Part 3 outlines Wagner's reception in the United States during the interwar period in the context of battered German-American cultural and political relations.
Author : Jos Hermans
World War I and the entry of the United States into the war on April 6, 1917 caused a landslide that affected all aspects of German-American relations, not least the perception of Wagner. For German cultural heritage in America as a whole, the war resulted in a significant loss of prestige and weight. German-born Americans felt compelled to give up or hide the German part of their identity by changing their names and becoming Americans "without a hyphen." Knowledge of this tectonic shift is essential to an understanding of the very turbulent history of American Wagner reception.
The external cause of the shift in mood that eventually led to American participation in the war was the sinking of the British liner, the RMS Lusitania, by a German submarine on May 7, 1915. Among the nearly 1,200 casualties were 128 American citizens. Little heed was paid to the German charges that the vessel was armed and carried a cargo of munitions. Though the truth of the former allegation had never been definitely ascertained one way or another, the latter was unquestionably true. Whether Winston Churchill (at that time First Lord of the Admiralty) actually arranged for the sinking of the Lusitania is still unclear but very likely.
Within German warfare, unrestricted submarine warfare was a primary factor. From the beginning of the war, German ports were blocked by the Royal Navy. U-boat warfare in the Atlantic was intended to ensure the supply of materials vital to the war effort, helping to break Britain's dominance.
This heavy loss of American lives led to a rapid reversal of attitudes toward Germany and the Germans in the initially neutral country, both among the public and in Congress. After more military incidents, both houses of Congress overwhelmingly approved entry into the war in early April 1917. President Wilson's hypocritical promise that this was a "war to end all wars" won over the people and their representatives.
Prior to the US entering WWI, an enormous years-long anti-German propaganda campaign had been unleashed by the Creel Commission, headed by Walter Lippman and Edward Bernays. Public libraries removed and (most often) burned all books by German authors, philosophers and historians. In some states, the use of the German language was prohibited in public and on the telephone. German professors were fired from their universities, German-language or German-owned local newspapers were denied advertising revenue, constantly harassed, and often forced out of business. Most Americans are aware that during the national hysteria of the Second World War the US government forced more than 100,000 US-born Japanese into concentration camps, but history has deleted the fact that many more Germans were interned in concentration camps in the US prior to and during the First War, and in all cases had all their assets seized. Among the notable internees were 29 players from the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Their music director, Karl Muck, spent more than a year at Fort Oglethorpe, as did Ernst Kunwald, the music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.
The day Wilson announced that the U.S. would enter the war was Good Friday, 1917, when Parsifal was performed in New York at the Metropolitan Opera, as had been the custom since 1903. As visitors to that momentous matinee left the opera house at the corner of Broadway and 39th Street, they were met by the din of newspaper vendors with the latest news of the U.S. declaration of war. The war silenced Wagner's music in New York and elsewhere and caused serious collateral damage to German-Americans, both socially and culturally. This causal link between submarine warfare and the boycott of Wagner provided compelling evidence that the intertwining of politics and opera, taken for granted in European countries, was also valid in democrati
Predominance in the cultural sphere was also at stake in the United States, and this even before the outbreak of war. This can be illustrated by the example of a prestigious publishing house that aimed to show the American public the importance of German cultural heritage and thus substantiate the claim of German-Americans to participate in shaping national life. At issue was the comprehensive 20-volume documentation series under the title, as laconic as it was ambitious, "The German Classics." The volumes were bound in leather, richly illustrated and emblazoned with the German imperial eagle. They were published by a specially founded "German Publishing Society," whose sponsors included not only the prominent Milwaukee brewery owner Adolphus Busch, but also Kaiser Wilhelm II. The general management of the enterprise was in the hands of Kuno Francke, a prominent Germanist who taught at Harvard University in Boston. In this context, it is not insignificant that the Kiel-born scholar was an admirer of the Kaiser and was on friendly terms with him.et hem stond.
The first three volumes were devoted to Goethe and Schiller. But although the subtitle promised to present "Masterpieces of German Literature" from the 19th and 20th centuries in English translation, the term "German Classics" by no means included only "fine" literature. The later volumes also included texts by philosophers, scientists, military leaders and politicians such as Bismarck and Helmuth von Moltke, the victorious Prussian chief of staff in the War of 1870/71. Volume 15 presented, framed by texts by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, a rich selection of Richard Wagner's autobiographical and theoretical writings: "Art and Revolution," "The Artwork of the Future," "Communication to My Friends," as well as excerpts from "Opera and Drama," Carl Maria von Weber's eulogy and parts of the treatise on Beethoven. The fact that this volume was supplemented with speeches by Kaiser Wilhelm II may seem strange to us today, but it very aptly describes the merging of spirit and power that characterized the entire enterprise. The impression that the selection of texts was conceived as a demonstration of German intellectual power could not be denied.
The German Classics were published in 1913 at the height of Wilhelminism, with no one able to foresee the melancholy fate that awaited them. The last volume appeared in 1915, just as the mood in the country was beginning to turn against Germany. Reactions to the volumes published even before the war were friendly and benevolent. But after the Lusitania disaster, the tide turned. Suddenly the German Classics were viewed with different eyes - with hostile and negative eyes. Sales collapsed; the German publishing house went bankrupt. The printers had to intervene to prevent the unsold volumes from being turned into pulp. From then on, the German Classics continued to experience their life in the country's major public and academic libraries and eventually in second-hand bookstores.
