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Sid Patra

Role of music in World War II - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • The Nazi government had an obsession with controlling culture and promoting the culture it controlled. For this reason the common people's tastes in music were much more secret. Many Germans used their new radios to listen to the jazz music hated by Hitler but loved all over the world.
  • In art, this attack came after expressionism, impressionism, and all forms of modernism. Forms of music targeted included jazz as well as the music of many of the more dissonant modern classical composers, including that of Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, and Arnold Schoenberg. Hindemith was one of many composers who fled the Third Reich as a result of musical persecution (as well as racial persecution, since Hindemith was Jewish).
  • orld War II in the English speaking world is usually remembered as a great triumph and the music is often performed with a sense of pride.
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  • Therefore the best that can be understood about German Music during the war is the official Nazi government policy, the level of enforcement, and some notion of the diversity of other music listened to, but as the losers in the war German Music and Nazi songs from World War II has not been assigned the high heroic status of American and British popular music, although as the music itself goes, it is considered by many as being above the level of the latter, which is also true of Fascist Italian music of the time.
  • it is also known that Germans sang songs in Nazi sponsored events; but it would be difficult to determine the relative popularity of this music in the current context of shame concerning the war.
  • In Germany, World War II is generally seen as a shameful period; it would be difficult to imagine a band playing 'all the old favorites' of World War II in a public place.
  • Approved Germanic music The Nazi were determined to the concept that German Culture was the greatest in history, but as with all parts of art Hitler took an interest in suppressing the work of all those considered unfit while promoting certain composers as proper Germans. Therefore the Government officially acknowledged certain composers as true Germans, including: Ludwig van Beethoven Anton Bruckner Hans Hotter singer Herbert von Karajan conductor Richard Wagner
  • Unapproved Germanic music The Nazis felt a need to identify all art that was somehow degenerate or Entartete though degenerate is probably a poor translation of the use the Nazis made of this sign, for to them it included all things Jewish, Communist, along with mental illness, gay and lesbian behavior, transgender, and expressionist and modernist. Along with exhibitions of Degenerate Art Entartete Kunst the Nazi government identified certain music, composers and performers as Entartete Musik, these included: Berthold Goldschmidt Ernst Krenek Erich Wolfgang Korngold Arnold Schoenberg Bruno Walter Anton Webern In 1938 Nazi Germany passed an official law on Jazz music. Not surprisingly it deals with the racial nature of the music and makes law based on racial theories. Jazz was “Negroid”; It posed a threat to European higher culture, and was therefore forbidden except in the case of scientific study.
  • Popular music permitted under the Nazis Degrees of censorship varied, and the Germans were likely more concerned with the war than styles of music. But as the war went poorly the objectives of the government moved from building a perfect German state to keeping the population in line, and the relative importance of morale-raising songs would have increased. Popular songs were officially encouraged during the war including: Berlin bleibt doch Berlin (Berlin is still Berlin) this was a popular with Joseph Goebbels near the fall of Berlin. A strange note is that Goebbels commissioned a swing band called "Charlie and His Orchestra" which seemed to have existed for propaganda purposes [edit] Polish songs of World War II See also: Polish music in World War II There were specific songs of Polish resistance, Polish Armed Forces in the West and Polish Armed Forces in the East. Notable ones included Siekiera, motyka, the most popular song in occupied Poland; Rozszumiały się wierzby płaczące - the most popular song of the Polish partisans; Czerwone maki na Monte Cassino - the most popular song of the Polish Armed Forces in the West; and Oka, the most popular song of the Polish Armed Forces in the East.
  • They played a few American records first. I don't remember everything she said. She said, "Your wives and girlfriends are probably home in a nice warm building, dancing with some other men. You're over here in the cold." It was cold and it was snowing. Dent Wheeler on Axis Sally during the battle of the Bulge [3] "There is no 'Tokyo Rose'; the name is strictly a GI invention. The name has been applied to at least two lilting Japanese voices on the Japanese radio. ... Government monitors listening in 24 hours a day have never heard the words 'Tokyo Rose' over a Japanese-controlled Far Eastern radio."
Sid Patra

Edurete.org - 0 views

  • Up to 50,000 poems were written daily in Germany as well as in Britain during the first month of the War. [E1] But it is, unfortunately, difficult to find German memoirs of the First World War that come anywhere near the relative objectivity of British memoirs. [E1]
  • Martin Travers, in his book on German novels of the First World War, points out that the political atmosphere in Weimar Germany effectively prevented any truly objective memoirs from receiving wide readership[
  • Among the fiction production we remember “All Quiet on the Western Front ” [E1] [I1] [F1][S1], ‘a political work by Erich Maria Remarque, that was intended as a rebuttal of the "nationalist myth" of war represented by others authors’. The author himself said that he belonged to a generation “von Krieg zerstoert wurde - auch wenn sie seinem Granaten entkam” ( a generation destroyed by war, even when surviving bombshells).
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  • E. G. Lengel says: “Any study of the First World War should include an examination of a wide variety of war memoirs, including some of those less well known. Anyone who reads these memoirs and is able to keep in mind that they do not always provide objective accounts of the war can learn a great deal about why World War One was such a shattering experience for all Europeans, both soldiers and civilians.
  • most of them did not express Remarque's pessimism. Although none of the survivors were ever again the same as they had been in 1914, every soldier had changed in a different way. Some who survived the war became dedicated to pacifism. Others looked forward to the next war. Most, however, never entirely made up their minds.”
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