Beyond Germanness? Music’s History as ‘Entangled History’ in German Musicology from the End of the Nineteenth Century to the Second World War

Abstract

In 1938 the German Railway Company hired the graphic artist Lothar Heinemann to create a poster promoting Germany’s attractiveness as a tourist destination. Heinemann’s work shows a massive eagle, clearly representing Germany, clasping an organ in its talons, plainly referring to the ‘most German’ of the composers, Johann Sebastian Bach. The text ties both elements together and reads: ‘Germany, the Land of Music’.¹ The poster clearly evokes that mélange of supposedly Prussian and Protestant qualities that the Nazis were eager to claim for themselves, but Heinemann’s drawing should not be dismissed all too quickly as merely a further example of Nazi propaganda. Quite significantly, there is no swastika to be seen on this poster. In fact, the idea of Germany as the land of music arose, as is well known, long before Hitler; its origins were at the end of the eighteenth century.²