on selective amnesia but also on destroying the evidence. One of the most remarkable successes in reinvention was achieved by Winifred Wagner’s son, Wieland, whose pioneering modernist productions helped foster a false image of him as one of the few Wagners of his generation without a Nazi past.