Weimar Republic

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The Jazz Republic
Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany
Kathleen Canning, Series Editor
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For a complete list of titles, please see www.press.umich.edu

The Jazz Republic
Music, Race, and American Culture

in Weimar Germany
Jonathan O. Wipplinger
University of Michigan Press

Ann Arbor
Copyright © by Jonathan O. Wipplinger
All rights reserved
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (be-
yond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by
reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher.
Published in the United States of America by the

University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
c Printed on acid-free paper
2020 2019 2018 2017 4 3 2 1
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wipplinger, Jonathan O., author.

Title: The jazz republic : music, race, and American culture in Weimar Germany / Jonathan O.
Wipplinger.
Description: Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2017] | Series: Social history, popular
culture, and politics in Germany | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016046421| ISBN 9780472053407 (pbk. : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780472073405 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780472122660 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Jazz—Social aspects—Germany—History—20th century. | Jazz—Germany—
1921–1930—History and criticism. | Germany—Civilization—American influences. | Music
and race—Germany.
Classification: LCC ML3918.G3 W57 2017 | DDC 306.4/8425094309042—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046421
And now I have to tell you how it was back then,
when the world, pretty much reaching its goal
on the first try, had become jazz.
—Hans Janowitz
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 Jazz Occupies Germany 21
2 The Aural Shock of Modernity 51
3 Writing Symphonies in Jazz 84
4 Syncopating the Mass Ornament 115
5 Bridging the Great Divides 141
6 Singing the Harlem Renaissance 165
7 Jazz’s Silence 197
Conclusion 226
Notes 241
Index 303
Acknowledgments
This project has accompanied me now for more than ten years and across four
institutions. Over this period, I have had more opportunities than I can recount to
converse with scholars and colleagues about the subject of jazz music and popu-
lar culture in Germany during the 1920s. Their cumulative effect has helped
shape The Jazz Republic. Even more so, without the collective support, guidance,
and knowledge of friends and colleagues, The Jazz Republic simply would not
have been completed. Throughout, I’ve also been financially supported through
a number of grants and stipends from the University of Michigan, North Carolina
State University, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
At both my current and previous institutions, senior colleagues in German
have supported me to a degree that went far beyond the call of duty. Fittingly,
they each share the first name “Ruth.” At North Carolina State, Ruth Gross was
my department chair, a scholarly mentor, and simply a wonderful colleague. At
Milwaukee, I have had the luck to be helped along and quite often lifted up by
Ruth Schwertfeger: our conservations always left me with a smile on my face.
I cannot thank each of them enough.
The following is an attempt to list, in no particular order other than alpha-
betical, some of those who have contributed to the current work over the years.
My apologies in advance to anyone I’ve forgotten: Vanessa Agnew, Kevin Ami-
don, Don Anderson, Paul Anderson, Naomi André, Kerstin Barndt, Vlad Bilen-
kin, Viktorija Bilic, Ulrich Biller, Stephen Bourne, Helga Braunbeck, Sylvia
Schmitz-Burgard, Peter Cahn, David Choberka, Michael Cowan, Chip Deffaa,
Bill Donahue, Andrew Donson, Michelle Eley, Carla Garner, Michael Garval,
Karl Gert zur Heide, Daniel Golani, David Gramling, Jürgen Grandt, Jane
Hawkins, Gabriele Hayden, Jürgen Heinrichs, Leroy Hopkins, Jochen Hung,
Andrew Hurley, Catherine Kirchman, Lutz Kube, Alan Lareau, Priscilla Layne,
Rainer Lotz, Jason Miller, Tobias Nagl, Nancy Nenno, Marc Pierce, Arnold
x Acknowledgments
Rampersad, Don Rayno, Marc Reibold, Christian Rogowski, Andreas

Schmauder, Michael Schmidt, Barbara Schoenberg, Laurence Senelick, John
Sienicki, Meredith Soeder, Werner Sollors, Scott Spector, Noah Strote, Kira
Thurman, Louise Toppin, Elisabeth Trautwein-Heymann, Simon Walsh, Silke
Weineck, and Michelle Wright.
Special mention, though, is due to two independent researchers of jazz
music and African American musicians in Germany and Austria: Hans Pehl
and Konrad Nowakowski. Each of them has contributed greatly to the follow-
ing project through collaboration, joint research, and sharing of their years of
knowledge and expertise. They have each greatly enriched the project and their
generosity has known no bounds; each read drafts of the manuscript and, in the
process, contributed new information and eliminated any number of errors.
Needless to say, any mistakes that remain are my own.
My research was also furthered through a number of archives and libraries
in the United States and Germany. Generally, I’d like to begin by thanking the
interlibrary loan staff at both the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and at
North Carolina State University for procuring almost every obscure request
I’ve made. In addition, I’d also like to thank specifically: Akademie der Künste
(Michael Schwarz), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale Uni-
versity, Center for Research Libraries in Chicago, Herzogin Anna Amalia Bib-
liothek Weimar (Dr. Hans Zimmermann), Hochschule für Musik und darstel-
lende Kunst in Frankfurt am Main (Dr. Andreas Odenkirchen), Institut für
Theaterwissenschaft of the Free University Berlin (Dr. Peter Jammerthal), Li-
brary of Congress, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University,
New York Public Library, Paul Whiteman Collection at Williams College,
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg
of the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Staatsbibliothek Berlin, and the The-
aterwissenschaftliche Sammlung of the University of Cologne.
To the University of Michigan Press and its entire staff, in particular
LeAnn Fields, who has supported the project from the start, I am deeply grate-
ful. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript as well
for their extremely useful comments.
Outside of academia, I have also been supported through my family, my
mother and father as well as mother-and father-in-law and my entire extended
family.
This book, though, is dedicated to my wife, Katie, and children, Charlotte,
Grace, Josephine, and Isabelle. Any words here will not suffice to express what
you mean to me, so I’ll only say that without you, I would be lost.
Acknowledgments xi
Note Regarding Language
Throughout this work, the word “Black” is capitalized when used in reference
to people of African descent and the Black African diaspora in all cases except
when occurring in direct citation. This usage is common though by no means
universal in a variety of fields such as African American Studies and African
Diaspora Studies. It is adopted here as a means of signaling these groups’ sta-
tus as communities on par with other nationalities, peoples, etc., yet in a way
that also attends to the diversity of Black peoples and cultures in the United
States and globally, something especially important given the derogatory and
dehumanizing language contained within some of my primary sources. The
manuscript also uses “African American” in non-hyphenated form throughout
for similar reasons and employs “Black” and “African American” synony-
mously where appropriate.
Introduction
Sometime in the spring of 1925, a sixteen-year-old Berlin native, Alfred Lion,

decided to spend a day at the Theater im Admiralspalast. One of the most im-
portant entertainment establishments of the German capital, it was well known
to Lion from his youth for its renowned skating rink. In 1922, however, the
building had been renovated and the rink replaced with a theater hall that could
fit an audience of over 2000.1 In addition to its café and casino, this institution
featured performances by musical revues and operettas throughout the 1920s.
On that spring day, there was a performance of the African American revue
Chocolate Kiddies. As Lion recalled much later, in part mixing the establish-
ment’s past and present:
Well, you know I was a young boy and I used to go skating, roller-skating,
in a place called the Admiralspalast, I think it was. And one day I went
there with my skates and they told me there was no skating today, they
had a band there and I saw a poster on the wall and it said “Sam Wooding
and his Chocolate Dandies” [sic]. And I didn’t know anything about it, but
it looked strange to me, different, you know. And I went in, checked out
my skates, and sat down and there was Sam Wooding. It was the first time
I saw colored musicians and heard the music. I was flabbergasted . . .—It
was something brand new, but it registered with me right away. . . . I
couldn’t really put my fingers[sic] on it, but it was the beat, you know. It
was the beat. That beat . . .—it got into my bones.2
Like so many others who heard jazz during Germany’s Weimar Republic,
Lion was completely taken by this music from America. Not content with the
live experience alone, Lion purchased recordings by Sam Wooding made in
Berlin, holding on to them for much of his life.3 A little more than a year
later, in September 1926, Lion undertook a trip to New York City, where,
amongst other things, he acquired recordings he could not find in Berlin.4
2 The Jazz Republic
Even in New York, Lion at first found it difficult to find the sort of jazz re-
cords he desired, until he discovered so-called “race records.” According to
Lion, it was only then that he was able to find the work of Duke Ellington,
Jelly Roll Morton, and others.5 Still, New York did not prove to be as en-
thralled about Lion as he was about jazz. A fight with a dockworker landed
him in the hospital, and after convalescing, he returned home to Germany.
Back in Berlin, he apparently worked for an import-export company until
1933, when the German-Jewish Lion was forced into exile, first to Chile and
then back to New York, this time permanently, in 1936.
While Lion’s experience might have remained but an interesting, private
aside in interwar history, in 1939, along with Max Margulis, he cofounded
Blue Note Records, today considered one of the most important record labels
in jazz history.6 Lion was joined in New York later in the year by his friend
Francis Wolff, fellow German-Jewish exile and jazz enthusiast from Berlin.7
The Blue Note label became a major driving force behind the recording and
dissemination of jazz music and grew from early successes with Sidney Bechet
and Albert Ammons and Meade “Lux” Lewis to later working with Thelonious
Monk, John Coltrane, Bud Powell, Art Blakey, and Miles Davis. Leaving Har-
lem for Berlin in 1925, Sam Wooding, the African American performer named
in Lion’s account, could hardly have imagined the impact his sojourn would
have on Lion, jazz history, or, as the present work suggests, on the culture of
Weimar Germany itself.
The Jazz Republic argues that encounters between Germans and jazz such
as Lion’s are emblematic of a broad and unpredictable exchange and dialogue
between Germany and America around jazz. From New Orleans to New York,
from London to Paris to Moscow, Madrid, and of course Berlin, the 1920s
witnessed a global explosion of interest in jazz that found special resonance in
Germany. This period in German history was one marked by extremes: in cul-
ture, society, and politics. On the one hand, Weimar Germany’s culture bristled
with the newness and innovation of modernist experimentation in Dadaism and
Expressionism, as well as in the films of Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau. On the
other hand, such radical departures from tradition mixed unevenly with re-
peated crises in politics and the economy: a runaway currency devastated the
German middle-class in the early 1920s, followed later by massive unemploy-
ment, not to mention a political atmosphere in which murder, rather than de-
bate, often ruled the day. And yet still, in the middle of all this, there stood a
new form of music from America called jazz.
From the beginning of the Weimar Republic through the early years of the
Nazi regime, American jazz was a constant presence. To speak of the “Golden
Introduction 3
Twenties,” as the third decade of the twentieth century is often called in Ger-
many, is to evoke images not only of political radicalism and avant-garde artis-
tic experiment but also jazz. More to the point, the Weimar Republic was, in a
central way, Germany’s own “jazz age.” It was an age syncopated by experi-
ences of revolution and betrayal, defeat and “victory” gone awry, hope and
despair, progress and reaction. Indeed, because it has become de rigueur to
refer to jazz’s presence within Weimar culture, the music can appear almost
omnipresent in scholarly discussions of the period. Yet while there are many
individual essays on jazz within German studies scholarship, there are but two
monographs devoted to the subject and none in English.8 More to the point,
neither of the existing works investigates the histories of the individual per-
formers to which German commentators responded, nor do they make exten-
sive use of the daily press and the innumerable discussions of jazz that took
place there. So though scholars may rarely question jazz’s cultural signifi-
cance, nor do they, as a rule, devote substantive, long-form analysis to showing
precisely and concretely how it contributed to, rather than merely reflected, the
period’s vaunted modernism and modernity. Everywhere and yet nowhere, in
many ways jazz figures as a form of cultural background music to Weimar
culture proper. Yet jazz and the German interest in it were more than mere pass-
ing fancies of a decadent society slipping into the abyss of totalitarianism,
more than acoustical accouterment to avant-garde or reaction. Against the im-
plication of jazz as ornament to Weimar culture, The Jazz Republic maintains
on the contrary that jazz and the German encounter with it must be placed at
the center of Weimar culture—of its modernism, modernity, and debates over
changing cultural, gender, and racial norms.
Part of the reason for jazz’s curious position within contemporary schol-
arship is the fact that it is a musical, rather than a visual, literary, or otherwise
textual, genre. In order to recognize jazz as central to Weimar culture, one must
first understand how, as the editors of a collection of writings on music and
culture put it, “sound matters”—to culture, subjectivity, and history.9 While
musicologists, in particular via the work of Susan McClary, have for some time
convincingly argued for a socially constructed notion of music and sound,
scholars within German studies have only more recently begun to ask similar
questions. If scholarship in the emerging field of sound studies has begun rede-
fining our understanding of sound in German studies, the exact role this aural
realm has played remains much less defined.10
For a number of reasons, the case of Germany during the interwar period
presents a particularly rich example of crossings between music, sound, cul-
ture, and society. As scholars Pamela Potter and Celia Applegate have argued
4 The Jazz Republic
in a variety of contexts, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,

German cultural identity was deeply invested in music.11 If the equation was
neither uniform nor uncontested, the idea of Germans as a “people of music”
acted as a powerful framing device within broader debates over German iden-
tity. During the interwar period, such debates increased in proportion and in-
tensity. Applegate and Potter summarize: “World War I marked a crisis in Ger-
man identity that deeply influenced the discourse on German music while
condoning attempts to exploit music for political aims.”12 The disruption of
society and politics caused by World War I and Germany’s ensuing defeat en-
gendered a crisis in national and thus musical identity. Over the course of the
Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, various attempts were made to rearticu-
late the fractured relationship between music and German cultural identity.
This lent the reception of jazz special significance during the interwar period
and guaranteed debate over the music’s powerful resonance in this period of
upheaval. As a musical form emanating from the United States, one viewed
simultaneously as both mechanical and primitive, jazz posed immediate chal-
lenges to the ideologies surrounding this musically inflected cultural identity.
Yet if discussion of jazz could act, as it indeed often did, as a means of rein-
forcing boundaries between “German” and “non-German,” so, too, could it
lead to spectacular breakdowns of such oppositions, to reforming and rearticu-
lating categories of national and cultural belonging, of constructions of Wei-
mar Germany as jazz republic.
Reimagining America, Rethinking German Americanism
In order to do justice to the complexity, unpredictability, and contradictoriness

of the meaning of jazz music for Weimar Germany, it is first necessary to
change how we approach the encounter between Germany and America as it
took place through jazz. During the Weimar Republic an important debate over
Amerikanismus (Americanism) and Amerikanisierung (Americanization) oc-
curred across German culture and society, with jazz being one essential com-
ponent of this discussion.13 From conservatives like Adolf Halfeld who railed
against the “mechanical life” of America to Bertolt Brecht’s satire of an infatu-
ated group of “700 intellectuals praying before an oil tanker,” debate over
America and American modernity occupied an important position on both ends
of the political and cultural spectrum.14 With the global recognition of the
United States as a world power following the First World War, Europeans and
Germans in particular paid increasingly public attention to this once upstart
Introduction 5
nation, elevating its status in the minds of many to the purest instantiation of
the present, of the modern; its skyscrapers, monopolistic businesses, films and
film stars, and jazz signaling to Weimar commentators simultaneously hope for
renewal as well as marking fear over decline.15
At the same time, one of the fundamental questions regarding American-
ism is the extent to which Germany’s image of America compares to the his-
torical reality of 1920s America. In accounts of the period, Weimar’s America
is all-too-often understood primarily as an absence, a projection of a utopian
or, as is often the case, a dystopian imaginary, against which German culture
could define itself. This line of thinking was by no means foreign to cultural
critics at the time. Rudolf Kayser, for example, could already claim in 1925
that Americanism “[c]ertainly . . . has nothing or only little to do with the
American,” instead, it “is a new European method” for embracing modern
life.16 While there is little question that Weimar Americanism was a cultural
war waged on a German field of battle, with German interests largely driving
the debate, this does not mean that the encounter and engagement with Ameri-
can culture was purely, or even primarily, determined by German interests
alone. To paraphrase Marx’s methodological challenge from the 18th Bru-
maire, Weimar Germany may have made its image of America, but it did not
make it freely, as it pleased. Instead of viewing German Americanism as a
mirror image of internal concerns, the present work understands the relation-
ship to be more akin to that of a prismatic refraction. While the prism of Ger-
man culture and history did indeed shape the output, the resulting image was to
no small part informed by the input of American culture itself. In a word,
Weimar’s America and the debates around it were, I argue, powerfully in-
formed by the contradictions and conflicts inherent to American culture itself,
most notably of race. One conclusion to draw from this is that in order to better
understand the images of jazz circulating in Weimar culture, one must investi-
gate the African American and African diasporic presence in the United States
and in Germany. As Tobias Nagl writes in his study of race and Blackness in
Weimar film, “representations of the ‘Other’ cannot be conceptualized within
a vacuum; they carry traces of real encounters and are symptoms of a repressed
history.”17 In addressing and evaluating the impact of America and jazz on
Weimar culture, the current work will argue that one must hear this history in
stereo, as it were, simultaneously listening to developments on both sides of
the Atlantic. Only in this way can one be attentive both to the ways American
culture framed and was in turn framed by the German encounter with it.
For this synching of German and American culture to work to its fullest
extent, however, each side of the encounter must be reexamined. On the Amer-
6 The Jazz Republic
ican side, this process begins with acknowledgment of the fraught racial com-
position of American culture. Scholarship on Americanism in Weimar tends to
abide by the unspoken agreement that when one is discussing Americanism in
Weimar, it is of a white Germany confronting a white America, with consider-
ation of the impact of African Americans and Blackness generally treated as a
separate topic. As long as this remains the implicit framework from which
German Americanism is judged, the German encounter with America will it-
self remain the caricature it has often become. To move away from such sepa-
ration and from Weimar’s own understanding of Americanism as “European
method,” one of the first steps is to view discussion of white American and
African American culture as inseparable. Ralph Ellison’s thoughts on African
American culture in relation to white American culture have been important to
my thinking here. As Ellison writes in “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke”:
Down at the deep dark bottom of the melting pot, where the private is
public and the public private, where black is white and white black, where
the immoral becomes moral and the moral is anything that makes one feel
good (or that one has the power to sustain), the white man’s relish is apt
to be the black man’s gall.18
Ellison’s recasting of the well-known metaphor of the American melting pot

not only speaks to the foundational importance of African Americans to Amer-
ican culture writ large, but also to the unique structure of American cultural
identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Both Manichean dualism
and dialectically dirtied stew of cultures, races, and identities, Ellison’s take on
American identity points towards the necessity to recognize in everything that
originates from this nation a duality of inseparably connected “essences.” As
Ellison argues, however, such interconnectedness has little to do with the equi-
table distribution of power. Speaking to the painful and often violent implica-
tions of the racial ideologies inherent to American culture, he reminds his
(white) readers that white enjoyment (“relish”) usually means pain and anger
(“gall”) for African Americans. In terms of conceptualizing the impact of jazz
on German culture, Ellison’s thoughts suggest the need to examine how all
instances of US culture are bound up with this dialectic of race and to investi-
gate in turn how German commentators engage (or do not) with this aspect.
I will define my use of the term “jazz” shortly, but it is important to con-
sider the implications of this idea in relation to American popular music more
generally. As the work of Ronald Radano has shown, the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century witnessed a fundamental shift in how African Ameri-
Introduction 7
can music was constructed and consumed by critics and audiences. Out of an
ideological matrix of music and racial difference, Radano argues, a focus on
rhythm in Black music emerged and created a code of listening to and defining
Black music that erased earlier understandings, in particular in relation to the
African American voice. The trope of an ineffable “Black rhythm” pervaded
and shaped American popular music, both Black and white, and in so doing
created the fraught system out of which American (and German) conceptual-
izations of jazz emerge. For Radano, this means that:
Black music’s power [is located] not in a segregated racial preserve but in
the relational position of a black sound confessing the mulatto truth of a
white supremacist nation. If it unseats the authenticity of black presence
so does it reveal for African-America something more: it places claim on
the totality of the American social experience that has been persistently
portrayed to be white.19
Following Radano, my conceptualization of American culture is not one that

would erase racial difference through a claim of power equity between Black
and white as in the non-Ellisonian idea of American culture as “melting pot.”
Instead, my emphasis on the relational structure of African American and white
American identities gestures towards an understanding of American culture
that better attends to W. E. B. Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness, which
amongst many other things, is tied with striving “to make it possible,” as Du
Bois writes in The Souls of Black Folks, “for a man to be both a Negro and an
American.”20 On the one hand, this will mean paying attention to how German
images of and interactions with African Americans overlap but are not identical
to other African diasporic communities. On the other, this means that it is nec-
essary to show how the seemingly most “white” American phenomena carry
“Blackness” and how “Black” phenomena like jazz are often structured via
white America’s image of African Americans.
Through this specific conceptualization of American culture, I hope to
unfold an equally complex German encounter with American culture, jazz, and
Blackness during the Weimar Republic. For one, it enables a reorientation of
Weimar Americanism along transnational vectors that often lead directly to-
wards Germany’s own conflicted racial and colonial past. As a modern Euro-
pean (after 1919 former) colonial power, German society during the first half
of the last century took part in a global network of exchanges: of peoples,
products, cultures, and ideas. Germany’s colonial era escalated the encounter
and exchange with the rest of the world, including Black Africans. Moreover,
8 The Jazz Republic
and in parallel to my own thoughts, Andrew Zimmerman’s Alabama in Africa

has shown the value of viewing these questions within a transnational context
of race, capitalism, and labor. As Zimmerman demonstrates through his discus-
sion of the expedition of members of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Insti-
tute to the German colony in Togo in 1901, German investments in Africa and
Blackness were part of a network linking African, African American, white
American, German, and other European actors.21 In revealing this interweav-
ing of Africa, African America, and Germany, Zimmerman’s work hints at
what might be gained through the application of a similar model to the study of
Americanism and jazz in the Weimar Republic.
The colonial and transnational context discussed by historians like Zim-
merman has obvious implications for scholars working in the interdisciplinary
field of German studies. As Sara Lennox argues in “From Postcolonial to
Transnational Approaches in German Studies,” while many German historians
since the work of Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel have come to
adopt a transnational approach in the broadest sense, the field of German stud-
ies has much more unevenly adopted the transnational perspective.22 Interven-
ing into this state of affairs, Lennox offers at the end of her essay a series of
important methodological challenges to guide German studies scholarship in a
transnational direction. She writes:
How are cultural representations affected by impulses external to the

nation state . . . and how does the cultural product position itself vis-à-
vis those impulses? To what degree does the text directly thematize
these questions, and how must we read differently to find the answers?
How and why do German-language texts respond differently to the same
transnational phenomena from texts with other linguistic origins? How
are the national and the transnational explicitly or implicitly represented
in the text?23
Given the global reach of jazz in the 1920s, such questions will be crucial for
thinking through Germany’s encounter with the music. While I address these
questions in more detail below, for the moment, the framework offered by Len-
nox suggests that when thinking through jazz on the global stage, it is neces-
sary to consider the global, transnational context of the jazz’s dissemination
and reception alongside the music’s African American origins.
There were three primary means by which the transnational space of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century inflected Weimar Germany’s en-
counter with jazz. To begin with, this period witnessed a proliferation of racial
Introduction 9
thinking along social Darwinist lines. As Fatima El-Tayeb argues, during the
period leading up to the First World War, Blackness and Blacks became a cen-
tral component of the ideology of race within German biological, as well as
philosophical, sciences.24 Across a wide range of thinkers, Africans, or rather
Blackness, as a socially constructed identity, emerged as the ultimate category
of otherness for white European identity. Yet colonialism and its inherently
global nature also meant that, in practice, the separation of white and Black, as
in the case of America, was a difficult proposition, to say the least. Within
Germany’s colonies themselves, crucial questions had to be asked about “race
mixing” between Black and white, for example regarding the citizenship of
offspring between white Germans and Black Africans.25 While in Germany
proper, a Black community was in the process of formation from the 1880s
onward.26 Though the history of the African diasporic presence in Germany
stretches much further back in history, German colonialism of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries fundamentally changed how, where, and under what
circumstances white Germans and members of African diaspora confronted
each other. Further, because such traffic between Germany and Africa did not
take place in isolation, but within the broader Western European colonialist
project, port cities like Hamburg and financial capitals like Berlin and Frank-
furt witnessed significant numbers of African migrant workers.27 One of the
arenas through which this presence entered into German consciousness was
popular culture.28 Beyond well-known associations of Blackness with choco-
late as in the advertising figure of the “Sarotti Mohr,” commercial advertise-
ments of the period for tobacco, soap, and numerous other commodities were
suffused with images of Blackness.29 Additionally, the entertainment industry
in the form of Völkerschauen, or “ethnographic shows,” such as those of Carl
Hagenbeck, not to mention the variety theaters and music halls regularly em-
ployed Black performers, as has been documented in works by Eric Ames and
Rainer Lotz for example.30
To turn back to the topic at hand, how did these phenomena inform and
how in turn were they informed by the German engagement with American
culture during the period roughly between 1890 and 1945? For one, around
the same time as the African diasporic presence was garnering greater visi-
bility within Germany, one witnesses an initial entry of American and Afri-
can American popular culture that in many ways presages much of Weimar’s
initial encounter with jazz, as is discussed in chapter 1.31 Central here were
new technologies of mechanical reproduction like the phonograph, in addi-
tion to an unprecedented influx of mass-produced sheet music. These devel-
opments exponentially increased the number and modalities of German con-
10 The Jazz Republic
tacts with American music and culture. Simultaneous to this expansion of

