Trumpeting down the walls of Jericho: The politics of art, music and emotion in German-American relations, 1870-1920.

A few years ago, I toured the United States to interview American GIs who had entered Germany in 1944/45 and liberated Nazi concentration camps. What did these soldiers think, I wanted to know, when they entered German cities and towns and encountered the first civilians among the ruins of the Third Reich? The response I heard from more than one of my interviewees startled me, indeed shocked me, and eventually inspired me to research and write this essay. Yes, the veterans told me, they had hated the Germans for having drawn them into this war, for forcing them to leave their homes and fight abroad and, worst of all, for what they had done to the Jews. "But you know," they would often add after a brief pause, "the Germans, they also gave us Beethoven." (1)

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Why did these veterans think about classical music when remembering their wartime experience? Why did their love for a German composer temper their memories of the Holocaust? Where did this powerful image of the "good" German musician in the minds of ordinary Americans originate? And how do we make sense of this ostensible juxtaposition of the best and worst in German history and culture?

Despite social scientists' preference for print and visual culture, classical music as a reflector of cultural and social conditions has recently caught the interest of a some musicologists and even a few historians. Much of the existing research has focused on Central Europe. Celia Applegate, for example, has cast the meaning of music into the context of nationalism in nineteenth-century Germany, asking how music and musicology contributed to the process of nation-building and the "imagined community." Stefan Esteban has studied Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, showing that from the beginning the piece was conceived essentially in European rather than German terms. (2)

The influence of music that we know today as "serious" or "classical" extended to people around the world and its legacy is quite visible today, as reflected in the above-mentioned quote. In the United Stares the symphony scene emerged in the mid-nineteenth century largely thanks to the influx of numerous foreign musicians, bands, conductors and soloists. It was heavily dominated by the music of the Romantics, which is no surprise since this reflected very much the musical taste of European audiences at the time.

Historians of American culture have been slow to stress and retrace foreign (as opposed to immigrant) "highbrow" influences on American culture. Though the story seems familiar, no one really wants to tell it. (3) To write about classical music does not seem to be the politically correct thing to do in an age skeptical of the influence of elites, notably the influence of white European males. Hence, readers interested in the subject turn to analyses of individual composers, recollections of managers and performers, and an abundance of biographies. (4)

Music historians who have looked at foreign influences have typically paid more attention to English legacies than those of non-English speaking countries. Thus, Katherine Preston has alerted us to the lively U.S. music scene in the first half of the nineteenth century when Americans of different social ranks enjoyed both English-language and Italian operas at a multitude of occasions, including band concerts, dances and theater shows. This happy democratic period ended, Preston tells us, with the arrival of a musical elite which epitomized the serious music of the German Romantics. Culture became differentiated into various segments, with each part confined to a certain social stratum. From then on, music was either "popular" or an art but never both. (5)

This story of how American music life went elitist (i.e. sour) after the Civil War has been taken for granted in much of the historiography of American culture. Folk, ethnic, and popular music and, most importantly, that crucial date in time marking the emergence of a genuinely American music (Foster? Sousa? Joplin? Armstrong?) has preoccupied the research agenda of most music historians.

Yet the impact of the nineteenth-century serious music in the United States deserves more than the interest of a handful of music lovers, for its implications were vast, political, and universal, and extended far beyond the development of American musical life. The solidification of a "classical" canon in the United States (and elsewhere) coincided with the rise of the German Empire and its self-appointed role as a Kulturnation (a nation based on a cultural canon). Far away from the diplomatic chess games that have characterized so much of our understanding of the late nineteenth-century international scene, artists and administrators believed they had a mission to bring music, the language of emotions, to audiences around the world. By catering to images of the "internationalism" of music, these men (and a few women) sought to promote the message of the national superiority of German musicianship.

This essay, then, presents a set of ideas on music, emotions and politics I have developed over the last few years. It investigates German, and, to a lesser extent, French, and British cultural initiatives in the United States prior to World War One. It retraces the lives, thoughts and impact of musicians as well as their immediate impact on audiences throughout the nation. It illuminates the growing antagonism of American audiences and critics to the preponderance of German music in the decades before 1917. And it investigates the long-term legacy of the symphony in the United States.

European political nationalism and cultural expansionism, I believe, fueled the emergence of American culture--both high and pop--in the late nineteenth century. Lawrence Levine and a generation of historians after him have argued, insightfully, that Anglo-American elites who were obsessed with refinement and taste, played an important role in the emergence of cultural hierarchy and the promotion of classical music in America. (6) Yet as much as the elites participated in the construction of a cultural canon, this development also constituted an international affair that was coordinated by tough French, British and German intellectuals, artists, and cultural administrators.

Much of my thinking about the power of music in international relations has taken place in the context of what has been labeled "the new international history." In the last decade scholars have probed new methods for the analysis of the history of foreign relations, methods involving gender, literary criticism, travel, environmentalism, race, and culture. They have written about nongovernmental organizations, religion, sports, and the spread of diseases in the framework of international relations. Today, the history of foreign relations is characterized by an intense pluralism, and an increasing awareness that the state is only one out of many principal actors in the international arena. (7)

Culture and cultural relations, I believe, develop their own form of power, and their interactions should not be viewed solely through political lenses. Nonetheless they belong into the realm of international history. In the case of German-American relations, cultural representatives sometimes worked hand in hand with policymakers. More often, however, they were on their own. Their intentions hence need to be considered independently from the policymaking process even though the effect of their actions occasionally achieved a desired political effect.

To understand the interplay between culture and international relations, I have developed a concept I call "emotional elective affinity." Elective affinity is a term for chemical processes coined originally by the Swede Torbern Bergman. (8) According to the most prominent advocate of the concept, Max Weber, elective affinity signifies a noncausal process in which two sets of interests seek one another out and reinforce one another. "A mutual favoring, attraction, and even strengthening is involved whenever ideal types coalesce in a relationship of elective affinity." (9) Today the term elective affinity has been associated with human, political and cultural sympathies and aversions, and it is in this sense that I wish to use it in the context of international history. Emotional elective affinity describes an alliance between different people that is based on cultural fascination rather than on political calculation. This approach does not dismiss the state nor state-centered historiography. Rather, it revises our understanding of international history by paying attention to the phenomenon of emotional experiences and its long-term political consequences.

It is important to note that this endeavor--the merger of musical and political history--represents a new and rather open-ended field. Some readers may criticize me for trying to cover too long a period in too scattered a fashion. I wish to remind them that this essay attempts to sketch out the parameters of a much larger research project--this is, after all, a speculative essay by which I hope to induce an interdisciplinary debate over the meaning of music and emotions in the context of international relations.

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Much of the existing literature on German-American relations before World War I has focused on diplomatic, military and trade aspects. Scholars agree that this period was one of dramatically changing political flirtations during which European nations increasingly wooed U.S. leaders in order to win their political support. Most importantly, the period after 1890 saw the rise of the Anglo-American rapprochement as well as a renewed friendship between the State Department and the Quay d'Orsay, both connections dreaded by the Kaiser. (10)

Daniel Pick has shown how long before the end of the nineteenth century war and discussions on the mechanics of international military conflicts became a standard topic in poetry, cultural debates and the news. (11) European intellectual and political leaders sensed the proximity of armed conflict long before the lines between the different factions were drawn. As tensions between the Central Powers and the Entente intensified, the United States--a seemingly neutral party with an enormous industrial capacity--emerged as a most desirable political ally.

This courtship affected both the diplomatic and the cultural arena. While European ambassadors busily embarked on diplomatic chess games and intrigues behind closed doors, cultural leaders conjured up their own special projects to charm Anglo-American elites into a bilateral alliance. Particularly France and Germany came to see the fin-de-siecle as an international competition for the export of national culture. The French feared that "unformed" German Kultur threatened their leading position in the arts and crafts. German intellectuals, in turn, nurtured long-standing fears of French modern civilization. (12) Indeed, to French, British, and German intellectuals, America represented a cultural wasteland ready to be civilized but also a convenient battlefield where the European powers would fight their last battle for global cultural preponderance.

