Music?

It can’t be destroyed.

Text Gaby Reucher, DW Culture

The National Socialists purposely used classical music for their propaganda. DW documentary director Christian Berger has been preoccupied with this topic for some time and now he’s making it the focus of his new documentary. Berger, a longtime editor with DW, shows on the one hand how star conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler and other well-known music makers were involved in the Nazi system and on the other, how young cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was able to survive the Nazi terror in Auschwitz thanks to music. “Klassik unterm Hakenkreuz” (Classics under the swastika) is the latest project in a long series of award-winning films from DW’s Culture and Lifestyle that breaks new ground: for the first time, unique archive footage including from concerts of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, has been restored and colorized. The color is key to making it possible to experience the events in a new way and bring them into the present.

Production for the new film is in full swing. Even though the complex processing of the archive material will still take several months, the award-winning director and his team are providing a look behind the scenes of this unique project. Berger’s documentary on the significance of classical music under National Socialism uses scores of period archive material that is currently being digitized.

The historic black-andwhite footage first has to be restored. After that, the majority of the black-andwhite images will be extensively colorized. “I wanted to bring these moments in music history into our time through color and make them more tangible, thereby also getting ’non-music specialists’ interested in the historical subject,” Berger says. Images showing the concentration camps Auschwitz, Theresienstadt and Bergen Belsen are deliberately left in black and white.

I wanted to bring these moments in music history into our time through color and make them more tangible.

Archive researcher Linn Sackarnd has painstakingly collected material from 24 different film archives in Germany, Europe and the USA. The particular problem with this genre: films from before 1945 are predominantly silent. “That was a challenge. You research archival films for a documentary about music— and there is often no sound in the sources.”

Other period documents pose the opposite problem. Sound recordings are available, but no images to go with them. This is the case, for example, with audio recordings of then 19-year-old cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a main protagonist in the film. Christian Berger illustrates her voice with detailed shots of a microphone from the 1930s.

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is the last survivor of the “Girls’ Orchestra of Ausschwitz.” She spent the last half year of her imprisonment in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp, where British troops liberated her in 1945. In a BBC radio interview, she recounts matterof-factly what she experienced in the concentration camps. “I witnessed everything with my own eyes. We heard the screams all the way in our barracks. There was always music to go with it. I myself was in the band. Music was put to the most terrible things.”

Music in the concentration camp

“For me, this interview with her was the most fascinating document; how precisely she analyzed the situation as a young woman. She was already afraid back then that people would not believe her at all about these monstrous events,” says Berger.

He visited 96-year-old Anita Lasker-Wallfisch at her home in London. She remembers clearly how in Auschwitz, she had to play marching music when the prisoners went to work. On weekends, they held concerts for the commanders. Among them was Josef Mengele, camp doctor at Auschwitz-Birkenau, who was involved in the murder of tens of thousands of people. He wanted to hear Anita Lasker-Wallfisch play Robert Schumann’s “Träumerei”. She is often asked whether she can still listen to this music today, even though it is connected with these terrible memories. “Of course!” she answers. “Life has two sides for me. One was hell and the other was normal life. The Nazis managed to destroy a lot. But the music, you can’t destroy it! You can try, but it’s impossible!”

Wilhelm Furtwängler: “Hitler’s Conductor?”

The film’s second main protagonist is star conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who died in 1954. There is archival footage of him, including the scene of him conducting on a stage decorated with swastika flags and then shaking hands with Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. The original blackand-white footage appears later in the film in the original colors of the time. “There’s something timeless about music,” says producer Bernhard von Hülsen. “When the Berlin Philharmonic performs this timeless music in color and good film quality in front of a Nazi audience, we immediately realize how close that time is to us. The magic of Furtwängler’s conducting, as well as the Faustian quality of his handshake with Goebbels, affect us that much more directly.”

In the 1930s, Wilhelm Furtwängler was sponsored by the National Socialists. One of his great performances was that of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which he conducted with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1942 for Hitler’s birthday in the old Berlin Philharmonie.

How the National Socialists appropriated music

Immediately in 1933, “Minister of Propaganda” Joseph Goebbels founded the “Reich Chamber of Culture” with the subdivision “Reich Chamber of Music”. Its first president was famous composer Richard Strauss, with Wilhelm Furtwängler as his deputy. Both were considered cultural figureheads of the dictatorship. Works by Jewish composers or political opponents were banned.

For the film, Christian Berger sought out musicologist Albrecht Dümling, who reconstructs the National Socialists’ so-called “degenerate music” exhibition. He says, “Music was considered the most German art, the art that speaks directly from the so-called ’racial soul’. And since music was so important, it had to be promoted even more. There had never been so much money spent on music by the state before.”

This did not come about suddenly or by chance. With the founding of the German Empire in 1871, Emperor Wilhelm I saw himself as the steward of the cultural heritage. He already wanted to tie “German” culture and music to the government and expand their status. International recognition of composers such as Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms and Bruckner played into his hands.

The National Socialists took up this tradition. The Berlin Philharmonic toured abroad as the Reich Orchestra. They filled the concert halls with German works by Beethoven, Liszt and Wagner. Adolf Hitler especially appreciated the music of Richard Wagner, who was also an anti-Semite who had written inflammatory pieces against the Jews.

Christian Berger sees Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and Wilhelm Furtwängler as two ends of a spectrum. “On one end is the star conductor courted by those in power. On the other side is a musician who made music in a concentration camp under fear of death. The contrast could hardly be greater.”

The documentary “Classics under the Swastika” is scheduled to premiere in fall 2022.