The hysterical features of xenophobia manifested themselves as early as World War I. The patriotically heated impetus for this came from popular former President Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1916 challenged the loyalty of all Americans with a hyphen ("hyphenated Americans"), primarily, of course, German-Americans. This also promoted their social discrimination. The Justice Department compiled a list of 480,000 "aliens" of German descent; 4,000 of them were detained in 1917. There were isolated incidents of violence. German as a lingua franca was banned in schools and churches; German-language newspapers, of which there were more than five hundred in 1910, had to cease publication. Countless German place and street names were renamed, contributing in no small measure to the deliberate erasure of German heritage from the public consciousness in America.
A particularly illuminating example provides the biography of the German scholar Hermann J. Weigand. Born in Philadelphia, a stronghold of German-American symbiosis, the young academic, born in 1892, lost his job at the University of Michigan in 1917. He had to try to make a living as a fine mechanic - in vain, because given his German name, all doors remained closed to him for several years. All the more remarkable, then, that Weigand got his academic career back on track and was eventually widely regarded as "the most prestigious of American-born Germanists" because of his decades of work at Yale University. However, Weigand later did not mince his words, stating that his experience showed that "Americans of second-generation German descent are generally classified as second-class Americans." In 1933, Hermann J. Weigand published a groundbreaking study of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain - a book that gave the German Nobel laureate a powerful boost to his reputation among Americans interested in literature, which served him well during his years of exile in America.
By the way, the German-American symbiosis is not a sentimental phrase; the term is well established in the relevant professional literature. It began in the early 19th century with the intense intellectual love affair with Goethe and the Goethe period on the part of the American transcendentalists around Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller. The great interest in German culture was not limited to the intellectuals of Boston and Harvard University. From New England it spread inland, and everywhere in the cities with a strong German presence it brought about a flowering of intercultural symbiosis, the traces of which, though faded, can still be seen today.
The centers of German-American culture on the East Coast were New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, in the Midwest Chicago, Milwaukee, Cincinnati and St. Louis. It was no accident that a vibrant musical life developed in these cities. The most striking example of this is the Wagner fever that Anton Seidl ignited at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in the late 19th century. For the cities mentioned, the observation impressively described by Joseph Horowitz in his consideration of the rise and fall of classical music applies: "The musical high culture of America was essentially a German import". German repertoire dominated programming, German musicians were in all orchestras, and German was predominantly spoken during orchestra rehearsals.
This dominance of German music in the musical life of America would be broken at once in 1917. Significant in this regard is the behavior of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which had been founded in 1881 by Henry Higginson, a learned financier who had become a passionate music lover after a two-year stay in Vienna. The orchestra's first conductor was Georg Henschel, born in Breslau in 1850 and trained as a singer. The program of his inaugural concert was purely German: Beethoven, Gluck, Haydn, Schubert, Bruch, Weber.
Other German conductors followed, including Wilhelm Gericke and Artur Nikisch. From 1912, the musical direction of the BSO was in the hands of Karl Muck, who had previously, from 1906 to 1908, come from the Prussian Court Opera and conducted in Boston with imperial permission. After the outbreak of war, Muck fell victim to a German-phobic smear campaign for allegedly spying for the German Reich, leading to the infamous "Muck Scandal." On March 22, 1918, immediately after an orchestral rehearsal for Bach's St. Matthew Passion, he was taken into custody. After further "revelations" of an erotic nature, he was eventually taken to a penal camp in Georgia. There he met his Austrian colleague from the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Ernst Kunwald, who had succeeded Leopold Stokowski in 1912. Kunwald had been accused of "disloyalty" and denounced by a patriotic and blatantly racist women's association, the "Daughters of the American Revolution."
The hundred-piece Boston elite orchestra, highly regarded by Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, was the pride of the tradition-conscious New England metropolis. The orchestra included musicians of various nationalities; the German contingent predominated. Muck had brought 27 German and eight Austrian musicians to Boston. Most of the 50 American orchestra members were recently naturalized Europeans; among them, again, a strong German contingent. Rightly, the BSO can be considered a "typically German" orchestra. Of the German-born musicians, 18 were interned in the US after the start of the war. They also lost their jobs.
The events in Boston are particularly indicative of what was ultimately at stake: the ethnic cleansing of a representative cultural institution. With the arrival of Pierre Monteux, who had been in charge of the Metropolitan Opera's French repertory since 1917, a development was set in motion in Boston that gradually gave the previously "German" repertory a French physiognomy in the eyes of connoisseurs and audiences. While the proportion of works of French origin in the 1916/17 season was only 12 percent, by the following season it was 46.5 percent.
In New York, at the Metropolitan Opera, then under the direction of Giulio Gatti-Casazza, the purge took a course no less apparent than in Boston. Six German ensemble members were fired, including Johanna Gadski, who had sung the highly dramatic Wagner roles under Gustav Mahler and Arturo Toscanini, alternating with Olive Fremstad. The Metropolitan Opera also followed the nationwide anti-German shift in sentiment and found it necessary to banish Wagner from the stage. It was a painful decision, since Wagner's works had been the most prestigious part of their program - not to mention the most profitable - since the "German seasons" under Seidl. Henry Krehbiel, the old master of New York music criticism, called the decision "philistine."
One might be tempted to notice the similarity between the anti-German sentiment of that time and the russophobia of today fueled by a similar wave of war propaganda.
Thank you, Jos! A very good review of a cancel culture at WWI !