Take, for example, a look at France. There, the central administration of the arts created a full-fledged advertising program for national artwork abroad. Professional French dealers like Goupil established renowned galleries along the U.S. east coast to sell French paintings picked and promoted by the French government. (13) In 1906, 57.2 percent of all paintings imported to the United States originated in France; followed by Great Britain (17.9 %), Italy (10.5%), and Germany (5.1 %). (14) In the same vein, the Alliance Francaise, founded in 1883, served to solidify the supremacy of French language and civilization against the onslaughts of German Kultur. From early on the Alliance had targeted the United States as its most fertile ground for civilization. By 1904, the Alliance established more than 150 committees around the country, counting some 25,000 adherents in the United States. (15)

Meanwhile, British political and cultural leaders capitalized on the growing pro-English affinity among U.S. elites. As Christopher Hitchens has shown, British aristocrats enabled, from 1902--03 on, a disproportionately high number of American students to study at English schools. Meanwhile, the British aristocracy's discovery of U.S. cash fostered Anglo-American ties. Mary Leiter exchanged vows with Lord Curzon, Consuelo Vanderbilt said "yes" to the Duke of Marlborough, and Jennie Jerome landed Lord Randolph Churchill. More than one hundred such weddings were celebrated during the years before World War I, and they collectively established a vital political link between British and American elites. (16)

Whether state-directed or not, the French and the British scored high sympathy points in the United States--unlike the Germans. By the turn of the century, American intellectuals recognized Paris, no longer a cave of promiscuous sins, as the cultural capital of the world. French art as well as British class, scholarship and novels commanded the attention of U.S. elites. In contrast, Germany was universally labeled as a bulwark of militarism and imperialism, driven by vanity and the quest for power. Observers like Henry Adams stated that German universities had become pedantic and sterile structures; that the political situation was ridiculously provincial; and that German food was downright disgusting. (17)

Monitoring U.S. public opinion as well as French and British cultural activities, German politicians and intellectuals feared that they would lose out in the European courtship for U. S. affection, and they, too, devised strategies designed to export deutsche Kultur (German culture) to the United States. The dissemination of Kultur, administrators hoped, would limit British and French influences among the American public and convince U.S. decision makers of the superiority of German statesmanship. "Our cultural efforts do not aim at doing a favor to the Americans," the German ambassador in Washington, Johann Heinrich Graf von Bernstorff, reviewed these efforts in January 1914, "instead we wish to elevate German Kultur to its due right--a right which it claims unconditionally as the first culture of the world. This, too, is a part of world policy." (18)

Since the German Reich's government had no mandate nor a formal agency to deal with cultural foreign policy until 1921, the politicians' zeal to spread German Kultur lagged far behind nongovernmental impulses. An abundance of private individuals, secret societies, and churches, along with popular images, architecture, maps, and souvenirs reflected an intense and steadily increasing climate of cultural nationalism and expansionism. (19) Patriotic associations such as the Vaterlandische Frauenverein or the Verein fur das Deutschtum im Ausland clearly revealed expansionist goals. These associations often believed that they had a better grasp of their respective national interests than their weak government and they often threatened to turn issues of marginal diplomatic interest into disputes over life and death of their country, a mortal clash in which national honor was at stake. (20)

As a result, Germany's early cultural export focused on a--rather unsuccessful--academic exchange program. Initiated by a number of German professors, the Prussian cultural ministry and the German Kaiser in the early 1900s, the program did more to alienate American elites than to attract them to German culture. Most American students could not attend German lectures due to the language problem. Worse and much to the disdain of their U.S. colleagues, German professors abroad did not always behave in keeping with the local democratic etiquette, insisting instead on their scholastic and social superiority. While expecting to be wined and dined at the White House as unofficial ambassadors of the German Reich, the professors at best got an invitation to the Havard Faculty Club or an evening engagement at the Germanic Society of New York. (21)

The German empire's cultural initiative also encompassed an art exchange program that proved equally futile. German artists could simply not compete with the French monopoly mentioned above. Apart from 19th-century painters such as Adolph Menzel, Arnold Bocklin, and Franz von Lenbach, German painters had never made significant inroads in the United States, partly because the American public automatically censored everything that was new and daring. More importantly, the Imperial Reich government deemed contemporary artists like Max Beckmann or Lovis Corinth inappropriate for an international exhibition. Landscapes radiating the spirit of Heimat such as the ones produced by Ludwig Dill and Gustav Schonleber, seemed safer politically and morally to policymakers in Berlin. (22)

Yet, it was in a third and more informally directed sector that German cultural export proved triumphant, and that was the case of orchestral music, notably the symphony. (23) Traditionally, music has been instrumental to the shaping of German national identity and it loomed large as the centerpiece of German Kultur, much larger than painting ever did. (24) Consequently, Germans always considered their music as an outgrowth of a specifically "Germanic" culture. Robert Schumann once observed that no composer epitomized the socio-political meaning of music more than Ludwig van Beethoven. Beethoven's symphonies were literally synonymous with German cultural pride, his personal suffering a symbol of the German character. During the Napoleonic occupation, when French civilization and language seemed to threaten German cultural independence, the tunes of Beethoven's symphonies along with the spirit of Goethe's Faust and the philosophy of Johann Gottfried Herder consoled millions of Germans, convincing them of their cultural superiority in the face of political and military defeat.

Equally important, the emergence of a new music form in Germany was the first serious challenge to the French and Italian musical leadership since the 1780s. Beethoven and his music embedded the overthrow of an established genre, the pride of the suppressed everywhere. From the early nineteenth century onward, music critics strove to establish J. S. Bach and his heirs as both representatives of the German nation and unique geniuses, incomparable to other foreign musicians and other nations. Germans alone seemed to have access to that celestial "spark of music" that only flourished on German soil and when composed by a German hand. Throughout the nineteenth century, musicians, music critics, and musicologists argued that music was vital to the development of a German national consciousness. (25) And when they said "music" they meant "serious" music, most notably the German symphony.

The Germans' cultural nationalism did not need political infusion; quite the contrary, it thrived due to its apolitical appeal. (26) "For whatever reasons," Celia Applegate writes, "we have long accepted the romantics' vision of music as a direct expression of humanity or of divinity, in either case universal, and thus unsullied by the political world." None other than Wilhelm von Humboldt proclaimed that serious music had to be intellectually and emotionally challenging, even draining, in order to give a voice to the human free will. That ability to probe, suffer and demand was German and, according to Humboldt, hence universal. To be German meant to be open-minded, free-spirited, and unconstrained by the fetters of any geographically or intellectually restrained way of life or thought.

Musical nationalism did not confine itself to the territorial borders of the German Empire. Instead, it included minds and musicians in German-speaking areas, including Austria, Bohemia and even Switzerland. For nineteenth-century Germans music became a direct expression of their national identity. It provided them with a means to form an imagined community on the cultural level without being burdened by the conundrums of daily political life. Cutting across lines of class and education, it promised social inclusion and community, while, at the same time, remaining lukewarm to the idea of state-building. (27)

The universalism embedded in the music of the Romantics allowed their influence to spread far beyond German-speaking areas. Audiences outside of Imperial Germany found German music equally appealing, often for the very same reason. Because of its nonverbal, non-political and "serious" appearance, it even appealed to foreign audiences who otherwise would not have granted a grain of sympathy to other manifestations to German culture, let alone politics. Esteban Buch has argued that Beethoven became an important national symbol for the same reason that he appealed to other Europeans: because his music embedded a universalism that made it accessible to people of all creeds. Romantics saw the "Ode to Joy" as the climax of their art. German nationalists praised its heroic power and its "Germanness" while French republicans felt it expressed the essence of 1798, extolling it as the "Marseillaise de l'humanite." Communists believed the symphony heralded a world without class distinctions. For the Catholic Church, the Ninth was, quite simply, the gospel. Hitler loved to listen to the Ode (particularly at his birthdays) as did the inmates of Nazi concentration camps. At the height of apartheid the Ninth was the national anthem of Rhodesia, it has become a standard staple at the Olympic Games and it is, today, the hymn of the European Union. (28)

This is the socio-political background framing the impact of German musicians and their art in the United States. Once music became itinerant, accelerated by both the emigration of 1848 and subsequently the advent of the steamer, it traveled fast across the Atlantic, where it generated a deeply-rooted affinity for German music and musicians among people who did not speak German nor cared much about the Kaiser, an affinity that would last until today.

It is difficult to overestimate this change in American musical life. During the first half of the 19th century, Italian opera and occasionally French composers had fascinated U.S. audiences. Italian opera troupes had extensively traversed the North American landscape. And even when they stayed away for a few years around 1840, American composers like Maurice Strakosch and William Henry Fry injected a fair amount of "Italianism" into their works. Likewise, American singers such as Jane Shirreff and John Wilson did not hesitate to build their careers on an Italian repertory, translated into English. Such improvisation aroused little suspicion as American audiences did not identify yet musical performances with spiritual and semi-sacral experiences. Operatic performers were seen as entertainers rather than prodigies, who simply did, sang, and played what audiences demanded. (29)

After mid-century, a new generation of artists, headed by the Romantics, arrived on the American musical scene who dramatically changed the perception of music per se. Replacing entertainment with education, they demanded a new form of participation from their audiences: silence, study and inner soul-searching. Many of these artists came from the northern half of the European continent, most notably Germany and Austria, as did the repertory they imported. In contrast to the cases of Italian or French music, these artists and the craft they represented were not regarded as fortuitous. Rather it was their "Germanness" that seemed to entitle them to a special access to performance and composition. And as a result, between 1850 and 1918, orchestral music composed in German-speaking countries, German conductors, German musicians as well as German musicology and music pedagogy virtually came to monopolize the American music scene.

The symphony, in particular, began to occupy a special place in the eclectic American musical landscape, as it combined aspects that appealed to men (the power of the orchestra, the sex of the performers) and women (the emotional impact of music). Most importantly, both as a musical piece as well as its representation by a group of (mostly) men, the symphony represented taste, orchestral power, and the spirit of universalism. It was designed as an ideal microcosm of society, complete with a clear hierarchical structure that assigned a place, a function, and, quite literally, a voice to each of its members.

