The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany

“A woman leans over to talk to her friend in the seat behind her. Orchestra musicians chat before the concert. A double bassist is called up for the draft, bringing a regional orchestra to a crisis. Concert times are changed because of air-raid alarms. Gregor’s sharp eye and ear for such details opens a world of sights and sounds from the lived experience of audiences, musicians, and administrators during the Third Reich. Gregor offers a social and sensory history that draws from his unparalleled knowledge of the political, social, and cultural landscape of the Third Reich. This immensely erudite but highly readable study gives us a multisensory awareness of the contradictions and paradoxes of this brutal regime that revered culture.”

“This is a provocative, disturbing, and original book. Using unexplored sources—photographs, architecture, acoustics, newspaper coverage, local civic archives, governmental records, and private diaries—Gregor strips the veil of innocence from concert life and listening. He shows how the Nazis exploited an entrenched conceit that predated 1933: the belief that classical music exemplified German superiority and Germany’s special sense of community. This book challenges the notion that Germany’s public musical culture under Nazism was a protected space of individual subjectivity and aesthetic distance separate from the radical evil and inhumanity of Nazism.”

“How did the concertgoing public and classical musicians align their aesthetic tastes with Nazism? All too easily, as Gregor shows us in this tour de force of a book. With immense knowledge and consummate finesse, he guides us into the world in which ‘art music’ was performed. This was Nazism in its upper-middle-class, educated register, virtually indistinguishable from the broader current of conservative nationalism. The classical concert, as Gregor shows brilliantly, was no safe refuge from the demands of the dictatorship. It was Nazi Germany.”

“Gregor’s book is an astonishing work of cultural history that strikes right at the heart of meaning-making, listening, and identity in twentieth-century Germany. In incisive, bold, and beautiful prose, Gregor guides us through how audiences, performers, and critics supported and maintained nationalist and racist ideologies in surprising ways. I am in awe of this deeply researched, gorgeously conceived, and profoundly thoughtful work of scholarship. May we sit with Gregor’s words for a very long time.”

“This is a magnificent work, taking a novel and long-overdue approach to demystifying the concert experience by investigating its behind-the-scenes workings. Gregor not only breaks down misconceptions about the Nazis’ micromanagement of cultural affairs but also draws on rich and varied resources that can deepen our understanding of the relationships between orchestras and their audiences then and now.”