Read on to discover all about legendary Berlin Philharmonic conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler and his complicated relationship with the Nazis...
The rise of Hitler in Germany
January 1933. Germany’s head of state, President Paul von Hindenburg, grants the position of German Chancellor – equivalent to Prime Minister – to Adolf Hitler. The charismatic leader of the National Socialist (Nazi) party enjoys substantial support – although as yet by no means overwhelming – from the German population. Those who have been voting in their millions for the party see Hitler as the solution to a string of concerns and grievances: mass unemployment, governmental instability, fear of Communism, resentment at the humiliations written into the World War I peace treaty and more.
Installed as Chancellor, Hitler proceeds to focus ultimate power into his sole hands. Such a concentration of authority is vital, he insists, if Germany is to meet the daunting challenges it faces. When Hindenburg dies in August 1934, Hitler puts it to the German people in a plebiscite that he should himself be both Chancellor and President, under the title of ‘Führer’ (‘Leader’). Over 90 per cent vote in Hitler’s favour.
Anti-Semitism in the field of German music
By this time, it was abundantly clear that the Nazi agenda required the ruthless excision of what was bizarrely imagined as the Jewish community’s pernicious influence across German life, a project which inevitably gave rise to a virulent anti-Semitism in the field of music, where the Jewish contribution had long been immense. The nation’s cultural ecosystem was to exalt specifically German values, culture and historic achievements above all others.
An estimated 1,500 Jewish musicians thus fled Germany, joined by a good number of non-Jewish performers. Various prominent or up-and-coming non-Jewish musicians chose to remain in Germany (or in Austria, after its 1938 assimilation into the Reich). Pianists Wilhelm Kempff and Walter Gieseking were at best equivocal in their attitude to the Nazis. The young conductor Herbert von Karajan remained in Germany, soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in Austria. And then there was the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler.
Wilhelm Furtwängler... conducting megastar and prize Nazi symbol
No musician’s continuing presence in Germany was of more prestige value to the Nazi hierarchy than that of Furtwängler, principal conductor of the great Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and a megastar with an international career and reputation. Furtwängler’s floppy, rag doll-like demeanour on the podium, with its ambiguous baton ‘technique’, belied the extraordinary results he could achieve once his beat was deciphered and his spell cast. The great Furtwängler recorded performances are possessed of a ferocious, animal intensity. His mission was to seek out the very soul of any given piece of music, recapturing the emotion invested in its composition. Ensemble and precision were secondary considerations.
Why did Furtwängler choose to remain in Germany, despite worldwide condemnation?
Furtwängler must have been aware that the Nazis (of whom he was no kind of supporter) would exploit his fame, yet he remained in Germany. Engaged onlookers around the world were dismayed – a dismay proportional to Furtwängler’s towering stature. (No such dismay attached to the then less-known conductor, Eugen Jochum – also no Nazi sympathiser – who likewise remained in Germany). As the Nazis established themselves, Furtwängler remained fully in the public eye, conducting the Berlin Philharmonic and State Opera. His concerts were regularly broadcast.
Condemnations of Furtwängler’s failure to leave Germany (or at least go into internal exile) continued across the pre-war Nazi years. When he brought the Berlin Philharmonic to the UK early in 1934 there were protests from sections of the musical community, not least given the expectation that Jewish musicians would surely sooner or later be ejected from the orchestra’s playing personnel. (Sir Thomas Beecham nonetheless very publicly defended Furtwängler and indeed took his London Philharmonic Orchestra on a controversial tour of Germany in 1936). A public outcry in the US – including objections from Jewish musician exiles – prevented Furtwängler appearing with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in the later 1930s.
Furtwängler's secret hatred of Nazisim
The evidence says that Furtwängler detested Nazism. He never signed up to membership of the National Socialist Party – as, in contrast, did Karajan and Schwarzkopf, who both enjoyed stellar post-war careers. The German Jewish conductor Jascha Horenstein exiled himself and believed Furtwängler (‘a weak man’) should have done the same. Yet Horenstein was happy to state ‘very emphatically’ that ‘Furtwängler was not a Nazi.’ In a 1968 documentary, Horenstein reported that Furtwängler ‘used very strong language against the regime’ when the two met during the 1930s.
In private correspondence, Furtwängler described Nazi cultural policies as ‘barbaric’. He reportedly refused to sign off letters with the required ‘Heil Hitler!’ He apparently never gave the Nazi salute, even in the presence of Hitler himself. A pension offered by the Nazi authorities was declined. The contribution made by Jewish players in the Berlin Phil (before the ejections) was cherished. Even two years into the Nazi take-over, he conducted the prohibited music of German Jew Felix Mendelssohn.
A deal with the devil
And yet Furtwängler failed to leave Germany – to his detractors, the primal sin. In the eyes of many, the defining transgression was the so-called ‘deal’ in 1935 between the conductor and the Reich’s odious propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. The previous year, Furtwängler had published in the press an open letter criticising the Nazi regime’s treatment of the (non-Jewish) composer Paul Hindemith on account of the ‘degenerate’ nature of his music. Goebbels wasn’t amused. Furtwängler’s passport was seized. The conductor resigned his positions with the Berlin Philharmonic and Berlin State Opera.