A case in point was the Germania Musical Society, an orchestra that specifically sailed for America "in order to enflame and stimulate in the hearts of these politically free people, through numerous performances of our greatest instrumental composers... [the] love for the fine art of music." (30) Under the motto "all for one and one for all; equality in rights and duties," individual members were required to yield to the community's interest. It was the Germania's symbolic value for political unity that impressed audiences between the Atlantic Coast and the Mississippi River. As Dwight's Journal of Music informed its readers, in July 1853, "Three and twenty Germans, who for five years now in this 'free' land have kept together faithful and united,--that is indeed a rarity, deserving to be held up as an example to be imitated... " (31)

Due to the influx and impact of this ensemble as well as countless other German orchestral musicians and the music they performed, symphonic music became synonymous with German. To be German meant to be extremely musical, emotionally gifted, and a member of a universally admired cultural club. Musicians who wanted to be professional artists saw their chances immensely increased if they could refer to a German background or at least German training. Leopold Stokowski, renowned conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and then the Philadelphia Orchestra, not only claimed to be from Pomerania or Poland (he was actually British). He temporarily even changed the spelling of his name (substituting a "v" for the "w") to make it look more continental, then cultivated a pidgin Central European accent complete with a crippled vocabulary, all of this to convince people of his "foreignness." (32) Even Louis Gottschalk, the only U.S. artist who ever reached the kind of fame otherwise reserved for foreign soloists, p roudly and consistently hinted to his European background: his father was a German-educated Englishman, his mother a member of the French upper class. The strategy apparently worked. When Gottschalk played at a matinee, women would rush on stage, grasp his handkerchief, touch his clothes--and faint. (33)

The New York Philharmonic did not hire a single long-term non-German conductor until 1906. And once the orchestra had signed contracts with Russian maestro Vassily Safonoff, it smuggled in the Austrian conductor, Gustav Mahler, and finally appointed the latter, in 1909. In Boston, the symphony counted 22 Germans, 8 Austrians, 2 Italians and 2 French players as late as 1917--after the United States had entered World War I. Karl Muck, formerly conductor at the Royal Opera in Berlin, personally hand-picked his players in Europe. (34) Rehearsals were typically held in German, and the music director would be addressed with "Herr." Programs were heavily dominated by Wagner and the three Bs (that is Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms), notwithstanding the performance of other European compositions as well. (35)

Great orchestras came to be identified increasingly with German conductors. Until 1920, at least a dozen metropolises, among those New York (1842), St. Louis (1879), Boston (1881), Chicago (1891), Cincinnati (1895), Pittsburgh (1896), Philadelphia (1900), Minneapolis (1903), and San Francisco (1911) established philharmonics, with others such as Baltimore, Cleveland and Detroit following suit during or shortly after the war. The symphony craze reached its climax in the 1890s with the simultaneous establishment of five orchestras, within roughly a dozen years. Most of these orchestras were sponsored by local elites and organized under the tutelage of a German-born conductor like Anton Seidl, Leopold and Walter Damrosch in New York, Theodore Thomas in Chicago, and Emil Oberhoffer in Minneapolis.

The artists performing with and in these orchestras did not count among the typical melee of immigrants who had turned their backs on Europe in order to settle in the United States. Instead, they very much resembled today's international artistic community personified by stars like Daniel Barenboim, Placido Domingo and Frank Zimmermann; these men and some women were constantly on the road, performing one week in Berlin, the next one in Paris and two weeks later in New York. And even if they had seasonal contracts in an American metropolis, most of them shuttled back across the ocean for the summer in order to visit the various musical centers, hire new instrumentalists and acquire novel compositions.

Likewise, many cities that emerged as musical centers did not necessarily profit from a sizeable German population influx. In Boston, for example, where German romanticism ruled supreme, German immigration remained at bay. The records indicate only 1,100 new arrivals between 1821 and 1845, yet in 1850 the census indicated a high number of German artists (33 of 249 actors and musicians). (36) In other words, music flourished in Boston not because there were a lot of Germans; instead, German artists deliberately headed for Boston knowing their art would encounter receptive ears.

What was it that drew German-born composers and musicians to the United States? There was, of course, the timeless appeal of money and fame. In the decades before 1900, European musicians increasingly felt compelled to test the ground in the United States where some found themselves celebrated and paid to a degree far beyond anything they had experienced in Europe. Johann Strauss, Jr., who came to Boston in 1872 to conduct a gigantic concert with 1,087 musicians and 20,000 singers, cashed in the incredible sum of $100,000.00, and returned to Vienna as a millionaire. (37)

Second, the German musicians clearly tapped into a market gap left open by American men and that, on first sight, consciously targeted American women. American tourists often likened Europeans and their emphasis on cultural achievements, to weak, emotional and undisciplined women. Like art, music seemed an "unmanly" occupation to Victorian Americans who interpreted the display of emotion, leisure and a taste for culture as decisively feminine, and unfit for admission to Theodore Roosevelt's vigorous concept of manliness and civilization. (38) The perception of music as feminine automatically discredited the achievements of American male composers and performers, thus opening a professional gap for German musicians. In other words, it was okay to play if you were a German musician; but it wasn't if you were an American man.

The third reason that drew German musicians to America, and by far the most significant one, was their almost missionary zeal to educate U.S. audiences in classical music, a zeal that echoed the German Reich's increasing propensity to spread Kultur across the globe. "For that alone is it, that attracts me to come there," wrote the Mainz musician Felix Volbach when applying for the conductorship at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, in 1894, "namely to bring our rich treasures of our great masters there to the world of the future and help that they conquer the world." (39) Meanwhile Theodore Thomas surrounded himself with busts, engravings, and pictures of Goethe, Schubert, and Mozart in his study, a room which he called his "Glaubensbekenntnis" [profession of faith]. Popular music he despised as it manifested Lucifer's work, "the sensual side of the art" that "has more or less the devil in it." (40) Clearly, an army of German musicians saw themselves appointed to trumpet down the walls of Jericho, or rather, America, a country that they believed lacked refinement.

From a twenty-first-century perspective, it is difficult to understand the courage of these musicians and the radicalism of their endeavor to introduce orchestral music to broad audiences. In an age with limited traveling possibilities and before the advent of the microphone, the loudspeaker, the radio and the record player, symphonic music still constituted a novelty for most nineteenth-century audiences, even in Europe. The power of a large orchestra, as discovered by Beethoven, Berlioz and Liszt, dazzled listeners in New York, just as it had frightened listeners in Berlin a few years earlier. Concert goers were used to simpler harmonic structures and often left the auditorium in outrage whenever Beethoven was played, convinced this was the only socially acceptable response.

In their efforts to introduce American audiences to the art of the Romantics, the soloists and players were therefore not merely traveling artists but leaders who could appreciate as well as interpret the composers of the new school. Uncompromising in their approach, these men cared little whether American audiences immediately appreciated the sounds of Bach, Beethoven and Wagner. Instead, they understood themselves like missionaries preaching the gospel among ignorant heathens. "But, Mr. Bergmann," the conductor of the New York Philharmonic was told when selecting a heavy Wagner program for a new concert season, "the people don't like Wagner." -- "Den dey must hear him till dey do," Bergmann fired back. (41)

Fritz Scheel, first conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, struggled so zealously to overcome the obstacles to his mission, including financial problems and the search for first-class musicians, that he suffered a mental breakdown and was eventually taken to a sanitarium. There he selected nurses and orderlies for a chorus and made them sing part songs, standing around his bed. One of his last hallucinations was to write letters to prominent musicians in Europe, offering them large sums to come to Philadelphia and teach in a conservatory that he was supposedly about to found. (42)

The musicians also targeted a larger audience outside of their immediate sphere of influence by traveling extensively across Canada and the United States. All philharmonics spent a considerable part of the regular season "on tour", trekking by train from city to city, town to town. The efforts involved in these excursions testify to the commitment of conductors and orchestra players who went a long way to preach their gospel. On the road typically during the winter and early spring, orchestras had to get used to being held up by snowstorms, defective trains and other unpalatable obstacles which would leave horns hoarse, fiddles scratchy, and players exhausted and annoyed. The 85 men of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra under German conductor Emil Oberhoffer gave 70 concerts on an eastern and southern trip in 1912 that covered 9,000 miles of territory in a season of 23 weeks, leading the orchestra as far as North Dakota and Alabama. (43)

One wonders about the responses they received. We still know very little about audience makeup, notably about who could go to the symphony, who went, and who merely pretended they went. Few researchers have taken the pains to look into this part of the story in greater depths, and for good reasons. There are no statistics, few pictures, and the sources that we have (such as programs, reviews, and diaries) are extremely partial to the "fashionable" dress circle. We know and have heard ad nauseam that symphony halls offered plenty of space for the creme-de-la-creme of local society. Ritzy boxes and parquet seats could cost as much as $2 per evening. (44) Some orchestras even auctioned off seasonal subscriptions for individual seats for several hundred dollars, as was the case in Boston where Isabella Steward Gardner paid $560 for her seasonal balcony seat during the 1900-01 season.

On the other hand, there was also plenty of space for those whose incomes were tight, and we need to wonder who sat in those seats before running to conclude that symphony culture was elitist. The entrance fee for the gallery and the back seats (which often made up for as much as 30 to 40 percent of all tickets sold in a hall) for example, amounted to around 15 to 25 cents. That was more than the tickets to the nickelodeon which cost, by definition, a nickle but less than a seat in a theater (already priced at 25 cents in the antebellum period). Even vaudeville theaters ranged in price between ten cents and a dollar in the 1890s, and they attracted thousands of working-class visitors each year. Symphonies made concerted efforts to draw listeners from all walks of life. Nearly all offered special afternoon concerts to attract single and "unchaperoned" female listeners who until the advent of the movies, hardly participated in the world of public entertainment. (45) The Theodore Thomas Orchestra designed specia l "Young People's" and "Workingmen's Concerts" to reach wider audiences. (46) Newspapers consistently stressed Henry Higginson's effort to draw listeners "without distinction of sex and color" into Boston's Symphony Hall, showing well-dressed African-Americans and single women standing in line to obtain tickets to concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Such illustrations have to be considered with caution, though. It may be possible that some of the people depicted eventually sold off their tickets or their place in line. (47)

All this is not to say that audiences converted to the beauties of orchestral music with flying colors. Indeed, home and road audiences often presented orchestras with trying challenges, forcing musicians and singers to compromise their repertories. Thomas' transcontinental tours often dragged on, sucked up plenty of money, and often did not even cover the orchestra's expenses. Audiences were often suspicious of classical programs and preferred minstrels to Wagner. Occasionally, people did not even take a traveling orchestra seriously at all because "they don't look at all like musicians"--musicians who were not "blacked up" as minstrels were presumably no musicians at all.

