Zwischen völkischer Bewegung und Nationalsozialismus

Abstract

The article examines the history of National Socialist discourse on music in the Volkisch movement, essentially spearheaded by the Berlin musicologist Oskar Fleischer (1856–1933). Director of the Royal Collection of Ancient Musical Instruments, his ideas are epitomized in his Musikalische Bilder aus Deutschlands Vergangenheit , staged at the Krolloper (Berlin) in 1912, and presents the history of music as a continuum from 1500 B.C. to the Reformation. At the center of his highly speculative interpretations—mostly rejected by experts but broadly accepted by the extreme right—is the elaboration of an autochthonous Germanic ( germanischen ) music culture with which the German is aligned, and how the Roman Catholic Church posed a threat to it.