Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis
*Starred Review* German nationalism and liberal Jews’ assimilation into German society were parallel nineteenth-century developments that met immediate opposition, nationalism from without, assimilation from within as Germany amalgamated. Despite the anti-Semitism of romantic nationalist Richard Wagner, Jewish musicians thrived, achieving eminent positions in German musical culture and institutions. After WWI and its peace treaties blasted German aspirations, even the best-placed Jews came to suffer impoverishment, exile, and death when Hitler’s violently millenarian and imperial populist politics merged nationalism and modern racism. Haas never lets us lose sight of those encompassing historical movements as he intertwines the stories of music and politics in Germany while expanding upon the main currents and countercurrents of Germany’s music, which (nonobservant) Jews—Mahler, Schoenberg, Schreker (the Nazi regime’s first great musical victim)—often seemed to direct. Haas sketches the fortunes of dozens of composers, in particular, during the Holocaust, most of them as exiles but some, inevitably, in the death camps. He continues the survivors’ stories, too, almost always to show them never fulfilling their early promise or maintaining their previous reputations. It is, altogether, a tragic and epic story that Haas relates so magisterially well that this book will probably remain definitive on its subject for the foreseeable future. --Ray Olson