American mass culture, African American artists, with the incumbent com-
plexities of cultural production under Jim Crow, were gaining greater visibil-
ity within the United States and abroad, in Europe and Germany, for exam-
ple. This meant that Germany’s first significant exposure to American popular
music (cakewalk and ragtime) was one in which the distinction between
white and Black music was both on display and very much up for grabs. It is
therefore unsurprising that within the German reception of these phenomena,
one witnesses some of the same tropes regarding Blackness, rhythm, and
capitalist commodification that can be found within the early debate on jazz
during the 1920s. While Astrid Kusser has produced an important mono-
graph on cakewalk dancing from a transnational perspective, with my con-
clusions generally echoing her own, the relative sparseness of scholarly dis-
cussion of cakewalk and other forms of American culture during Wilhelmine
Germany, even compared to the literature on jazz during the Weimar Repub-
lic, let alone Nazi-era jazz, is striking.32 That these earlier encounters have
until very recently largely been ignored has much to do with the prevailing
mythology regarding jazz in Weimar Germany.33
Mythologies of Weimar Jazz Culture
As I suggested earlier, the idea that jazz is important to Weimar culture is by no

means new and hardly anyone writing a cultural history of the period would
fail to refer to jazz’s presence or general significance. Yet at the level of the
actual history of jazz in Germany, such discussions for the most part remain at
the level of superficial glosses—a few names of jazz bands or African Ameri-
can performers are mentioned before turning to other matters—or, alterna-
tively, look at jazz in isolation from the issues addressed above. Most signifi-
cantly, scholarly analyses have all too often depended on outdated secondary
literature, for example, Horst Lange’s Jazz in Deutschland (Jazz in Germany),
for details regarding jazz bands in Germany.34 One result of this is the persis-
tence of a very specific mythology regarding jazz in 1920s Germany. This
mythology approaches jazz anachronistically and with the hindsight of around
one hundred years of writing on jazz, rather than investigating what jazz meant
to Germans, Americans, and members of the Black diaspora in 1920, 1925, or
1930. More specifically, I would like to suggest that most discussions of jazz
in Weimar Germany have remained embedded in what Scott DeVeaux has
called the “jazz tradition.”35 By this term, he means to indicate the broad con-
Introduction 11
sensus regarding jazz as a metacategory for the variety of African American

musical styles and genres that emerged in the twentieth century. As DeVeaux
writes: “The idea of the ‘jazz tradition’ is an idea of relatively recent vintage,
an overarching narrative that has crowded out other possible interpretations of
the complicated and variegated cultural phenomena that we cluster under the
umbrella jazz.”36 From Dixieland to big band, swing, bebop and beyond, the
“jazz tradition” narrates the history of jazz in a progression of genius musi-
cians like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and
John Coltrane. While this narrative has a great many advantages, it is nonethe-
less a specific historical narrative, one long in the making and certainly not
available to writers, German or otherwise, during the 1920s. Furthermore,
while the “jazz tradition” does an excellent job of explaining the history of
recorded jazz in the United States, it is less useful at explaining the develop-
ments at the margins, such as the case of Germany, where many practitioners
were neither African American nor white American, but rather German, Afro-
German, Afro-European, African, and other identities, or for that matter where
no recorded documentation exists.
While accounts of jazz’s historical, cultural, or literary presence within
Germany tend to approach the music from the “jazz tradition,” they differ in
terms of how they view German jazz’s relationship to it. At times, references to
jazz by Weimar commentators are contextualized with missing information
from the “jazz tradition.” Though this was particularly prevalent in earlier
scholarship, it continues on today and has led to any number of errors about
which types of jazz musicians Germans knew or heard in Berlin, Frankfurt,
Dresden, and elsewhere. One typical error in this regard is the repeated refer-
ences to Duke Ellington’s presence in Weimar Berlin, and to this day, one can
find erroneous claims of Ellington having toured Germany during the Weimar
Republic.37 While errors are inevitable and the present work is by no means
excluded, the focus on Ellington and the overall approach to Weimar jazz
through the contemporary narrative of the “jazz tradition” has had the effect of
obscuring the role played by other African American jazz musicians, like Sam
Wooding or members of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, who did in fact
perform in Germany. Just as significantly, the work of Afro-Europeans and
other non-American members of the Black diaspora was long ignored for sim-
ilar reasons.
Another manner of responding to Weimar jazz culture, currently much
more prevalent, is to dismiss early German jazz and jazz culture as inauthentic
precisely because it does not correspond to the “jazz tradition” and its develop-
mental narrative. In other words, a common thread of contemporary scholar-
ship is to suggest that Weimar jazz is largely or even wholly of German origin,
sharing little in common with the “jazz tradition.” The work of J. Bradford
Robinson, in particular his “Jazz Reception in Weimar Germany: In Search of
a Shimmy Figure” is perhaps the best example of this mode of analysis.38 Rob-
inson’s conclusion in this influential essay is that “two misconceptions haunt
all discussions of the impact of jazz on the musicians of Weimar Germany. One
is that the music they confronted was legitimate jazz; the other, that it was
specifically American.”39 Based on an analysis of jazz-inflected German and
Austrian art music, Robinson argues that the jazz of composers such as Ernst
Krenek and Kurt Weill was a German invention, owing to the specific historical-
economic situation of the early years of the republic.40 As Robinson sugges-
tively writes: “Legitimate black-American jazz, as apart from its diluted com-
mercial imitations, was unknown in Germany as a concept until 1930,” citing a
single review in the music journal Melos of recordings by Louis Armstrong and
Duke Ellington as evidence of this claim.41 While Robinson’s work was path-
breaking insofar as it challenged naïve assumptions regarding jazz in 1920s
Germany, his analytical framework, as is clear from the above, remains that of
the “jazz tradition,” rather than the more complicated situation in both Ger-
many and the United States. Even more so, Robinson’s claim that Weimar
musicians and the German public encountered no “legitimate” African Ameri-
can jazz until 1930 is deeply problematic as this work will show. So though his
work does indeed push back at the mythologies of jazz in Germany, it is only
the beginning of grasping the function of jazz for Weimar culture, hardly the
end. For as DeVeaux has argued elsewhere, the “jazz tradition,” this narrative
upon which jazz history is constructed, is a shifting thing. Those who belong
to the “core” and those who are excluded from it (and why and how) is ever
changing. As DeVeaux writes in a passage highly relevant for the case of jazz
during the Weimar Republic: “It’s time to acknowledge that the history of
global jazz cannot be reduced to a single story, no matter how ‘American’ the
century in which it developed may have been.”42 The Jazz Republic aspires to
make one, albeit very specific, contribution to this global history of jazz.
In this reorientation towards the transatlantic and global history of jazz, as
well as much else in the following, my thinking is deeply indebted to Paul
Gilroy and his seminal work The Black Atlantic. Specifically, it attempts to
heed Gilroy’s call to understand Black diasporic cultural production in all its
variation:
How are we to think critically about artistic products and aesthetic codes
which, though they may be traceable back to one distinct location, have
Introduction 13
been changed either by the passage of time or by their displacement, relo-

cation, or dissemination through networks of communication and cultural
exchange?43
This statement has particular force in terms of the global transmission of cul-
tural forms like jazz under capitalism and colonialism. The Jazz Republic as a
whole is an attempt to work through these insights by Gilroy, to acknowledge
the messiness of cultural transfer, as well as to remain attuned to jazz’s cultural
and historical specificity as a multiply determined art form of American popu-
lar music emerging from and within African American culture and aesthetic
practices.
The stakes involved in the application of the term “jazz” for Weimar cul-
ture are obviously high. In point of fact, many German commentators have
long shown a preference for alternate terms like Tanzmusik (dance music), Un-
terhaltungsmusik (entertainment music), or Schlager (hit songs), despite the
fact that the word “jazz” litters their source material.44 While from a certain
point of view these terms may be more technically precise, I find the disavowal
of the term “jazz” conceptually limiting. In many ways, it is an a priori nega-
tion of the question of whether American jazz influenced German culture and
music. Taking this conceptual slippage and Robinson’s argument to one logical
conclusion, Thomas J. Saunders argues that jazz’s
falsely implied ubiquity, on the basis of very limited exposure to the orig-
inal American music or bands, can be taken as evidence of just how Ger-
man, and impervious to America, popular culture remained. Here, as else-
where, the longing among certain intellectuals for cultural renewal
valorized an otherwise marginal cultural phenomenon.45
If, as Damon J. Philips has shown, the notion of Germany’s “limited exposure”
to jazz, at least in comparison to other European nations, can be called into
question,46 there is a broader and more important point to be made here.
Though scholars like Robinson and Saunders may be correct to question hap-
hazard and anachronistic assumptions regarding jazz, i.e., those that fill in
missing details from German jazz history with information from the jazz tradi-
tion, it nonetheless remains counterproductive to close off German culture in
an age so replete with international translation, transmission, and cultural ex-
change. It also means closing oneself off to so many of the encounters with
jazz detailed in the present work.
Instead of attempting to delineate a stable notion of jazz against which
German knowledge might be judged, the present work proceeds from a differ-
ent conceptualization. It is one that seeks to provide sufficient space for mo-
ments of volatility and unpredictability, as well as dialogue between white
Americans, African Americans, other members of the African Diaspora, Euro-
peans, and Weimar Germans, both Black and white. Under the term “jazz,” it
understands a shifting set of positions emerging from a specific cultural con-
stellation through which “jazz,” or better, jazz effects were produced. By jazz
effects, I mean to indicate moments of intersection and interpenetration of dis-
courses of music, race, and American culture. Fundamentally, such jazz effects
are the result of interaction and engagement with cultural products originating
from America. In other words, a jazz effect emerges when the three cultural
coordinates, music, race, and American culture, combine in or after an encoun-
ter with a form of American culture. In focusing on such moments of cultural
contact and dialogue, I hope to show that jazz was not only a metaphor but also
material for Weimar culture.
While naturally the points of departure for my analysis will remain pri-
marily musical and/or auditory (visiting jazz bands, listening to jazz record-
ings, the training of jazz musicians), this usage carries a number of advantages
over the narrower definition of the “jazz tradition.” For one, the cultural terrain
comprised by these elements is much larger and more complex and is better
capable of encompassing the wide variability of cultural documents from the
period that were indebted to jazz—music, both popular and serious; poetry;
literature; visual arts; criticism; philosophy; advertising; etc. This definition
also allows me to discuss under the rubric of “jazz” matters that, from the per-
spective of the “jazz tradition,” would seem only tangentially related to the
music, yet because of their intersectional position were caught up within Wei-
mar’s jazz culture. Through the idea of the “jazz effect,” in other words, I en-
deavor to reconstruct the broad landscape of German knowledge about Ameri-
can culture and jazz, which could be extremely specific and detailed, if, in the
manner of a prismatic refraction, also highly selective. This use of jazz and the
idea of a jazz effect are obviously much more than definitions; they act as an
interpretive model and seek to build a framework for demonstrating the cen-
trality of jazz to Weimar culture.
While my ultimate aim is to better explain the origins and development of
Weimar jazz culture, this can often only be achieved via a more thoroughgoing
engagement with matters outside of Weimar’s geographical boundaries. At
various places within the following work, I devote substantial space to detail-
ing the histories of white and African Americans, various peoples of African
descent, members of the Jewish diaspora, Austrians, Russians, and Hungari-
Introduction 15
ans. Through the attention paid to the individual histories of figures like Evan-
dale Roberts, Sam Wooding, Paul Whiteman, Sonny “Fernandes” Jones, Má-
tyás Seiber, and Anna Nussbaum, I endeavor to open up Weimar cultural
history and Weimar jazz culture more fully to these “foreign” voices that
played such significant roles, yet have not found a central place within scholar-
ship. To identify one extreme case, where does Ossip Dymow’s musical com-
edy Schatten über Harlem (Shadows over Harlem) belong within Weimar cul-
ture, jazz and otherwise? This 1930 work may have premiered in Stuttgart, but
it was written by a Russian-Jewish-American author, set to music by a Hungar-
ian composer, and was based upon translations of works by African American
and Afro-Caribbean poets done by Austrian and German writers. Unless one
looks both within and beyond Germany’s geographical and cultural bound
aries, this and less extreme examples will remain without a place. For me, then,
reading jazz in Germany demands that we look as much at what was going on
inside Weimar Germany as at how this inside connected with the outside. In-
deed, what else sums up better the promise of Weimar culture than, to cite Peter
Gay, the idea of the “outsider as insider”? This history, however, can only be
reconstructed at this culture’s edges in interstitial spaces that exist between and
often beyond America and Germany. In sum, The Jazz Republic aspires to re-
orient current understanding of jazz in Germany as formed by intercultural
and, indeed, transnational exchange to provide a new sense of this culture that,
like Alfred Lion, was once so thoroughly invested in and enthralled by jazz.
Overview
After the introduction, seven substantive chapters follow. While they are
roughly organized chronologically, each also represents an instantiation of
Weimar Germany as “jazz republic”; that is to say, each acts as a specific ex-
ample of how music, race, and American culture collided to produce a “jazz
effect” and, in the process, pushed jazz to the center of Weimar culture. It is
important to note that while they cover a broad range of political, cultural, and
aesthetic issues, they are by no means exhaustive. They have been selected in
part on the basis of their representativeness for the broader German discussion
of jazz, such as because they belong to a specific cultural arena, e.g., visual
culture; but always they were selected because they reveal how the experience
of American culture directly shaped the context and contour of Weimar jazz
culture. These range from the avant-garde, to social constructions of the jazz
experience in relation to critical theory, literary and theatrical modernism, rep-
resentations of the New Woman and gender on stage and in film, the crisis of
high culture, transnational modernism, and Adorno’s aesthetic theory. Still,
there are many more examples and histories than can be recounted in any sin-
gle work. So if some better-known figures like Josephine Baker, Kurt Weill,
and Ernst Krenek do not receive extensive treatment, this should not be read as
an indication of their insignificance, to my argument or otherwise. Instead,
these, along with many other lesser-known yet no less important examples,
cede their position in order to present the following selection of Weimar Ger-
many as jazz republic.
Chapter 1, “Jazz Occupies Germany: Weimar Jazz Culture between the
Rhine and Berlin,” looks at the initial responses to jazz after the First World
War. It shows how German exposure to jazz from 1919 to 1923 proceeded in
an uneven and geographically differentiated manner. In Berlin, new social
dances like the foxtrot and “jazz” appeared in the winter and spring of 1919,
though with little relation to jazz music. For the next two years, however, Ber-
lin’s nascent jazz culture was supported through the activities of modern artists
who featured jazz dancing and American popular culture across a spectrum of
works that can be read as belonging to the transnational debate surrounding
jazz amongst European-American modernists. During the same period, yet
within the zones of foreign occupation along the Rhine, jazz bands and jazz
music began emerging much earlier than in Berlin and in much closer dialogue
with American, British, and French developments in popular music. Along
with these jazz bands, the occupation also brought with it debate over the pres-
ence of French colonial African soldiers, the so-called scandal of the “Schwarze
Schmach am Rhein” (“Black Shame” or “Black Horror on the Rhine”). As I
show, between 1920 and 1922, both this debate as well as jazz bands, white and
Black, German and non-German, moved from the occupation zones along the
Rhine to Berlin and elsewhere in Germany. Through analysis of early German
jazz criticism, as well as visual representations of the music, I suggest the de-
velopment of German jazz culture was, from the beginning, both involved in a
broad network of European-American jazz criticism and, more importantly,
decidedly influenced by the contact and conflict along the Rhine.
The relative stabilization of the economy and society in 1924 ushered in a
new era of cultural vitality, the so-called “Golden Twenties.” During this pe-
riod, jazz and its effects were felt most strongly and across a broad swath of
Weimar culture. To begin with, Germany welcomed African American jazz
musicians like Sam Wooding in greater numbers. These jazz artists, as well as
their white counterparts, began to exert an influence that remained strong for
the next nine years and beyond. Because of the wide-ranging and long-standing
Introduction 17
impact of jazz from the mid-1920s onward, each of the next five chapters pres-
ents a cross-section of Weimar culture’s jazz impulse as it expanded and con-
tracted between the years 1924 and 1933.
The second chapter, “The Aural Shock of Modernity: Sam Wooding and
Weimar Germany’s Experience of Jazz,” considers the 1925 Berlin perfor-
mances of the African American jazz band of Sam Wooding. It seeks to explain
the distinctive impression made by jazz bands, Wooding’s in particular, on
German audience members like Alfred Lion through development of the con-
cept of the aural shock. Indeed, to many a reviewer, Wooding’s jazz seemed to
differ from prior experiences with jazz, necessitating within critical writings a
renegotiation of the understanding of jazz in the years following his initial ap-
pearance. Drawing on the writings of Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benja-
min, it argues that jazz music and Weimar Germany’s experience of it were
bound up with specific transformations of sound and music under modernity.
Through reconstruction of the original performance context, along with analy-
sis of initial reviews and subsequent mediations of the event, it seeks to rethink
and retheorize Weimar culture’s encounter with jazz as a conceptual space in
which questions relating to the individual’s experience of modernity were re-
fracted through discussion of jazz.
Just one year after Sam Wooding performed in Berlin, the white American
bandleader Paul Whiteman visited the capital. Chapter 3, “Writing Sympho-
nies in Jazz: Paul Whiteman and German Literature,” explores a set of literary
mediations of Whiteman’s “symphonic jazz,” which celebrated its Berlin pre-
miere at the Grosses Schauspielhaus in June 1926. While the reaction to this
less raucous and more “refined” version of the music was divided between
music critics who by and large rejected it and the audience and popular musi-
cians who tended to embrace it, Whiteman’s controversial pairing of jazz and
the symphony found resonance with a number of modernist authors. This chap-
ter explores Hans Janowitz’s Jazz. Roman (Jazz: A Novel), Rene Schickele’s
Symphonie für Jazz (Symphony for Jazz), and Gustav Renker’s Symphonie und
Jazz (Symphony and Jazz) as literary experiments structured by the German
encounter with Whiteman and symphonic jazz. Read as reactions to White-
man’s experimental combination of high and low culture, such works, I argue,
are no longer “merely” novels about jazz, but rather literary meditations on the
breakdown of traditional form in art and society.
While the previous two chapters considered the significance of visiting
American jazz musicians for Weimar culture, how Whiteman and Wooding
shaped and were shaped by their German interlocutors, the next chapter fo-
cuses on German cultural responses to shifts in gender hierarchies vis-à-vis
jazz productions of their own. Chapter 4, “Syncopating the Mass Ornament:

Race and Girlkultur,” investigates the relationship between jazz, gender,
Blackness, and visual culture on the Weimar revue stage. Specifically, I’m in-
terested in how jazz and the African and African American performers associ-
ated with it collided with the debate over the white American chorus girl or
“Tiller Girl.” Towards this end, I read the construction of Girlkultur by Weimar
theorists and artists as having been produced out of fear over racial contamina-
tion between Black and white. This chapter shows how such discussion of the
white American chorus girl bore directly on the figuration of Weimar’s New
Woman, as not only a threat to gender but also to racial hierarchies. As is sug-
gested in this chapter’s conclusion, Siegfried Kracauer’s well-known work on
revue culture, portrayed most famously in his 1927 essay “The Mass Orna-
ment,” reveals itself to contain traces of these very same tensions around gen-
der and race. In re-reading Kracauer via jazz, in syncopating his mass orna-
ment, I want to show how jazz had a hand not only in the construction of
Weimar culture but Weimar theory as well.
Adding further geographical balance and much more, the fifth chapter,
“Bridging the Great Divides: Jazz at the Conservatory,” transitions away from
the city of Berlin to interrogate the scandal of the Jazzklasse, or jazz program,
at Hoch’s Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main. That this was the first example
of postsecondary academic training in jazz in Europe indicates the special im-
portance accorded to jazz in 1920s Germany. Composer and conservatory di-
rector Bernhard Sekles announced the program in late 1927 and a predictable,
if no less vitriolic, debate ensued. Beginning with an explanation of the struc-
tural and institutional reasons for this unlikely announcement, I next look at the
terms of the debate over the Jazzklasse from the perspective of its supporters.
My analysis shows how, in their defenses of the program, liberal music critics
such as Heinrich Strobel and Alfred Baresel rewrote jazz’s origins as ultimately
European, rather than American or African American. Yet this debate is but one
aspect of the program’s broader significance. In this chapter, I also explore the
jazz pedagogy of the program’s Hungarian-born director Mátyás Seiber as an
example of the uneven jazzing up of German culture. Examining the jazz prac-
tices at Hoch’s Conservatory allows me to reveal the much deeper and more
complicated exchange that took place between Germans and their American
and African American models than consideration of the debate alone might
otherwise suggest.
While the previous chapters deal more or less directly with the issue of
jazz music and its place within Weimar culture, the next two seek to show how
Introduction 19
jazz impacted cultural production even when the music seemingly played no
role. The translation of the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes into
German and Theodor W. Adorno’s incomplete Singspiel based on Mark
Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer each show how the German discussion
and engagement with jazz came to impact cultural production more broadly.
Indeed, if African American figures often play a muted role in debates about
jazz, such as the Jazzklasse, chapter 6, “Singing the Harlem Renaissance:
Langston Hughes, Translation, and the Diasporic Blues,” demonstrates that
African American voices were by no means silent during the era. In the recep-
tion and translation of Hughes from 1922 onward, I show how the poetic and
musical translation of his work acted as a pivot point for international and
transnational exchange between African Americans, Jewish Germans and Jew-
ish Austrians, and other marginalized groups. Reaching beyond Weimar Ger-
many’s geographical borders, I identify in the more than sixty translations of
Hughes by seventeen different translators a fertile exchange between German
and African American modernist cultural production that grew out of and
alongside Weimar culture’s fascination with jazz and America. Together with
the direct, personal encounters of Hughes himself with three of his translators,
important works like Anna Nussbaum’s 1929 collection of Harlem Renais-
sance poetry or the 1930 operetta Shadows over Harlem demonstrate that cul-
tural exchange between African Americans and German-speaking Europe was
hardly one-sided.
At the same time and in the wake of the economic collapse of 1929 and
the renewed radicalization of German politics, jazz’s position within Weimar
culture became ever more precarious. An increasingly loud chorus of voices
across the political spectrum proclaimed jazz’s relevance for German culture
to be at an end. Chapter 7, “Jazz’s Silence: Adorno, Opera, and the Decom-
position of Weimar Culture,” looks anew at Theodor W. Adorno’s controver-
sial rejection of jazz. Against the common reading of Adorno as ultimate
antipode to jazz, I interpret Adorno’s work of the early 1930s as belonging to
the very same complex of music, race, and American culture traced through-
out the present work. Specifically, I read Adorno’s neglected opera fragment
Der Schatz des Indianer Joe. Singspiel nach Mark Twain (The Treasure of
Indian Joe. Singspiel after Mark Twain) as an, albeit indirect, engagement
with the legacy of Americanism and jazz reception during the Weimar Re-
public. My discussion of Adorno further serves to demonstrate how Weimar
culture was continually defined and redefined through jazz, even at this, its
moment of dissolution.
Of course, the construction of Weimar Germany as jazz republic did not

proceed smoothly, let alone uniformly. Between jazz’s entrance after the war,
Alfred Lion’s seemingly chance encounter with Sam Wooding, and Theodor
Adorno’s unfinished opera much changed. Yet one thing held fast throughout
the period: jazz’s association with the modernism and political travails of the
new German democracy born in 1919 out of military defeat and revolution fol-
lowing World War I.
Chapter 1
Jazz Occupies Germany: Weimar Jazz

Culture between the Rhine and Berlin
The German schoolmaster cannot dance it. The Prussian reserve officer
cannot dance it. If only all ministers and councilors and professors and pol-
iticians were obliged to dance jazz, even now and again publicly! In what a
joyous way would they be stripped of their entire honor (Würde)! How hu-
man, how nice, how comical would they have to become! No atmosphere
of stupidity, vanity, and grandeur (Würde) could form. If the Kaiser had
danced jazz—all that would never have happened! But no! He could never
have learned it. Being German Kaiser is easier than dancing jazz.
—Hans Siemsen (1921)
In what has become one of the most cited early commentaries on jazz in Ger-
many,1 Hans Siemsen, cultural critic and early proponent of popular culture,
sums up much of the hope placed in jazz by German leftists in the period fol-
lowing war.2 Offering the absurd counterfactual history of Kaiser Wilhelm II
dancing jazz, he suggests jazz could have changed the course of German his-
tory. While the comedy of this image ensures its effectiveness, both then and
today, Siemsen’s words raise more questions than they offer answers. Though
jazz for Siemsen clearly has the effect of removing dignity from those who
practice it, what exactly would not have happened had the Kaiser danced jazz:
the war? Germany’s defeat? For another, why does he not ask us to imagine the
German Kaiser playing, rather than dancing jazz?
The goal of this opening chapter is to investigate the broader context of
Siemsen’s statement in order to understand more precisely how jazz entered
and eventually spread across Germany’s cultural and geographical landscape
in the first years of the Weimar Republic, roughly the period between 1919 and
1923. For while Siemsen’s report takes jazz’s presence for granted, the road
leading from the end of the First World War in November 1918 to this text from
early 1921 was not only circuitous but filled with developmental cul-de-sacs.
21
Indeed, any attempt at reconstructing jazz’s presence in this early period is

faced with a number of difficult, hitherto only vaguely answered questions.
How did Germans first encounter jazz? Where and under what circumstances?
How did jazz in Germany develop in contrast to the United States, England,
France, or elsewhere? And was there something unique to its use and spread in
Germany? Such questions are all the more compelling due to the seemingly
eccentric place Germany holds within broader jazz history itself, what Damon
J. Phillips has called the “puzzle of German jazz.”3
This chapter will attempt to answer some of these questions by broadly
tracing the earliest exposure of Germans to jazz and related musical styles and
dances through a comparative framework. On the one hand, I will pay attention
to the development of jazz and jazz criticism within the United States and
Western Europe, in particular France and England, in order to evaluate the is-
sue of German jazz’s uniqueness. In addressing this early history of jazz in
Germany, I argue that it is essential to distinguish, at least for the years 1919
through 1921, between the situation in Berlin and that within the zones of oc-
cupation and occupied cities along the Rhine like Bonn, Coblenz, Cologne,
and Wiesbaden. Though the word “jazz” enters roughly simultaneously in Ber-
lin and in the zones of occupation, Weimar jazz culture proceeds, initially at
least, along slightly different paths within these two spaces, with the greater
contact with foreign citizens, soldiers, and musicians more quickly producing
encounters with jazz music and jazz bands than in Berlin. More substantively,
I want to suggest that just as jazz spread across America, Europe, and indeed
the globe at different rates and along different paths, there is not one singular
genealogy of jazz in the Weimar Republic, but many.
Taking Jazz Seriously in Postwar Germany
As mentioned in the introduction, jazz in Germany, and even more so German

critical writing and musical compositions related to jazz, have for at least the
past twenty-plus years taken on a reputation of being characterized by misun-
derstanding and ignorance, due both to Germany’s separation from develop-
ments in American popular music during the war and then, later, to the political
and economic instability of the early Weimar Republic. At the same time, there
is general consensus that by 1921, there existed a demand amongst younger,
metropolitan Germans for “jazz,” also known by variants such as “Yazz,” “Ds-
chatz,” “Schesbend” (jazz band), and others. What remains in question is
whether such a thing has anything to do with what one today would call jazz.
Jazz Occupies Germany 23
In a retrospective account of his introduction to the music, entitled “Meine

Jagd nach der ‘Tschetzpend’” (“My Hunt for the ‘Tschetzpend’” [i.e., jazz
band]), musician Henry Ernst offers a comic glimpse into the apparent igno-
rance of early Weimar-era musicians and audiences regarding jazz.4 Ernst’s
1926 article is not only a unique firsthand narrative of German musicians’ ex-
posure to jazz, it, like Siemsen’s image of the dancing Kaiser, has also become
a centerpiece of various arguments for German jazz’s uniqueness and abbera-
tion.5 Though Ernst’s text offers us much in terms of better understanding early
jazz culture in Germany, it begs many questions as well. First amongst them is
who exactly “Henry Ernst” was and what his relationship to jazz was. This
question is especially pressing when one considers that he was described as an
opponent of modern trends in music in his obituary.6
Born Ernst Ratkowsky in Austria, “Henry Ernst” studied piano and, under
Antonín Dvořak, cello in the period before the First World War. In 1903, he
became a Kapellmeister and worked in Munich, Hamburg, Bremen, and Dort-
mund as well as touring neighboring countries like Holland, Sweden, and Den-
mark. After serving in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War,
he took up residence in Dortmund after the war but also toured within Ger-
many’s neighboring countries.7 It was one such foreign booking that set off the
famous “hunt” for the jazz band. Ernst and his Original Wiener Meistersalo-
norchester were hired to perform in a hotel in St. Moritz in Switzerland in
1920, which became the setting for his 1926 article. Ernst had brought along
with him the latest German foxtrots, mostly now-forgotten pieces like Ernst
Tompa’s foxtrot “Mariposa” and an unnamed piece by another popular com-
poser Wilm Wilm (Wilhelm Wieninger).8 All seemed to be going as planned,
he related, until one evening, an English audience member requested that Ernst
play a foxtrot, in other words, the type of music Ernst assumed he had been
playing all along. When Ernst replied that he was indeed playing foxtrots and
questioned whether the gentlemen had been listening closely, the guest “re-
sponded for his part that he had paid close attention to our playing. Though he
could not say what we had played, he could say with certainty that there was
not a single foxtrot amongst them.”9 Determined to rid his repertoire of such
pseudo-foxtrots, Ernst reestablished his subscription to a London music pub-
lisher in order to acquire dance music from England and America. This appar-
ently improved his standing with the English and other foreign guests, as Ernst
reports no further uncomfortable requests. However, the hotel’s director then
made his own uncomfortable request. He said that he would like to hire Ernst
for the next season, but first the director needed to know if he could play what
Ernst initially hears as Tschetzpend (“jazz band”), later explaining that last
season an English group at the hotel across the street had quite the success with
this music. Despite his utter ignorance and inability to parse the word, Ernst
claims to know how to play this music, whatever Tschetzpend may be, so that
he can secure the contract.
The ensuing hunt for the “jazz band” begins, understandably enough,
with him excluding musicians in the area as potential sources of information
for fear that his ignorance will be exposed and he will lose the potential con-
tract. While from Ernst’s perspective this may indeed be a necessary strategy,
it is the first of two moves that will isolate him from any international artists in
his midst. Avoiding the local musicians, Ernst writes back to Germany and Der
Artist. Published in Düsseldorf from 1882 onward, this was the most important
trade periodical for practicing musicians and popular entertainers in Germany.
From there he learns “that the general view is that jazz band is an American
Negro music,” a claim that, while interesting, does not help him very much.10
He also writes to the Kapellmeister-Verband Deutschland and receives word
from his colleagues that jazz is not music, but a “new Negro dance, so a sort of
new edition of the cake walk.”11 The organization does, however, provide him
with the address of a foreign band in Wiesbaden said to play jazz music, one
that had apparently been brought there by the English officers stationed there.
Though Ernst follows up on this lead and writes a letter (in English) to the
bandleader, he will never receive a response. Within Ernst’s “hunt,” this is but
one dead end of many, and he hardly pauses before turning elsewhere. Yet, the
reference to a foreign jazz band in the city of Wiesbaden is more significant
than it may at first glance appear.
Following the First World War, German territories west of the Rhine were
occupied and divided into four zones of occupation by the American, Belgian,
British, and French. I will speak to the debate sparked by the French use of
African colonial soldiers and its relation to German jazz reception a bit later.
For now, however, I want to think about the occupied territories as a whole in
terms of their function as an incubator for German encounters with jazz bands
and Weimar jazz culture more generally. First, as in Berlin, there existed within
occupied cities like Wiesbaden, Cologne, Coblenz, and Bonn a demand for
new dances such as the foxtrot and “jazz,” but with the additional element of
large numbers of foreign soldiers.12 Numbering just over 100,000 in early
1919, American soldiers brought with them a variety of entertainment typical
in US society. In June of that year, journalist Harry A. Franck noted that the
Americans “commandeered the poor man’s drinking-places and transferred
them into enlisted men’s barracks. We shooed the rich man out of his sumptu-
ous club and turned it over to our officers. We allotted the pompous Festhalle
and many other important buildings to the Y.M.C.A., and ‘jazz’ and ragtime
and burnt-cork jokes took the place of Lieder and Männerchor.”13 Yet after a
severe reduction in forces, by September, the American influence had been
limited to the city Coblenz and the immediate area surrounding it.14 Even still,
there are isolated accounts in the German press and in later memoirs of musi-
cians having both heard and learned jazz from American troops.15 If not the
American zone directly, then the neighboring cities of British-occupied Bonn
and Cologne and the French-occupied Wiesbaden would prove to have a more
lasting influence on the development and spread of jazz within Germany.
This idea is partially substantiated by the fact that the first extended dis-
cussion of jazz music in German is published in the city of Cologne in June
1919. The author of this first German-language essay on jazz music was
George Barthelme, long-time Washington correspondent for the Kölnische Zei-
tung. Barthelme, to be sure, had a unique perspective insofar as he had experi-
enced firsthand the music’s entry into New York during the First World War.
Indeed, he is one of the only German commentators to mention the early Afri-
can American jazz great James Reese Europe, whom Barthelme refers to as
New York’s great “jazz master” (Jazzmeister).16 Despite this, his politicized,
anti-modernist reading of the music shares striking similarities with later Ber-
lin writers. As with Siemsen and his use of the jazz-dancing Kaiser in possible
reference to the war, Barthelme uses James Reese Europe’s transformation
from army lieutenant into American jazz king to argue for jazz as a cultural
continuation of the war. Throughout this article, which was reprinted in the
American press as well, Barthelme’s take on jazz oscillates between ironizing
the claims made on the music’s behalf and, given the British occupation of the
city of Bonn, taking them more seriously.17 In part satirizing the language of
early American jazz modernists, Barthelme invests the music with grandiose
aesthetic claims, transforming jazz from music into worldview, jazz into jazz-
ism. “Now listen!” he writes:
Jazz is a worldview and therefore to be taken seriously. Jazz is the expres-