Goebbels thereafter reached an unwritten agreement with Furtwängler, the prized icon, whereby the latter could continue to conduct in Germany (although without holding any titular positions) as long as he didn’t openly oppose the regime. The conductor duly toned down his public comments, his passport was returned, and he resumed concertising both in Germany and in centres abroad. Many decided Furtwängler had fatally compromised himself.
Conducting for the Führer
The fact that Furtwängler spurned multiple opportunities to remain abroad was one thing. At home, that ‘deal’ meant Furtwängler failed to physically distance himself in public from the Nazi regime. There were the various occasions before and during the Second World War when Hitler attended his concerts and even shook his hand, as did Goebbels.
No occasion raised more eyebrows than the April 1942 Berlin Philharmonic performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that marked Hitler’s 53rd birthday, with the Führer in the audience. It was hardly a good look for Furtwängler to be seen conducting on concert platforms swathed in swastikas. And from a broader but equally damning perspective, critics and commentators saw Furtwängler’s longstanding and passionate belief in the supremacy of the historic legacy of Germanic musical repertoire as an all too comfortable fit with Nazi views on the superiority of the German race.
Furtwängler: 'Art and politics shouldn't mix'
But why didn’t Furtwängler leave Germany? Whatever these motivations were, the evidence doesn’t indicate they were ego-driven by Furtwängler’s inability to contemplate surrendering his various prestigious musical positions. The Jewish musician and revered musicologist Hans Keller, who fled Austria for the UK in 1938, insisted that Furtwängler was ‘the only conductor I knew who was totally without vanity… absolutely without conceit’.
No, we must at least attempt to understand the mindset of a complex man faced with what he saw as cruel dilemmas. Distilling things into a few sentences, two explanations for his failure to go into exile stand out. First, he felt that departing Germany would leave no other figurehead capable of defending the Germanic musical tradition from crude Nazi cultural attitudes. Second, Furtwängler had always been possessed of a profound belief that art and politics shouldn’t be mixed.
Note the pay-off of these key justificatory lines of his, quoted in that 1968 documentary: ‘I could have emigrated… and been thought of as a martyr and fought National Socialism from outside Germany. But I remained, not because I had changed my views. I offered resistance where it was possible. I did not conduct in occupied [as opposed to annexed] countries because I did not wish to appear in the wake of bombs and guns. My view was and is that art must have no truck with power politics… war and hatred between nations.’
Resistance from inside the Nazi regime
How far, then, did Furtwängler actually ‘offer resistance’ to National Socialism? One key document is the 1944 memoir covering the Nazi years provided by Furtwängler’s personal assistant Berta Geissmar. We should note that she was herself Jewish and was duly forced to flee Germany in 1935, settling in the UK where she wrote The Baton and the Jackboot. Geissmar refers to the heated dialogues Furtwängler had with the Nazi authorities. He ‘battled with all the ministers and with Hitler’ wrote Geissmar in reference to the conductor’s struggle to resist choking Nazi control of German music-making.
What certainly is true is that relations between Furtwängler and the Nazi hierarchy worsened through the war years. The mutual loathing was obvious. Early in 1945, at the eleventh hour in the hostilities, Furtwängler slipped over the border into neutral Switzerland, in fear of his life.
The allied enquiry... had Furtwängler supported the regime by conducting at Nazi events?
In the event, Furtwängler faced a lengthy enquiry as part of the ‘denazification’ process conducted by the Allies after the war. He wasn’t accused of being a member of the Nazi Party, but was investigated over whether he had condoned the regime by conducting at high-profile Nazi occasions. He was cleared of serious wrongdoing, serving only a short ban from conducting, but even today the court of public opinion embraces the range of verdicts from measured forgiveness to vicious condemnation.
On the evidence of a 1946 diary entry, Furtwängler himself remained unrepentant over his decision to remain in Germany: ‘Any worry that my presence could be manipulated by the Nazi propaganda machine had to take a back seat to my major preoccupation, to save the soul of German music as far as possible, and continue to make music with German musicians for a German public.’
Post-war rehabilitation... of sorts
In the immediate post-war years, Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic successfully toured in both the UK and France, Germany’s bitter foes during the war. (On the 1948 so-called ‘reconciliation tour’ of Britain, the BPO conductor and players declined to charge a fee for their many appearances). In contrast, such were the protests in the US at the thought of Furtwängler being engaged by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra that he was forced to distance himself from the possibility.
Furtwängler worked internationally as a guest conductor up to his death in 1954, but scarcely a Jewish musician agreed to perform under his baton. The first to do so was Yehudi Menuhin. During the Nazi years before the war, under guidance from his parents, the youthful violinist declined to appear with Furtwängler. After the conflict, however, the pair collaborated several times, firstly in a 1947 Beethoven Violin Concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic. Especially now the full horror of the Holocaust was revealed, such an action caused all the more consternation. Yet ever the high-minded patrician, Menuhin (who visited and performed in concentration camps) was quoted as saying that ‘of all German musicians Furtwängler put up the most resistance to Hitler’.
Can we separate the music from the man?
Can listening to Furtwängler’s blazing recordings be an unsullied pleasure if you deem the conductor’s actions in Nazi Germany to be unforgivable? That’s for each individual to decide. Whatever verdict is reached about Furtwängler’s culpability, though, his story – as with that of, say, Dmitri Shostakovich in the Soviet Union – provides a detailed case study in the compromises and dilemmas that staying rather than leaving in such impossible circumstances inescapably entail.