This book brings together seventeen contributors from the fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, history, and German literature to explore these questions: how music came to be associated with German identity, when and how Germans came to be regarded as the "people of music," and how music came to be designated "the most German of arts." Unlike previous volumes on this topic, many of which focused primarily on Wagner and Nazism, the essays here are wide-ranging and comprehensive, examining philosophy, literature, politics, and social currents as well as the creation and performance of folk music, art music, church music, jazz, rock, and pop.

The result is a striking volume, adeptly addressing the complexity and variety of ways in which music insinuated itself into the German national imagination and how it has continued to play a central role in the shaping of a German identity.

Contributors to this volume:

Celia Applegate

Doris L. Bergen

Philip Bohlman

Joy Haslam Calico

Bruce Campbell

John Daverio

Thomas S. Grey

Jost Hermand

Michael H. Kater

Gesa Kordes

Edward Larkey

Bruno Nettl

Uta G. Poiger

Pamela Potter

Albrecht Riethmüller

Bernd Sponheuer

Hans Rudolf Vaget

This book explores the questions of how music came to be associated with German identity, when and how Germans came to be regarded as the "people of music," and how music came to be designated as "the most German art." Drawing on the expertise of leading scholars in German history, musicology, and German literature, the essays assembled here examine philosophy, literature, politics, and social currents, as well as the creation and performance of folk music, art music, church music, jazz, and pop to explore the ways in which music has continued to play a central role in the German national imagination and in shaping German identity.

Pamela Potter is an associate professor in the musicology and German departments at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler's Reich.

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Germans as the "People of Music": Genealogy of an Identity

Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter

Reconstructing Ideal Types of the "German" in Music

Bernd Sponheuer

Einheit—Freiheit—Vaterland: Intimations of Utopia in Robert Schumann's Late Choral Music

John Daverio

Wagner's Die Meistersinger as National Opera (18681945)

Thomas S. Grey

Landscape—Region—Nation—Reich: German Folk Song in the Nexus of National Identity

Philip V. Bohlman

Kein schöner Land: The Spielschar Ekkehard and the Struggle to Define German National Identity in the Weimar Republic

Bruce Campbell

Hosanna or "Hilf, O Herr Uns": National Identity, the German Christian Movement, and the "Dejudaization" of Sacred Music in the Third Reich

Doris L. Bergen

National and Universal: Thomas Mann and the Paradox of "German" Music

Hans Rudolf Vaget

Culture, Society, and Politics in the Cosmos of "Hans Pfitzner the German"

Michael H. Kater

"Für eine neue deutsche Nationaloper": Opera in the Discourses of Unification and Legitimation in the German Democratic Republic

Joy Haslam Calico

Darmstadt, Postwar Experimentation, and the West German Search for a New Musical Identity

Gesa Kordes

American Jazz in the German Cold War

Uta G. Poiger

Postwar German Popular Music: Americanization, the Cold War, and the Post-Nazi Heimat

Edward Larkey

On the History of the "Deutschlandlied"

Jost Hermand

Ethnicity and Musical Identity in the Czech Lands: A Group of Vignettes

Bruno Nettl

"Is That Not Something for Simplissimus?!" The Belief in Musical Superiority

Albrecht Riethmüller

List of Contributors

Index