sion of a cultural epoch, the victorious battle of the elementary forces of
the soul over the redemptive form. [ . . . ] Jazz is thus . . . a musical revela-
tion, a religion, a worldview, like Expressionism and Impressionism. But
these two are only partial. Jazzism by contrast is total, is the higher unity,
the Hegelian synthesis. But its synthesis lies ultimately in the negation of
any synthesis. It doesn’t bring together, it disperses, isn’t solution but dis-
solution. It is analysis driven to the extreme. In Jazzism form cedes to
chaos, law to anarchy, the rule to incidence or coincidence. Jazzism is
amorphous music. It is the negation of all musical syntax and stylistics,

likely also of musical notation, which, however, can’t be heard. It is the
transvaluation of all values of tone and tempo. It is anti-, anti-, anti-: Anti-
Wagner, Anti-Strauss, Anti-Reger, even Anti-Debussy. As such musical
Bolshevism. Or a big joke to find out what you all can offer an audience
of the 20th century while still getting paid.18
Despite the article’s hyperbolic tone, it is clear that for Barthelme, jazz was to
be taken seriously, at the very least as a musical and cultural sign of Germany’s
precarious present. Linking the war, jazz, and the question of Germany’s fu-
ture, he notes in conclusion: “In the right jazz mood, anyone will pledge any-
thing. Even the introduction of a soviet system or the creation of the Rhine
republic! Dschatz [jazz]! Dschatz!”19
If Barthelme’s experience of American jazz was certainly unique, the
presence of jazz bands along the Rhine was not. For one, beginning in Decem-
ber 1919, a French jazz band, Marcel’s Jazz Band, performed in Wiesbaden,
with many more to follow.20 Indeed, many of the first jazz formations adver-
tised in Der Artist, the same publication in which Ernst’s article later appeared,
can be geographically located within Germany’s occupation zones on its west-
ern border. The very first jazz band, Jackson’s Jazz Band,21 that advertised in
Der Artist (and later examples William’s Jazz-Band,22 The Harlington-“Jazz-
Band”23 Original-Jazz Band,24 and Jimmy’s Jazz-Band25) originated in Wies-
baden, while those like the Jazz Band Duet26 and Harry Johnson’s Orig.
Amerik. Jazz-Band27 originated in Bonn. The Original Jazz-Band from Wies-
baden is one early example of the Black diasporic presence in the German jazz
scene. The advertisement was placed by Joseph (Joe) Sewonu, a multilingual
artist and Togolese migrant active in the zones of occupation and Wiesbaden in
particular.28 It was also in Wiesbaden that an advertisement for a very large
group of African American musicians could be found in late 1921. This group,
a “Negro Orchestra” from New York featuring 35 performers, potentially rep-
resents the largest single group of African American musicians in Germany
until 1925.29 Though very little is known about this group and no reviews of the
performance have surfaced, it was potentially a spin-off of Will Marion Cook’s
Southern Syncopated Orchestra (SSO), which left New York in 1919 for Eng-
land and is today considered one of the most important examples of the African
American musical presence in Europe during the early 1920s.30 Cook’s group
featured an almost ever-changing personnel that amounted to more than one
hundred participants and whose repertoire encompassed a variety of African
American music, including, but by no means limited to, jazz. Throughout its
history, various iterations of Cook’s group played in London, Paris, Vienna,

and elsewhere, famously inspiring one of the most significant early European
commentaries on jazz, the Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet’s tribute to Sid-
ney Bechet in October 1919.31 Though it is impossible to know with certainty,
the group that was advertised in Wiesbaden in October 1921 was potentially
similar to the one headed by African American composer Harry M. Wellmon32
that had performed in Paris in the summer of 1921 and would perform in Vi-
enna from May through October 1922.33
So while Henry Ernst was not able to connect with any jazz bands or jazz
musicians, Black or white, they were present in Germany and from at least
December 1919 onward in Wiesbaden. Indeed, in counterpoint to Ernst, whose
relevance to German jazz history is based solely upon this article, the popular
German bandleader Bernhard Etté, who recorded prolifically during the 1920s,
reported that his jazz career began after he was inspired by listening to a visit-
ing English jazz band in Wiesbaden.34 As the case of Etté and others indicate,
rather than developing in isolation from France, the UK, and America, jazz
bands and German jazz culture along the Rhine, both foreign and domestic,
emerged precisely at the closest points of contact with American, British, and
French soldiers. As should be clear, however, it is important to avoid overgen-
eralizing the situation of early German knowledge and experience of jazz
based upon any individual account. Instead, the situation of jazz in Germany in
1919/1920 was at once isolated from and connected to developments else-
where, with personal connections and one’s individual geography being the
most salient factors.
Moreover, not only does Ernst’s missed lead in Wiesbaden exclude this
avenue of jazz’s dispersion in Germany, it impacts the direction his “hunt” next
takes him, namely towards Berlin. As he explains: “Berlin has everything, Ber-
lin knows everything, so it will be able to clear up the mysteries of the Tschetz-
pend for me.”35 From an unnamed source in Berlin, Ernst received word that
jazz is a new dance, a three step, and that they had been dancing it for months.
His Berlin colleagues send him the “Dolores Jazz” by Byjacco, a pseudonym
for the popular composer Fritz Jacoby.36 Like other early German popular
songs featuring the word “jazz,” the music was labeled a “three step” and was
named after a dance pair, in this case Bella Chitta and Arthur Dolores.37 Still,
the reference is telling insofar as it can be connected to perhaps the earliest us-
age of the word “jazz” in the Berlin press (figure 1). Defined as “the newest
fashionable dance,” their jazz dancing was a major drawing point for the duo’s
April 1919 appearance at the Simplicissimus, a cabaret and dance club located
on Potsdamerplatz.38
Figure 1: Advertisement for jazz, “the newest fashionable dance” (1919)
by Chitta and Arthur Dolores.
This definition of jazz as a new dance, rather than music, was utterly common
in 1919, and the jazz dance can be found across Europe in the late 1910s and
early 1920s.39 As Jed Rasula writes in his treatment of jazz’s place within the
European and American avant-garde: “In both Europe and America jazz is of-
ten taken to mean dancing, not a kind of music. The dance audience being
considerably larger than the listening audience, recordings are meant for danc-
ing—a point made conspicuous on their labels, in which jazz releases bear a
generic indicator: ‘Fox trot.’”40 Still, while jazz dance may have been common
elsewhere, Berlin’s adoption of the dance had some unique consequences ow-
ing to the fact that, unlike in cities like Wiesbaden, let alone Paris or London,
there were no corresponding jazz bands. Most significantly, the German re-
cording industry’s concentration in this city meant that there is a disjuncture in
the discographical record between jazz recorded in Germany, i.e., in Berlin,
and the jazz bands present in the occupation zones. What this means concretely
is that the first German recordings to feature the word “jazz” unsurprisingly
refer to the dance, and not the music.41 While Germany is hardly alone in pro-
ducing recordings that sought to capitalize on the dance craze by featuring the
word “jazz” in their title, the geographical divide between the Berlin recording
industry and the jazz musicians in the occupation zones impeded the recording
of such groups in Germany until early 1921.
Back in St. Moritz and now outfitted with “Dolores Jazz,” Ernst began
playing this latest jazz dance music from Berlin. Yet he is again confronted
with “puzzled looks” from the audience, confirming for him that he has failed
to find the Tschetzpend.42 His confusion only increases as yet another for-
eigner, this time a Parisian woman, requests a shimmy, also a new dance from
America. Confronted with another instance of his failure and frustrated by the
answers he has thus far received from Germany and especially Berlin, the next
morning Ernst goes to a local Swiss bookstore, where he finds a stack of sheet
music containing dance music from France and England. Leafing through
them, he discovers a foxtrot with a photograph of a famous jazz band from
London. He notes: “Then I finally saw what a jazz band is. Seven little men
(Männeckens) dressed in sporty clothing: piano, violin, two banjos, saxophone,
trumpet, and percussion instruments.”43 Having finally found out what Tschetz-
pend was, Ernst returned to Germany confident in his knowledge. Indeed, in
1921, he even advertised for his group in Der Artist as possessing “recognized
success as a jazz band.”44 In a final twist, however, Ernst reports that once back
in Germany, the audience was less than welcoming of his “real” jazz. He says
they still preferred the jazz dance, and in the end, he returned to playing just as
he had before his discovery of the Tschetzpend.
While Ernst’s account of jazz’s entry into Germany is generally substanti-

ated by evidence from Der Artist, it is clearly also a well-crafted tale, hitting all
the right notes of a humorous anecdote. So for as much as it tells us about the
encounter with jazz in the early years of the Weimar Republic, it also speaks to
the changing conception of jazz in the mid-twenties. To a certain degree, Ernst
is laughing at himself, his colleagues, and the Berlin audience in this story,
indulging in a bit of self-effacing humor at a moment when he could claim to
understand jazz music fully. Recalling the photograph of the jazz band, he
notes: “All that which is today considered by every musician to be self-evident
regarding jazz, but what was at the time still unclear and mysterious, became
evident to me.”45 So if Ernst’s individual story contains much about how musi-
cians dealt with the introduction of jazz to Europe and Germany and Switzer-
land, its status as indicative of the early German experience of jazz writ large
needs a degree of contextualization.
Indeed, Ernst’s report serves as a reminder of the fact that overreliance on
the dissemination of jazz via recordings and the Berlin press to the exclusion
of other cities and areas can have a distorting effect on what was an extremely
complex process. While Berlin will no doubt remain the focal point for the
study of Weimar jazz culture, one cannot lose sight of the fact that jazz in Ber-
lin is also very much a local story. It is, however, one with great implications
for the rest of Weimar Germany and one that remains fundamental to under-
standing how jazz culture in the Weimar Republic develops.
Berlin Dances to Dada’s Jazz
The jazz dance’s entry into Berlin at the latest by April 1919 was itself part of
the broader dance mania that followed the war. An individual example of the
European and American dance craze of the time, Berlin’s embrace of social
dancing, in particular the foxtrot and jazz, was also partially unique.46 During
the war, such dancing had been controlled by the German authorities and there
had been a ban on dancing in Berlin. Even before the war, German officers had
been prohibited from publically dancing in uniform or associating with people
who danced the tango, one-step, or two-step.47 Of course, the fact that jazz and
foxtrot were not just new, but American dances, lent them even more reso-
nance. When the dance prohibition was lifted on New Year’s Eve 1918, the
Berliner Tageblatt wrote the following morning: “Music plays in hundreds of
locales, dance after dance: waltz, foxtrot, one-step, two-step. Legs race across
the floor as if bewitched, skirts fly, hearts jump [ . . . ] and new year’s greetings
resound in the exact same streets where the steps of demonstrators had just
echoed.”48 If such frenzied dancing certainly had much to do with the pent up
desires of four years of corporeal and psychic deprivation, foxtrot and, later,
jazz dances were not only fashionable, they were foreign and racially suspect.
In his impressionistic account of the same New Year’s eve dancing, writer Kar-
lernst Knaatz wrote in description of two foxtrot dancers that “the couple
raised their feet in a negroid manner,” continuing: “How it would lose its at-
tractiveness, this joke treated so very seriously, if it were simply called ‘Fuch-
strab’ [i.e., foxtrot].”49 Like the critic in the Berliner Tageblatt, Knaatz also
linked such dancing to the revolution, noting: “The rage with which our con-
temporaries disjoint themselves at the first partial-peace balls [Halbfriedens-
bälle] ultimately originates from the same source from which the tidal wave of
the revolution sprang. It is but the other end of the same current.”50
In broadly similar fashion to the situation in Britain and France, jazz en-
ters the Berlin public sphere as a dance in 1919, though with the crucial differ-
ence that there are no jazz bands in Berlin until 1921 at the latest, whereas in
Britain, France (and Wiesbaden), jazz bands emerged, in part, from direct con-
tact with American forces.51 In addition, such dancing, be it foxtrot, jazz, or
any of the other fads of the period, was initially linked to the upper echelon of
Berlin society, a fashionable pastime for the city’s middle-class and wealthy
youth to satisfy their need for the new. The cycle of dance fashions, foxtrot,
jazz, maxixe brésilienne, fish walk, and others, meant that “jazz” as a word
rarely surfaced in isolation. Instead, its fashionable origins as a social dance
opened it to conservative, moralistic, as well as leftist, political attacks.
Already in January 1919, one could observe around Berlin the now well-
known image of a woman dancing with Death,52 on which the caption read:
“Berlin, stop! Come to your senses. Your dance partner is Death.”53 The poster
combines lines from author Paul Zech’s “Berlin, halt ein” (“Berlin, stop”) with
a wartime illustration, “German Tango,” by the Belgian artist Louis Raemaek-
ers.54 Though the original image had referenced the tango, by 1919 the foxtrot
and jazz now became implied targets of its message. Indeed, leftist cabaret
artists like Walter Mehring connected this specific image with foxtrot and jazz
dancing in works from the period. Mehring’s “Dada-Prologue 1919,” for ex-
ample, contains the lines: “Berlin, your dance partner is Death—/ Foxtrot and
jazz—/ The republic is amusing itself royally / Forget me not on the first of
May.”55 Further examples, most notably the “foxtrot epidemic” featured in
Ernst Lubitsch’s Die Austernprinzessin (The Oyster Princess), demonstrate the
cultural resonance of social dancing and American dancing in particular.
Filmed in Berlin in May 1919, i.e., during the initial wave of the jazz dance
craze, Lubitsch’s depiction of the foxtrot features an absurdist caricature of

popular dance and the bands that accompany them. A large orchestra plays to
the tune of a conductor wildly flailing about and accentuating his posterior.
Equally significant here are the strange percussive instruments depicted, e.g., a
saw cuts through wood, a pistol is fired, and a man is slapped in intervals indi-
cated by musical notation, etc. The jazz dance as part of the post-war dance fad
and the eccentric conductors and percussionists who provide the musical ac-
companiment will largely hold sway in Berlin for the first two years of the
Weimar Republic. Still, it will produce at least one spectacular example of
early exchange between artists in Germany and American jazz, namely the
British musician and eccentric arranger Frank Groundsell’s recording of the
Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s classic “Tiger Rag” in 1919 in Berlin.56
Yet if Berlin’s embrace of the “Dolores Jazz” and eccentric jazz dancing
point generally towards the city’s isolation in terms of jazz music, the impor-
tant modernist movement of Dada helped bridge the pre-war history of Afri-
can American music and dancing with the newfound jazz dance fad. The
place of popular culture and Blackness within Dada Berlin, whose activities
peak in the period 1918–20, is a reminder of the longer history of modernist
engagement with these essential elements of Weimar jazz reception. More
than this, Dada’s interest in African American music and Blackness is itself
embedded within the modernist network of Europe that had similarly em-
braced precursors of jazz like the cakewalk and ragtime.57 In considering
Dada Berlin’s use of jazz, it is therefore important to understand how, during
this initial period, their works draw as much on the newness of jazz and fox-
trot dancing as on their experience of American popular music and culture
from during and before the war.
The significance of African American popular music to Dadaist George
Grosz’s work in the years 1917 through 1920 is hard to overestimate. More
than any other artist, Grosz’s works from this period, poetic, performance, and
visual, reveal a long-standing engagement with American popular culture and
a particular interest in music characterized as African American. Grosz col-
lected ragtime records, and in his letters to fellow artist Otto Schmalhausen, he
references ragtime song titles and describes debauched nights spent drinking,
dancing, and listening to them.58 During the dance mania of winter 1919, fur-
thermore, he advertised for “Foxtrot and Ragtime Records” in the short-lived
Dadaist periodical Jedermann sein eigner Fussball (Everyone his Own Foot-
ball).59 In addition, at Dada events, he performed American step dances and
jigs under the rubric “sincopations”60 and likely performed in blackface during
at least one such event.61
Significantly, all of the musical works referenced by Grosz in this period

date from the period between 1890 and 1914. While obviously his dependence
on these works shows the more or less culturally isolated position of Grosz
during the war and afterward, the history of these works’ production and their
reception in Germany is also noteworthy. It was during this period that Ameri-
can popular music and culture entered the German and European market on a
wide scale. This occurred both in the form of African American performers like
Elmer Spyglass, Louis Douglas, and Arabella Fields, as well as in the form of
blackface minstrel iconography and American racial stereotypes.62 Further
complicating the field was the introduction of ragtime. While piano ragtime
music from African American composers like Scott Joplin enjoyed some popu-
larity in Germany, a greater influence was exercised on the German listening
public (Grosz included) by related, though distinct, musical forms like the rag-
time song and so-called “coon songs.” As Fred Ritzel notes, during Wilhelmine
Germany, popular music about, influenced, or performed by African Ameri-
cans became a staple of the German music publishing industry’s repertoire.63 It
is thus no accident that Grosz returns, again and again, to songs of this era
during the war or that he portrays the same Black performers in three separate
drawings between 1915 and 1920.64 Both through Dada Berlin’s resurrection
of the prewar encounter with Blackness and American popular music and cul-
ture, as well as the foxtrot and jazz dance mania of 1919, Berlin, its artists and
dancing public, were thus well prepared for the initial wave of jazz bands that
arrive in early 1921.
Berlin Occupied
If jazz bands nonetheless remained largely outside of Berlin in 1919 and 1920,
the debate over the occupation did not. In April 1920, the scandal over the use
of French African colonial troops along the Rhine, catalyzed by an altercation
in Frankfurt, reached its boiling point.65 France was not only the largest occu-
pying force in the region, it also made the greatest use of colonial, non-white
troops. Out of 85,000 troops, in the summers of 1920 and 1921, there were
between 30,000 and 40,000 African troops, primarily from Morocco, though
troops from West Africa (Senegal) and Madagascar were also present at vari-
ous times and in significant numbers.66 As Christian Koller has shown, the
propaganda campaign against the so-called “Schwarze Schmach am Rhein”
(“Black Shame” or “Black Horror67 on the Rhine”) was carried out by official
government channels as well as unofficial groups like the Rheinische Frauen-
liga (Rhenish League of Women).68 Apart from claims of “inverse colonialism,”

the stationing of black troops within German borders brought with it a threat of
large-scale encounter between Africans and Germans. In particular, the propa-
gandistic claim that Black troops were raping German women became a major
rallying cry for opposition to the occupation. While much has been written on
the campaign,69 even in relation to its use within German jazz discourse,70 it is
important to think through how discussion of the Black presence in the occupa-
tion zone functioned in the context of Berlin’s modernist interest in Blackness
and American popular culture.
Significantly, it is also in 1920 that Black performers, initially unrelated
to jazz bands, once again appear in significant numbers in the Berlin enter-
tainment district. Apart from isolated Black performers in cabarets who used
pseudonyms like the dancer Tom Black in May 1920,71 a large group of Black
performers and stars were featured in the October 1920 production Harems-
nächte (Harem Nights) at director James Klein’s Apollo-Theater.72 The cast
included twenty Cameroonian performers and thirty Bayadere dancers. Most
significantly, two of the lead roles were occupied by Black performers: Myr-
iam Barka, a “Sudanese actress,” and Louis Brody, the “Negro film star.”73
Barka, about whom little is known, apparently spoke fluent German and had
been active as a performer in Berlin as early as September 1919,74 while
Brody, born (Ludwig) M’bebe Mpessa in Duala, Cameroon, was amongst the
first Black German artists to be recognized during the period for his work in
films such as Joe May’s Die Herrin der Welt (The Mistress of the World)
(1919–20), Robert Wiene’s Genuine (1920), and Fritz Lang’s Der müde Tod
(Destiny) (1921).75
Harem Nights ran during October and November 1920 and was by all ac-
counts a success, if clearly a provocative one. Though details regarding the plot
are few, it was described in an official police report as involving “a [ . . . ] sultan
kidnap[ping] the favorite wife of a Negro chieftain. As revenge, the Negro’s
tribe attacks the sultan’s harem and kidnaps its inmates.”76 According to histo-
rian Jared Poley, in spite of the regular press reports on the occupation, Harem
Nights was generally well-received by the Berlin audience, which is said to
have been composed primarily of members of the lower middle-class, in addi-
tion to foreign visitors.77 British officer J. H. Morgan, then part of the Inter-
Allied Military Commission of Control in Germany, later noted: “By a curious
irony, at the very time that all Berlin was flocking to ‘Harem Nights’ the whole
German Press was launching the vast campaign of propaganda . . . against the
‘infamy’ of ‘black troops on the Rhine.’”78 Though unlike later performances
featuring Black men on stage with naked women, Harem Nights did not result
in police intervention;79 it did provoke critique from the Rhenish League of

Women, one of the main groups associated with the “Black Horror” cam-
paign.80 Indeed, almost two years later, nationalist DNVP representative Rein-
hard Mumm criticized the piece for featuring “partially-clothed women kow-
towing before their black master every evening for weeks on end,” continuing:
“How can we in the Reichstag act effectively against the Black Horror, when
such a shameful act is not forcefully prohibited in the capital?”81 The timing of
Mumm’s speech was anything but coincidental; it was delivered during the
same month as the Lola-Bach Ballet was performing its own, apparently unre-
lated Haremsnächte, featuring the Liberian artist Peter Johnson.82
More typical than Klein’s Harem Nights in terms of the use of Blackness
and American popular music was the newly resurrected Schall und Rauch
(Sound and Smoke). Originally created by Max Reinhardt in 1901, this famous
cabaret reopened in 1919 and featured performers like Paul Graetz and Gussy
Holl, in addition to key modernist writers like Walter Mehring and Klabund
(Alfred Henschke), as well as, of course, composers such as Friedrich Hol-
laender and Mischa Spoliansky.83 Sound and Smoke took part in both the fox-
trot and jazz dance craze during this period and was closely aligned with Dada
artists, including George Grosz.84 In terms of jazz, Sound and Smoke is impor-
tant not only of early German jazz criticism but also as a site of jazz perfor-
mance. In spring 1921, for example, at least two separate jazz bands are fea-
tured there.85 The cabaret also included the participation of two of the authors
discussed below in relation to early writings on jazz music, Kurt Tucholsky and
Jaap Kool.86 Already during the 1920 season, one finds Klabund’s “Rag 1920,”
yet another variation of the motif from “Berlin, Your Dance Partner is Death,”87
while the May 1920 “Dada-Issue” presents three images of the foxtrot-inspired
“Dada-Trot” by “Music Dada” Gerhard Preiss.88
The impact of the new configuration of race, music, and politics following
the “Black Horror” debate can be felt here as well. Two important, early com-
positions by Friedrich Hollaender reflect the changing circumstances of Black-
ness and American popular music. The first is his “Fox macabre (Totentanz)”
(Dance of Death). Though like Klabund’s “Rag 1920” and Mehring’s “Dada-
Prologue 1919,” the primary frame of reference remains the foxtrot and jazz
dance with death, Hollaender’s lyrics may also be read as offering commentary
on the occupation debate. “Berlin, you’re dancing with Death! Berlin, you’re
reveling in filth! Stop, relent, and think about it a moment! You can’t dance
away your disgrace (Schmach), for you’re dancing and jazzing and foxing on
the powder keg.”89 In including the word Schmach in this piece published in
December 1920, Hollaender adds a further layer to the idea of decadent jazz
dancing as escapism not only from politics but from the continuation of the
occupation of Germany.90 Issued alongside the “fox macabre” was Hol-
laender’s “Jonny (fox erotic).”91 Though the word “jazz” is absent from Hol-
laender’s 1920 song, its status as a foxtrot places it clearly within the context
of jazz’s development in Berlin as dance and then in 1921 as jazz band music.92
Originally performed by Blandine Ebinger at the Café Größenwahn, Hol-
laender’s Jonny, as cabaret scholar Alan Lareau has discussed, was issued in
two versions, one in which Jonny is a white American and one in which he is a
Black African.93 In both, however, Jonny is a foreign violinist at a local bar,
where he attracts the attention of a German girl and impregnates her, only to
leave shortly thereafter. Read in tandem, the “fox erotic” and “fox macabre,”
the American with the African Jonny, suggest an important moment of conflu-
ence between jazz and foxtrot dancing, the debate over race, and the presence
of Black artists inside and outside the capital city Berlin.
At the same time, as Lareau has also shown, Hollaender is neither the
first, nor the last Central European composer to deploy the figure of Jonny or
to produce a song revolving around a Black man and white woman.94 One
further example of how cultural production involving American popular music
changed through the debate surrounding the “Black Horror” is Walter Meh-
ring’s “If the man in the moon were a coon.”95 Mehring, part of the Dada circle
around the Sound and Smoke, authored a variety of politically inspired cabaret
songs at the beginning of the 1920s.96 Here, one sees not only the continuation
of pre-war traditions in this work’s citation of the 1905 Fred Fischer song of
the same name but a melding of pre-jazz vocabulary and the “Black Horror”
debate. This element is most clearly present in the song’s refrain, which asks
listeners to imagine what would happen if this Black man in the moon: “Gave
all white ladies / Black babies / Black boys.”97 Postulating the reality of the
very worst fears of the scandalized members of the German public, Mehring
ironizes, rather than soothes, their anxieties. He achieves this effect, however,
not by directly commenting on the “Black Horror” campaign but by borrowing
from foreign, here American traditions, with the distance between Germany
and America functioning as a buffer for his critique.
Jazz music’s relationship to Blackness will be considered in detail below,
but it is important to note how Berlin artists and the Berlin public in 1920 were
already engaging with these crucial elements of the Weimar jazz discourse
prior to the large-scale introduction of jazz bands in the winter of 1921. Dances
like the foxtrot and jazz, modernist movements like Dada, and theatrical spaces
like Sound and Smoke, as well as, of course, the presence of Black performers
on stage and screen meant that the city was never far removed from the jazz
band’s music that soon enough reached Berlin as well.
Enter the Jazz Band
Though the first documented occurrences of the word “jazz” in the Berlin press
occur in 1919 and then only in reference to this three-step dance,98 it was only
in the first half of 1921 that one finds a large number of musical groups calling
themselves “jazz bands” in the city.99 If scattered use of the word “jazz” had
been made in 1919/1920, early 1921 brought wide-scale use of a new term, the
“jazz band,” to the press. This term could refer either to a new form of music,
closely associated with the latest dance, the shimmy, or simply the trap drum.
In this, German usage of the term closely matches that of the French, English,
and indeed Australian.100 What distinguishes this moment from the earlier one
is that jazz’s presence in Berlin did not dissipate as it had in 1919—it intensi-
fied. Not coincidentally, this was also the moment at which jazz bands and
musicians from the occupied zones came to the capital in significant numbers.
Beginning in January, but peaking in March and April of that year, jazz
and jazz bands seemed to be everywhere in Berlin.101 There was the Cosmo
Jazz Band,102 Jimmi Jazz Band,103 Kapelle (or Ballorchester) Boesing mit
Original Jazz Band,104 High Life Jazz-Band,105 Jazz-Band Max de Groot,106
and others. If some of these examples refer to the presence of a trap drum
alone, there are nonetheless at least two highly significant jazz bands and Ger-
man jazz pioneers playing in Berlin. The first of all these, appearing in January
1921 at the recently opened Scala-Casino, was the four-man formation of the
Original Piccadilly Four Jazz Band. While a photograph of this early jazz band
exists (figure 2), little certain is known about this group or its history.
It is, however, now clear that the group was not from Berlin, as had been
long assumed, but in all likelihood from London. It can also be stated that the
group did not come directly to Berlin, but rather reached Berlin via Wiesbaden,
where it had performed at the Apollo starting in October 1920.107 After Berlin,
the group likely played the north-German resort town Binz auf Rügen and,
after a return stint in Berlin in the fall of 1921, traveled to Switzerland, per-
forming in Geneva and Zurich in 1922, and, potentially, Lausanne in 1923.108
After this date, however, it has not been possible to trace these “famous synco-
pated Entertainers of London” as they were advertised in Zurich. Of course,
had they not performed in Berlin, with its proximity to the German recording
Figure 2: The Original Piccadilly Four Jazz Band at the Berlin Scala in
early 1921. From F. W. Koebner, Jazz und Shimmy (Berlin: Eysler, 1921).
industry, they might have been entirely forgotten. Yet as it was, this group re-
leased more than twenty recordings from Berlin in the first half of 1921 on the
labels Parlophon, Beka, and Anker. These recordings remain early highlights
of early jazz recorded in Germany.109 The instrumentation features banjo,
drums, violin, and piano, which, with slight variations, was typical of the jazz
bands active in Germany (and elsewhere) in this period, such as the previously
mentioned Marcel’s Jazz Band.
In addition to the Original Piccadilly Four, another important jazz band,
the Original American Jazz Band was present at the Scala-Casino from Febru-
ary 1921 onward.110 This band was quite probably formed by German jazz pio-
neer Eric(h) Borchard(t). Born in 1886 in Berlin, little is known about Bor-
chard’s life before the First World War, though he likely spent some time in the
United States before 1914.111 While Borchard has long stood out as an early
German jazz pioneer and it was assumed he spent at least some time in the
United States, it now appears that between 1914 and 1918 he lived not in Ger-
many, but in America, specifically New York, where he was active as a vaude-
ville artist.112 The duration and timing of his stay in the United States are im-
portant because, like Barthelme’s wartime experiences that resulted in the first
German jazz essay, Borchard’s stay took place during the beginnings of the
New York jazz scene, for example, the arrival of the Original Dixieland Jazz
Band. While details of Borchard’s exact path from New York in late 1918 to
Berlin in early 1921 remain unknown, this information lends credence to Bor-
chard’s later claims to the press that he had played jazz in German cities around
the Rhine following the war.113 None of this work, like that of the Original
Piccadilly Four, was recorded until his move to Berlin, when in May of 1921
and under the name Eric Concerto’s Yankee Jazz Band, Borchard and his band
recorded major American hits from 1920, such as “Whispering,” “Japanese
Sandman,” “Everybody Shimmies Now,” “After You Get What You Want, You
Don’t Want It,” and “Swanee.”114 In other words, in the cases of the Original
Piccadilly Four Jazz Band and Erich Borchard’s jazz band, we have clear ex-
amples of Weimar jazz culture developing via direct and prolonged contact
with foreign musicians and environments, rather than a simple dressing up of
German music in the new foreign vocabulary of “jazz” as Ernst’s “hunt” may
make it appear.
The Original Piccadilly Four and Borchard’s band are white jazz forma-
tions, yet, from other sources, we know that members of the Black diaspora
were also involved in the move of the jazz band from the Rhine to Berlin. This
fact is substantiated by the presence of yet another early jazz pioneer in Berlin
in July 1921, Evandale Roberts. Potentially the first example of a jazz musician
of African descent to perform in Berlin, Roberts, who at times went by the
name as the “Original Jazz-King,” came to the Scala-Casino in the summer of
1921 via Wiesbaden.115 Another example is Phillips Original amerikanische
Neger Jazz Band, which performed in Cologne in September 1921,116 before
appearing in Berlin in November at the Scala-Casino, yet again repeating the
path from the Rhine to Berlin.117 A third example from this period, one dis-
cussed further in the next chapter, is Pete Zabriskie’s jazz band, which per-
formed in Berlin in 1922. As is clear, by 1921 at the latest, multiple artists of
African descent were active in the Berlin jazz, music, and entertainment indus-
try. Though like many of these early jazz bands, one can debate whether the
music they played was likely to have been jazz in the narrow sense of the jazz
tradition, it is important that they and their groups were marketed and indeed
marketed themselves via the terminology of jazz and the jazz band.
The Jazz Band Drums
In response to the numerous jazz bands, German writing on jazz increased

