Anti-Music: Jazz and Racial Blackness in German Thought Between the Wars by Mark Christian Thompson (2018)

As the existence of jazz in the interwar years was a sensation/historical event/outrage in Germany, many theorists, philosophers, musicologists tried to make sense of it. Later the Nazis attempted to analyze it and utilize it for their own purpose. Naturally, jazz also was a topic in literature, theater and popular German culture of the time.

„The task of this book is in part to help trace the course of philosophical jazz discourse of interwar German thought, of which Adorno‘s only makes up a part. … Its intervention is made in philosophical discourse centered on Americanization and culture in Germany that either conflicted with or contributed to the rise of Nazi rule, and in both cases quite erroneously but nevertheless rigorously understood itself to be conditioned by and limited to white audiences.“

The title – as others before concerned with similar topics – tries to investigate Theodore Adorno’s explanation and somewhat insufficient idea of jazz. (As Thompson puts it: “…Adorno constructs a historical narrative of German jazz originating in Wagner….”. Thereby cleverly avoiding claims of racism while localizing a fictional origin of the style in fascism.) As already portrayed and explained as a story full of misunderstandings – on Adorno’s side – concerning a type of music that he wrongly classified as jazz (while listening to German and British cafe music, and smooth foxtrot tunes played by mostly white bands).

For some “[critical theorists, musicologists or critics] jazz offered a racially vitalist, primitivist liberation from ossified, oppressive political structures. For others it represented the debilitating political effects of the culture industry’s commodification of race and for Nazis determined to appropriate jazz to their racist political and propagandist means, jazz represented an opportunity. In each instance, jazz simply as music is absent. In this way, but not in this way alone jazz is anti-music.”

Nevertheless, Thompson goes one step further. In four of the altogether five chapters he takes a very close look at the jazz reception in Germany of that time. Thereby, he concentrates not just on Professor Adorno’s idea of jazz and the arts, but also on neighboring disciplines, such as film, visual arts (in particular the effect of the 1938 “Entartete Kunst” exhibition) literature, cabaret and theater in Germany, namely on some works of famous German authors like Hermann Hesse, Berthold Brecht and Klaus Mann.

This approach is rather new, as much previous critique on Adorno’s jazz presentation did not explicitly include other artistic renderings of improvisation, ideas of creative freedom and individuality in popular cultural products of the time.
As there were hardly any people of African descent in Germany at this time, their presence, cultural products – such as jazz music – or mere appearance always were strongly connected to prejudice, stereotypes and feelings of superiority (on the German side). “In the German popular imagination, jazz’s originary, unforgivable blackness war corollary to the more general and changing political ascription of racial origins to cultural manifestations. …. The late Weimar and Nazi association of Jewishness with blackness and jazz speaks to this political instrumentality of reading for instability in an otherwise tropologically static racial origin story…”

Anti-Muisc is an interesting and highly theoretical title that examines not just the definition and reception of jazz in Germany of the interwar years, but also the loosely connected topics and definitions of blackness, racial imagination, primitivism, white superiority, and cultural imperialism; all in all the identification of jazz as a catalyst that fostered various avant-garde tendencies in cultural productions that had developed in Germany since the 1920s. The book may be hard to read and evaluate for readers who are not already familiar with the situation of foreign (US and British) jazz bands in Germany, the status of German (jazz) musicians, the German radio and film production or the works of the writers mentioned above.
The author is Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University.

Review by Dr. A. Ebert © 2018

Mark Christian Thompson. Anti-Music: Jazz and Racial Blackness in German Thought Between the Wars (SUNY  Series, Philosophy and Race). State Univesity of New York Press, 2018, 226 p.