In almost every town locals demanded a parade and a free concert in front of the "opery-house." In a southern city, in the 1880s the Theodore Thomas Orchestra played in a theater where a farmer in a slouch hat occupied a box of solitary splendor. His two big cowhide boots swung over the edge of the box, he snored his way through the evening as a Beethoven symphony "lulled the ranchman into a little snoring sleep." In Iowa, the mayor of a city asked Thomas to play a minuet louder. When the conductor pointed out gently that the piece was marked "PP," the mayor responded resolutely: "No matter if it is. Such a pretty piece deserves to be played louder." (48) In Texas, local authorities felt compelled to put up a sign for a concert by Federico Busoni reading: "Don't shoot the pianist; he's doing the best he can." (49)

Busoni's experience illustrates the fact that not infrequently, musical artists received a less than favorable reception and many artists found themselves in situations testing the limits of their survival skills. In the spring of 1885, Theodore Thomas took his New York-based orchestra on its second transcontinental tour to bring vocal and symphonic music to audiences across the Great Plains, the Rockies and the Pacific Coast. On its way west, the train transporting the musicians stopped by in Coleridge, Colorado, a cattle town, to change engines. While the players stretched their legs on the platform, some of the local cowboys came up to the conductor and asked for a performance. Hearing that the orchestra had no intention to play in their town, the cowboys disapproved loudly, threatened Thomas, and the situation began to get out of hand. The European singers all shut themselves up in their staterooms and refused to come out. To soothe matters, Thomas produced his violin and began to play a solo concert. The n, Miss Emma Juch, a soprano in Wagnerian roles, stepped on the back platform and sang "The Last Rose of Summer," an early nineteenth-century Irish song, tearfully sentimental to the core. When Juch finished, a newspaper man recorded, "there was loud cheering and hurrahing, and as the train pulled out the enthusiastic cowboys fired a hundred guns into the air." (50)

The humor of these stories notwithstanding, their important aspect is not that plain people favored plain melodies and that orchestral music remained ostensibly reserved for elite audiences in search of refinement. Quite the contrary: despite their previous lack of access to classical music, ordinary Americans did attend these concerts in ever increasing numbers, regardless of their initial reactions. The major orchestras continued to travel across long distances, convinced that all audiences would--if properly educated by constant exposure--appreciate the power of classical music. None of these incidences ever discouraged conductors from continuing their annual tours into the most remote corners of the American landscape. Instead, they often employed a carrot-and-stick method by lightening heavy classical programs with occasional sentimental songs drawn from folk culture.

Audiences were also charmed by the elegance of the performers, often young unmarried dashing men. Newspapers and journals across the nation were swamped with sketches, biographies, and photographs of distinguished-looking pianists, violinists, and singers from Germany who, presumably, led a purified life dedicated to "the higher arts." In more than one way, the above-mentioned Germania Musical Society was, by today's standards, a boys' group, replete with solidarity, friendship and sex appeal. "There was a romantic flavor in the mutual devotion of the Germanians," John Sullivan Dwight lateron remembered. "They were young men, friends, who had been drawn together.... It was the fraternal spirit of their union, with their self-sacrificing zeal for art ... it was this 'art religion,' so to speak that gave them an immense advantage over all the larger orchestras in every city." (51) German male performers like Emil Sauer were idolized to the same extent as were the Backstreet Boys, one hundred years later. Sauer' s hairdo, attire, and love affairs became a central feature in gossip columns across the country. (52) "Soloist Likes American Girls," the Cincinnati Post advertised the arrival of the pianist Hugo Reisenauer, in March 1904. "So, Girls, There's a Chance." (53) The image of the German musician as a gifted and attractive man who knew how to express his feelings became a symbol for Germany's ubiquitous and attractive Kultur. "The waltz king, personally, is evidently a good fellow," declared one journalist during Johann Strauss' visit to America. "He talks only German, but he smiles in all languages." (54)

Shrewd managers soon capitalized on the artists' emotional appeal. When Anton Rubinstein crisscrossed the United States for a 215-concert tour expounding the power of Beethoven, Bach, Schumann and Chopin, in 1872-73, he was appalled at the sight of windows and wallboards plastered with his photograph, an abundance of invitations, and the ruthless attack of autograph seekers. (55) While they loved to cash in on their concerts, artists found Americans' irreverence often depressing. "Good God," wrote Federico Busoni in 1910, "the method they have here of turning people into celebrities makes one's heart sink into one's boots." (56)

It is important to note that touring orchestras and soloists were not the only ones to provide audiences outside of the larger cities with the musical repertory of German-speaking composers. Many Americans had a lot more actual performing experience than we do today as they engaged in home music making. This was the only way to listen to music around the house before the advent of high-quality recording technology. (57) The piano especially became a standard piece of furniture in middle and upper class homes around the nation. Still in 1910, 139,000 teachers were teaching Americans how to play on parlor pianos, uprights, baby grands and grands. Six years later, William Geppert's Official Guide to Piano Quality counted over forty American piano companies with a capital stock between $100,000 and $2 million or more who produced more than 300,000 pianos per year. (58) Students and their teachers typically did not seek to merely reproduce a given piano repertory but also played transcriptions of symphonic and ope ratic parts (often for four hands).

There was, of course, a vast amount of music in the U.S. in this period besides symphonic music, Lutheran hymnody, and Wagnerian opera. Until the late 19th century, Americans attributed far more significance to vocal music, especially sacred music and opera. Italian, British, French and German vocal artists and opera companies did much to shape the general music scene. And much of the music played and performed did not originate among German composers. Likewise, one might think of the countless popular folk ballads, tin-pan alley songs, drinking songs, church hymns, chorale music, and later on ragtime, jazz, blues, opera, piano music, band music, guitar and fiddle music and many others besides. Apart from Wagner and Weber, Italians still dominated the opera. Likewise, turn-of-the-century music journals reveal quite a few articles on French music, especially regarding pedagogy, the tours of Saint-Saens and D'Indy, the reception of Debussy, and the like. (59)

Yet in the eclectic musical landscape of the United States German serious music advanced to a more prominent position than most of the genres mentioned above. And when Americans thought--and think--about high classical music, "true" beautiful music, music that was apt to express human emotion and uplift the soul, they reverted to German composers and musicians.

Why? What was it that made German "serious" music eventually so appealing to audiences across the North American continent and how, exactly, did this appeal affect the international arena? Cultural historians have argued, correctly, that nineteenth-century Anglo-American elites created spheres of social control in order to distinguish themselves by refinement and taste. Yet the attachment people develop to high culture cannot be dismissed by analyses of social climbing, politicization and manipulation. As I have shown above, music audiences were much more heterogeneous than we have hitherto believed. The artists, in turn, formed by no means a wealthy elite but spent much of their lives on tour reaching out to audiences who otherwise would never have heard the sound of an orchestra. Instead, it was the early artists' iron determination, their foreignness and attractiveness, and the emotional appeal of the music they performed that proved eventually irresistible to North American audiences and created a bond be tween German and American audiences that would survive two world wars.

Current scholarship is just beginning to investigate the history of repertories in nineteenth-century America. What little we know makes it clear that concert programs at the time were highly eclectic. One could find parts of a symphony and an overture of German or Austrian origin along with Italian opera selections, quadrilles, and virtuoso items of Franco-Italian origin on one and the same program. Indeed, frequently conductors and soloists mingled "serious" music with lighter fares, including folk songs and arias from French and Italian operas. Thanks to an abundance of antebellum touring opera companies, elite and ordinary Americans knew the operatic canon almost as well as their European counterparts. (60)

At the same time, there is no doubt that the German-Austrian repertoire by far outweighed anything else on repertoires around the nation. Between 1890 and 1915, more than sixty percent of all music performed by American symphonies stemmed from Austro-German composers, followed by approximately 12 percent each of French and Russian music. Less than four percent of the music played was composed by Italian composers while American music occupied less than one percent. (61)

It is, thus, important to understand the difference between repertory and canon. While a repertory merely comprises actual performances, the canon manifests the ideology. To play and perform a certain kind of music does not integrate it into the canon of accredited masterpieces. Critics, pedagogues, performers, connoisseurs, and, yes, the public need to accept, establish and then strengthen a regular place for a specific kind of music (in this case symphonic) in the surrounding musical culture; their consensus and the longevity of the same then make a composer or a piece part of the canon. The nineteenth-century canon defined music as a spiritual, moral, uplifting and purifying force. It drew its strengths from the assumption that some composers (and their music) could withstand the threat of commercialization. Instead they would rescue musical life and help their audiences reach a "higher plane" untarnished by the concerns of a capitalist society. (62)

In other words, it was not so much the repertory, or the repertory alone, but the ideology, the belief in "good serious music," that set German serious music apart from all other genres. For all their popularity and tradition, opera music and virtuoso music which figured prominently on concert programs throughout the western world, never found themselves associated with ideology, humanist values, cosmopolitanism or the national soul. The preponderance of German music was thus mostly visible in a set of social ideals rather than what people liked, heard, or individually preferred playing on their home pianos.

