Musicology under Hitler: New Sources in Context

Recognizing musicology's demonstrated potential to contribute to its ideological aims, the Nazi government took immediate steps to centralize music scholarship and, along with the SS, to subsidize relevant research projects. Alfred Rosenberg's ideological watchdog organization recruited musicologists for a variety of tasks, including the plundering of musical treasures in occupied territories and the assessment of the receptivity of occupied populations to Germany's eventual takeover of cultural life. Meanwhile, many scholars contributed to the press with music historical justifications for all of Germany's current military and diplomatic actions. Born in an era preoccupied with the creation of the German nation-state, musicology had embraced a Germanocentric focus, dating back to Forkel, that the Nazi propaganda machine fully exploited. This nationalism also infiltrated American musicology with the arrival of German émigré scholars.