exponentially as different authors with varying degrees of interest and knowl-
edge of popular music produced newspaper and journal articles, illustrations,
and caricatures about the jazz band. Aside from further jazz-inspired works for
the cabaret by Walter Mehring and Hans Erich Winckler for example,118 the
presence of jazz bands in Berlin can be tied to an extremely early German-
language book: Jazz und Shimmy. Brevier der neuesten Tänze (Jazz and
Shimmy: Brevier of the Newest Dances).119 To a large extent, this unique work
is but a collection of early German-language texts and images related to the
jazz dance, rather than the music. Jazz and Shimmy was edited by Franz Wolf-
gang Koebner, author of a series of dance manuals (to which Jazz and Shimmy
clearly belongs) and fictional works, as well as cofounder and editor of the
important journals Die elegante Welt and Das Magazin. Beyond its noteworthy
title, Jazz and Shimmy contains selections by modernist writers like Hans
Siemsen and Kurt Tucholsky, drawings and texts by the artist and designer
Robert L. Leonard, and an essay on dance music by the Dutch ethnomusicolo-
gist Jaap Kool.120 At the same time, it is important to recall that Jazz und
Shimmy remains a work interested in jazz almost solely from the perspective of
modern social dancing. The fact that “jazz” shares the title with the shimmy,
the latest of the American dance trends to hit Germany, is an obvious indication
of this focus.121
In the following analysis of the Berlin and German reception of the
“jazz band” in early 1921, attention will be paid both to selections from
Koebner’s collection, as well as works that fall outside of it, yet are clearly
part of the Berlin discussion. While the following selection is by no means
exhaustive, it offers a cross-section of responses from Weimar mass media;
the music trade press; modernist journals; voices of liberal, socialist, and
conservative writers; and German-speaking modernist authors. As a whole,
these documents suggest the emergence, through competing claims, of a set
of ideas about the jazz band’s origins, practices, and place within contem-
porary society. For example, on March 11, 1921, the Berliner Tageblatt
publishes an initial report on the jazz band and shimmy as the latest “Berlin
hype,” only to be corrected and expanded upon two days later.122 Written by
the Berlin music publisher, Curt Max Roehr, the correction later appears in
Der Artist as well as in Koebner’s Jazz and Shimmy, yet Roehr’s name is
included only in the publication in Der Artist.123 Further, in at least one
early report, Americans present in Berlin are used to critique the inauthen-
ticity of the Berlin vision of jazz.124 As this brief excursion suggests, unless
early German jazz criticism is considered from such a multi-perspectival
approach, its interconnectedness, as well as the different audiences it
reached, can all too easily become lost in the focus on any one publication
such as Jazz and Shimmy.
Aside from the fact that the jazz band was new to these writers, a remark-
able trait of almost all of these documents is that names of specific jazz bands,
let alone individual musicians, are rarely if ever mentioned, making it all but
impossible to align individual accounts with specific groups like the Original
Piccadilly Four. Rather, individual names generally remain a distinction re-
served for the music’s composers. Even in exceptional cases, such as art critic
Herwarth Walden’s reference to recordings by the Original Piccadilly Four, the
author does not praise the group’s performers but instead remarks: “The com-
poser doesn’t even have a name, but he can certainly compose. An unknown
master.”125 In another variation on this theme, Hans Siemsen proclaims of one
jazz drummer: “The fat man—a musical genius!”126
Like Siemsen, who uses a descriptive adjective in line with the image of
the American “doughboy,”127 most writers functionalize individual members of
the jazz band, distinguishing between, without, however, naming the musicians
or their groups. It is only later, from around 1924 onward, that reference to the
names of individual jazz bands becomes standard, rather than exceptional
within German jazz reception. While authors vary in terms of their descriptions
of instrumentalists, the most space in these accounts is devoted to the percus-
sionist, or trap drummer, as “the most important person of the jazz band” (fig-
ure 3).128
Descriptions of the jazz band tend to begin by noting the presence of the
piano, violin, and banjo, as well as further instruments like the saxophone,
clarinet, bassoon, guitar, trumpet, and harmonica. When writers reach the trap
drum and the percussion instruments, however, they often produce a dizzying
list of exotic and everyday objects. “Four nice fellows sit and make the noise
of a regiment,” begins Robert L. Leonard, continuing:
A banjo rattles and causes your bones to shake, a violinist fiddles synco-
pes, a pianist races across the keys, a fourth man . . . sure, what does he
do? What is he? What is he playing?
A fourth man has constructed an instrument for himself, no, not an in-
strument, an orchestrion of instruments that strike, clap, hammer, torture.
He plays everything at once: the small xylophone box, the tambourine,
the cymbal, the drum . . . temteremtem, tem—tem—tem.129
Figure 3: A Jazz Drummer in Berlin in early 1921. From F. W. Koebner,
Jazz und Shimmy (Berlin: Eysler, 1921).
Other writers use similar imagery to describe the trap drum of the jazz band as
consisting of “an eight-headed instrument,”130 “a number of extremely interest-
ing objects,”131 “a number of nameless, extremely fantastical instruments, that
don’t exactly make music, but a form of musical noise (Geräusch),”132 or, fi-
nally, as a “mystical instrument.”133
Of course, not all commentators respond in this manner. Those more ac-
customed to describing musical instruments and popular dance orchestras like
aforementioned Jaap Kool, Poldi Schmidl, or Richard Effner are less ecstatic in
their descriptions. Effner, a Berlin manufacturer of music instruments, seeks to
correct readers of Der Artist about jazz and its most characteristic instruments:
the trap drum and the banjo. On the one hand, he notes that “jazz band” is often
incorrectly taken to be synonymous with the trap drum; on the other hand, he
insists that “‘jazz’ is, as we know, a dance.”134 Arguably more successful inter-
ventions are those by Poldi Schmidl, Berlin music critic for Der Artist, and Jaap
Kool, an ethnomusicologist. Though by no means supportive of the jazz band, in
his first discussion of jazz from February 1921, Schmidl points not at the central-
ity of any particular instrument, but at the unique timbre of the jazz band, its
rhythm, and, most notably, its use of syncopation.135 Kool, by contrast, focuses
on historical precedents of the jazz band and the technology of the trap drum
specifically. He claims that it was around 1900, with John Phillip Sousa and the
introduction of ragtime to Europe, that instrument makers began developing a
“mechanical apparatus (Maschinerie)” that would enable control of the drum
and cymbal through the feet so that the hands would be free to use other instru-
ments.136 Kool’s argument here lines up with that of American expatriate com-
poser George Antheil and his 1922 call for composers to take up the drum: “Let
our youngest composers buy a drum or two and limit themselves to one or two
lines of rhythm for a year. Let them work with a pencil and learn dynamic
draughtsmanship. Let them experiment with space and create new musical di-
mensions.”137 As becomes clear in these early treatments and descriptions of the
jazz band, it was the trap drum that carried much of the interpretive weight for
these writers. It is also, as I want to suggest in this chapter’s concluding section,
in such depictions of the jazz band’s drum that one most clearly finds the inter-
section of music, race, and American culture.
Blackness and the Machine, or Jazz Band Modernism
If Cornelius Partsch and others are certainly correct to point towards the strong
correlation between Expressionism and jazz, in addition to its equally strong
correlation with Dadaism,138 within early accounts, the jazz band is also related
to Futurism139 and Cubism,140 with reference to Picasso, Joyce, Klee, Schoen-
berg, and even Einstein’s theory of relativity.141 So while critics like Herwarth
Walden and Hermann Wedderkop may intellectually spar over whether the
shimmy and jazz band belong to Expressionism or an as yet unnamed post-
Expressionism,142 there was no overarching consensus regarding the jazz
band’s specific brand of modernism, other than that it was obviously, funda-
mentally modern. The three elements of the jazz bands’ modernism and mo-
dernity that attract the most attention are: the jazz band’s connection to ma-
chines and mechanization, the music’s ability to destroy individual free will,
and the music’s relation to Blackness.
The effect of the rhythm of the jazz band, of the trap drum and its arsenal
of percussion, was interpreted along a variety of axes, commonly invoking the
mechanization of war, capitalism, and industrial production. Alice Gerstel
writes, for example, that the jazz band has the “rat-a-tat (Geratter) of the can-
nons they have been firing at the ‘enemy’ for five long years.”143 Kurt Tuchol-
sky links jazz and shimmy to the dance around the golden calf and contends
further that “the jazz band is the continuation of business by other means.”144
He continues that its music “clacks to the beat like the typewriters, which the
audience left two hours ago,” while its rhythm “jerks and its counter-rhythm
works against it, firmly and intricately, as a softly tapping motor.”145 For dance
critic Heinz Pollack, meanwhile, the rhythm of jazz doesn’t sound like it is
coming from “four humans, but [from] an electrically-driven band.”146 The
jazz band can also serve as but a symptom for the broader mechanization of
humanity. “Humans have become mechanical,” writes Hermann Wedderkop,
“firmly ruled by a rigidly rhythmic, onward-rushing present that calls itself
jazz band.”147 Indeed, for some writers, it was the mechanization of labor that
stood behind much of jazz’s popularity. Of the men dancing to the jazz band,
Gerstel writes: “Nothing can dissuade them from the secret of which they are
certain: how dreadful is the wretchedness of this time, how there remains noth-
ing for them to do but dance and the market runs itself and [Karel] Čapek’s
robots make the sewing needles and roll their cigarettes into ready-mades.”148
The materialism and mechanization authors viewed in the jazz band, its
audience, and the age for which it stood, could seem overpowering. In a man-
ner similar to the reaction of critics to the jazz of African American bandleader
Sam Wooding discussed in chapter 2, writers report being overwhelmed at the
experience of the jazz band. Be it hypnosis,149 the madness of an insane asy-
lum,150 or the ecstasy of intoxication,151 the jazz band overtakes their rational,
mental faculties. Dancers, for example, are said to be “under the spell of these
rhythms, these colors and sounds.”152 Wedderkop would note that under the
influence of the jazz band: “Intellect no longer controls the leg, rather the leg
at best controls the intellect, were this not so completely suspended (ausge-
schlossen) that it no longer sees the consequences for itself.”153 Berlin theater
critic Oscar Bie wrote of his experience of another jazz band: “The drummer
drummed beyond all measure. It had been paid for. Everything had been paid
for. The jazz band, the champagne, the ornaments, and my intellectual faculties
(Geistigkeit).”154 One notices this sense of shock in visual representations as
well. Visual artist Otto Schmalhausen, previously encountered as correspon-
dent of George Grosz, provided an image to accompany a 1924 essay by Jaap
Kool in the journal Uhu. Schmalhausen’s “Jazz Band Music: What I Felt the
First Time I Heard It” (1924) can be read as a visual representation of the chaos
of the experience of the jazz band, melding technology, alcoholic excess, and
dancing with distortions and screams to visually represent the psychological
state of confusion so common to all these representations of the first experi-
ence of jazz.155
In its depiction of three caricatured Black dancers, Schmalhausen’s image
also brings to the fore another important element of numerous early jazz dis-
cussions, namely race and the function of Blackness within these accounts.
Though authors disagreed as to whether jazz in its present form was a Black or
white music, they were all but unanimous in attributing a Black, at times Afri-
can, origin to the music.156 In this way, German commentators partook in a
reading of jazz similar to what Jeremy F. Lane has called the trope of the
“techno-primitive hybrid,” something he finds within a wide array of French
modernist thought, in particular in relation to jazz.157 While certainly not orig-
inating with jazz, this fusion of Blackness and the machine was present at the
beginning of white American jazz criticism. This occurs most notably in Amer-
ican critic Walter Kingsley’s reference to jazz as “an attempt to reproduce the
marvelous syncopation of the African jungle” and as an “opera of ultra moder-
nity” in his article “Whence Comes Jass” from 1917.158 Long before the “red
count” Harry Kessler would connect “ultramodern” and “ultraprimitive” with
jazz after seeing Josephine Baker in Berlin,159 writers in the United States and
Europe were already at work linking jazz with Africa, primitive Blackness and
urban, industrial capitalism. Not least of them was Austrian novelist Joseph
Roth, then working as a journalist for the Berliner Börsen-Courier. In a May
1921 article, he wrote in reaction to this idea: “A funny punch line (Pointe) of
cultural history is that the machine becomes negroid.”160 While Roth’s and oth-
ers’ deployment of this idea partake in a broader European and American dis-
course, unique to the German case is its presence in light of the debate over the
occupation on the Rhine.
The Black presence within Germany’s borders, on the Rhine and in Ber-
lin, complicated the embrace of jazz and its Blackness by early writers. For
example, though claiming a Black origin to the jazz band, Kurt Tucholsky still
sought to differentiate between jazz’s Blackness and that of the occupation. He
writes:
[Enrico] Caruso is old and fat and meanwhile that which the Nigger sang
has gone into the people’s blood. (It is very difficult to speak the word
Negro in Germany, without one being cut off with the cry “Black Horror.”
But the black horror, as far as it exists, appears to me to be much more a
French one, and Abyssinian rapists do not repudiate [desavouieren] the
rhythm of Nigger songs.). / The new troubadour is not a Nigger anyway.161
This distinction between jazz’s white present and its Black past was one whose
“nuance” was often ignored by those who opposed the music and its modern-
ism. Indeed, given the centrality of the trap drum to early modernist readings,
the issue of the jazz band’s Blackness was one not easily pushed aside.162 It is
a point that was caricatured within the pages of the Berliner Volkszeitung al-
ready in April 1921. In a drawing entitled “The Jimmy” (here meaning
shimmy), artist Theodor Leisser depicts a bustling Berlin dance hall with a
four-man white jazz band on the left-hand side. In the foreground of this im-
age, however, two caricatured French African soldiers comment: “The Ger-
mans are really a curious bunch (wunderliche Leute). In the occupied territo-
ries they get excited about the ‘black horror,’ but in their ballrooms they dance
to our nigger dances with passion and devotion.”163
Yet if readings like this from early 1921 still assume jazz’s black origins
and white present, texts from a bit later, in particular from 1922 onward, hint at
the shifting ground of jazz performance in relation to race. For from the sum-
mer of 1921 onward, members of the Black diaspora, like Evandale Roberts,
Joseph (Joe) Sewonu, and others, were becoming more visible and audible
within the Berlin jazz scene. In September 1921, the Berlin correspondent for
the Austrian Neues Wiener Journal, Albert Held, wrote that, in Berlin, Black
performers and jazz bands were all over, noting: “the audience only loves the
variety theater stars and the Negroes with their terrible music.”164 In his com-
ments from January 1922, Poldi Schmidl discusses the increasing preference
of Berlin entertainment establishments for Black performers over their white
Figure 4: To Beauty (An die Schönheit). 1922. Dix, Otto (1891–1969) ©

ARS, NY. Oil on canvas, 140 x 122 cm. Von-der-Heydt-Museum. Photo
Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.
counterparts. For him, the “many music-making Negroes in Berlin” are not
musicians but film actors and dancers masquerading as such because they
could not find any roles.165 In part echoing earlier comments regarding the suc-
cess of Harem Nights despite the “Black Horror” debate, his problem, he in-
sists, is not with the Black musicians but with the public “that runs to the Ne-
groes.”166 Schmidl’s thoughts on Black musicians and the “Black Horror”
debate thus act both as a sign of the resistance to jazz’s Black origins as well as
an indication of the very real existence of Black jazz musicians in Germany in
1921 and 1922.167
The jazz band, the trap drum, and the Black presence in Germany find a
synthesis of sorts in Otto Dix’s An die Schönheit (To Beauty), from 1922 (fig-
ure 4). Like other modernist writers and artists analyzed here, Dix was an early
adopter of jazz, both dance and music.168 Tellingly, Dix’s representation of the
trap drum in this painting features a large image of a Native American figure in
headdress, as well as the words “Tom Boston,” an oblique reference to this
pseudonym of another Black jazz performer of the period. As with other jazz
musicians from these early years, little definitive is known about Tom Boston,
a musician and dancer who also went by the names Tom(m)i and Tommy Bos-
ton and appeared in Wiesbaden (1920), Frankfurt (1921), Chemnitz (1924),
and Erfurt (1928).169 Like the other jazz artists of the Black diaspora and oth-
erwise, Tom Boston’s path seems to have taken him from the occupied zones
to the east and Dresden, where Dix and fellow visual artist Friedrich Karl
Gotsch encountered him as a drummer in a jazz band in 1922.170 As one moves
away from the Berlin explosion in early 1921, there is less and less a concen-
tration of voices from this city, indicating that the jazz band expanded its im-
pact to other metropolitan areas in Germany like Dresden or the unidentified
jazz band that appeared in Danzig around this time (figure 5), not to mention
other Central European metropoles like Prague, Vienna, and Budapest.171
While Dix’s painting is in some ways typical of the space of the encounter
with the jazz band in the postwar period, the work also figures its meaning
through a contrast between the self-portrait of the artist and the Black drum-
mer. They share identical suits, torso positions, and each engages the viewer
with an askew glance. Furthermore, from Dix’s sketchbooks, which contain
various versions of the Black musician and numerous sketches of his instru-
ment, the highly caricatured presentation of the Black drummer was one Dix
came to only gradually.172 Though the physical and visual proximity between
the artist’s self-representation and the drummer produce a connection between
the two figures, Dix’s use of contrasting technologies in the work also act to
create distance between the two. Whereas the Black drummer relies on his
physicality to communicate via the drum, Dix’s persona deploys modern tech-
nology to overcome any corporeal limitations. For one, the drummer is the
only figure in the work whose mouth is not closed, with his wide grin acting to
suggest an oral, rather than technological, mode of communication. Dix, by
contrast, presents his white German persona as not only capable of reaching
beyond these limitations but via the telephone in his hand of both sending and
Figure 5: A Jazz band in the Winter Garden at Danzig (today Gdansk,

Poland). Ca. 1920. Anonymous, 20th century. Photo Credit: Adoc-
photos/Art Resource, NY.
receiving information. One might say that Dix uses the telephone within this
work to affect an image of himself as the passionless transmitter of information
via direct, immediate, and modern technology. While one must be careful not
to draw too many conclusions based upon Dix’s work in isolation, it is also
evident from Tucholsky’s and Schmidl’s remarks that the Black presence in the
German jazz scene impacted the framework for representing jazz in this pe-
riod, even as the use of the trap drum and technology remained equally sig-
nificant points of interest.
If initial reactions to the jazz band had generally emphasized the music’s
Black origins and its white present, Black jazz musicians, whether by choice or
by circumstance, complicated this developmental narrative. Indeed, questions
surrounding jazz’s Blackness as a thing of the past, present, or future, continue
throughout the period, with various responses given at different times.173 Here,
as elsewhere, the turn towards jazz between 1919 and 1923 proceeded in fits
and starts as jazz expanded across the cultural and physical landscape of Ger-
many. From the embrace of American dancing following the war through the
incubation of the jazz band in the occupation zones, by 1922, jazz and jazz
bands had become part of Weimar modernists’ vocabulary, works, and per-
sonal experience. As the debate over the “Black Horror” and a short while later
the jazz band travelled east to Berlin, Dresden, Danzig, and beyond, commen-
tators constructed a chaotic vision of the contemporary moment and its disrup-
tion, or rather representation, in the jazz band’s drum. Finally, reacting to
greater numbers of Black performers in Germany, critical reactions to jazz in
visual and textual form offered competing interpretations of the music and its
meaning, in particular in relation to race.
Still, in 1923, the jazz band momentarily seemed to retreat into the back-
ground. Both for musicians and the public, confronting the economic misery
and political violence of the early republic outweighed discussion of jazz and,
of course, lowered the rates for foreign musicians. In point of fact, as Konrad
Nowakowski has documented, the premiere German jazz musicians of the pe-
riod, like Fred Ross and Eric Borchard, fled the German capital and headed to
Vienna, further weakening the resonance of jazz in the capital,174 while the
Original Piccadilly Four had already left for Switzerland in 1922. Yet, after the
stabilization of German currency in 1924, Weimar Germans and their jazz mu-
sicians continued their consideration of the role of jazz in their republic. This
time, however, Black musicians and African Americans in particular moved
from the periphery to the center of Weimar Germany’s experience of jazz. This
change is nowhere more clearly expressed than in the case of Sam Wooding
and his jazz band from Harlem.
Chapter 2
The Aural Shock of Modernity:

