Loathsome Deutschtum?

Abstract

Much has been said about the Nazi appropriation of Wagner’s music in the 1930s and 1940s. As early as 1933, Hitler transformed the Bayreuth Festival into a celebration of National Socialist ideology and propagated miniature Wagner festivals to celebrate his own birthday. Wagner’s music also resounded throughout the culture and media at large. What has been less understood and examined, however, is how this same music was also used in nonnarrative films, newsreels, government documentaries, and industrial and advertising films of the period. Here the appropriation of Wagner is more complex and problematic. Master Hands (1936), the critically acclaimed, feature-length industrial film sponsored by the American car company Chevrolet, is an excellent example. As several film scholars have observed, the film is an artistic advertisement for the American automobile industry that borrows heavily from Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. But the film’s score, a compilation full of Wagner excerpts, arranged by composer Samuel Benavie and performed by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, about which almost nothing has been said, is equally propagandistic. By examining the music for this industrial advertisement for Chevrolet, this chapter not only re-examines the reception of Wagner in the United States between the World War I and World War II but also examines the integral role his music played in the creation of American films of persuasion. It explores the use U.S. industrial filmmakers made of Wagner’s music as an audible signifier not for German fascism but to advertise for American democracy, industry, and capitalism.