How did these efforts along with the attraction of foreign artists translate into an emotional affinity for German music and culture at large? Wilhelm von Humboldt once characterized music as the language of emotions which could be accessed, understood and spoken without special education or training (to a certain extent, that might even apply to vocal music). And because music was so accessible, it constituted "a natural bond between the lower and higher classes of the nation," without "the accidental distinctions of society." (63) Music established an emotional equality that political life never admitted; it offered the solution to a tension that threatened to rip apart the social structure.

Emotion, according to a central thesis in modern psychological theory, "is aroused when a tendency to respond is arrested or inhibited." As the musicologist Leonard Meyer has written, "music may give rise to images and trains of thought which, because of their relations to their inner life of the particular individual, may eventually culminate in affect. (64) Typically, the connotations and feelings music arouses are based both on a knowledge of and experience with music, and on the knowledge of and experience in the world of images outside the world of music, such as a landscape, a building, or a mood. Some of those may even have specific sound effects that music can reproduce, such as a tempest or a battle.

In nineteenth-century America, German musicians clearly had--and felt they had--a monopoly on the public display of "emotion," an idea that both obsessed and frightened Victorians as the century came to a close. (65) Nineteenth-century Kultur offered U.S. audiences the artists and composers to whom Americans turned in search for an emotional refuge from an increasingly modernizing environment: Beethoven, Wagner, and an array of German-trained performers. (66) It also established German music as the language of emotion, reigning over the hearts of listeners between Boston, Pittsburgh and San Francisco.

According to the Romantics' belief in the difference between reason and emotion, the Volk expressed itself in cultural forms such as music; hence, the performance of the German symphony promoted the hegemony of German Kultur. And as Susanne Langer and Leonard Meyer have argued, the German type of thematic construction produced a form of emotional "greatness" in music that distinguished it from other European genres. (67) Much of this cultural work happened at the level of emotional affinity and familiarity. People heard and felt a Beethoven symphony; they learned to feel emotionally moved by its tonal and rhythmic elements; all the rest ensued at an unspoken level.

*****

This process of canonization--the establishment of an ideology valuing Austro-German music higher than anyone else's--came about at the very time the German musicians began shuttling across the Atlantic. We still know preciously little about how the Austro-German repertory evolved in the United States. What we do know, however, is that the United States no doubt shared the same frustration with nearly every European country save Austria and Germany: they could not look back on an internationally accredited musical tradition, let alone a repertory that matched the influence and meaning of a Bach, a Haydn, a Mozart, and a Beethoven.

In the United States as elsewhere the canon of accredited masterpieces developed at precisely the moment when the concert scene began to flourish and when more and more visiting European musicians were willing to cross the Atlantic. Eager to carve a niche for themselves, these soloists and conductors turned themselves into the gate-keepers of this new and powerful cultural canon. This strategy was extraordinarily successful, as the story of the lives and motivations of these artists shows--motivations that, for all their appeals to the sacredness of art originated in rather wordly elements.

As long as German musicianship bore no political connotation, the admiration for the symphony went unchallenged. For most of the nineteenth century, American audiences perceived orchestral music as a manifestation of enjoyable art. New England intellectuals in particular felt attracted by the Romantics' quasi utopian appeal and their alleged ability to link nature to the new stress on mans natural emotions. Audiences did not, however, realize that they were, when looked at in diplomatic terms, paying homage to Germany. (68) Instead, they believed that music represented the universal language of emotions oblivious to the fact that its teaching and grammar had originated in Germany (and that much music vocabulary was--and is--Italian). "Music has been, is, and must ever be, the art of emotion, or rather, say the art of moods," proclaimed the journal Music. "Emotions are to moods what the bodily organs are to the blood, out of which they are all built up." (69)

But as the century came to a close the idea of classical music as a universal language was increasingly challenged by an understanding of music as a form of national and political self-expression. Nations, so the argument went, had to find their own creative use of music as a manifestation of their collective national feelings. Mirroring the rising political nationalism everywhere, notably the consolidation of nation-states, composers increasingly strove to develop their own national styles motivated by an interest in folk music and a heavy dose of patriotism. In Scandinavia, England, France, Russia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere, artists sought for an independent, native voice that would manifest their ethnic identity. (70) No one could express a nation's emotional self, they believed, save for indigenous composers. Those who played and, thus, "borrowed" compositions from foreign masters, had evidently failed to develop a national music, and hence a national and emotional identity.

The transition from an all-open universalist perception of music to a limited national one conflicted with the preponderance of German orchestral music and its promoters in America. German musicians seemed to advocate the universal powers of sound yet reduced their production to a single geographical area and thus, so the argument went, blocked indigenous music. Since the 1840s, U.S. composers like William Henry Fry had protested the absence of distinctive American music on orchestra programs around the country. In his desperation, Fry dedicated an entire symphony to the New York Philharmonic. But all he received in return was a polite thank you note while the piece was quietly filed away in the orchestra's library. (71) Complaints intensified toward the end of the century when the United States entered the international arena and a growing number of U.S. critics and artists began to wring their hands over the fact that despite its industrial and political leverage, the United States had no national music, no national culture, and no national soul.

One of the foremost proponents of a new American music was Homer Moore, a contributor to the journal Music, who believed that America's dependence upon German compositions would "ultimately result in its own musical suicide." In his "13 propositions to encourage American Music," Moore admonished his readers for their deferential admiration of foreign cultural imports and their inability to develop a characteristically American emotion.

We can never claim to be the equal of Germany musically while we copy Beethoven and Wagner.... Beethoven and Wagner are German in their natures and in their music; we are not German in our natures. Our music must find its source in our natures, and as we cannot bring out of them that which they do not contain, we cannot produce a musical expression of German nature.... We must develop a music which will express our own American natures fully and completely. (72)

Yet for all their assurance that there was something wrong and missing in the cultural scene, the propagandists of a new American music lacked the courage to realize their most radical dreams. The year Moore poured out his desperation over the lack of a national soul, a group of wealthy socialites and musicians founded the "National Conservatory of Music" in New York, forerunner of the Julliard School and a patriotic institute designed to "unify American musical interests," create a generically American music and train young Americans in the art of performance and composition. (73) Ironically, the board could not agree on an indigenous director and in the end it appointed Antonin Dvorak, the famous composer from Prague and at the time a virtual popstar in Europe. Dvorak was flattered by the offer but also overwhelmed by the idiosyncrasies of his task: "The Americans expect great things from me," he wrote home shortly after his arrival in Manhattan, "and the main thing is, so they say, to show them to the prom ised land and kingdom of a new and independent art, in short, to create a national music. If the small Czech nation can have such musicians, they say, why could not they, too, when their country and people are so immense." Dvorak himself deliberately failed to initiate an American school of music. His Symphony No. 9 in E Minor ("From the New World"), celebrated by U.S. critics as an homage to the American landscape, constituted according to his own words primarily a greeting to the composer's friends in Prague. And at the end of his three-year stint, Dvorak recommended that in their quest for "indigenous music," Americans should not enroll the help of foreign composers. Rather they should listen to the two most powerful and non-European musical sources their culture had to offer: African-American gospels and American-Indian folk songs, a recommendation that at first only raised eyebrows around the country. (74)

But the conservatory's founders received staunch support from a completely unexpected and much more pragmatically oriented group of men and women, and that was the American Federation of Musicians (AFM). Based in Cincinnati with headquarters all over the United States, from its inception the AFM had imposed a strict residence rule on immigrating musicians to protect local players from the competition of foreign musicians. Since most conductors and orchestras preferred European players to indigenous talent, and even remunerated the former with more attractive fees than the latter ones, the AFM was constantly at war with orchestra leaders who either denied union members access to their orchestras, or at least attempted to curb their influence.

The AFM was quick to convert pragmatic concerns over employment opportunities for indigenous musicians into ideological and patriotic arguments. At the heart of the matter lay the question whether or not artists ranked beyond (or below) the position of a unionized worker. The unions insisted that they had to protect native talent to create both decent working conditions and a new national art scene. Conductors, in contrast, insisted on selecting their players where they found them as they did not work for money or business but only for art. Boston's dapper maestro, Karl Muck, even developed an elaborate theory according to which certain nations could play certain instruments particularly well. In his orchestra, the French dominated the woodwind instruments, the Germans the brasses, and the Austrians the string section. (75)

Resistance to German musicianship culminated shortly after the American entry into World War I, and it was no surprise that Muck was among the first targets. After he had refused to preface his symphony concerts with the U.S. national anthem--scolding that the tune posed an insult to his artistic ear--Muck was labeled an "enemy alien." When the district attorney discovered that the artist owned a vacation home in Maine, near a gigantic transmitter (presumably designed to receive messages from German submarines), and had had affairs with several young wealthy Boston and New York heiresses, Muck was first arrested and expropriated, then put into an internment camp at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, for over a year, and finally deported to Germany, never to return. (76) In Cincinnati, Ernst Kunwald enjoyed a similar fate while others had to undergo extensive interviewing; in many cities, modern German music remained censored until after the war.