Sam Wooding and Weimar Germany’s
Experience of Jazz
Sam Wooding’s masterful jazz orchestra was the real highlight (Clou), the
true sensation of the “Chocolate Kiddies.”
—H. H. Stuckenschmidt (1925)
May 1925 bore witness to arguably the most important performance of an Af-
rican American jazz band during the Weimar Republic. As part of the Choco-
late Kiddies revue at the Admiralspalast, Sam Wooding’s eleven-man orchestra
introduced the capital to their brand of New York jazz in a series of more than
seventy performances occurring over a two-month period. As noted theater
critic Oscar Bie wrote following the premiere: “Everything else has been mere
preparation, the bands in the bars, the American operetta at the [Theater am]
Zoo, the presentation of exotic poetry with jazz—here you have the final word
(das Endgültige).”1 Bie’s words begin to register the impact of Wooding’s per-
formances on German jazz discourse and indicate that, for those who heard it,
the group’s arrival represented more than just another evening in Berlin’s al-
ready crowded entertainment district on Friedrichstrasse.
As the first large-scale African American revue to perform in the capital,
famously followed six months later by Josephine Baker and La Revue nègre,
reactions to the revue were often rooted within received racial discourses and
their appearance prompted reactions connecting the African American per-
formers to the “Black Horror.”2 What amazed the Berlin public, however, was
not just the visual attraction of an African American performance troupe; it was
also, and even primarily, the jazz music played by Sam Wooding and his jazz
orchestra. So that what was initially received as an African American revue, to
a certain degree became even more a jazz show.3 As Hans Heinz Stucken-
schmidt wrote in praise of the revue somewhat later: “Sam Wooding’s master-
51
ful jazz orchestra was the real highlight, the true sensation of the ‘Chocolate
Kiddies.’” Stuckenschmidt’s, and indeed many reviewers’, focus on the nov-
elty of the music has served to amplify the notion that Berlin and Germany had
been isolated from live African American performances prior to Wooding’s
performances. Yet, African American and other Black performers and jazz mu-
sicians, as well as white American and European jazz bands, were by no means
absent from Berlin before May 1925.
Aside from those groups already referenced in chapter 1, a number of vo-
cal groups, singers, and jazz bands and musicians had already played the Ger-
man capital. In December 1924, the African American artist and impresario
Will Garland and a group of more than ten singers perform and record in Ber-
lin.4 More immediately, the world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers appeared in
Berlin at the Beethovensaal on May 15, 1925, just ten days prior to the Choco-
late Kiddies’ premiere.5 If these are not jazz bands, then they nonetheless show
the range of African American performance styles presented to Berliners. Of
course, African American jazz artists were active in the period as well.6 Jacob
Pete Zabriskie performed in Berlin during 1922. He appeared first at the Espla-
nade in September 1922 and then, along with drummer George “Bobo” Hines,
at the Fiametta from October through December 1922, with Hines alone re-
turning there in January 1923.7 Further, during the same month in 1924 as Af-
rican American tenor Roland Hayes performs in Berlin at the Beethovensaal,8
George Clapham’s jazz band was appearing at another Berlin locale, the Al-
hambra.9 Clapham’s band also appears to have recorded in Berlin as well, pro-
ducing two songs “Nothin’ But” and “Runnin’ Wild” for Vox in the summer of
1924.10 Perhaps most striking within the context of Bie’s words, jazz drummer
Buddy Gilmore will perform with his wife Mattie as “Buddie and Buddie” at
the Scala in April 1925, just one month before the premiere of the Chocolate
Kiddies. The presence of George Clapham and the Gilmores in Berlin, along
with Black musician James Boucher who played with Julian Fuhs (see below)
in Berlin from December 1924 through early 1925, is noteworthy as all three
had performed with the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, once again linking
German jazz history with that of European and African American jazz his-
tory.11 In addition, white European jazz bands and bandleaders, in particular
from New York, had been performing in Germany since at least 1924. Amongst
these can be included the German-Americans Julian Fuhs12 and Alex Hyde,13
as well as the British dance band, the London Sonora Band.14 Finally, two
white American jazz groups with no apparent biographical connection to Ger-
many arrived in Berlin—the Kentucky Serenaders under Eddie Woods, who
had first performed in Munich in April 1924, came to Berlin in October 1924,
The Aural Shock of Modernity 53
in each case appearing as part of the show Wien gib acht! (Vienna Watch
Out!),15 and the Ohio Lido Venice Band led by Harl Smith, which arrived in
Berlin during the winter season of 1924/25, playing at the Palais Heinroth.16
That in May 1925 reviewers tended not to refer to these performers can be
in part attributed to one important novelty of the Chocolate Kiddies, namely
where prior Black and/or jazz performers had played and where Wooding and
the Chocolate Kiddies premiered.17 While earlier Black jazz performers had
appeared in entertainment locales, ones typically ignored by the mainstream
bourgeois press (bars, cafés, hotels, variety theater houses like the Wintergar-
ten or Scala), Wooding performed in Hermann Haller’s Admiralspalast, a large
and relatively well-known establishment catering to a middle-class crowd. The
other, perhaps even more unique attribute, was, as is discussed below, the ad-
vertising campaign that accompanied their debut. This meant, amongst other
things, that for the first time, across a wide spectrum of news outlets, an Afri-
can American jazz band received broad discussion in the Berlin press. So while
other African American performers and jazz musicians had preceded the Choc-
olate Kiddies and Sam Wooding, this chapter will argue that their Berlin per-
formances became central to the German critical understanding of jazz
throughout the 1920s and into the early 1930s.18 A partial list of those who
discussed or heard them would include cultural critics Fritz Giese, Siegfried
Kracauer, Kurt Pinthus, Alfred Polgar, Herwarth Walden, Frank Warschauer,
and Hermann von Wedderkop; ethnomusicologists Erich Moritz von Hornbos-
tel and Jaap Kool; and music critics Max Butting and Hans Heinz Stucken-
schmidt, as well as composers Ernst Krenek, Klaus Pringsheim, Franz Schreker,
Karol Rathaus, Kurt Weill, and others. In a word, much of Weimar critics’
conceptualization and experience with African American jazz can be traced
back to Sam Wooding and his jazz band (figure 6).
Before proceeding to a discussion of the history of the revue and the
reactions to the premiere, it is important to understand the cultural and musi-
cal context of Wooding’s band, as these elements, too, will play a role on that
May evening in Berlin. Born in Philadelphia and schooled in ragtime and
jazz in Atlantic City and later Harlem, Sam Wooding (1895–1985) has
emerged as a crucial figure in the history of jazz and its global reception. In
World War I, Wooding played in the 807th Pioneer Infantry Band, a forma-
tion similar to James Reese Europe’s referenced in the previous chapter. Dur-
ing this time, Wooding came to know other important jazz pioneers, such as
Will H. Vodery and Earl Granstaff, and even performed for the first time in
France in January 1919.19 After returning to the United States, the pianist and
arranger eventually made his way to New York and Harlem. As he later wrote:
Figure 6: Jazz Musi-

cian Sam Wooding in
Berlin. (Photograph
Courtesy of Chip Def-
faa and Mrs. Sam
Wooding.)
“I found Harlem to be everything a young Negro would look forward to and

desire, to give the necessary push to his hungry ambitious spirit for culture
and musical aspirations.”20 Yet, Wooding most indelibly left his mark not on
the New York jazz scene but on the European one. Wooding and his band
traveled to Berlin, Budapest, Copenhagen, London, Moscow, Paris, Prague,
Vienna, and beyond. Having introduced so many across the world to jazz,
Wooding came to view himself “as the Christopher Columbus of jazz,” as
“having brought big band jazz to a new world.”21 Beginning with the Choco-
late Kiddies revue, Wooding toured Germany and Europe between 1925 and
1931.22 His first stint included over seventy performances in Berlin alone.
Wooding not only toured the capital, however, but across Germany, traveling,
amongst others, to Danzig, Hamburg, Hannover, Leipzig, Dortmund,
Mannheim, Magdeburg, Breslau, and Frankfurt am Main. He also, unlike
other American jazz bands, both Black and white, returned repeatedly to the
capital. After their May premiere, the Chocolate Kiddies made a return trip
to Berlin in December 1925, appearing at the Neues Theater am Zoo, though
without the fanfare of their initial arrival.23 After the show disbanded, Wood-
ing next returned to Berlin to perform at the Faun des Westens in June and
July 1926 and, in a sign of his growing fame, was part of a panel of jazz ex-
perts invited to weigh in on jazz’s meaning in the Berliner Tageblatt, where
he published a short text, “The Transfiguration of Jazz,” which is discussed
below.24 Wooding was back in Berlin in October 1926, performing at the
Ufa-Palast am Zoo.25 After a return trip to the United States in 1927, Wood-
ing returned to Berlin in 1928 for a new African American show, Die schwarze
Revue (The Black Revue), which premiered in Berlin on June 15.26 A final
appearance in Berlin occurred during his April 1930 stint at the Dachgarten
Café.27 So while Wooding’s Berlin performances were neither the first expe-
rience Germans had with live jazz, nor with African American music in gen-
eral, the duration and geographical variety of his engagements in Germany,
in addition to the sheer critical mass of German-language writings about
him, are further reasons why his jazz music became one of the most cited
examples of African American jazz during the period.
Finally, one must consider Wooding’s own understanding of the genre of
music that he aspired to play. It was not only the sound of Black jazz artists that
Wooding admired, but also Paul Whiteman and symphonic jazz, a style which
other African American artists like Fletcher Henderson were also involved in.
It was not for nothing that the section of the Chocolate Kiddies revue in which
his band played was designated in programs as a symphonic jazz concert.28
Indeed, in a 1930 retrospective of his impact, a reporter from the African
American newspaper the Chicago Defender noted: “Mr. Wooding’s orchestra
was the first symphonic jazz unit ever to play in Germany.”29 Yet, Wooding also
sought to distinguish himself from Whiteman’s vision of “massive jazz (Mas-
senjazz)” as he termed it and in the aforementioned “Transfiguration of Jazz”
he argued for the refinement of jazz by drawing upon African American musi-
cal traditions, not only of rhythm but of melody.30 He concluded his short com-
ments on the question of jazz and artistic production by writing:
Against all prognostications, the future of this improvisatory music con-

sists not in further development of breadth, but in an internal purification
and clarification, one might say, of chamber-musical refinement. Jazz and
art music enrich each other. How long will it be, ten, twenty years before
one will no longer refer to the pariah “jazz”—because it has become the
expression of a refined feeling (eines geläuterten Gefühls).31
So like Fletcher Henderson and other African American musicians, Wooding

can be considered part of the symphonic jazz movement, without this impact-
ing the originality or authenticity of his music. As one scholar has recently ar-
gued, many African American and white jazz bands and musicians of the pe-
riod produced music that transcended current distinctions between jazz and
jazzy popular music, creating “an overlapping family of syncopated musics in
dialogue with one another.”32 Indeed, while Wooding could be hailed as a sym-
phonic jazz pioneer in the Chicago Defender in 1930, in January 1925, he and
his orchestra were described in the Baltimore Afro-American as “far and away
the hottest and jazziest combination of colored musicians . . . in many a day.”33
Aligning Wooding’s jazz with symphonic jazz therefore in no way diminishes
his achievements; instead, it enriches our understanding of how jazz was prac-
ticed by African American musicians in the 1920s.
The Chocolate Kiddies between

New York, Moscow, and Berlin
The first published reference to the show that would become the Chocolate
Kiddies was released in mid-April 1925, a little more than one month away
from the premiere.34 Indicative of the personalities at stake in its creation, a
short notice was placed on the front page of the American publication The
Billboard on April 18. Under the heading “To Offer Colored Revue in Europe,”
the release frames the show that will become the Chocolate Kiddies as a col-
laboration between Morris Gest and Arthur Lyons.35 If Lyons’ name as pro-
ducer of the revue has long been known within scholarship on the Chocolate
Kiddies, Gest’s name has been largely absent. According to this early report,
however, the show was to be performed under the title “Morris Gest pres-
ents . . .” and after an initial stint in Berlin, it would go on to Paris, Vienna, and
then Moscow, where it would be featured at the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT),
famously founded by Constantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-
Danchenko. Though much in this early report is inconsistent with the show as
it would premiere in Berlin, the references to Morris Gest and the MAT repre-
sent lost traces of the transatlantic connection between Russian and African
American diasporic communities that played a major role in producing this
important moment in early German jazz history.
Though not named in the release, at the center of the relationship was the
Russian- Jewish impresario Leonid Davydovich Leonidoff- Bermann.36
Leonidoff, born in Kharkov (Charkow) to a merchant family, became involved

with the MAT in the 1890s and enjoyed a particularly close relationship with
the theater’s cofounder Nemirovich-Danchenko. He left Russia during the civil
war, taking part in a famous theater troupe around the actor Vasily Kachalov.
With this group, he performed across southern and central Europe, including a
prolonged stint in Vienna in the early 1920s.37 Yet like other Russian émigrés,
he eventually settled in Berlin, where he became chief negotiating agent of the
MAT for Europe and North America. Leonidoff was part of the vast commu-
nity of the Russian diaspora in Berlin, a population that peaked in 1923 at
around 360,000.38 Berlin’s location and the size of its Russian émigré commu-
nity made it an important pivot point for Russian exiles and Soviet artists alike,
as they traveled back and forth between Moscow and New York and places in
between. Morris Gest, of Russian-Jewish extraction, travelled regularly to Ber-
lin, and his brother Simeon (“Sam”) resided there during the period, acting as
a local representative for his brother. In the New York theater scene, Russians,
and Jewish Russians in particular, played an equally pivotal role in the early
1920s. It was through Morris Gest that the MAT became a sensation in New
York. Beginning in 1922 with Balieff’s “Chauve Souris” (“Bat Theater”), Gest
orchestrated a series of successes. As one of its representatives, Leonidoff ne-
gotiated between the MAT and Gest, both in Berlin and New York, and worked
with world famous artists from the singer Chaliapin to dancer Pavlova and, of
course, Balieff. If today Russian theater and the MAT in particular are gener-
ally held in high regard, as Valerie Hoffmann argues, Gest’s promotion of Rus-
sian art and artists led to this shift in their perception, catapulting them from
the variety theater to paragons of high art in Europe and America.39 It is a shift
that resonates with developments in the African American theater scene from
which the cast for the Chocolate Kiddies was drawn. Through his involvement
with the success of MAT in New York, Leonidoff had had ample opportunity to
learn from Gest’s strategy, which combined massive press campaigns with
high salaries to top entertainers.
As Leonidoff related in an interview given on the occasion of the Choco-
late Kiddies premiere in Vienna, he first hit upon the idea of bringing an Afri-
can American revue to Berlin and Europe after visiting a cabaret in Harlem. In
all likelihood, this took place during 1924 when Leonidoff visited the newly
established Club Alabam.40 At the time, pioneering African American musician
Fletcher Henderson was performing there. Henderson and his band left the
Club Alabam in July 1924, and they were replaced by Sam Wooding’s band. So
that when Leonidoff returned to New York in March 1925 with plans to bring
an African American revue to Berlin, it was to the Club Alabam that he headed,
and there he encountered not only Sam Wooding but the agent and producer
Alfred S. Lyons.
Like Leonidoff and Gest, Lyons was of Russian-Jewish extraction. Later
in his career, he became an important agent in Hollywood, representing over
the course of his career artists like Jack Benny, Cole Porter, Ida Lupino, Heddy
Lamar, and Lucille Ball. During the 1920s, Lyons represented a number of
African American artists, including Wooding and the famous comedian Johnny
Hudgins. In the fall of 1924, Lyons became the producer of a new musical re-
vue at the Club Alabam called Alabam Fantasies. Though it premiered in the
fall, the most important performance of Alabam Fantasies took place at the
Lafayette Theatre in January 1925. This was to be a springboard for the show’s
move to Broadway and beyond. Indeed, advertisements in The New York Times
announced that the Alabam Fantasies were booked for a European tour in Lon-
don, Paris, and Berlin, inverting the order that would accompany the initial
report of the Chocolate Kiddies in April.41 For reasons to be discussed below,
shortly after the Lafayette premiere, the planned European tour of Alabam
Fantasies fell apart. Yet Lyons’ intention to bring the Club Alabam show to
Europe represents an important precondition of the curious origins of the
Chocolate Kiddies.
The January 1925 performances at the Lafayette Theatre were by all ac-
counts a success, though they were initially marred by controversy. First, the
prima donna of the show, African American singer and actress Abbie Mitchell,
bowed out of the show on the first night. Mitchell’s name will resurface in a
subsequent chapter, and so it is important to detail here her connections to Af-
rican American performance in Europe and the New York theater scene. Mitch-
ell had first appeared on the European stage in the first decade of the twentieth
century as part of her then husband and composer Will Marion Cook’s London
production of In Dahomey (1903). Equally importantly, she would again tour
Europe as part of Cook’s Southern Syncopated Orchestra, which, as is men-
tioned in chapter 1, toured London, Paris, and Vienna amongst other European
cities. After returning from Europe in 1923, she gave a number of concert per-
formances and, in the fall of 1924, joined the Club Alabam. In her unpublished
memoirs from 1938, Mitchell remembers the club fondly, noting that the man-
agement was “gracious, unprejudiced, and endeavored to keep every-thing
pleasant.”42 Like other clubs in Harlem at the time, the Club Alabam was fre-
quented by an elite, primarily white New York audience. Though alongside
Johnny Hudgins and Eddie Rector she received top billing in advertisements,
on the opening night, Mitchell performed but one song. According to Mitchell
this was because the numbers of the show had not been rehearsed and because
they included things, which, as she told a reporter at the time, “should be al-
lowed to remain buried in the past.”43 Though her allusion is oblique, one as-
pect of the show to which she may have objected was the blackface act of Af-
rican American comedian Johnny Hudgins. Mitchell’s status as singer, whose
concert repertoire regularly featured European art songs, was potentially at
odds with the more populist tradition represented by Hudgins.
Yet if Mitchell was a major draw for the show, Hudgins was its star. His
career trajectory had been rising steadily since the fall of 1924 when the Balti-
more native received widespread attention from his performance in Noble
Sissle and Eubie Blake’s Chocolate Dandies. It was in this show that he de-
buted his signature “Silent Hudgins” act. While a trumpeter played, Hudgins
mouthed the sounds, seemingly transforming the human body into brass instru-
ment. If the performative brilliance of his act is clear, contemporary viewers
are nonetheless equally likely to notice the minstrel iconography through
which Hudgins voiced his modernist act. This is equally the case of the Choco-
late Kiddies trio “Three Eddies:” Shakey (Clarence) Beasley, Chick (Layburn)
Horsey, and Tiny (Earle) Ray.44 They too will perform in blackface makeup,
but for Berlin, rather than New York, audiences. Further connecting the trio
with Hudgins is the fact that Chick Horsey, first with Arthur Bryson and then
with Willie Robins, did a version of “Silent Hudgins” with trumpeter Bobby
Martin as part of the Chocolate Kiddies revue in Europe. The disconcerting
images of blackface performers that abound in European advertisements and
stage design therefore must not only be placed within the context of the Ger-
man history of representations of Blackness but also within the context of
American and African American performance history. More to the point, the
fact that Hudgins was one of the most successful acts in New York in the mid-
1920s points towards a high degree of similarity rather than dissimilarity be-
tween the proclivities of (white) German and North American audiences.
Needless to say, the entire matter of Blacks in blackface and the response of the
African American community to this practice is a highly complicated matter,
to which Mitchell’s objections in 1925 may attest.45
While Mitchell bowed out after the first performance of Alabam Fanta-
sies, Lyons, too, made a less than gracious exit, though not of his own voli-
tion—he was fired after the first week by the management of the Club Alabam.
Lyons quickly turned to the courts and sued the management for monies owed
him.46 While Lyons’ case was still being adjudicated in the New York Supreme
Court, Leonidoff returned to New York on March 24, 1925. The primary reason
for his visit was to negotiate with Gest for the next season of New York perfor-
mances by the MAT. Whether Lyons initiated contact with Leonidoff or vice
versa remains unclear, but very shortly after Leonidoff’s arrival he came to the
Club Alabam to hear Sam Wooding. As Wooding later recalled: “And then one
day, Lyons came in and said to me: ‘How would you like to go to Europe?’ I
looked at him as if to say, ‘Are you kidding?’ He said, ‘No, I got a man coming
in from Europe, an impresario, a fellow named Leonidoff.’”47 According to
Wooding, the contracts were signed the next day at 4:00 a.m. Leonidoff, how-
ever, needed more than a jazz band; he needed a show and with the fate of Ala-
bam Fantasies revue locked in court, Lyons turned to the outside to recruit new
talent. If the show’s top stars like Johnny Hudgins, Eddie Rector, and Abbie
Mitchell could not be convinced to go to Europe, Lyons and Leonidoff had
many things working in their favor. For one, Lyons was a known figure within
the Black theater scene, while Leonidoff could offer intimate knowledge of the
European theater scene and, equally importantly, could trade on Gest’s and the
MAT’s international fame and reputation.48
Lyons and Leonidoff filled the cast of the Chocolate Kiddies with per-
formers who were all well-known figures of the Black theater scene. These
included singers Arthur “Strut” Payne and Lottie Gee, like Hudgins, formerly
of the Chocolate Dandies. In addition, performers George Statson, Charlie Da-
vis, Bobby and Babe Goins, and Adelaide Hall all became part of the show. Yet
other than Wooding’s band, the stars of the show were Thaddeus Greenlee and
Arthur Drayton.49 The duo was one of the premiere acts of the period, starring
in Broadway and at the Cotton Club in the 1920s. They had also performed in
Europe before the First World War and incorporated a number of foreign lan-
guages into their act, something that proved to be of great value during their
stint with the Chocolate Kiddies. Unlike their contemporaries, “The Three Ed-
dies,” or Johnny Hudgins, Greenlee and Drayton did not perform in blackface.
Instead, through their immaculate dress and linguistic proficiency, they posi-
tioned themselves as an international and sophisticated “class act.” This latter
term designates in the narrow sense an act of multiple dancers performing
alongside in unison and correspondingly demanding precise execution; yet it
also is meant to stake out a new space beyond minstrelsy for African American
artists. Like Alabam Fantasies, then, the Chocolate Kiddies was composed of
various elements of contemporary African American entertainment. So though
it may never have been performed in America, neither its stars nor their acts
would likely have struck a Broadway audience of the period as particularly out
of place.
Lyons also commissioned original music for the show. For this, he turned
not to Wooding, but to the songwriting duo of Joe Trent and future jazz great
Duke Ellington. Ellington had moved to New York from his native Washington
D.C. a few years earlier, and aside from playing in the city and touring with his
band in the northeast, he also made ends meet through “Tin Pan Alley” compo-
sitions.50 The songs he composed for the show were a big break for Ellington,
and he vividly describes in his memoirs how he had to write the music for the
show in just one night.51 Though obviously exaggerated (in fact, one song,
“Deacon Jazz,” had already been written the year before), Ellington did deliver
at least four original songs in a very short amount of time: “With You,” “Jig
Walk,” “Love Is Just a Wish,” and “Jim Dandy.” These songs, as Ellington
scholar Mark Tucker has suggested, both follow and break with standard har-
monies and rhythms of popular music of the time and are demonstrations of
Ellington’s early compositional techniques and point forward towards his later
work of the 1930s.52 Well-known German bandleaders and composers, amongst
others Dajos Béla, Mischa Spoliansky, and Bernhard Etté, took note and pro-
duced recordings of Ellington’s songs from the Chocolate Kiddies between
August and September 1925. Ellington’s impact through these songs was felt
as late as 1928 when the famous vocal group the Comedian Harmonists re-
corded a test version of “Jig Walk” for Deutsche Grammophon.53 So though
Ellington himself never made it to Weimar Berlin, his music via the Chocolate
Kiddies and Sam Wooding was heard and performed by Weimar-era musicians.
Given the personalities involved and the size of the group, news of the
Chocolate Kiddies was reported on regularly in the African American press.
In a short notice on the show, the Baltimore Afro-American claimed that this
would be the first large group of African American performers to tour Europe
since Cook’s In Dahomey, though this claim ignores the slightly earlier
SSO.54 Within the African American press, the Chocolate Kiddies was more
than just another Broadway show to African Americans at home: it was an
opportunity to demonstrate abroad and at home their importance to American
cultural life. On May 3, 1925, a farewell party was organized for the depart-
ing members of the troupe. Featuring performances by cast members as well
as Florence Mills and Fletcher Henderson, this grand send-off from Harlem
also received coverage in the African American press.55 Two days later, the
cast of the Chocolate Kiddies, thirty-two singers and dancers and Sam Wood-
ing’s eleven-man band, embarked for Hamburg aboard the SS Arabic of the
American White Star Line.56
After arriving in Berlin via Hamburg, the Chocolate Kiddies revue opened
at the Admiralspalast on May 25, 1925. The timing of the revue’s premiere,
however, was less than opportune. The prime season for Berlin’s great revues
was in late August and early September, and spring shows often struggled to
fill the house. It was for this reason that the large revues often left the capital in
the spring to go on tour. Indeed, the departure of the prior year’s show was the
reason for the Chocolate Kiddies’ booking at the Admiralspalast. According to
a report in The Billboard, Haller’s show was leaving the capital as of April 1,
and he needed something to fill the space until the beginning of the new sea-
son.57 According to cabaret historian Peter Jelavich, Haller’s annual revues be-
tween 1923 and 1929 “epitomized the genre [of the revue] in the minds of
contemporary observers.”58 Performing in such a venue was obviously a sig-
nificant factor in the troupe’s ability to garner critical recognition for the revue
in the German press.
Broadly following the strategy of Gest and Leonidoff with the MAT in
New York, the revue was widely publicized, apparently under the direction of
Fritz Jacobsohn.59 The Chocolate Kiddies advertised in major dailies like the
Berliner Tageblatt, Berliner Montagspost, 8 Uhr Abendblatt, Berliner Lokal-
Anzeiger, Vossische Zeitung, and elsewhere; and from photographs the band
took of themselves while in Berlin, there is evidence to suggest that scattered
throughout the city were posters on kiosks and elsewhere announcing the
troupe’s arrival. In an advertisement from the 27th of May, the Chocolate Kid-
dies were cited as containing the “most famous colored artists of America,”60
while an advertisement from June 6 heralded the group as the “latest sensation
of Berlin.”61 In addition, at least four articles appeared before the revue’s pre-
miere discussing the rehearsals.62 In these advertisements, illustrations, and in
the many newspaper accounts that followed the premiere are further indica-
tions of the event’s significance and of its highly effective marketing, which
included, like Paul Whiteman’s symphonic jazz concerts just over a year later,
inviting members of the press and celebrities to the special premiere perfor-
mance on May 25. All this is another indication of why, though other African
American artists were present in Weimar Germany both before and after, the
Chocolate Kiddies was the first jazz performance widely visible to the Berlin
public and widely reviewed by the Berlin press.
From the program for the show’s Berlin premiere, one can reconstruct not
only the scenes, dances, and music the audience experienced, but also the man-
ner by which the audience’s experience was framed (figures 7 and 8).63 Inter-
estingly, the first page of the program, unlike the advertisements, merely de-
scribes the revue as a “Negro Production with a Prologue and Two Acts.”64 It
lists Arthur Lyons as writer and director, along with choreographer Charles
Davis, music by Joe Trent and Duke Ellington, orchestrated by Arthur S. John-
son, and scenery by Willi Poggany.65 After a cataloging of the performers’
names, their home New York theater, and their specialties, there follows a syn-
opsis of the show.66
1000 words English67 are hardly required of the visitors to the “Chocolate
Kiddies” to understand what the following scenes, songs, and dances are
about. The language of music, rhythm, and—legs is international.
Beginning on the “plantation” of the American South, where the black
farmers dance and sing their peaceful songs, where they pray at sunset,
laugh and joke around during sunlight; from there it goes out into the
world, to the north, to the city of millions that lures and draws everyone:
New York. The duo of Greenlee and Drayton plays the role of tour guide
through the different stations: new types of dances, comic appearances,
eccentrics, lyric and religious songs, the New York Negro quarter of “Har-
lem” is mirrored in its life and goings on. The Symphonic Concert of the
Sam Wooding Jazz Band opens act two, and the extensive program of the
Negro Cabaret in the Harlem quarter forms the conclusion.68
The first words of the above quote, “1000 words English,” appear in large, bold
letters. Should the description at first arouse a sense of anxiety in those viewers
who do not understand English, it then allays this fear by emphasizing the
extra-linguistic, in part sexual, aspects of the show: music, rhythm, and legs.
Another reason for this emphasis on the performers’ legs is to frame it as be-
longing to the chorus-line genre of the American Tiller Girls. Accordingly, jazz
music plays little or no role in this description of the show. Indeed, aside from
the reference to the symphonic concert in “The Sam Wooding Jazz-Band,” the
word jazz appears only once more in the program.
Instead, most of the space in the opening acts is devoted to the “Old
South,” which is then replaced by the modernity of New York and Harlem, a
city whose poets were already being translated into German as is discussed in
chapter 6. The prologue begins with the sketch “Plantation at Sundown,” a
scene depicting an imagined return to the antebellum South. “Gone are the
days when my heart was young and gay, / Gone are my friends from the cotton
fields away,” Arthur “Strut” Payne sang in his performance of Stephen Foster’s
“Old Black Joe,” the first song of the show.69 During all this, Sam Wooding and
his band accompanied the cast from the pit.70 The first act also featured the star
singer Lottie Gee performing Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” under the
more popular title “Swanee River.”
The two concluding numbers of the prologue, “Farewell to the Plantation”
Figure 7: Cover of the Berlin Program for Chocolate Kiddies Revue at
the Theater am Admiralspalast, 1925. Courtesy Institut für Theaterwis-
senschaft der Freien Universität Berlin and Dr. Peter Jammerthal.
Figure 8: Performers and Summary from the Berlin Program for Choc-
olate Kiddies, 1925. Courtesy Institut für Theaterwissenschaft der
Freien Universität Berlin and Dr. Peter Jammerthal.
and “Grab Your Girl,” transition the show to the first act, which was made up
of a peculiar assemblage of milieus and genres. For example, after a dance by
Bobby and Babe Goins, the scene opened into a “‘Zulu Forest,’” during which
singer and dancer Adelaide Hall performed “Jungle Nights in Dixie,” donning
only a white wig, grass skirt, and brassiere.71 As Garvin Bushell, a musician
with Wooding’s jazz band, later recalled: “There was always a jungle number
in the Negro shows. In New York Florence Mills used to do one called ‘Hawai-
ian Night in Dixieland’. . . . In Chocolate Kiddies we had ‘Jungle Night in
Dixieland.’ They’d always give the same reason to have some jungle music:
tom-toms and hoochie-coochie.”72 The sixth scene of the first act, “Harlem in
New York—The New York Negro Quarter and Its Life and Goings On,” shifted
the scene to the contemporary. It consisted of eight separate skits, one of which,
the Ellington song “With You,” with its subtitle “Four Generations of Love,”
revolved around a story of sexual infidelity between cast members playing
mother, postman, a messenger boy, and children. The depiction of Harlem con-
cluded with the entire cast performing the “Rabbit Hop” across the stage.73
Contributing to the mélange of old and new, nestled between “With You” and
the “Rabbit Hop” and framed by a thick-lined border, was an announcement of
the cast’s performance of the Charleston, “America’s latest dance rhythm.”
After intermission, the Sam Wooding Orchestra made its way onto the
stage to perform the second act of the show. The personnel of the Sam Wood-
ing Band at the time of their performance in Berlin was as follows: Bobby
Martin, Maceo Edwards, and Tommy Ladnier, trumpets; Herb Flemming,
trombone; Johnny Mitchell, banjo; Garvin Bushell, Willie Lewis, and Gene
Sedric, saxes/clarinets; Sam Wooding, piano; John Warren, bass; and George
Howe, drums. Wooding’s contribution here was truly original. In the midst of
this revue on a plantation and in a Harlem cabaret, Wooding and his orchestra
gave a jazz concert to which no one danced and that was not accompanied by
any visual stimulus other than eleven African American musicians performing
jazz music. This bold move, as becomes clear from the song selection, was in
dialogue with Paul Whiteman’s earlier “Experiment in Modern Music” from
1924, the impact of which will be discussed in the following chapter. The con-
cert opened with a medley of popular songs. According to Wooding, this med-
ley included an arrangement of “By the Waters of Minnetonka,” a claim sub-
stantiated by the fact that it was amongst those recorded in Berlin’s Vox studios
a short while later.74 “By the Waters of Minnetonka” was especially important
in the development of symphonic jazz; it had been famously recorded by
Whiteman in 1924 and received extended discussion in Charles Osgood’s 1926
So This Is Jazz, one of the first book-length studies of jazz written in Amer-
ica.75 The second song, “I Want to Be Happy,” was from Broadway composer
Vincent Youmans with words by Irving Caesar and had appeared in the 1925
musical No, No, Nanette. This was followed by two versions of Rudolf Firml’s
“Indian Love Call,” the original and a jazz version arranged by Wooding. This
is yet another possible homage to Whiteman, whose 1924 concert had featured
the same contrastive method to demonstrate the specificity of jazz. Next,
Wooding’s band performed “O Katharina,” which is followed in the program
by the words: “how it is heard by Negro musicians!” “O Katharina,” written by
L. Wolfe Gilbert with music by Richard Fall, was a popular song from the
previous year in both America and Germany. Their concert ended with two jazz
standards, W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” and “Limehouse Blues” with mu-
sic by Philip Braham.
The Chocolate Kiddies revue was thus palimpsest of contemporary Afri-
can American performance. Simultaneously behind and ahead of its time, the
revue gave Berliners and later Hamburgers, Frankfurters, and other Weimar
Germans, a composite view of African American culture and its representation
within American popular culture. This included both “class acts” like Greenlee
and Drayton and the Black symphonic jazz of Wooding, as well as stereotypes
associated with slavery and blackface minstrelsy.
Experiencing Jazz, Experiencing Modernity
If it is clear that for very complex reasons Wooding and his 1925 performances
occupy a privileged position within Weimar jazz culture, this status owes as
much to the music and performance venue as to German cultural history. In an
attempt to explain the distinctive quality ascribed to Wooding’s jazz and to
explore the broader function of the German experience of jazz during this pe-
riod, I want to develop the concept of aural shock as an analytical model to
explain Wooding’s unique status specifically, as well as the power of the jazz
experience to represent modernity more broadly. Nora M. Alter and Lutz Ko-
epnick write that “the arrival of modern sound can best be described through
the figure of the shock. Industrial noises and mechanically reproduced sounds
disrupted the working of the subject’s perceptual apparatus. They often elicited
fear, pain, or horror, and prompted the development of sensory protection
shields that could cushion or even parry traumatic intrusions.”76 Alter and Ko-
epnick argue that the transformation of the lived environment through industri-
alization and industrialized culture created qualitatively new sounds and that
these sounds in turn necessitated new modes of experiencing sound.
While their discussion of the modernization of sound can be applied to a

