How to Read Hitler, and Haunted City: Nuremberg and the Nazi Past. Most recently he coedited Dreams of Germany: Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Floor.
Gregor applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany, and shared the following:
Page 99 of my book falls in a section entitled ‘Guidance, Direction, Censorship’, so takes us straight to the heart of what the book is about – namely the question of how the Nazi dictatorship impacted the work of German orchestras in the 1930s and 1940s. As one would only expect, the regime swiftly developed mechanisms to ensure that orchestras adjusted their repertoire to Nazi demands regarding the promotion of ‘healthy’ German music (whatever that was). Conversely, the regime’s antisemitism was such that the performance of ‘Jewish music’ was rigorously policed – composers such as Mahler or Mendelssohn disappeared from concert programmes very quickly. So in this sense the Page 99 Test works remarkably well!Learn more about The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany at the University of Chicago Press website.
At the same time, the passage nods to the ways in which the work of monitoring orchestral programming was carried out not by ‘the Nazi regime’ in the sense of something suspended over the musicians’ own world, but by figures co-opted from that musical world into the apparatus of control. In other words, it carries something of one of the core arguments of the book, namely that the remaking of German musical life under the dictatorship was a process in which musicians participated actively themselves. Over the course of the last twenty years historians of Nazi Germany have come to understand that the regime was not so much something that sat on top of German society as something that was embedded in it. This encourages us to think of musicians – and others – not merely as passive objects of the regime’s policies, but as agents in the formulation and implementation of those policies, and to recognise that the participatory dimensions of Nazi rule were in operation in the musical sphere too.
Where the test works slightly less well is in capturing the side of the book that is about audiences. As well as exploring how orchestras changed as institutions, the book is concerned with the question of whether new forms of listening to music emerged among the public. I am interested to explore not only how the transformation of ‘Germans’ into ‘Nazis’ over the 1930s and 1940s can be mapped in the concert hall, but also to think about how the concert hall was a site in which that transformation was pursued. In that way, the book moves beyond thinking about the world of policy and regulation into offering a social and cultural history of the phenomenon of concert-going more generally.
--Marshal Zeringue
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