ABSTRACT
There were close links between the avant-garde in music, in literature and in the visual arts; those involved were all more or less clearly aware that they were part of one general movement. There was a readiness to give the new music a chance, even on the part of conductors who were by no means in the forefront of modernism. In the struggle between the old and the new music Germany was not the main battleground. The dilemma of modernism was not, of course, an exclusively German phenomenon, but it emerged nowhere more sharply than in republican Germany. The prevailing fashion in German architecture during the last decades of the nineteenth century was, as elsewhere, ornate, over-decorated, with many turrets and gables. The violent reaction to modern art affected even the new style in architecture. And yet the attacks on modern architecture were as acrimonious as the criticism of serial music or abstract painting.