number of examples during the Weimar Republic, the syncopated and seem-
ingly cacophonous sounds of jazz resonate strongly with the aural experience
of the metropolis described by Koepnick and Alter. Thus if film is often seen as
registering the shock of the visual in this period, jazz was equally powerful in
registering the shock of the aural, in being experienced as an aesthetic media-
tion of the danger and exhilaration of the sounds of the street and the machine.
As author Fritz Giese argued in the same year as Wooding’s Berlin perfor-
mances, jazz is capable of expressing the sounds and experiences of:
being run over, electric shock, the clap of the mail box, the whistle of the
locomotive, the whetting of the razor blade [ . . . ] the rolling of the ele-
vated train, the workings of vending machines, the flapping of the revolv-
ing door of a café, stumbling up and down a subway stairway, the calls of
newspaper sellers, the pounding of jackhammers at the construction of a
high rise building, the grinding of cranes, howling of factory sirens.77
Jazz signifies here both the inescapability of modern sound and the ever-
increasing danger it represents to the individual. The noise of modernity per-
meates the air and fills the listener with sounds of friction and anguish. Giese’s
description of jazz resounds with a disjointed and discomfiting modernity and
implicitly locates in jazz’s syncopations and improvisations the unexpected-
ness and horror, as well as exhilaration, of daily metropolitan life.
However, the experience of jazz did more to German listeners than merely
reflect back to them a priori notions of modernity. Jazz also directly impacted
and concretely transformed them. The experience of jazz, like the sounds of the
street, was at first confounding and confusing, understood as noise rather than
as music. Yet precisely because of this, German listeners found in it a means of
accessing, and thereby reflecting upon, the aural component of the everyday
shocks of modernity. It is for this reflective mode of the jazz experience that I
want to use Benjamin’s and Adorno’s ambiguous employment of shock as a
category of aesthetic experience. Before proceeding to an analysis of the Ger-
man experience of the Chocolate Kiddies revue and Wooding’s jazz, it is there-
fore first necessary to explore the ideas of shock and experience in relation to
music in order to develop a theoretical apparatus capable of more meaningfully
exploring the significance of jazz to German culture and of Wooding to the
German jazz experience. In putting Wooding’s jazz into conversation with
Benjamin and Adorno, I not only want to lend theoretical weight to the German
experience of jazz but also suggest Weimar jazz reception as a part of the im-
petus of this period’s theorization of modernity.
At its core, Benjamin views the concept of experience as one divided
within itself, split, in his famous distinction, between the fragmentary and iso-
lated form of Erlebnis and a deeper, diachronic mode of Erfahrung. As Miriam
Hansen’s and Margaret Cohen’s respective analyses of these terms have shown,
Benjamin’s understanding of experience underwent significant change from its
initial iteration in pieces like One-Way Street to its fullest expression in the
1939 “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.”78 Constant to his understanding, how-
ever, was his anchoring of the dialectic of these two types of experience through
the key third term of shock.
Following Freud, Benjamin maintains that the maelstrom of modern ur-
ban existence necessitates the cultivation of a protective shield of conscious-
ness. Here, one might think as well of Simmel’s discussion of the blasé attitude
of city dwellers in “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” By preventing or, rather,
by deflecting the impact of the shock, this protective shield saves conscious-
ness from experiencing the everyday of modernity as one unrelenting trauma.
This necessary parrying of shock by consciousness carries a heavy cost accord-
ing to Benjamin. In order for the defense against shock to work properly, po-
tentially traumatic experiences must be emptied of their content and trans-
formed into less meaningful events. Benjamin describes this process in the
following passage: “The greater the share of the shock factor in particular im-
pressions, the more constantly consciousness has to be alert as a screen against
stimuli; the more efficiently it does so, the less do these impressions enter ex-
perience (Erfahrung), tending to remain in the sphere of a certain hour in one’s
life (Erlebnis).”79 What distinguishes successful from unsuccessful parrying of
shock, Erlebnis from Erfahrung, is the presence or lack of an accompanying
Schreck, or fright, horror, terror, to the impression. Horror is to be distinguished
in this context from fear (Angst or Furcht). Fear steadies the subject before
impact, serving to deflect the full extent of a potentially traumatic impression.
As Benjamin continues, it is only in the absence of such reflection that “the
joyous or (usually) joyless horror sets in which . . . confirms the failure of the
shock defense.”80 Benjamin’s focus is indeed upon such failures. They form the
foundation of his aesthetic theory of the experience of modernity because they
are experienced directly, as it were, rather than mediated by waking conscious-
ness. Through a short-circuit of the psyche, the Schreck cum shock is able to
inscribe itself in the unconscious, making possible, but not guaranteeing, a
retroactive revealing of the horrifying truth of the subject’s position. The para-
dox is that because this experience occurs without the knowledge of the sub-
ject, such liberating truth remains largely inaccessible to the conscious mind
and the attempt to access it directly remains fraught with difficulty and, per-
haps, impossibility.
Benjamin worked to expose examples of these unlikely successes in the
poetry of Baudelaire, Proust’s mémoire involuntaire, and in film and film prac-
tices like montage. Of course, Benjamin devotes little space in his analysis to
questions concerning sound, noise, and music. Yet if he ultimately fails to take
the aural mode of experience into account, Theodor Adorno, someone as ac-
customed to thinking with his ears as with his eyes, did gesture on numerous
occasions towards the shock of musical experience.81 While at first glance
placing Adornian theory at the forefront of an analysis of the experience of jazz
in the Weimar Republic may appear as an incongruous move, particularly in
the face of his caustic criticism of jazz and the justifiable skepticism regarding
the validity of his claims regarding jazz, its purpose reflects a genuine desire to
read Adorno against the grain. To do so carries the inherent threat of circu-
itously “defending” critical theory through critical theory. I hope to avoid this
trap by reading Adorno much as he reads music, i.e., as fragmentary and in-
complete. In other words, I want to read Adorno’s writings on music, experi-
ence, and shock not so much as a theory to be applied to jazz but as a means of
opening up the question of jazz in Weimar culture to the aesthetic experience
of modernity through the figure of shock.
Adorno’s concern for musical experience is especially evident in the 1934
text, “Music in the Background,” a short feuilleton article on the fate of music
in the café.82 Taking as its object the non-object of background music, it asks
how music is experienced when it is no longer heard; music in the background
is defined for Adorno by the fact that “you don’t have to listen to it.”83 Driven
into the margins of society by the sound film, recorded music, and the radio,
the live music of the café carries on with a meager existence in much the same
way as the once-glorious arcades of the nineteenth century lingered on in the
early twentieth. Adorno writes:
Nowhere has music become so wholly appearance as in the café. But in

appearance, it is preserved. It must, or so it seems, be thus emancipated
from all human seriousness and all genuineness of artistic form if it is still
to be tolerated by human beings amidst their daily affairs without fright-
ening [erschrecken] them. But it is its appearance that lights up for them.
No—that lights them up. They do not change in it, but their image changes.
It is brighter, sharper, more clearly defined. When café music falls silent,
it sounds as if a miserly waiter is turning off a couple of electric bulbs.

Background music is an acoustic light source.84
What Adorno argues for in this passage is the unconscious power of such mu-
sic, not only as object in the background, but as source of knowledge, of expe-
rience qua Erfahrung. If it does not (yet) do so in the sense of a Benjaminian
shock, then one nevertheless recognizes in it remnants of experience in the
strong sense. Music in the background has become appearance, has been pro-
tected against and removed from the everyday so that it will no longer terrify
the subject. Yet such distance, its separation from the seriousness and genuine-
ness of the concert hall, marks but one determinant of this music’s transforma-
tion into appearance and light. The music that resounds here is constructed
from the remnants of the past: potpourris of works by Puccini, Grieg, and
Tchaikovsky. Described by Adorno as “dissolved works, by those once-famous,
then forgotten masters,” such compositions are proper for the background be-
cause their unconscious familiarity makes no demands on the listener.85 These
works continue to exist only as musical ruins stitched together for the moment
of performance. And yet: “The joints between the brittle sounds into which
they are layered are not firmly bonded. Through them shimmers the mysterious
allegorical appearance that arises whenever fragments of the past come to-
gether in an uncertain surface.”86 What interests Adorno in the music of the
café are these tears and rough edges. For him, these imperfections imbue café
music with an enigmatic luminescence. Their light puzzles, much like Vexier-
bilder, or puzzle pictures, those objects of fascination for Adorno and Benja-
min, in that it can be read two ways: manifestly as a sign of decay and demise
or allegorically as an illumination of the dreams of the past. “However dimly,”
the musical ruins of the café illuminate for Adorno, as Richard Leppert puts it,
“what might have been.”87 Unlike filmic shock in Benjamin, such illumination,
pointing not towards the present, let alone the future, can only exist as other-
worldly, or, more precisely, as netherworldly. “But it is not a black shadow,”
Adorno continues, “rather a bright one, like milk glass.”88 The shadow of his-
tory cast by such music is bright because these are soothing spirits of the past
and do not disrupt the spell of the present. The moment of fright and thus shock
is therefore missing here and the musical fragments listeners hear are “quoted
from the unconscious memory of the listeners, not introduced to them.”89
Yet music in the background is not always so easily absorbed or parried.
At times, it can unexpectedly inspire moments of horror, particularly when the
listener becomes aware of the absence present within it. This takes place when
the music travels, via the background, beyond the protection of consciousness
to strike the listener. The means by which music may do so remains unclear. As
Albrecht Riethmüller suggests, much of Adorno’s writing on music and experi-
ence during this period remains largely gestural.90 Such a moment is, however,
described by Adorno in the conclusion to “Music in the Background.” He
writes: “Anyone who, moved, yet startled [aufschreckt] out of his conversation
or thoughts, and who looks in that direction [i.e., of the performers], is trans-
formed into Georg Heym’s suburban dwarf: ‘he looks up to the great green bell
of heaven, where silent meteors cross far away.”91 Here is presaged the dis-
tracted viewing of Benjamin’s cinema viewer, yet with a difference. It is not
the content of the music that frightens the listener, but the absence it signifies.
True, the music may continue, but it has activated a gaze which looks in vain
for the object of its desire, for an origin that no longer, if ever, existed. Surely,
the poor musicians performing in the café towards whom the gaze is directed
will not quench the listener’s desire. And this is Adorno’s point. Such moments
transform the listener’s perception of the world from the oceanic calm of non-
existence into a melancholic awareness of lack. But it is an awareness that can
be rendered into a form of knowledge about the present. The meteors of the
past are silent only from a distance, that is to say, the present, and in remember-
ing, the listener can re-experience that which once was not but might have
been.
Perhaps it is all too understandable that Adorno remains silent about con-
temporary music in this Nazi-era piece about the silencing of music. Yet near
the end, he remarks: “Strange that the new dances don’t want to fit in, either.
Their function is too fresh for them to allow themselves to be used as back-
ground yet.”92 Implicit within this statement is that the new dance music, a
common code word for jazz at the time, was not yet fully incorporated into the
protective shield of consciousness, and that it was still, if only slightly so for
Adorno, shocking in a more immediate way. The remnant of shock contained
within the new dances could be furthered, by ripping them from their context
and placing them into a new constellation through the principle of montage
construction. In his 1932 “On the Social Situation of Music,” Adorno discusses
at length the role of montage in contemporary music and elucidates his thoughts
through analysis of the music of Kurt Weill. Musical montage for Adorno re-
sults from the interpolation and transformation of both popular and classical
compositional practices and clichés through which new relationships within
the music and of the music to the audience can be created. Though Adorno is
ultimately critical of this technique, his criticism is directed not against its im-
mediate impact but its sustainability. The type of musical montage created
through Weill’s style:
abrogates the “organic” surface structure of neo-classicism and moves

together rubble and fragment or constructs actual compositions out of
falsehood and illusion, as which the harmony of the nineteenth century
has today been revealed, through the addition of intentionally false notes.
The shock with which Weill’s compositional practices overexposes com-
mon compositional means, presenting them as ghosts, becomes horror
[Schrecken] about the society within which they have their origin and, at
the same time, it becomes a negation of the possibility of a positive com-
munal music, which collapses in the laughter of the devilish vulgar music
as which true music is exposed.93
As with the music of the café, Weill’s music is constructed from the ruins of the
musical past. At the same time, Weill’s music differs qualitatively from the
music of the café in that it is suffused with the very modernity disavowed by
the latter. While the performers in the café seek to soothe through immediate
quotation from the listener’s musical unconscious, Weill’s music intends the
opposite: namely, to awaken the audience to its own unconscious by showing
them “their own ‘use’ music in the distorting mirror of his artistic method.”94
Such conscious application of shock, however, transforms the nature of its
experience for Adorno. While in the café the moment of horror is accidental,
perhaps unlikely, here it is built into the very structure of the music itself.
Adorno distinguishes this form of shock through the concept of overexposure,
which serves to indicate that the glow of Weill’s music is an artificial form of
the netherworldly glow possessed by the music of the café. Rather than critiqu-
ing him, Adorno praises Weill for this achievement, writing: “It is beyond
question that Weill’s music is today the only music of genuine social-polemic
impact; which it will remain as long as it resides at the height of its negativ-
ity.”95 Yet in order for the artificial shock to retain the power of its punch, it
must remain unrelentingly negative, dealing blow after blow lest it succumb to
the deadening effects of repetition and the power of presence.
Indeed, the punch, as it were, of art is something Adorno took quite liter-
arily. In the aphorism “Special Edition” from Minima Moralia, where Adorno
returns to the complex of shock and experience, he writes: “Baudelaire’s po-
etry is filled with the type of flash that is seen by a closed eye when it is struck.
The idea of the new is itself as phantasmagorical as this light.”96 Adorno’s
metaphor reveals the pain that often lies implicit in discussions of shock: with
little protection other than a thin layer of equally fragile skin, the blow to the
eye is a particularly debilitating experience. Equally central here is that the
light, or knowledge, produced by both Baudelaire’s and Weill’s works is of a
phantasmagorical nature, an unreal, if still powerful, afterimage of the suffer-

ing of the individual. Maintaining this effect obviously requires tremendous
energies, and it is the endurance of Weill’s montages that Adorno doubts most.
Thus it is that the critique of the popular (and classical) achieved in the Weill’s
Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera) metamorphoses into its opposite at the
precise moment the audience “peacefully consumes the songs . . . as hit
tunes.”97 Intentioned shock, then, easily falls victim to its own success, its
shock effect eventually becoming as unpredictable and unlikely as the ghostly
music of the café.
Adorno’s theory of sonic experience and aural shock, though obviously
indebted to Benjamin, possesses some distinct advantages in terms of the anal-
ysis of the jazz experience during Weimar. For one, his thoughts shed greater
light on the corporeal dimension of these experiences. Second, as Riethmüller
correctly notes, Adorno is not so much interested in the issue of the artist’s or
composer’s shock as he is in the reception of such music, i.e., its impact on the
listener.98 As we will see, this emphasis on the experience of the listener, on the
pain that music can inflict, is especially germane to comprehending the Ger-
man experience of jazz and Wooding’s jazz in particular. In addition, Adorno’s
atmospheric description of music’s impact on the listener speaks to the indirect
and diffuse effects of the music felt by its listeners. This diffusion of effect will
be especially important in dealing with the afterlife of shock. By remaining
sensitive both to the immediate light of recognition and to the ghostly, phantas-
magorical afterlife of aural shock, Adorno’s understanding opens up new inter-
pretive possibilities for reading the lasting image of Wooding’s music in Wei-
mar culture.
Hearing Sam Wooding in May 1925
Given jazz’s function within broader German cultural discourse and its asso-
ciation with modernity’s dangers and dreams, let us now turn to the critics’ and
audience’s reaction to Wooding’s music. Reviews of the performance appeared
in the socialist, liberal, conservative, and even Russian-language press in Ber-
lin.99 As might be imagined, reviewers reacted differently to the show, depend-
ing upon their political and aesthetic leanings, as well as their professional fo-
cus, be it theater, entertainment, or music. While some focused on the dancers
and the show’s effectiveness as a theatrical production, others discussed the
group in relation to racial difference and, in the socialist press, racial and class
solidarity.100 Even with these differences in focus and quality, taken as a whole
these many reviews represent a unique moment in the public discussion of and
encounter with jazz and African American jazz in Weimar Germany. Still, be-
fore coming to the German reaction to Wooding and the Chocolate Kiddies,
mention must be made of Wooding’s reaction to the German audience. Long
after the premiere, Wooding recounted his impression of the initial moments
after “By the Waters of Minnetonka,” this standard of the symphonic jazz rep-
ertoire and, by today’s standards, a relatively sedate offering.
The last notes of the overture faded away into silence. Silence, stark si-
lence. [ . . . ] Then . . . the silence was shattered as, like a clap of thunder,
the audience erupted into a wild demonstration of foot-stamping and
shouting: ‘Bis! Bis! Nochmal! Hoch! Bravo! Bis! Bis!’ over and over
again, sounding like the roaring of a large pack of angry and hungry lions.
The musicians didn’t understand a word of German and knew even less
about local customs. The conglomeration of sound was so great that the
word ‘Bis!’— a way of showing approval in German— sounded like
‘beast’ to them and they thought the audience was shouting: ‘beast!
beast!’ and were out for blood. [ . . . ] But after the foot-stamping and
shouting continued for nearly five minutes and nobody has attacked us
physically or thrown anything at us, we then realized that the audience
was giving us an ovation. Our fright turned to confidence.101
This anecdote gives a sense of both the performers’ and audience’s state of
unpreparedness and the difficulties of intercultural communication between
African American performers and their German and European audiences. The
few beats of silence that followed the end of the first song suggest that many in
the audience were simply unsure how to react, how they were supposed to react
to this music, in this setting. The applause that followed, however, functioned
as a release of anxiety and enabled audience and performers to coalesce in their
communal experience and enjoyment of jazz.
Such collective experience recalls the work of music critic Paul Bekker on
the gesellschaftsbildende Kraft (“socially-creative power”) of symphonic mu-
sic. If the connection at first seems far fetched, it is important to remember that
Wooding was performing a symphonic jazz concert. Bekker writes in his 1918
Die Sinfonie von Beethoven bis Mahler (The Symphony from Beethoven to
Mahler) that the symphony possesses the faculty “to create a unified, distinctly
individual being from the chaotic mass of the public, when in the moment of
listening, of aesthetic experience, it recognizes itself moving towards an indi-
visible unity with identical impressions and identical goals. It is this commu-
nity forming capacity of the work of art that first determines its significance
and its value.”102 In its jubilant response, Wooding’s audience opened itself up
to the experience of jazz and, in so doing, ceased to be mere spectator and, at
least to one reviewer, became part of the performance itself. “Here the people’s
applause is no longer a response to the stage,” wrote Oscar Bie, “rather it has
already become a part of the ubiquitous noise that belongs to all of this and
which strengthens the sensation.”103 As Fritz Zielesch summarized, audience
members left in an exhausted state, as if they had themselves performed, due to
the energy expended throughout the performance. “Already within the first few
minutes there was applause mid-scene and hurricanes of cheering blew from
every corner of the gigantic room. This taxing of our nerves continued for
hours through the overabundance of acoustic and optic noise and the overabun-
dance of repetition of similar scenes. Many an audience member staggered
away, as if broken (wie zerschlagen hinauswankte).”104 Similarly, in what is
likely the last article from Berlin written in response to the show’s original run,
Artur Michel noted: “Already by the end of the prelude, one is so physically
(körperlich-motorisch) agitated that one can hardly sit still.”105 The totalizing
effect of the audience’s response added a synergistic component to the overall
experience of the music. For Kurt Pinthus, who described Wooding’s band as
Berlin’s first experience with “a true Negro jazz band that plays for Negroes”
and as “the best band that ever played in Berlin,” Wooding’s jazz was the
“binding element of this Negro show.”106 He continued: “Without this music it
[the revue] would collapse into many, individual variety and cabaret numbers.”
Jazz, as element of Wooding’s concert and as accompaniment to the show, ap-
peared capable of melding the listener with the music and, at times, even with
the world.
That the performance engendered such a sense of community and in the pro-
cess elicited powerful emotions can be glimpsed in the longevity of the impression
it made on audience members. As was noted in the introduction, the experience of
Wooding profoundly impacted Alfred Lion, who went on to cofound Blue Note
Records. Here, I want to return to Lion’s later recollection of this experience he had
as a teenager in order to analyze Lion’s experience of Wooding as typical, rather
than exceptional. Lion recalled of his initial impression:
It was the first time I saw colored musicians and heard the music. I was
flabbergasted . . .—It was something brand new, but it registered with me
right away. . . . I couldn’t really put my fingers[sic] on it, but it was the
beat, you know. It was the beat. That beat . . .—it got into my bones.107
This description of the music as affecting the entire body of the listener was an
important trope of the reviews at the time as well, even if it could lead, as here,
to an implicit denial of the previous presence of Black performers. As it had in
1921, the music seemed to enter into and possess one’s body, to get into your
bones as Lion puts it. This was often expressed through a deflection of such
possession onto the musician, while at other times it remained with the listener,
as in the case of Lion. Klaus Pringsheim, who wrote glowingly of the music in
Das Tage-Buch, remarked: “the world a twitching whirlwind (zuckender
Wirbelsturm)—the demonic power that grips these people, when their rhythm
drives into their limbs: no, we never imagined anything like that.”108 Another
reviewer wrote generally of the revue: “you’re swept away, lashed (aufge-
peitscht), fall into rapture and for three hours outside of yourself.”109
Due to the energy of the music, the frenetic rhythm of the show, the danc-
ers, and the combined effect on the audience, a sense of overstimulation and
eventual exhaustion can be found in response to Wooding and the Chocolate
Kiddies. Indeed, many, though hardly all, reviewers felt tortured by the tempo
and music of the revue, regardless of whether the overall impression was posi-
tive or negative.110 In the view of conservative critic Adolf Stein, for example,
the relentless drive of the show became excruciating: “But to this music that
issued torturously forth for two and a half hours, they dance unceasingly.”111
Or in the mixed review from the Berliner Tageblatt: “In the long run, it is hor-
rendously exhausting, but it is by no means boring.”112 Finally, Erich Urban,
writing in the BZ am Mittag recommended the show, but only for those with
robust nerves or with a desire to be tortured: “It hammers, bangs, drums as if
against the skull!”113 These various remarks hint at the level of conscious exer-
tion necessitated by the experience of jazz. In the Benjaminian vocabulary of
shock, we might say that jazz, here Wooding’s jazz, could not be easily parried,
swept aside by consciousness. This ascription of mercilessness to the music
and show by the reviewers can be read as a reflection of their inability to pro-
cess the sound of jazz within received categories of musical understanding.
The seemingly awkward fit of jazz music to listeners’ expectations raised the
further question of categorization, that is to say whether jazz should be consid-
ered as music at all.
The reviewer to treat this question most directly was Herwarth Walden in
Die Weltbühne. Walden begins his review cryptically, noting: “The world has
seen again and again (noch und noch) in the Admirals-Palast.”114 His oblique
reference is to the title of the first Tiller Girls revue, Noch und Noch (More and
More) from 1924, and throughout the piece, he will use the Tiller Girls (and their
legs) to construct an opposition between their mechanized precision and the

