ABSTRACT
New musical languages were needed in Germany after May 1945, and here there was a happy coincidence of Allied and German self-interest. In the summer of 1945, to perform or broadcast a Mendelssohn overture or a Tchaikovsky symphony was to make an anti-fascist statement, one whose content was so obvious as to render further elaboration unnecessary. Nonetheless Mendelssohn, above all, continued to serve as a symbol of anti-fascism in the post-war period. In July 1945 Yehudi Menuhin toured the British Zone with Benjamin Britten, playing in Belsen and other camps for ‘displaced persons’. The promotion of modernism was more controversial. Although it served more strongly than Mendelssohn’s essentially Protestant music as a symbolic anti-Nazi language, most modernist music was far less popular with the German public. Conscious of the deteriorating material conditions in the Zone, they were also aware of the tensions between their lavish cultural policy and the near-starvation conditions prevailing in their Zone.