What is interesting here is the extent to which audiences and critics merged actual politics and arts. Although the nineteenth-century American musical landscape was remarkably resourceful, it was German musicians and German music that became the focus of the nationalization debate long before the war. Nothwithstanding the important role of Italian opera, French novel compositions and folklore songs, throughout the nineteenth century critics and audiences had revered the symphony as quintessentially German and the highest form of music. And when searching for a generic brand of U.S. music, they targeted German--not French or Italian--music as American artists' foremost adversary.

It is curious to note that at precisely the time when people everywhere began worrying about the "Americanization" of the world, no one worried so much about cultural identity as Americans themselves. As U.S. cultural critics expounded their apprehension of "Teutonization" and deplored the American people's inability to knit their own brand of artistic expression, European conservatives, in turn, began to resent what they perceived as the menace of American culture. European critics of American culture such as William Stead, D. H. Lawrence, and Adolf Halfeld were among the first to give a voice to all those fears that have since become so commonplace around the world. (77) Fears that U.S. culture, standards and way of life would overrun everyone else's. Fears that American consumer products would erase other countries' cultural independence. Fears that American culture would extinguish local identities. To many observers, American civilization was not just different but formed a subversive threat to European culture. (78)

Just as Europeans began to dread the influx of American cultural artifacts and their presumably annihilating impact on their national cultures, Americans felt threatened by the preponderance of foreign sounds. The marriage of culture and Kultur in America thus ended when the growing desire for a national culture conflicted with the accepted canon of classical music. American critics conveniently came to identify Kultur as an early version of cultural imperialism but also with Prussian militarism and espionage, designed to subjugate American art, democracy and patriotism. (79) Such resistance had little to do with the short-lived anti-German craze of 1917/18 bur originated in a struggle for cultural identity that went back more than 60 years. World War I facilitated this temporary rupture; but it did not inspire it.

*****

Nor did it last very long. In the long run the deportation of German musicians did not contribute much to the nationalization of American music. For one thing, it only opened the door to French, Russian and Italian conductors and musicians, who along with an army of German peers repopulated the stages of American symphony orchestras in the 1920s. Equally important, on the concert stage Germany's musical reputation quickly overrode memories of its military and political past. Beethoven and Wagner continued to be played throughout the war and even "living" composers who were banned in 1918-such as Richard Strauss--returned to the repertories soon thereafter. Soloists, too, found themselves welcomed again on concert stages around the country.

Even artists from outside of the Austro-German hemisphere could not bring themselves to break with the canon. Consider the conductor Arturo Toscanini who directed the Metropolitan Opera from 1908 to 1925, the New York Philharmonic from 1926 to 1936 and the NBC Symphony, from 1937 to 1954. With his patriotic behavior during the Great War, he made himself a name as a nonGerman conductor who acted, spoke, and was just ever so "Italian." And yet, even Toscanini, the conductor of the people, kept his gaze as firmly fixed on the repertory of the accredited masterpieces as Theodore Thomas once had, filled with the German battleships of the nineteenth century: Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner (he also became the first non-German conductor in Bayreuth, in 1930). More than any other 20th-century composer, Toscanini dedicated his life's work to the celebration of the nineteenth-century canon. His example inaugurated a concert culture that celebrated traditional music while admitting only slightly different interpretations. (80 )

There are other aspects of the success of German-speaking musicians and their art that bolstered the preponderance of German "serious" music after World War I. This includes, above all, the development of the academic field of musicology but also musical pedagogy and private music making. From the 1930s on, German emigres introduced the discipline of musicology at American universities and conservatories, an effort that, among other things, virtually blocked the recognition of Italian operas as "serious" music worthy of study. And as Pamela Potter has shown, the teaching of music at state universities and conservatories likewise reflected a clear preference for the German repertory. (81)

The power of "serious" music in German-American relations climaxed in the 1950s when high culture became a key variable in cold war propaganda for the hearts and minds of people around the globe. Communist officials realized early on that Europeans identified strongly with their high culture and they made Bildung (knowledge, education) and Kultur central points of their own propaganda. Public opinion polls taken by the American military government in Germany between 1945 and 1950 revealed that Germans feared the adaptation of democratic values at the expense of their cultural heritage. The Red Army paper in the Soviet occupation zone, Tagliche Rundschau, for example, regularly published reports on the popularity of Beethoven among Kultur-loving Russians. Numerous letters to the U.S. radio station RIAS in Berlin showed that it lost many listeners due to its 'western' music program. Communists, audiences believed, at least liked and listened to Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. Democratically-inclined audiences, in co ntrast, numbed their minds with jazz. (82)

U.S. propagandists grasped that the Atlantic community required a cultural foundation in order to remain politically stable. Germans needed to remember their elective affinity with the United States that had been growing in the decades prior to 1900. They needed to be reminded that their cultural heritage tied them closer to America than to the Soviet Union. Sponsored by the prestigious funds and cultural anxieties of the cold war, U.S. officials consequently created a multitude of information programs to convince foreign audiences that Germans and Americans shared a common dedication to high culture, Abendland-style.

In 1959, President Eisenhower sent Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic on a mission all across Europe--notably Germany--to persuade millions of listeners of the cultural compatibility between Europe and the United States. At the end of the trip, the Philharmonic organized a workshop at the Moscow Conservatory where the charismatic Bernstein exclaimed in front of hundreds of sober-looking Russians: "Your music and ours are the artistic products of two very similar people who are natural friends, who belong together and who must not let suspicions and fears and prejudices keep them apart." (83) Despite ideological and diplomatic differences, Bernstein believed that Europeans and Americans were bound together by the bonds of their common musical preferences.

There is no doubt that the power of music features prominently in the United States' special relationship with Germany today. The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra has always served as a self-appointed ambassador for the Federal Republic. In celebration of 50 years of democracy the orchestra recently visited former Allied capitals for guest performances. In October 2001, just three weeks after the attack on the World Trade Center, the Philharmonic opened the season at Carnegie Hall with a concert dedicated to medicat doctors and rescue workers. "To overcome the shock, the speechlessness, through music and thereby to express our friendship and solidarity with our American friends," the Philharmonic recorded, five days after the attack, in cooperation with the Orchestra of the German Opera of Berlin as well as the Staatskapelle Berlin a CD subsequently distributed by the German Foreign Office all over the United States. Packaged in a flashy jacket featuring pictures of the New York skyline and the Brandenburg Gate, the selection offered the core of the canon: Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Mahler's Symphony No. 9, and Franz Schubert's Unfinished. (84)

*****

All this said, what does the story of German music in the United States illuminate? On the theoretical level, it shows the historicism of "culture"; the term, quite simply, means different things to different people at different times. Notions of culture are chronically torn between national and universalist ways of thinking and, thus, subjected to cycles. Their meaning and their interaction need to be viewed through historical lenses. Nineteenth-century Americans thought of culture along the lines laid out by the philosopher Matthew Arnold: culture was, quite simply, universal knowledge; it embraced the best that had been thought and known in the world. (85) In contrast, German Kultur included knowledge, education, civilization, national genius and the arts (high culture) all of which expressed the national soul. (86) Kultur--above all music--was deeply rooted in an exclusive concept of blood and soil. Ironically, it often comprised German-language areas outside of the territorial borders of the German empi re and appealed to universalists who believed that the export of Kultur could not fail to produce both artistic admiration and sympathy abroad for Germany and its Reich. Because American intellectuals' conception of culture was less nationally bound than Kultur, and because nineteenth-century German cultural expansion catered to universalist expectations, it initially encountered little resistance in the United States.

In retreating to a preference for German classical music, U.S. audiences acted exactly the way Imperial officials and artists hoped they would. While the efforts of Theodore Thomas and Walter Damrosch may not have represented a diplomatic act, they clearly had a diplomatic effect. For the art of the three Bs or Wagner evoked precisely the respect for German greatness, Heimat, and emotionalism that Reich officials wanted to convey, and their legacy lasted much longer than the German Kaiserreich. The real long-term consequences of the musicians' evangelicalism became visible during the cold war when, as I have shown, Americans remembered their emotional elective affinity with the Germans and the U.S. government embarked on a concerted effort to convince their allies that American and Europeans cherished the same composers, the same music and the same Kultur.

Such observations do not whisk away the sociological questions New Left historians have been posing nor do they dispute the elitist manipulation of highbrow culture. But as much as the elites participated in the construction of a cultural canon, this development at bottom constituted an international affair that was actively orchestrated by representatives of the German, French and British art scene. To recognize their influence means understanding that in the past Americans have been as much the recipients as the agents of cultural expansionism.

It also means understanding why World War II veterans remember Germany as much for the best as for the worst its people have produced: the Holocaust as well as the music of Beethoven. Just as Nazi atrocities have grown into a universal metaphor for evil even among people who otherwise know little about German history and Germany in general, German music has become--rightly or wrongly--an expression of the highest art form in music. Both images are simultaneously tied to the German national character as well as to the canon of universal experiences in the western hemisphere. (87) It does nor even matter whether these combined images reflect "truth". What matters is that they do exist and that they have come a long way to influence how Americans, indeed, people around the world think about the Germans.

ENDNOTES

I wish to thank my colleagues at the Charles Warren Center, and, above all, Akira Iriye, Jim Kloppenburg, Bernard Bailyn, Jon Rosenberg, Jona Hanssen, Donna Gabaccia, David Armitage, Daniel Levy, Richard Pells, Gareth Davies, Celia Applegate, Peter Stearns as well as the anonymous reader of the Journal of Social History for their comments on my work.

(1.) These comments stem from interviews I conducted for my first book, Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945--1955 (Baton Rouge, La., 1999). In a gesture to this common perception of Germany among Americans, Stephen Spielberg's "Schindler's List" has an SS man play Bach during the liquidation of the ghetto in Cracow.

(2.) Celia Applegate, "What Is German Music? Reflections on the Role of Art in the Creation of the Nation," German Studies Review, special issue on "German Identity" (Winter 1992): 21--32; Esteban Buch, La neuvieme de Beethoven: Une histoire politique (Paris, 1999).

(3.) Note that the pioneering study in this field does not flow from the pen ofa professional historian but a scholar in music. Joseph Horowitz, Wagner Nights: An American History (Berkeley, 1994).

(4.) Ezra Schabas, Theodore Thomas: America's Conductor and Builder of Orchestra, 1835--1905 (Urbana-Champaign, Ill., 1989); Philip Hart, Orpheus in the New World: The Symphony Orchestra as an American Cultural Institution (New York, 1973).

(5.) Katherine K. Preston, Opera on the Road: Traveling Opera Troupes in the United States 1825--1860 (Urbana and Chicago, 1993); Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1988).

(6.) Much of this argument has come under attack and scholars have, rightfully, pointed to the multiplicity of social and aesthetic motivations people felt when attending a concert. See, e.g., Horowitz, Wagner Nights, 324--7.

(7.) See, e.g., the collections of essays in Wilfried Loth and Jurgen Osterhammel (eds), Internationale Geschichte: Themen--Ergebnisse--Aussichten (Munich, 2000); Michael Hogan and Thomas Paterson, Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, forthcoming); Daniel T. Rogers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, 1999).

(8.) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe reinvented the term "elective affinities" in a romantic novel about two men and two women torn by their mutual, insurmountable but socially unacceptable attractions to one another. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809; Munich, 1956).

(9.) Stephen Kalberg, Max Weber's Comparative Historical Sociology (Chicago, 1994), 102-17 (quote by Kalberg, 103).

(10.) Alfred Vagts, Deutschland und die Vereinigten Staaten in der Weltpolitik, 2 vols. (New York, 1935); Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase, Lateinamerika als Konfliktherd der deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehungen 1890--1903 vom Beginn der Panamerikapolitik bis zur Venezuelakrise von 1902/03, 2 vols. (Gottingen, 1986); Nancey Mitchell, "The Height of the German Challenge: The Venezuela Blockade, 1902--1903," Diplomatic History 20 (1996):185--209; Reinhard R. Doerries, Imperial Challenge: Ambassador Count Berstorff and German-American Relations, 1908--1917, trans. Christa D. Shannon (Chapel Hill, 1989); Raimund Lammersdorf, Anfdnge einer Weltmacht: Theodore Roosevelt und die transatlantischen Beziehungen der USA, 1901--1909 (Berlin, 1994).

(11.) Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalization of Slaughter in the Modern Age (New Haven, 1993).

(12.) Nancy Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (New Haven, Conn., London, 1991).

(13.) Lois M. Fink, American Art at the 19th Century Paris Salon (Cambridge, 1990); Lois M. Fink, "French Art in the United States, 1850-1870," Gazette des Beaux Arts (September 1978): 87-100.

(14.) Reiner Pommerin, Der Kaiser und Amerika: Die USA in der Politik der Reichsleitung, 1890-1917 (Cologne, Vienna, 1986), 292-93; Ekkehard Mai, "Prasentation und Reprasentativitat--interne Probleme deutscher Kunstausstellungen im Ausland (1900-1930)," Zeitschrift fur Kulturaustausch 31(1981):112-13.

(15.) Gerhard Weidenfeller, VDA: Verein fur das Deutschtum im Ausland: Allgemeiner Deutscher Schulverein 1881-1918: Em Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Nationalismus und Imperialismus im Kaiserreich (Frankfurt a.M., 1962), 316-19; Maurice Brueziere, L'alliance francaise: Histoire d'une institution (Paris, 1983), 10, 28, 42, 50, 76; Frank Trommier, "Inventing the Enemy: German-American Cultural Relations, 1900-1917," in Confrontation and Cooperation: The United Stares and Germany in die Era of World War 1, 1900-1924, ed. Han Jurgen Schroder (Oxford and New York, 1993), 103.

(16.) Christopher Hirchens, Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies (New York, 1990), 134, 174, 298-99, 358.

(17.) Frank Trommler, "Inventing the Enemy: German-American Cultural Relations, 1900-1917," 103.

(18.) Cit. in Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase, "Die polirische Funktionalisierung der Kultur: Der deutsch-amerikanische Professorenaustausch 1904-1914," in Zwei Wege in die Moderne: Aspekte der deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehungen, 1900-1918, ed. Ragnhild Fiebig von Hase and Jurgen Heideking (Trier, 1997), 45.

(19.) Ute Frevert, Heniz Gerhard Haupt, Bettina Brandt, Franz Becker, Dagmar Gunther, and Moritz Follmer, "Zur Wirkung des Nationalismus im Deutschland des 19. Jahrhunderts," panel at the 42th Deutsche Historikertag, Frankfurt a.M., 9 September 1998; Henrik Karge, "Architektur und Stadtplanung in Dresden nach 1871: Modernitat dutch Regionalbezug," paper presented ibid, 11 September 1998; Alon Confino, The Nation As a Local Metaphor: Wurttemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997).

(20.) Roger Chickering, "Patriotische Vereine im europaischen Vergleich," in Europa urn 1900, ed. Fritz Klein and Karl-Otmar v. Aretin (Berlin [Ost], 1989), 151-162; Eckart Koester, "'Kultur' versus 'Zivilisation': Thomas Manns Kriegspublizistik als weltanschaulich-asthetische Standortsuche," in Kultur und Krieg: Die Rolle der Intelek-tuellen, Kunstler und Schriftsreller im Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Wolfgang Mommsen (Munich, 1996), 249-58.

(21.) Fiebig-von Hase, "Die politische Funktionalisierung der Kultur;" Eckhardt Fuchs, "Der Mythos von der internationalen Gelehrtenrepublik: Moglichkeiten und Grenzen der internationalen Wissenschaftskooperation am Beispiel der deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehungen vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg." (Work in Progress, Berlin).

(22.) Mai, "Prasentation und Reprasentativitat," 107-123. For more on the visual arts after German unification, see Shearer West, The Visual Arts in Germany, 1890-1 937: Utopia and Despair (New Brunswick, N.J., 2001).

(23.) By "German" music I refer to music from German-speaking areas (incl. Austria), based on a definition of cultural identity as a "lived space" as opposed to a geographical area defined by political borders. CE Guido Muller, "Gesellschaftsgeschichte und internationale Beziehungen: Die deutsch-franzosische Verstandigung nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg," in Deutschland und der Westen: Internationale Beziehungen im 20. Jahrhundert: Festschrift fur Klaus Schwabe zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Guido Muller (Stuttgart, 1998), 49-64.

(24.) Pamela Potter, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler's Reich (New Haven, 1998), ix-xvii; Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (eds.), Music and German National Identity (Chicago, 2002).

(25.) Celia Applegate, "What Is German Music? Reflections on the Role of Art in the Creation of the Nation," 21,29; David B. Dennis, Beethoven in German Politics, 1870-1989 (New Haven, 1996), 5, 32-85; A. H. Ehrlich, "Musik-Cultus und allgemeine Bildung," Die Gegenwart 2 (7 Dezember 1872): 363-4.

(26.) For a definitive analysis of the German notion of Kultur, see Georg Bollenbeck, Bildung und Kultur: Glanz und Elend eines deutschen Deutungsmuster (Frankfurt a.M., 1994).

(27.) Applegate, "What is German Music?" 28-30; Celia Applegate, "How German Is It? Nationalism, and the Idea of Serious Music in the Early Nineteenth Century," 19th-Century Music XXI (Spring 1998): 280, 288, 295.

(28.) Buch, La neuvieme de Beethoven, 13, 15, 124-303.

(29.) Preston, Opera on the Road, 44-98, 214-57.

(30.) Henry Albrecht, Skizze aus dem Leben der Musik-Gesellschaft Germania (Philadelphia, 1869), 9, translation in Nancy Newman, "Gleiche Rechte, gleiche Pflichten, und gleiche Genusse: Henry Albrecht's Utopian Vision of the Germania Musical Society," Yearbook of German-American Studies 34 (1999): 107.

(31.) Heinrich Bornstein in Anzeiger des Westens, reprinted in Dwight's Journal of Music III (9 July 1853), cit. in Newman, "Gleiche Rechte, gleiche Pflichten," 108; A. Willhartitz to A. E. Kroeger, St. Louis Republican, 27 October 1875, Saint Louis Philharmonic Society, Box 1/4, Missouri Historical Society.

(32.) Abram Chasins, Leopold Stokowski: A Profile (New York, 1979).

(33.) Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music (New York, 1987), 22.

(34.) Gayle Turk, "The Case of Dr. Karl Muck: Anti-German Hysteria and Enemy Alien Internment During World War I," Undergraduate Thesis, Harvard University, 1994, 23- 24, 27.

(35.) Howard Shanet, Philharmonic: A History of New York's Orchestra (New York, 1975), 61-62, 109-110; Norman Lebrecht, The Maestro Myth (New York, 1993).

(36.) Michael Broyles, "Music of the Highest Class:" Elitism and Populism in Antebellum Boston (New Haven and London, 1992), 218. For music life in Washington, D.C., see Katherine K. Preston, Music for Hire: A Study of Professional Musicians in Washington, 1877-1900 (Stuyvesant, N.Y., 1992).

(37.) Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 104-42, 219: Elkhonon Yoffe (ed.). Tchaikovsky in America: The Composer's Visit in 1891, trans. Lidya Yoffe (New York, Oxford, 1986), vii; Harold Schonberg, The Great Composers, 3rd ed. (New York, 1997), 317.

(38.) William Stowe, Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton, N.J., 1994); Emily Rosenberg, "Money and Manliness," Diplomatic History 23 (winter 1998): 10ff; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago, 1995).

(39.) Felix Volbach, Mainz, to "Madam" (Taft?), 14 July 1894, Wulsin Family Papers, Series I, Box 24, Folder 1, Cincinnati Historical Society (hereafter CIHS).

(40.) Theodore Thomas, A Musical Autobiography, ed. George Upton, vol. 1 (Chicago, 1905), 3.

(41.) Thomas Goodwin, Sketches and Impressions: Musical, Theatrical, and Social (1799-1885) (New York, 1887), 153-56, 192-4, 199

(42.) Frances Anne Wister, Twenty-Five Years of the Philadephia Orchestra, 1900-1925 (Philadelphia, 1925), 71-73.

(43.) "Musical Invasion of Eastern Cities Starts Tonight," Minneapolis Journal, 8 March 1912, Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra Scrapbooks, Archive for the Performing Arts, University of Minneapolis.

(44.) Minutes, 29 October 1912, Executive Committee, Box 1/5, Saint Louis Symphony Society, MHS; "Average attendance with prices paid season 1900-1901," Manager's Files, F. Wessels, 1/21, Rosenthal Archives, Chicago Symphony Orchestra (hereafter CSO); "A Complete Success," Boston Herald, 21 October 1900, BSO Scrapbooks, MF M125.5/6, BSO.

(45.) Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, 1986), 144-46. Preiss observes that even nickelodeon owners targeted women viewers by putting up announcements like "We are aiming to please the ladies" and "Ladies without escorts cordially welcome" (p. 148-9).

(46.) Hart, Orpheus in the New World, 29.

(47.) Newsclip, Boston Daily Advertiser, 13 March 1909, Boston Symphony Orchestra scrapbooks, MF Press, reel 13, Boston Symphony Orchestra (hereafter BSO).

(48.) "Old Guard of Thomas Orchestra," Inter Ocean, 20 April 1913, Chicago Symphony Orchestra Scrapbooks, CSO.

(49.) Harold Schonberg, The Great Pianists, (New York, 1963).

(50.) "Old Guard of Thomas Orchestra."

(51.) Cit. in Newman, "Gleiche Rechte, gleiche Pflichten," 102.

(52.) "Newest Hair, Music and Mesmerig [sic] Idol--Paderewski Has Fallen!," n. p., approx. 8 November 1898, Boston Symphony Orchestra scrapbooks, (MF), **M.125.5, reel 5, BSO.

(53.) "Soloist Likes American Girls: So, Girls, There's a Chance," 12 March 1904, Cincinnati Post, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra scrapbooks, vol. 2, CIHS.

(54.) Schonberg, Composers, 317.

(55.) Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini, 23.

(56.) Schonberg, Great Pianists, 26.

(57.) Charles Rosen, "The Future of Music," The New York Times Book Review (20 December 2001).

(58.) Craig H. Roell, The Piano in America, 1890-1940 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1989), 88, 216, 293.

(59.) I am indebted to Marianne Betz for this point.

(60.) Nancy Newman, "Gleiche Rechte, gleiche Pflichten;" Preston, Opera on the Road, 307, 309, 316.

(61.) Hart, Orpheus in the New World, 59.

(62.) William Weber, "The History of Musical Canon," in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford, New York, 1999), 349, 352.

(63.) Quoted in Applegate, "How German Is It?" 295

(64.) Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago, 1956), 14, 265.

(65.) Peter Steams and Carol Z. Steams, "Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards," American Historical Review 90 (October 1985): 813-36.

(66.) Karen Ahlquest, "Mrs. Potiphar at the Opera: Satire, Idealism, and Cultural Authority in Post-Civil War New York," in Music and Culture in America, 1861-1918, ed. Michael Saffle (New York, 1998), 30-31; George Martin, The Damrosch Dynasty: America's First Family of Music (Boston, 1983); Ezra Schabas, Theodore Thomas: America's Conductor and Builder of Orchestras, 1835-1905 (Urbana, 1989).

(67.) Eero Tarasti, "The Emancipation of the Sign: On the Corporeal and Gestural Meanings in Music," AS/AN, No. 4, pp. 179-90 (http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/french/assa/ASSA-No.4/ET1.htm); Susanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, 3 vols. (Baltimore, c1967, 1982); Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago, 1956).

(68.) Marcia Lebow, "A Systematic Examination of the Journal of Music and Art Edited by John Sullivan Dwight: 1852-1881, Boston, Massachusetts," Ph. D. Dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles, 1969, 23.

(69.) John S. Van Cleve, "The Dignity of Music", Music 1 (November 1891): 12.

(70.) Barbara Russano Hanning, Concise History of Western Music (New York, 1997), 445; Hugh M. Miller, History of Music (New York, 1953).

(71.) Shanet, Philharmonic, 94, 111; Betty E. Chmaj, "Fry versus Dwight: American Music's Debate over Nationality," American Music 3 (Spring 1985): 63-84.

(72.) Homer Moore, "How Can American Music Be Developed," Music 1 (February 1891): 324, 325, 327, 331-32.

(73.) "Leading Musicians in New Movement," Standard Union (Brooklyn, New York), 22 July 1917, Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler collection, box X-186, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Oh.

(74.) Ludmilla Bradova, "Antonin Dvorak, 1841-1904," in Abroad in America: Visitors to the New Nation, 1776-1914, ed. Marc Pachter and Frances Wein (Reading, Mass., 1976), 228-37, quote p. 229.

(75.) Philo Adams Otis, The Chicago Symphony Orchestra: Its Organization, Growth and Development, 1891-1924 (Chicago, 1924), 30; Marc A. De Wolfe Howe, The Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1881-1931 (Boston, 1931), 120.

(76.) Turk, "Karl Muck."

(77.) Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, "Shame on US? Academics, U.S. Cultural Transfer, and the Cold War," Diplomatic History 24 (summer 2000): 465-94.

(78.) D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1950) (Original, 1923), 9-21; Adolf Halfeld, Amerika und der Amerikanismus: Kritische Betrachtungen eines Deutschen und Europaers (Jena, 1927); Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York, 1994), 26, 113-114; Frank Costigliola, Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919-1933 (Ithaca, NY, 1984), 19ff, 167-183, 264ff; Alexander Schmidt, Reisen in die Moderne: Der Amerika-Diskurs des deutschen Burgertums vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg im europaischen Vergleich (Berlin, 1997), 163-69.

(79.) Trommler, "Inventing the Enemy," 115-16; Elliot Shore, "The Kultur Club," in Confrontation and Cooperation, 127-33.

(80.) Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini, 403, 416, 411.

(81.) Reinhold Brinkman and Christoph Wolff (ed.), Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration from Nazi Germany to the United States (Berkeley, Calif., 1999); Potter, The Most German of the Arts.

(82.) D. G. White, U.S. Military Government in Germany: Radio Reorientation (Karlsruhe: U.S. European Command, Historical Division, 1950), 114-17. David Pike, The Politics of Culture in Soviet-Occupied Germany, 1945-1949 (Stanford, 1992).

(83.) Leonard Bernstein in "Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic," produced by Robert Saudek, taped 12 September 1959 at the farewell concert in the Moscow Conservatory, videotape, New York Philharmonic Archives.

(84.) "In Friendship and Solidarity," 16 September 2001, SFB broadcasting live recording.

(85.) Matthew Arnold, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," in Victorian Poetry and Poetic, eds. Walther E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1969), 522, 527. See also Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (London, 1869).

(86.) Max Weber's scholarly Kulturbegriff which brilliantly captured nineteenth-century culture in Germany, formed the opposite of Natur and thus implied everything of interest for the interpretation of the world to humankind. Max Weber, "Die 'Objektivitat' sozial-wissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis," in Weber, Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tubingen, 1988), 146-214; Ute Daniel, "'Kultur' und 'Gesellschaft:' Uberlegungen zum Gegenstandsbereich der Sozialgeschichte," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 19(1993): 69-99; Friedrich Jaeger, "Der Kulturbegriff im Werk Max Webers und seine Bedeutung fur eine moderne Kulrurgeschichte," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 18 (1992): 371-393.

(87.) Recent scholarship has tried to raise assessments of the Holocaust's legacy to the civilizational (i.e. western) level by focusing on the consequence of "modernity," mass society, and the decline of individualism. Zygmunt Bauman, 1st der Holocause wiederholbar? (Wiesbaden, 1994); Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (Oxford and New York, 2000); Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack (eds.), In God's Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (New York, 2001). For two analyses on the Holocaust in the collective memory of Germany and the United States, see Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory: The American Experience (London, 2000); Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (1988; Cambridge, 1997).