“primitive” vitality of the Chocolate Kiddies. “Are the people really so blind,” he
asks further down, “that they see the legs of the female Creoles? Do they really
only think about their legs? Do they not see the formed movements, to which the
legs merely serve as an artificial body? Whoever only sees legs here is looking
for female artists not art.”115 In this passage, Walden frames the focus on the legs
of the Tiller Girls as resulting from the fragmenting of the senses under moder-
nity, in particular the separation of sound and vision in European art. By contrast,
the legs of the dancers in the Chocolate Kiddies cannot be separated from their
bodies; according to Walden, they remain integrated and retain meaning only as
part of a totality of movement and sound. Walden specifically imagines such a
unification of the external world and art occurring in the revue’s music.
And all of the sudden Sam Wooding and his Orchestra are sitting on the
stage. Without notes. Through the room swing sounds of whooshing,
howling, groaning, quacking, bawling, murmuring, whining, rattling,
clanging. Sounds ring out and are joined together to form an organism.
Formed movement, thus art. It is not the sound (Ton) that makes the
music. Where sound is missing, the concept of noise appears. Music,
however, is not to be conceptualized, it is to be heard. One does not hear
music, when thinking of noise.116
Walden here describes the music of jazz not through musical concepts, but by
invoking an amalgam of the sounds of modernity. The sound of jazz is for him
all encompassing, like the experience of the street, but with the distinction that
in it noise has become art. Yet precisely because it remains closer to noise than
European art music, jazz is uniquely capable of uniting this cacophony into art
for Walden. It swirls and swings through the acoustic space like the howling of
the siren or the clanging of the train, unfettered by the restrictions of form. Bie,
as well, likened jazz to the noise of the metropolitan street. On that evening in
the Admiralspalast, one could, he writes, “hear the great noise of the world that
otherwise only weakly resounds from the newspapers, the true joy of the world
in drumming, screaming, dancing, singing, and jumping, without any content,
just like it is on this earth.”117 Obviously, while many reviewers connected jazz
to noise, not all connected it with art. In the conservative Neue Preußische
Zeitung, the show was also described as “overwhelming” and “noisy,” but ulti-
mately this was a function of the performers’ race “and therefore not art.”118
Still, what both Bie and Walden suggest in their accounts is a view of jazz
as a method of conceptualizing the sense and non-sense of noise. For Jacques
Attali, noise is both repressive and liberatory, in a word, for Attali “noise is
violence.”119 Like shock for Benjamin and Adorno, noise in Attali acts as a
disruption of received codes of meaning, which are often experienced as pain-
ful. Yet noise for Attali is neither natural nor ahistorical. “Noise,” he argues,
“does not exist in itself, but only in relation to the system within which it is
inscribed: emitter, transmitter, receiver. Information theory uses the concept of
noise . . . in a more general way: noise is the term for a signal that interferes
with the reception of a message by a receiver, even if the interfering signal it-
self has a meaning for that receiver.”120 Attali’s argument demonstrates that the
view of jazz as noise has nothing to do with jazz as unintelligible or chaotic.
Jazz could appear as noise only because it seemed indecipherable within the
existing system of musical meaning; it was precisely this unintelligibility that
made jazz so meaningful in terms of relating it to modernity and modernism.
Through the idea of noise, the shock imparted to the listener upon the first
hearing of jazz could be made to resonate with the shock of the initial hearing
of the mechanical press, car horn, or jackhammer. By making meaning of jazz
through the idea of noise, audience members like Lion and reviewers like Bie
and Walden were able to reactivate the alienating and painful sounds of the
metropolis, leaving them “broken” as we saw earlier. In this way, one can un-
derstand the description of jazz as noise as acting to bridge the gap between the
audience’s system of aesthetic understanding, music, and modernity, to see in
this music a possibility of what Attali calls “the symphony of the future.”121
Yet if the initial experience of jazz shook the consciousness of the Ger-
man public, breaking through the protective shield of consciousness to form a
unifying experience, the ecstatic rapture found in reviews by Bie, Walden, and
others did not maintain itself over the course of the next five years, something
foretold by critic Fritz Zielesch. He maintained in his review that the success
of the Chocolate Kiddies was a one-time occurrence and that “a second troupe
of this kind will certainly be met with cooler heads.”122 In point of fact, after
another African American revue Black People premiered in July 1926, one re-
viewer noted that two years ago the audience would have been taken with the
show but continued: “Now, however, after we’ve seen and heard the ‘Chocolate
Kiddies’ and their incomparable Sam Wooding, the lightning image that cha-
otically flashes (chaotisch vorüberzuckende Blitzbild) before us hardly has any
noticeable, unmitigated impact.”123 More generally, shortly after the Chocolate
Kiddies made a return visit to Berlin in 1926, Kurt Weill wrote:
Jazz is not created when one mechanically plays a syncopated rhythm in

two-two time. The music of Negroes, which forms the basis of the jazz
band, is composed of a complexity of rhythm, of a harmonic care, of a

tonal and modulatory wealth that most of our light orchestras simply
cannot bring about. Now we have heard for a few weeks a real jazz band
nightly on the radio: Ernö Rapée’s Jazz-Symphoniker.124 If one mea-
sures it against the magisterial jazz bands of the Negro revues, even this
organization still lacks the sophistication of the latter. But it neverthe-
less exhibits that stomping confusion (stampfendes Durcheinander) of
saxophones, jazz drums, and muted trumpets, that unleashed rhythm,
that improvised humor, which the jazz band alone makes tolerable. Ev-
erything else offered by the Funkstunde125 in terms of dance music is
only a surrogate.126
Though Weill like Bie, Walden, and the others draws here upon the vocabulary
of the jazz experience, his language is already more precise, more subdued.
More importantly, the exhaustion and torture associated with the jazz band has
become tolerable in his account. Thus, while Weill’s language contains a trace
of the first, painful experience of jazz, of noise, and of the street, his descrip-
tion has already slipped past the dialectic of pain and pleasure witnessed within
the first reviews and has moved into the realm of more detached observation
and description.
Weill’s analysis is part of the beginning of a more sober analysis of jazz
that fully set in only after Wooding’s initial performances and which becomes
more pronounced after the visit of the “King of Jazz,” Paul Whiteman, to Ber-
lin discussed in the following chapter. This shift in the function of the Weimar
experience of jazz is brought into focus in a 1927 essay by composer Karol
Rathaus, himself composer of a jazz-influenced opera Fremde Erde (Foreign
Soil).127 Rathaus explores in this short text whether jazz is in a process of de-
cline, whether a “Jazzdämmerung,” or “twilight of jazz,” as he entitles his ar-
ticle from Die Musik, is currently afoot.128 He begins by asserting the history
of jazz is for the most part well known to Germans and later asserts that Euro-
peans know jazz is African American in origin.129 What interests Rathaus at
this point is not primarily how jazz is practiced or what it is. Rather, what he
strives to explain are the psychological conditions under which jazz became
popular first in the United States and then in Europe.
He begins by rejecting the commercial, “civilized” jazz performed in Ger-
many’s café houses, seeing it as a direct byproduct of American civilization, in
which the rhythm of production dominates over mental and spiritual work.
From America,
came (and come) almost all forms of life in finished form, the express
culture devours more than it can absorb, hypertrophy of the ability to ab-
sorb led already long ago to the record, to the victory of achievement
perceivable by the senses over the spiritual value to be embraced. With
movingly ruthless honesty, with which America professes its faith in Ma-
terie, it created the most favorable conditions for jazz.130
To this static and oppressive version, he counterpoises another type of jazz, one
that could combat the very same instrumental rationality now conspiring to
create a type out of the individual. He writes: “We only received a correct idea
of jazz from the Negroes. Chocolate Kiddies, the revue of Josephine Baker and
Black People brought us to the edge of the source. Here, jazz reached a state of
perfection as a result of their deep state of rootedness.”131 And: “While Amer-
ica has led to the lifeless Whiteman Orchestra, which is unable to develop, the
opposing path of Europe led to the simple ‘Negro spirituals.’”132
Rathaus’ vision of European culture admits jazz into its vocabulary only
as an idealized return to an organic primitivity. In this cul-de-sac of European
subjectivity, the role of the African American begins to recede behind an im-
penetrable aura of authenticity. Paradoxically, however, it is the perfect authen-
ticity of African American jazz that now makes it expendable.
Because we are familiar with jazz, because over the course of approxi-
mately twelve years jazz has conquered the ground of the entire civilized
world, because it is now danced and sung unproblematically (wider-
spruchlos) . . . because we have eavesdropped on all the secrets of its in-
strumentation and can use them freely, because one must no longer fight
over jazz—now one begins to speak of a twilight of jazz.133
Jazz no longer holds the secrets it once did in 1921, in 1925: African American
jazz has been studied and incorporated into European art music, while resis-
tance to the materialist jazz of white America grows. In a word, for Rathaus,
the European has listened to jazz’s siren song, and now that the European has
done all this, has been tempted without falling into temptation, its usefulness
has come to an end. As Rathaus concludes on an ambiguous note: “behind all
great events, movements, and people stands history. It has already absorbed
jazz, now it goes unwaveringly (unbeirrt)—onward.”134
This transformation of jazz from aural shock into cultural background
music pervades Hans David’s 1930 “Farewell to Jazz,” one of a group of depar-
tures from jazz written by critics in the early 1930s.135 Like other documents
written during the end phase of the Weimar Republic, David’s text takes a
critical tack vis-à-vis jazz. Yet it interests here because its point of departure is
a return visit to Berlin by Sam Wooding.136 David begins by suggesting that
Wooding’s original 1925 performances have stuck within German conscious-
ness as exceptional. He writes,
Five years ago we heard him for the first time. He led the orchestra of the
“Chocolate Kiddies,” one of the great Negro revues. The theatrical
achievements of the “chocolate children” were not bad, even if the troupe
lacked a talented performer of [Josephine] Baker’s caliber. More than
anything else, there were a few transitional concert pieces in the musical
interlude which have adhered to our memory (im Gedächtnis haften) as
amazing and fascinating. And for a long time memory has likewise busied
itself with the achievements of the accompanying orchestra, the form of
its leader, an animal-like, fanatical musician.137
David’s commentary is more than merely demonstrative of the continued im-

portance of Wooding. Cleaving to German cultural and individual memory
alike, in 1930, Wooding’s performances were still able to draw upon the power
of the original experience. This laudatory tone, however, quickly turns into one
of memorialization. To David, jazz has lost its novelty and, more importantly,
its role in avant-garde art.
It is not to be feared that jazz as a unique form will diminish in use; but its
captivating technique which appeared at first to be of interest to the more
intellectual person is presently losing the hint (Beiklang) of meaningful-
ness that was attached to it as long as it contained within it progress and a
qualitatively different future. People forget quickly: soon one will see in
jazz nothing more than a neutral form of dance composition. Jazz is be-
coming a musical complex that may be useful and perhaps necessary . . .
but it is a complex whose intellectual, artistic power has been extin-
guished. In this sense it is valid to bid farewell to jazz.138
What jazz has lost for David is the capacity to point towards the future through
an aestheticization of the experience of the present. The noise that was attached
to the original experience of jazz has subsided and the shock of jazz has be-
come a memory, or ghost. Like the performances of the forgotten masters in
the café, jazz in general and Wooding’s music as well now seems to wash si-
lently over the audience, recalling a distant and subdued past as opposed to the
turbulent present. But the critical turn against jazz by David and others ought
not be read as but a reflection of the music’s failure in Germany. The experi-
ence of Wooding’s jazz that presented itself to those thousands of Berliners in
1925, not to mention the Frankfurters, Hamburgers, Danzigers, Leipzigers,
Dresdeners, could, after all, still be felt in 1930. The general dismissal of jazz
as a progressive art form by German modernists might more profitably read as
a mourning of the passing of the earth-shattering power of its initial successes.
Wooding’s final appearance in the capital took place in 1930, yet even when
Wooding was not physically present in Germany, he was textually present
through repeated references to him within German jazz criticism.139 It was
through these echoes that the aural shock of modernity represented by Wood-
ing’s music could still be remembered, long after May 1925.
Yet while Wooding’s impact on the German conceptualization of jazz is at
least partially due to the duration and geographical variety of his performances
in Germany, another American jazz musician had an equally great effect on
Weimar jazz culture, yet visited Germany but once. This is Paul Whiteman.
Carrying the title of “King of Jazz” for the vast majority of audiences across
Europe and North America, Whiteman and his symphonic jazz cast a shadow
over German discussions of jazz even larger than that of Wooding. For despite
the critical view taken by music critics, Whiteman enjoyed incomparable
standing in the popular press at large and with the majority of jazz musicians
in in this period and, as I want to suggest in the next chapter, became an un-
likely model for Weimar-era novelists as well.
Chapter 3
Writing Symphonies in Jazz:

Paul Whiteman and German Literature
When I put on . . . one of the magnificent records from Paul Whiteman, I
immediately become another person. My pulse is elevated . . . , I imagine
the most colorful images and a tremendous need for action (Tatendrang)
overtakes me. I then say to myself: “You have the most magnificent sym-
phonies by Mozart and by Bruckner, works that you would go through fire
for. . . . And yet—this fantastical effect the music of the jazz band has, you
still haven’t felt that with any of them.”
—Jaap Kool (1924)
Symphony and jazz existed at the center of much of the debate about musical
culture during the Weimar Republic, in particular through the controversial
practice of jazzing the classics, be they Mozart, Beethoven, or Wagner.1 To-
gether, the pair formed what could often seem like a self-writing script of Ger-
man jazz criticism—both for the music’s proponents as well as its opponents—
pitting an almost sacred symphonic tradition against a profane and racially
other jazz. Of course, what made the combination of the terms so evocative
was that cultural, musical, and aesthetic developments were constantly threat-
ening to bring the two into ever-closer proximity. As the above statement by
ethnomusicologist Jaap Kool hints at, symphony and jazz seemed to exist in
worlds apart, yet they were also worlds that seemed to be in a constant state of
collision. This meant that in many instances, neither jazz nor symphony could
be thought of in this period without also invoking its other, and perhaps no
greater representation of their collision existed than the musical genre of sym-
phonic jazz. Most closely associated with the white American bandleader Paul
Whiteman, from at least 1926 onward, symphonic jazz dominated the German
jazz scene while at the same time shaping German musical culture in innumer-
able ways.
Still, the importance of symphonic jazz to Weimar culture goes far beyond
84
Writing Symphonies in Jazz 85
its role in German popular music. Beyond this, symphonic jazz and its promise
of unifying tradition with modernity (and vice versa) became especially attrac-
tive to Weimar-era novelists. Just as composers like Ernst Krenek attempted
jazz operas, novelists tried their hand at producing jazz novels. Czech-born
Hans Janowitz’s Jazz. Roman (Jazz. A Novel) (1927), Alsatian René Schick-
ele’s Symphonie für Jazz (Symphony for Jazz) (1929), and the Swiss-Austrian
Gustav Renker’s Symphonie und Jazz (Symphony and Jazz) (1931) are each
examples of such jazz novels, or more specifically of the symphonic jazz
novel.2 Put differently, I want to suggest that each novel represents an example
of a literary response to the challenge of symphonic jazz. In this set of novels,
symphony and jazz become organizational figures around which these authors
experimented with jazz’s aesthetic potential. Significantly and unlike the mu-
sic’s use in much Weimar literature, jazz in these works acts not primarily as a
symbol of social disorder, a Dionysian, racialized, sexualized other, but as an
experimental aesthetic. In other words, these works explore, with all its atten-
dant contradictions, the idea of symphonic jazz as synthetic melding of moder-
nity and tradition, as an aesthetic capable of structuring and making manage-
able the foreign and modern.
To be sure, this pairing of jazz music and German literature may at first
seem unlikely, yet it serves two very important purposes. The first is to rethink
symphonic jazz and its meaning for German jazz culture. While Whiteman’s
name is by no means unknown, the popularity of the corpulent, white White-
man during the 1920s regularly serves as proof that Germans did not listen to
and/or were unfamiliar with African American jazz. If this argument is an im-
portant corrective to anachronistic visions of Weimar Germans listening to
Louis Armstrong, James P. Johnson, or Fletcher Henderson, as we saw in the
previous chapter, by the mid-1920s, African American jazz was routinely felt
to be more representative of authentic jazz than white American jazz, albeit for
vastly different reasons than today. Yet, the stakes of Whiteman’s symphonic
jazz during this period were simultaneously greater and less than was recog-
nized by Weimar critics: greater because symphonic jazz’s influence extended
beyond popular music and less because Whiteman’s jazz was hardly the only
way by which Weimar Germans came into contact with the music.
Tellingly, such dismissals of Whiteman stand largely in parallel to current
judgment regarding the Weimar-era jazz novels of Janowitz, Schickele, and
Renker, which aside from isolated treatments have been for the most part ig-
nored within general accounts of the period’s literature.3 Separately, these
works are the isolated endeavor of a one-time novelist (Janowitz), a minor
work by a major author (Schickele), or the conservative rant of an author ob-
sessed with racial and cultural purity (Renker). Yet when read together as a set
of novels responding to the aesthetic challenge of symphonic jazz, an entirely
new sense of their significance emerges. In their common focus on the relation-
ship between symphony and jazz as a means of engaging with modernism,
literary and otherwise, they stand as an index not only of the wide-ranging in-
fluence of Whiteman but of the profound ways by which jazz affected German
culture in the 1920s. In other words, they propel jazz in German literature be-
yond the superficial and gesture towards the music’s presence at a formal and
structural level. Or to speak with a language indebted to jazz itself, these au-
thors use symphony and jazz not as a self-writing script but as a jazz standard:
a well-known, popular melody, onto which each author sought to produce a
new version through improvisation, variation, and addition. Writing sympho-
nies in jazz, each attempted to carve out a space within the center and, in so
doing, gave birth to a new literary genre, the symphonic jazz novel.
It is significant here that this literary genre owes its existence not only to
the American Whiteman but to three novelists from the margins, geographi-
cally and culturally. Because of jazz’s transnational and geographically inde-
terminate position, figures like Janowitz, Schickele, Renker and many others
seem to have been particularly attracted to jazz as an object of identification
and self-expression. As had Grosz and Dix in the early 1920s, these figures use
jazz, their encounters with and representations of the music, as a means of
symbolically creating a new German culture into which they not only fit but
have a hand in creating.
Paul Whiteman in Berlin
Still, their experiments owe a great debt to the idea and form of Paul White-
man’s symphonic jazz. Before looking at Janowitz, Schickele, and Renker, it is
first necessary to examine Whiteman’s project as well as the reaction to his
music in Germany following his Berlin concerts of June 1926. Born in Denver,
Colorado, to a local music teacher, Whiteman’s early life was spent far away
from traditional centers of early jazz music in New Orleans, Chicago, or New
York.4 It was only in 1918, he notes in Jazz, a 1926 work coauthored with Mar-
garet McBride, that he first heard the music: “My whole body began to sit up
and take notice. It was like coming out of blackness into bright light. [ . . . ] I
wanted to dance. I wanted to sing. I did them all. Raucous? Yes. Crude—
undoubtedly. Unmusical—sure as you live. But rhythmic, catching as the
small-pox and spirit-lifting. That was jazz then.”5 Soon thereafter, he quit his
work for the symphony and turned to playing popular music and jazz. Despite
early setbacks (including being fired for not being able to play jazz correctly),
he eventually became a sought-after arranger of popular jazz-influenced music
on the American West Coast.6 Out of this early success, he was offered a job
playing at the Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City, where the Victor Recording
Company discovered and signed him. In August 1920, he recorded “Whisper-
ing,” with its B-side “Japanese Sandman.” This recording is said to have sold
more than a million copies and made Whiteman a national and international
star. As discussed earlier, Whiteman’s music had an almost immediate impact
on the German jazz scene. His “Japanese Sandman” was not only recorded by
early jazz pioneer Eric Borchard in 1921, it was also the subject of an early
treatment by the German-speaking Prague author Max Brod in 1922.7
Yet quite possibly, Whiteman would have remained one name among
many in American popular music had he not attempted his “Experiment in
Modern Music” in February 1924. There, Whiteman introduced his peculiar
fusion of jazz and symphonic music that came to be known as “symphonic
jazz.” This concert, held at New York’s prestigious Aeolian Hall, attempted to
demonstrate to an elite audience that jazz deserved to be recognized as Ameri-
ca’s classical music. As well as jazzed-up selections of popular music, it was
here that Whiteman premiered what was to become George Gershwin’s signa-
ture piece for the next decade, Rhapsody in Blue. With this concert, Whiteman
hoped to showcase the music’s transformation into something that no longer
belonged in the brothels of New Orleans’ Storyville district but in the concert
hall. This raising up of jazz also had a racial component. “My notion,” he wrote
in 1926, “is that the chief contribution of the white American to jazz so far has
been his recognition of it as legitimate music.”8 Whiteman’s attempt to sepa-
rate jazz qua legitimate art form from its African American roots and transform
it into the national music of white America has rightly been criticized.9 Yet his
view of jazz also seeks to rearticulate the relationship of American to European
culture, specifically by claiming that jazz belongs amongst the pantheon of
great national musics. In seeking to put American jazz music on par and in dia-
logue with European music, Whiteman’s aspirations were shared by many of
his contemporaries, including African Americans like Sam Wooding. To quote
Paul Allen Anderson, Whiteman was “not alone . . . in fusing vernacular source
materials with large-scale and orchestral instrumentation and scored-through
compositions. New Negro composers and concert artists were pursing a simul-
taneous campaign of syncretism, idiomatic formalization and bourgeois vindi-
cation.”10 Whiteman’s symphonic jazz should thus be understood as both ex-

ploiting Black musical traditions as well as part of the broader trend towards
greater appreciation of the aesthetic value of American music and culture.
Word of Whiteman’s successes with symphonic jazz soon spread to Ger-
many, and by 1925, German musicians were embracing this new style of mu-
sic. Not merely an idea, Whiteman’s model was copied by numerous German
musicians and arrangers of the period. Bernhard Etté, Marek Weber, Dajos
Béla, Julian Fuhs, Efim Schachmeister, and others became implicit ambassa-
dors for symphonic jazz in Germany through the numerous recordings and
performances of their “jazz symphony orchestras” (Jazz-Symphonie-
Orchester). There were many reasons for the rapid adoption of symphonic
jazz. For one, with members numbering between twenty and thirty, symphonic
jazz orchestras represent a considerable enlargement over the small group for-
mations of early jazz, common in both America and Germany during the early
1920s. The larger size of the orchestra meant employment for greater numbers
of this profession still struggling to cope with losses due to technological in-
novations like gramophone and radio. Second, symphonic jazz moved the em-
phasis away from the practice of collective improvisation, something particu-
larly difficult for the conservatory-trained musicians who made up a significant
proportion of Germany’s popular ensembles. Though in America the exactness
and precision characteristic to performances of symphonic jazz was intended
to put jazz orchestras on a level approaching that of the symphony orchestra,
classically trained German musicians were simply much better suited to this
new form. Finally, from the monetary perspective of practicing musicians, a
turn towards symphonic jazz was attractive because it was said to earn a great
deal more money. Whiteman, for example, was quoted in the German trade
journal Der Artist as saying: “Musicians who had before earned 30 to a maxi-
mum of 60 dollars a week, were paid upwards of 150 dollars a week by first-
class jazz bands.”11 For all these reasons, then, Whiteman’s brand of symphonic
jazz appeared especially attractive to Weimar-era musicians.
Still, a full two years passed before Whiteman personally presented the
case for symphonic jazz to German music critics as opposed to musicians.
By the time he reached Berlin, there was a great deal of anticipation. In fact,
no other jazz concerts of the period were as widely discussed (or publicized)
as Whiteman’s Berlin concerts. Like Sam Wooding’s performance in the Ad-
miralspalast, the site of his concerts was also significant, Erik Charell’s
Grosses Schauspielhaus. Designed by Hans Poelzig in 1919 for Max Rein-
hardt, in the mid-1920s, Charell’s theater featured mid-brow entertainment;
but with 3,200 seats, this largest theater in Europe was certainly befitting the
visiting jazz dignitary.12 Indeed, the American was feted by the German press
throughout the month of June; the Berliner Zeitung is even reported as hav-
ing hired a plane to take Whiteman on an aerial tour of the city.13 Photo-
graphs and caricatures of Whiteman were widely reprinted in the daily news-
papers, as were regular reports about the concert. For example, an image of
Whiteman playing multiple instruments adorned the cover of Lustige Blätter,
a popular illustrated magazine.14 One extreme instance of the attention allot-
ted Whiteman during his stay in Berlin occurred when a reporter submitted
an article after happening to cross paths with the jazz king on Potsdamer
Platz.15 Whiteman responded by giving numerous interviews to reporters as
well as authoring a text about himself for the Berliner Tageblatt.16 According
to Albert Henschel, who reviewed the concerts in Das Tage-Buch, Berlin was
barraged with publicity in anticipation of Whiteman’s arrival: “Placards
screamed for weeks: King of Jazz! Jazz Symphony Orchestra!”17 A report on
the Berlin concert from Paul Goldmann for the Neue Freie Presse in Vienna
noted that Whiteman’s face, his thin mustache and upper lip, were all recog-
nizable before he took the stage due to such publicity.18 Not only placards,
however. Like the Chocolate Kiddies, Whiteman also held open rehearsals
for the press and was visited by academics, as well as by the composers Ar-
nold Schoenberg and Franz Schreker.19 In addition, a competition was held
for the best German foxtrot, with the winning entry receiving its world pre-
miere during Whiteman’s final Berlin concert.20 Based on the rehearsal, the
Vossische Zeitung published an initial article praising the musical virtuosity
of Whiteman’s orchestra and the sensation about to happen in Berlin.21
By the time Whiteman reached the German capital in June 1926, he had
already enjoyed a warm welcome from other European audiences, such as in
London. Yet what Whiteman could not know was that Berlin’s music establish-
ment would approach his project not with excited anticipation but with skepti-
cism. So that while Berliners sold out his four concerts and heartily applauded
the performances, the response by Berlin’s music critics remained rather cool.
Indeed, according to one Whiteman biographer, it was in Berlin that his music
met with harsh criticism for the first time.22 The origin of such resistance is not
to be found in the German musical establishment’s rejection of American pop-
ular music or even of jazz, as the generally warm response of the press to Sam
Wooding and the Chocolate Kiddies demonstrates. Nor can the generalized
antipathy displayed by reviewers towards symphonic jazz be explained simply
by pointing towards jazz’s controversial nature in this period. Instead, as I want
to argue, the cooler reception of Whiteman’s symphonic jazz by Berlin’s music
critics can best be understood when viewed alongside the question of the per-
ceived decline of the classical European symphony in the first quarter of the
twentieth century.
This period witnessed a prolific decline in the number of symphonies pro-
duced by European composers. Against the grandiose monumentality of the
symphonic form, after 1908 and Schoenberg’s “emancipation of dissonance,”
a new generation of composers turned increasingly towards the musical minia-
ture: suites, quartets, and small ensemble chamber music. The period of prog-
ress in symphonic composition that could be located between Beethoven and
Mahler seemed to have come to an inglorious end. It was, in fact, the profes-
sional music critics, those who were most critical of Whiteman, who, accord-
ing to Karen Painter, kept the form alive as it were. Through their writings, the
symphony was imbued with even greater cultural worth than it had in the nine-
teenth century, transforming the symphony into a central cultural icon of the
early twentieth century. As Painter summarizes: “During periods of crisis in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers repeatedly turned to the
symphony and symphonic analogies to reconcile an ideal wholeness and unity
that stood opposed to the atomizing effects of democracy, industrialization,
and urbanization.”23 Out of the musical form of the symphony, these music
critics created a cultural trope meant to undergird the German musical estab-
lishment against the incursion of modernism and modernity. If the symphony
became a sign of tradition threatened, jazz was a primary symptom of that
threat. Delivered in raucous, three-minute urban miniatures, it was no less
threatening to the idea and ideal of the symphony than an atonal composition
by Schoenberg. Perhaps no greater sign of this trend away from the symphony
could be found than in the person of Mitja Nikisch. Son of the famed conductor
of Bruckner and Beethoven, Arthur Nikisch, the younger Nikisch became one
of the Weimar Germany’s best-known practitioners of symphonic jazz.24 The
stakes for German music critics were therefore high; jazz seemed to be taking
over the world, and, if the word from abroad was to be believed, Whiteman’s
symphonic jazz threatened the concert hall as well. Indeed, just after his Berlin
concerts, the satirical magazine Simplicissimus featured a caricature of the jazz
king Whiteman holding Beethoven’s death mask and commenting “There is
one thing I have on him—my music has made a lot people thin” (figure 9).25 If
the threat of jazz to the symphony is clearly lessened through the caption, the
image of Whiteman literally holding Beethoven in his hand next to a drum set
featuring Native American imagery is suggestive of jazz’s potential power over
the classical tradition in the contemporary moment.
Of course, not all of Berlin’s critics fretted over this possibility; some
modernists like Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt awaited Whiteman’s arrival more
Figure 9: Cover of satirical magazine Simplicissimus from July 5, 1926,
featuring a caricature of Paul Whiteman by Wilhelm Schulz (1865–
1952). Courtesy of Dr. Hans Zimmermann of the Herzogin Anna Ama-
lia Bibliothek Weimar.
or less with dispassion, while others like Hans Siemsen embraced the idea. On
May 28, 1926, Siemsen reworked his “Jazz-Band” article from 1921 to wel-
come the news that Whiteman would be appearing in Berlin.26 Siemsen opens
this piece by repeating certain statements from this earlier text but then adds to
it by filling in the past five years of German jazz history. Speaking of those
from the province who don’t know what a jazz band is or think it to be a trap
drum, he notes: “they still don’t know that a jazz band is nothing more than an
orchestra constructed according to new principles, whose tonal possibilities are
more complicated, richer, and adaptable (wandlungsfähiger) than those of the
old . . . orchestra.”27 He mentions Eric Borchard as the first musician who
brought real jazz to Germany and names Sam Wooding and Julian Fuhs as
further examples of authentic jazz. Rejecting the earlier clown-like perfor-
mances of drummers from the period around 1921, Siemsen ends by saying
about jazz: “There’s no more joking around. It creates real music.”28 Much in
tune with Whiteman’s own presentation to the Berlin press, jazz for Siemsen
has become a serious matter, a serious music, rather than the mere parody
thereof. As Whiteman explained to the readers of the Berliner Tageblatt: “We
don’t intend to jazz well-known pieces or, as has been done in Germany, exe-
cute jazz variations on well-known motifs. Rather, we want to create some-
thing new.”29 Distancing himself partially from the entertainment sphere tradi-
tionally understood as jazz’s rightful home, Whiteman emphasizes that he “did
not come to Europe to create a sensation for the Europeans. I’ve come to pave
the way for the development of futuristic music.”30 Whiteman, then, wanted to
show how jazz had developed into an art music in the strong sense, how it had
developed beyond an initial imitative stage and had begun to create unique
musical compositions of its own.
Likewise, Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt also authored a piece in anticipa-
tion of the concerts. Stuckenschmidt was an important liberal music critic and
part of the Berlin Dada movement. In the year 1926 alone, he defended “me-
chanical music,” wrote separate paeans to gramophones and revues, and de-
clared Sam Wooding’s jazz band the “true highlight” of the Chocolate Kiddies.
In a word, he was precisely the type of critic for whom Whiteman’s music
would seem to have been made.31 Like Siemsen and Whiteman, Stucken-
schmidt suggests that jazz has developed into an art form from the clowning
and joking present at its origins, but he also sees in this development a danger
that “this most joyous expression of contemporary humanity will go to waste
as a result of seriousness and compositional method.”32 Equally notably, he
outlined how he felt the German audience would receive Whiteman and his
attempt to elevate jazz to the concert hall as the music of the future. Analyzing
Whiteman’s place within jazz, and, in turn, jazz’s position within modern cul-
ture, Stuckenschmidt writes:
Paul Whiteman, King of jazz, accessible to Germans up to now only

