ABSTRACT

This chapter examines how assumptions about Nazi music continue to rest on outmoded ways of thinking about the Third Reich that date back as far as 1945, with the inauguration of the ill-fated Allied program of denazification and the early postwar zero-hour mentality. In the western zones of occupation, later the Federal Republic of Germany, any full confrontations with the Nazi past had to wait until the 1970s, by which time general historians had questioned several assumptions that music historians nevertheless embraced. As a result, to this day discussions of music in Nazi Germany often gravitate toward fulfilling the denazification-inspired task of determining the guilt or innocence of individual musicians and composers, and answering zero-hour-inspired questions about the degrees to which the Nazis, and even Adolf Hitler himself, acted to suppress certain types of music and promote others.