How does creativity thrive in the face of fascism? How can a highly artistic individual function professionally in so threatening a climate? Composers of the Nazi Era is the final book in a critically acclaimed trilogy that includes Different Drummers (OUP 1992) and The Twisted Muse (OUP 1997), which won the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize of the Canadian Historical Association. Here, historian Michael H. Kater provides a detailed study of the often interrelated careers of eight prominent German composers who lived and worked amid the dictatorship of the Third Reich, or were driven into exile by it: Werner Egk, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Carl Orff, Hans Pfitzner, Arnold Schoenberg, and Richard Strauss. Kater weighs issues of accommodation and resistance to ask whether these artists corrupted themselves in the service of a criminal regime--and if so, whether this may be discerned from their music. After chapters discussing the circumstances of each composer individually, Kater concludes with an analysis of the composers' different responses to the Nazi regime and an overview of the sociopolitical background against which they functioned. The final chapter also extends the discussion beyond the end of World War II to examine how the composers reacted to the new and fragile democracy in Germany.

Michael H. Kater's profile page

Michael H. Kater is Distinguished Research Professor of History at the Centre for German and European Studies, York University, Toronto. He has published widely on modern Germany and is a Guggenheim Fellow as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

"A judicious, exceptionally informative study of eight composers, who were victims, accomplices, and sometimes both, of the Third Reich." --Peter Paret, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

"With this volume, Kater has completed a remarkable trilogy of books about music during the Nazi era....Kater...is rigorous in his attention to detail; his research is up-to-date, and his conclusions are persuasive. This book--indeed, the entire trilogy--should be a part of every collection."--Library Journal

"Congratulations to Michael Kater for resisting the usual black-or-white temptation and casting his portraits in a wide, and therefore illuminating, spectrum of greys." --Richard Taruskin, University of California, Berkeley

"Should be of interest to a far broader circle than simply those interested in musical life in Nazi Germany. It actually makes and interesting and important contribution to the general debate over the modernity of National Socialism."--The Historian

"....This psychologically sensitive and fascinating study of the lives of eight selected composers must be acclaimed as a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of the Third Reich....Kater lucidly demonstrates....the relationship between art and politics in a totalitarian state, but also of the way in which the past was dealt with during the post-war era." - - -German Historical Institute Bulletin (Vol.XXIV No 2)

"A largely successful effort to clarify the motives and behaviors of some representative men during a fascinatingly ugly chapter of human history, without appearing to sit in judgment so much as to illuminate various noble, deplorable, and frequently contradictory phenomena of human character....Meticulously documented."--The Washington Post

"These eight portraits provide ample and fascinating illustration of Kater's main themes of complicity, complexity, and corruptibility.Kater provides excellent guidance through his cases as they came before the tribunals of immediate postwar judgement." - - entral European History

"Michael Kater's new book, the third and best of his studies of German music during the Third Reich, examines the fortunes, in the Nazi and first postwar years, of eight composers: Werner Egk, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Carl Amadeus Hartmann, Carl Orff, Hans Pfitzner, Arnold Schoenberg, and Richard Strauss. Based upon a staggering amount of original research, it is endlessly informative." --Gordon A. Craig, Stanford University