Music

Poster: This Nazi propaganda poster is a crude exaggeration of the original poster for the opera Jonny spielt auf. This grotesque figure became the Nazi symbol for all they considered "degenerate" in the arts.

Degenerate Music, A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust.

Music of Rememberance: A Web site "dedicated to remembering Holocaust musicians and their art through musical performances, educational activities, musical recordings, and commissions of new works."

Entartete Music: Music Supressed by the Third Reich. "A year or so after the opening in Munich of the exhibition "Entartete Kunst" (Degenerate Art), the cultural politicians of the Nazi regime put on another, much less well-known show: this exhibition, entitled "Entartete Musik", was staged in Düsseldorf in 1938...[Today] from a purely musical point of view, the "Entartete Musik" series has, with unanimous international critical acclaim, brought back to life more than 30 forgotten key works from the first half of this century by composers such as Braunfels, Goldschmidt, Haas, Korngold, Krása, Krenek, Ullmann and Waxman. These recordings may help the listener imagine what the musical life in Europe was before its destruction by the Nazis, and what it might have been if these great branches had not been abruptly cut off."

Image: From The Films of Oskar Fischinger, Vol. 1. VHS videocassette: Jack Rutberg Fine Arts Inc.

Oskar Fischinger's Visual Music: Fischinger worked at UFA in the 1920s, designed special effects for Lang's silent sci-fi flick Woman on the Moon, fled the Nazis for making "degenerate" art, created shorts for Paramount and M-G-M, spent a year with Disney on Fantasia, had a stint with Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre, and settled in Hollywood, where he lived, painted, and animated until his death in 1967.

Photo: Paul Hindemith, 1895-1963.

Paul Hindemith (1895 - 1963): "Attacked by the National Socialists, who viewed him as a musical degenerate, he resigned from the Berlin Musikhochschule, where he had served as professor of composition for some eight years. He moved to New York where he was appointed visiting professor at Yale University in 1940. After the war he returned to Europe and spent the rest of his life touring extensively, conducting for various orchestras, teaching at the Universities of Yale and Zurich and composing his later introspective compositions."

Web site: Music of the Holocaust, USHMM.

Music of the Holocaust: Highlights from the Collection by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum