„So very German“

Abstract

During the years of the Nazi regime, Paul Hindemith’s opera Mathis der Maler was regarded as the epitome of the aesthetic resistance movement against the regime, to quote Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt. Performances were not allowed in Germany in spite of the plot being viewed as “German enough” in nature. The press reactions following the first performance 1938 in Zurich or the first German performance 1946 in Stuttgart show that this “Germanness” was instrumentalized for both the sake of the resistance and for assimilation to the Nazi regime, even though Hindemith’s strategies of a verdeckte Schreibweise (writing between the lines; see Dolf Sternberger) were not even recognized.