Book Review
Oct. 16th, 2017 09:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kenjariThe Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich
by Michael H. Kater
This compelling book examines a wide variety of musicians - from struggling performers to world-renowned composers - and how they and their music interacted with the Third Reich. Kater looks at the degrees to which these musicians complied, collaborated, or resisted. He also looks at the value Hitler and his regime placed on music, the ways they manipulated it to serve their political and social ends, and the degree of success they had in these endeavors.
Although I feel like Kater could have tightened up the organization of his material, I really enjoyed his writing. His prose was clear and flowed well. I also like the fact that, when referring to Nazis and their atrocities, he almost entirely eschewed the kind of sanitized, objective prose typical of scholarly writing. Kater directly and bluntly described Hans Frank, governor of occupied Poland, as "that butcher of Poles and Jews". He also described a musician who did not survive as having been "sent to Auschwitz to be murdered", rather than saying that he died in the camp.
The picture Kater paints is often complicated, without a lot of clear heroes or villains among the musicians profiled. Nonetheless it was still chilling in many ways, and there was a sense in which it all read a little like the non-fiction equivalent of a horror novel.
by Michael H. Kater
This compelling book examines a wide variety of musicians - from struggling performers to world-renowned composers - and how they and their music interacted with the Third Reich. Kater looks at the degrees to which these musicians complied, collaborated, or resisted. He also looks at the value Hitler and his regime placed on music, the ways they manipulated it to serve their political and social ends, and the degree of success they had in these endeavors.
Although I feel like Kater could have tightened up the organization of his material, I really enjoyed his writing. His prose was clear and flowed well. I also like the fact that, when referring to Nazis and their atrocities, he almost entirely eschewed the kind of sanitized, objective prose typical of scholarly writing. Kater directly and bluntly described Hans Frank, governor of occupied Poland, as "that butcher of Poles and Jews". He also described a musician who did not survive as having been "sent to Auschwitz to be murdered", rather than saying that he died in the camp.
The picture Kater paints is often complicated, without a lot of clear heroes or villains among the musicians profiled. Nonetheless it was still chilling in many ways, and there was a sense in which it all read a little like the non-fiction equivalent of a horror novel.