through gramophone records, has to his merit that he made these princi-
ples acceptable for the concert hall.
With his orchestra . . . he deftly and with the clearest of instincts drew
symphonic consequences from jazz. In February 1924 he made a trium-
phal debut at New York’s greatest concert hall, the Aeolian Hall.
In June 1926 he will tour Germany.
Snobs will have fits of lust. Spectacles will shatter with fright. Musi-
cians will dedicate scores.
And only some will recognize: here one of the most typical emanations
of the Zeitgeist of the 20th century’s first half has been formed.33
Jazz emerges within Stuckenschmidt’s positioning of Whiteman and his sym-

phonic variant as a cool, calculated, rational emanation of modern culture. The
emotion surrounding Wooding’s appearance of but a year prior is absent, re-
placed by this reading of jazz and Whiteman as but “the most typical emana-
tions” of modern culture and society.
After weeks of preparation by newspaper articles, advertisements, and
airplane tours, Whiteman finally presented his concert program to the Berlin
public on June 26 with Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue as its centerpiece (figure
10).34 As with Wooding’s performances with the Chocolate Kiddies, the con-
cert program allows us to better understand the presentation of Whiteman’s
symphonic jazz to his audience and contextualize certain idiosyncrasies within
the reviews. Most notably, the program contains explanatory notes by noted
musicologist Hugo Leichtentritt, who based his remarks in part on Whiteman’s
recently published coauthored monograph Jazz. Over two dense pages, audi-
ence members learned of jazz’s history and aesthetic developments, and of the
virtuosity of Whiteman’s band members. Though certain grotesque, i.e., low-
cultural, excesses remain, as Leichtentritt writes in summary: “Paul Whiteman
views in jazz the first specifically American musical practice (Betätigung). He
leaves open the question of whether jazz has already been elevated to the level
of true art. He is, however, profoundly certain that jazz is doing great service
for the matter of art in America.”35 Following the introduction, two separate
concert programs are included. The first, which was the subject of almost all
critical writings, was performed on Friday, Saturday, and Monday evening, as
well as the Sunday matinee, with the second apparently offered only once on
Figure 10: Berlin program of Paul Whiteman’s Concerts at the Grosses
Schauspielhaus (1926).
Sunday evening.36 As such, I will focus here solely on the first program, a
variation of concert programs Whiteman had given previously on his European
tour.37 It began with Ferde Grofé’s “Mississippi,” which is described as a musi-
cal depiction of a trip down the Mississippi river, modulating in style as it takes
the listener south towards New Orleans in four movements. The second piece
was “Five Popular American Melodies”: the jazz standard “Tiger Rag,” Fritz
Kreisler’s “Caprice Viennois,” Zez Confrey’s “Dizzy Fingers,” “Spain,” likely
by Gus Kahn, and concluding with Ray Henderson’s “I am Sitting on Top of
the World.” The medley was followed by Chester Hazlett’s saxophone solo of
the song “Nadine” by B. Hinton. Fourth came “Castles in the Air,” and the fifth
piece was “Meet the Boys,” a standard of Whiteman concerts in which indi-
vidual band members were featured. Also included, though not listed in the
program, was Whiteman’s smash hit of 1926, “Valencia,” which was referred
to in many reviews of the concert. The program then indicated that an intermis-
sion would take place. However, this intermission, as well as the concluding
piece, a number to be picked by audience, was skipped for the premiere con-
cert, something that caused some confusion on the part of reviewers. Instead,
the program at the premiere ended with what was to be the highlight of the
concert: George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which as the notes for this
piece make clear, became famous after Whiteman debuted it as part of his Aeo-
lian Hall concert in 1924.
The premiere began at 10:00 p.m. and continued until after midnight. It
was warmly received by the audience, though according to Whiteman’s biog-
rapher, the jazz king had been particularly nervous about the reaction, given
what he perceived as the cold demeanor of the Berliners.38 Most of the reviews
that appeared over the next few days began by discussing the marketing cam-
paign that had now gone on for weeks, as well as referencing that all of Berlin
society had been present. Almost all of them praised the virtuosity and tech-
nique of the Whiteman orchestra. Equally prevalent in the reviews, however,
was their rejection of the idea that the concert demonstrated that Whiteman had
created a new art form for the future.39 Despite, or perhaps because of, the
framing of Whiteman’s concert by Stuckenschmidt and the coordinated media
campaign, Whiteman emerges in the view of Berlin’s music critics as a disap-
pointment. “Before one knows what Whiteman is,” begins the reviewer of the
Vossische Zeitung, “the concert was at an end.”40 The reviewer was amazed that
at the precise moment he had expected the concert to have an intermission, it
was over. Even more negatively, Hans Feld in the Film-Kurier maintained that
while Whiteman has created perfection in the realm of dance music, “Paul
Whiteman is no musician. For this reason, it would be better if he would refrain
from giving concerts and playing symphonies.”41 Similarly, Dr. Leopold

Schmidt wrote in the Berliner Tageblatt:
When one heard of the triumphs of Paul Whiteman and his “Symphonic
Jazz Orchestra,” there appeared to threaten danger that the boundaries
between art and artistry (Kunst und Kunstfertigkeit) could be altered. Now
we have been satisfied with our own ears by the results of the Grosses
Schauspielhaus and can be reassured. Jazz remains jazz, whether one
plays it well or poorly . . .42
Schmidt’s fear of jazz infiltrating high culture receded, as his expectations of

jazz as the music of the future were not met. As he writes, the concert “disap-
pointed those who awaited two things: jazz itself and an art developed from
jazz that was forward looking.”43 Along a somewhat different vein, the re-
viewer in the Berliner Montagspost noted of the performance: “Whiteman has
really separated jazz from dancing and it almost appears as if the public senses
the importance of this day for aesthetic production, even if the originators
themselves remain stuck in the variety theaters.”44 Referring to the continued
presence of African American and Black jazz musicians, who, other than
Wooding, could never dream of the press and attention heaped on Whiteman,
this comment is an important reminder that Whiteman’s jazz, while often the
most visible, was not the only example of jazz heard by the German public.
Returning to Whiteman’s June 1926 concerts, one can say that pace
Stuckenschmidt there were no fits of lust and spectacles did not shatter with
fright. Instead, reviewers conclude one of two things from Whiteman’s con-
cert: first, that what they heard that evening was no threat to the classical tradi-
tion, or second, that there was more symphony than jazz in Whiteman’s con-
certs. For example, the reviewer for the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger began his
review by noting that “from the perspective of music as art . . . , there is hardly
anything serious to be said about that which Mr. Whiteman and his cohort per-
form.”45 Or, as Klaus Pringsheim more pointedly wrote a short while later: “We
are thankful for the visit of Paul Whiteman because it has given us clarity about
that which our future music has to expect from jazz. It has nothing to expect
from jazz.”46 Instead of reeling back in horror or disgust at the grotesque, blas-
phemous nature of jazz, reviewers repeatedly suggest that Whiteman’s sym-
phonic jazz music is banal and backward looking. Indeed, the tone of many of
these critiques borders on mockery. “The symphonic attempts . . . point namely
in the direction of the past: ‘Mississippi’ by Ferdy [sic] Grofe towards the area
of Grieg; the ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ by George Gershwin is an extremely banal
matter, filled with romantic platitudes.”47 Or, from Schmidt: “the pair of ‘sym-
phonic’ pieces . . . , the ‘Mississippi Suite’ or the ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’—my
God, what kind of feeble (dürftig) music is that!”48 Even Oscar Bie, who had
so greatly praised Sam Wooding, said that these pieces were “undeveloped, of
thematic and tonal, rather than musical interest.”49 Finally, musicologist Walter
Schrenk, writing in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, concluded: “If jazz is to
acquire an intellectual and musical meaning apart from a technical one, then it
must first create a corpus of significant compositions. What we heard yester-
day, the ‘Mississippi’ by Grofe or ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ by Gershwin, was in-
sipid and uninspired, lacking any value whatsoever (ohne irgendeinen dis-
kutablen Wert).”50
Yet if Stuckenschmidt’s prophecy that snobs would be appalled at this
music did not come to fruition, one assertion did: namely, that a few would see
in Whiteman a prototypical example of the modern Zeitgeist. Another preva-
lent theme of the immediate reviews of Whiteman’s Berlin appearance was that
here the culture of New Objectivity, of Americanism, consumerism, and
machine-age modernity could be seen flourishing. Frank Warschauer’s article,
written seven days in advance of the concerts, typifies this tendency. For
Warschauer, jazz, however one may feel about it, is simply, objectively an el-
emental component of modern society and moralizing about its status or debat-
ing whether it is art or commerce, German or American, does little to change
this fact.
The same question always arises: whether it [jazz] is art or could some
day become art. Answer: the question either cannot be answered at all or
at least not immediately. [ . . . ] It bears repeating that the method usually
applied in Europe is pernicious: to point a pistol at every new phenome-
non with the demand that it reveal its ultimate aim and pass the test of
whether it can be designated art! 51
Yet as such calculated acceptance of jazz replaced the subjective moralizing of

writers like Schmidt, this often resulted in abstracting jazz from its individual
elements and transforming it into a mere vocalization of American society, ra-
tionalization, and modernity. In other words, Whiteman’s music and persona
were often put to the type of trite and predictable uses in the culture war of
traditionalists versus modernists that typifies many German discussions of
jazz. One example of this is an article in Der Deutsche that simulates a discus-
sion between anti-and pro-jazz critics, in part using passages from earlier tex-
tual discussions of jazz. The opponents predictably fail to reach a compromise
and, in the process, frustrate each other and the reader. As the anonymous au-
thor concludes: “In this discussion, two worlds talk across each other. For my
part, I’ll be buried with jazz.”52 Yet if the “King of Jazz” Whiteman was never
accepted by Weimar’s music critics, the remainder of this chapter will suggest
that Whiteman and his symphonic jazz did exert an influence commensurate
with his chosen moniker in another arena, namely in German literature. For it
was in the jazz novels of the period that not his music but the structure and idea
of symphonic jazz took hold.
Jazz Literature and the German Jazz Novel
Of course, an author didn’t have to be familiar with, let alone be a fan of White-
man, to include jazz in his or her works. Numerous authors of the period used
references to jazz within works from the period. From well-known authors like
Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann to lesser known authors like Bruno Frank,
Claire Goll, Vicki Baum, Hedwig Hassel, and Klaus Mann, discussions of sax-
ophones, drums, shimmies, foxtrots, Black performers, and other indicators of
the jazz milieu abound within Weimar literature.53 Even in novels featuring the
word “jazz” in their title, such as Felix Dörmann’s Jazz. Wiener Roman (Vien-
nese Novel) (1925), the music acts as little more than a surface phenomenon, a
mere reference to cultural disorder,54 rather than gesturing towards the evoca-
tive, if still ill-defined, category of jazz literature. Instead, jazz most commonly
was deployed within Weimar literature as a reified symbol of modernity.55 As
Marc Weiner summarizes: “Viewed within the cultural vocabulary of the time
as fundamentally antithetical to German cultural traditions, [jazz] both acted as
an icon of non-German forces and provided an acoustical screen for the projec-
tion of fears regarding rapid and violent political change in postwar Ger-
many.”56 For most writers, then, jazz was more often than not used as a ready-
made symbol of the present, either to be rejected or embraced.
In order to address the ways in which jazz was transformed from its use
as literary topos into a literary form in the novels of Janowitz, Schickele, and
Renker, it is first necessary to investigate what jazz literature would and could
look like to Weimar Germans. Writing in 1927, critic Friedrich Hirth attempted
to understand modern French literature as “literary (literarisierter) jazz.”57
Searching for commonalities in the post-war French literary scene, Hirth coun-
terintuitively suggests that the work of young French authors tends towards the
grand and colossal.58 He writes: “A generation that has experienced something
like the world war, can, at base, do nothing other than to aspire towards the
colossal in order not to feel minimized and overwhelmed.”59 Yet, he specifies

that these are colossuses with feet of clay: “One might be tempted to compare
the newest French writing with a symphony in which new motifs are continu-
ally arising. But it is in the essence of the symphony that in the end all motifs
and motif beginnings merge with each other. The young French writers do not
aspire to any form of merging (Zusammenfassung).”60 Instead of harmoniously
uniting individual tones, notes, sounds, and instruments, in this contemporary
French jazz literature, the independence of the individual elements is main-
tained. So that while figures and motifs may sound out simultaneously, they
remain fundamentally isolated from each other. For Hirth, this polyphony
without harmony is precisely the jazz quality of the new literature. As he writes
of his experience reading it: “One almost has the sensation of listening to a
gigantic jazz band (Riesenjazz) executed by machines.”61
Hirth’s analysis, with its diagnosis of jazz literature as narrative progres-
sion without telos is strikingly similar to Hans Janowitz’s Jazz. Roman (Jazz:
A Novel).62 To be sure, Janowitz is hardly a figure with whom most would to-
day associate jazz. Instead, he is most famous for his coauthorship with Hans
Meyer of the film Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920). Nonetheless, Janow-
itz’s jazz novel is a worthy follow-up to this masterpiece of cinematic history.
Like Caligari, the novel is richly evocative and resonant with broader modern-
ist impulses and can be said to reveal important undercurrents of German cul-
ture and society in its modernist experimentation.63 Staging the setting in the
then distant future of 1999, Janowitz’s novel begins with his narrator’s attempt
to explain the interwar period to contemporary readers living in the “United
States of Europe.” Opening the novel in clear, stylistic parody of Dickens’ A
Tale of Two Cities, the reader learns of the 1920s: “It was the time of the ‘page
boy’ hair cut, it was the time of the ‘short skirt,’ ‘flesh-colored nylons,’ it was
the time of prodigal sons and kidnapped daughters” (JR 6). Not only through
such grandiose and futuristic evocations does Janowitz’s novel follow Hirth’s
description of literary jazz, his novel also displays narrative dissonance. Inter-
ruptions, elliptical thoughts, and elisions fracture the narrative of the novel to
such a degree that the reflection of the times promised in the opening is more
akin to a cubist’s refraction of reality than any form of realism.
The plot begins on a train from London to Paris, where the main character,
named Lord Henry, meets Madame Mae R. The two immediately delight in
deceiving the other passengers: she pretending to faint and he pretending to be
a medical doctor capable of attending to her. After arriving in Paris, Lord
Henry responds to an advertisement for musicians and meets the other mem-
bers of the soon-to-be world famous “Lord Punch’s Jazz Band Boys.” Instead
of chronologically narrating the group’s predictable rise to fame and fortune,

Janowitz introduces a separate narrative thread surrounding the figure of Ar-
pad, a Hungarian Eintänzer, or dancer for hire.64 As if playing a similarly co-
quettish game with the reader’s expectations, Janowitz’s narrator continually
veers from the ostensibly principle voice, Lord Henry and his Jazz Band Boys,
towards such minor notes. As Jürgen Grandt summarizes: “The narrative voice
[in Jazz: A Novel], much like the jazz musicians, leaves the basic melody of the
story-line behind and improvises to elaborate on anything and everything.”65 In
point of fact, while the section on Arpad ends with the narrator’s promise to
return to jazz, the text instead sheers in yet another direction.66 Such narrative
misfires and misdirection are central to the novel and can be viewed as part of
its attempt to recreate jazz in literary form. As the narrator informs the reader
in a mea culpa to his literary conscience:
I am aware that I’ve portrayed the characters a bit superficially and arbi-
trarily (eigenwillig) and thereby violated on numerous occasions the law
of the epic: to provide exposition of the characters through the action and
not to ‘narrate’ (schildern) the figures of the action. Professional writers
aren’t likely to forgive me for this. If one grants me the mitigating circum-
stance that I’m writing a jazz-novel, either as an excuse or apology, this
can be used to demonstrate that this book is no typical novel. I believe
there are different laws governing it, just as the laws for a work of jazz are
different than those for a sonata for piano and violin. (JR 25)
One senses here more than mere bravado, more than the superficial exploita-
tion of jazz as a literary subject, for example in the oblique reference to the
musical coupling of Beethoven’s and Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata.
literary-
Rather, the text gestures towards an understanding of jazz as aesthetic form,
something that cannot be incorporated into traditional culture (here, the form
of the novel) without consequence. Put differently, one senses that the narrator
feels jazz pushing back at him, back at literature.
In a very important way, then, Janowitz’s novel is less about jazz than a jazz
piece itself. Or as one reviewer put it: “This jazz novel is not so much, as is prom-
ised at the beginning, the story of ‘Lord Punch’s Jazz-Band-Boys,’ than it is a
story composed and executed in the manner of jazz music.”67 The title, Jazz: A
Novel, already hints at this productive tension. Here, the generic subtitle “A
Novel” is not merely a convention, but exists to connect the two terms “jazz” and
“novel.” Most explicitly, the terms’ seeming separation through the colon is eas-
ily erased through the substitution of a different form of punctuation, as the nar-
rator does in the above quotation, to form a “jazz-novel” (Jazz-Roman) from

Jazz: A Novel (Jazz. Roman). The significance of the proximity between these
two terms is, I would suggest, the very meaning of the work. Through its con-
scious exploration of the formal rules of the novel, Janowitz is investigating the
ability of traditional literature to narrate the new. Whereas most other authors
saw little difficulty in this matter, deploying jazz as symbol of anarchy, rebellion,
primitivism, etc., the fact that Janowitz bothers to ask this question is significant,
even if, as I later show, his response remains ambiguous.
While overall Jazz: A Novel suggests that modernity’s newness has pro-
gressed to a point beyond which traditional narrative form can be relied upon
to contain and represent it, Janowitz’s rather traditional narrator struggles with
this fact—it is, of course, only with a guilty conscience that he has proceeded
with the jazz novel. More significantly, jazz is not the only aesthetic form put
forward in the novel as a model for representing the new; instead, jazz remains
but one, certainly privileged, example amongst many.68 All these various at-
tempts eventually exhaust themselves, and the novel concludes on a particu-
larly pessimistic note regarding the very possibility of representing the new. As
the narrator states to close the novel:
As one sees, in general our ensemble fared exactly just as well as every
living ensemble on the earth has for a few thousand years—with every
day they lost a new day of their lives. The old flaw (Fehler) that every-
thing living is condemned to live from its capital, rather than only off the
interest. This old fundamental flaw of creation is to blame if in this matter
we have nothing new to offer, even to the reader of a jazz novel. (JR 122)
As the multiple strands of the plot are finally brought together, the narrator
reaches what are, for him, the limits of the jazz-novel: death and ending. While
jazz may demand new modes of representation, aesthetic innovation cannot
fundamentally alter life and consequently its representation in art. The unex-
pected entrance of death retroactively undercuts the freedom towards which
the narrator seemed to have been striving.
In order to understand why the narrator figures the work as a formal fail-
ure, it is necessary to turn the analytical screw once more, to consider the work
not only as a jazz-novel but as a novel about jazz, in this case about symphonic
jazz. For one, it is important that within the narrative, loose though it may be,
Lord Henry and his Jazz-Band-Boys progress from rowdy, anarchic “jazz band
boys” in the beginning to members of a jazz symphony orchestra towards the
end (JR 111). More than merely reflecting the history of jazz in Germany,
when read in the context of the critical rejection by music critics of symphonic
jazz as a backward-looking pseudo-revolution, the shift to symphonic jazz also
serves to signal the narrator’s turn against jazz. Like the critics who came to
view in Whiteman’s jazz but a dressed-up salon orchestra, Janowitz’s narrator
slowly but surely gives up on his initial dream of jazz. Most important here is
not that he gives up on jazz but how he does so: through a shift in the narrator’s
own understanding of the project from jazz novel to jazz symphony. Towards
the end of the novel, the narrator states: “I don’t think we even have to be there
when our ensemble slides into a catastrophe. This would perhaps suffice as an
exciting climax to a dime novel, but cannot provide the final movement of a
jazz symphony. It must be said again that different laws are governing the mu-
sic of these pages than those for a sonata for piano and violin or even a banal
finale of an operetta” (JR 111, emphasis added). This is repetition with a dif-
ference. The substitution of symphony for novel alters how the references to
Tolstoy and operetta function: instead of existing above, or at the very least
beside, jazz, they now clearly exist below them.
For if Whiteman took the listener on a journey from “primitive” jazz to
“elevated” symphonic jazz, the narrator sees himself taking the reader on an
equally important journey through modern literature: mixing the high culture of
Dickens and Tolstoy with contemporary, more popular modes like the detective
novel. Still, while Whiteman’s “Experiment in Modern Music” was in many
ways a demonstration of the brilliance and modernism of symphonic jazz, Jazz:
A Novel ultimately exists as a eulogy of this attempt. Though the incorporation
of jazz initially pushes the narrative towards ever-greater crimes against the lit-
erature, in the end, the narrator pushes back at jazz and does so by way of sym-
phonic jazz. As he suggests in the novel’s conclusion: no matter how daring the
escape, no matter how dissonant and syncopated the individual moment, there
will always exist a point of ending, a last page, a final word, jazz-novel or not.
Still, it is important to remember that though Lord Henry (and the narrative) fails
not as jazz band boy, but as part of a jazz symphony orchestra, the narrator re-
fuses to distinguish between the two. Moving from the jazz novel to jazz sym-
phony and then in the final scene back to jazz novel, Janowitz’s narrator ulti-
mately conflates the failure of symphonic jazz with the failure of jazz itself.
Symphony for Jazz
While Jazz: A Novel struggles to understand jazz’s significance for German

literature, Janowitz’s project of writing the German jazz novel continued in the
works of two other authors, René Schickele and Gustav Renker. Though nei-
ther of these later works shares the radical form of Jazz: A Novel, their engage-
ment with jazz, symphonic and otherwise, as well as the legacy of Whiteman’s
project, combine to form a German jazz literature of its own. Unlike Janowitz
or Renker, René Schickele clearly belongs to the canon of German literature.
Highly praised for his trilogy of novels Das Erbe am Rhein (The Inheritance
on the Rhine) (1925–31), Schickele’s Symphonie für Jazz (Symphony for Jazz)
appears at first glance to offer relatively little new insight into the meaning of
jazz for Weimar literature.69 It covers the life of composer and jazz musician
John van Maray, who makes his way across Europe as a successful popular
artist. Early in the novel, van Maray will marry a young woman named Jo-
hanna. As the plot progresses, however, their marriage becomes increasingly
strained and, after separating, each seeks out a space of his and her own, his
wife finding a new life in Berlin, while van Maray moves between Lake Con-
stance, Paris, and Southern France. It is the timing of the separation that is of
most interest here. The couple separates just as van Maray sets about compos-
ing a jazz symphony, and his progression in the composition inversely mirrors
the state of his relationship with Johanna: the more he succeeds with it, the
further apart the lovers grow. The two will eventually reconcile at the van Ma-
ray home on Lake Constance, but only after van Maray has tossed his saxo-
phone into the lake, thereby forsaking American jazz.
Though unlike Janowitz, Schickele authored further novels, he, too, never
returned to the subject of jazz. While the work’s manifest subject matter stands
out against his other works, its treatment of Franco-German relationships and,
even more so, the strong similarities between the relationship of the composer
van Maray to his wife Johanna and writer Schickele to his wife Anna Schick-
ele, firmly place it within the broader context of his oeuvre.70 The question
must arise then: Does it matter at all that Schickele wrote about jazz? The first
point to make in this regard is that Schickele’s work can be seen as in conversa-
tion with Janowitz and the discourse of symphonic jazz. Beyond the obvious
fact that each novel contains a composer who creates a jazz symphony, at the
level of content, both works use the saxophone as an organizing metaphor71
and include a Josephine Baker-like character.72 Equally important are the for-
mal similarities. Like Janowitz, Schickele uses his jazz subject as motivation to
experiment with language and narration. He begins the novel with an onomato-
poetic homage to the sounds and rhythms of jazz, such as in the opening line
of the novel: “Bäbä, tu. Bäbä, tut. Tut! Bäbä.”73 Combining, inverting, defamil-
iarizing, Schickele is playing with these terms and others in the novel’s open-
ing as he moves words, ideas, and sounds like so many pieces on a chessboard—
indeed, nowhere in the novel is he as jazzy as in the opening pages. At the same
time, there is much more at stake here than mere play. First, his word play
eliminates language’s representational power, and its reduction to sound,
rhythm, and form can be read as an attempt to mimic the non-representational
nature of music. Second, and by contrast, the ultimate end of Schickele’s open-
ing gambit is not to disregard language’s capacity to signify in a turn towards
abstraction. Instead, this opening creates a disjuncture of language and mean-
ing in order to create a space of freedom, which Schickele can later fill with
new meaning. Indeed, all the terms referenced in the opening four lines, though
stripped of context and content, will come to have very specific meanings
within the narrative. For example, “bäbä, tu” is associated with the sound of
van Maray’s saxophone and serves as a leitmotif throughout the novel, while a
seemingly random reference to a kangaroo will later appear in a discussion
regarding technological progress (SFJ 252–57). The language of the opening
section is thus both a play with language, demonstrating Schickele’s jazz
chops, as well as a straightforward narrative device used to introduce themes
from the novel.
At the same time, Schickele’s opening is a hard act to follow, and the re-
mainder of the novel proceeds in a much less radical manner. As Kurt Martens
notes in his critical review of the work, it isn’t clear from the first lines whether
Schickele “intends to objectively represent the style of jazz, adapt his writing
to it or develop it ad absurdum.”74 If Schickele leaves this question in many
ways unanswered, the novel nonetheless builds upon the Weimar jazz literature
project in significant ways. After van Maray returns from touring abroad to
Lake Constance, two central events take place that simultaneously shape the
novel’s trajectory as well as reveal a potential debt to the debate on Whiteman.
The first involves the symphonic work for which the novel is named. Having
tired of his life as a popular jazz musician, John van Maray travels to the Alps,
where he is inspired to write a “symphony for jazz band” (SFJ 53). Upon his
return, he proclaims to Johanna: “Let’s go! I’m writing a symphony for jazz,
strings (Streicherkorps), and organ” (SFJ 54). The specification of “jazz band”
and then jazz’s serialization with strings and organ transform the significance
and meaning of the novel’s title, which here cannot mean a symphony dedi-
cated to jazz, but rather only to one written for jazz ensemble, i.e., a specific set
of instruments. In other words, instead of placing jazz qua musical form on
relatively equal footing with the symphony, jazz is here subsumed under the
symphonic form, existing alongside and in apparent harmony with traditional
bourgeois string instruments and the religiously coded organ. This constella-
tion, as is hinted at in van Maray’s initial description of the piece, can also be
read historically as a reversion from contemporary popular music to bourgeois

to religious music. As he explains to Johanna, the symphony will tell “the en-
tire history of us bipeds. From our departure from the jungle to . . . nickel-
plated instrument cabinets. . . . You’ll have nothing to laugh at” (SFJ 54–55). In
part following the seriousness of Whiteman’s experiment in modern music and
in part satirizing the culture of New Objectivity, jazz is ultimately framed in the
work as the loveless result of modern progress from which van Maray desires
to escape.
Yet if van Maray would seek to control jazz by positioning it underneath
the symphony, a jazz experience that evening at a hotel will disrupt his mo-
nopolization of the debate. Shortly after he has announced his intention to
write a symphony, van Maray and Johanna attend a performance by a jazz
band. During the performance, Johanna admits to van Maray that she is in love
with the band’s drummer. As with other depictions of the drums, race plays an
important role here. Though the drummer is white, an “image of a Negro bar-
ing his teeth” is painted upon a percussive metallic surface of his drum (Schlag-
blech) (SFJ 57). Schickele’s description here generally recalls the paintings on
early drum sets such as that seen on the drum of the unidentified jazz band in
Danzig or the one in Dix’s To Beauty. Unlike these examples, however, the im-
age in Schickele has to be continually painted anew as the drummer’s daily
strikes upon it are constantly erasing it. This inventive detail suggests that
jazz’s Blackness, its “primitivity,” exists in a state of tension with its moder-
nity, here represented by the metallic surface upon which the image is painted.
The very next evening, Johanna and van Maray once again attend the nightly
concert of the jazz band, during which they bear witness to the following sen-
sational scene involving the drummer:
At the evening concert the man struck the drum with the mockery of a
self-important Roman augur (“gives me the chills,” whispered Johanna
and timidly edged her knee towards mine under the table)—as planned,
the music stopped to let this single drum hit resound. The man gasped
(schnappte), opened his mouth wide, and blood shot out. The stream of
blood formed an arc and landed exactly on the rim of the drum. The
painted negro skull snarled its teeth. (SFJ 60)
This scene depicting the gory death of the white jazz drummer and competitor
of van Maray raises any number of important questions about the role of Black-
ness within jazz discourse in the late 1920s. In order to answer these questions,
however, it is necessary to investigate the cultural meaning of both the drum
and the saxophone, the instrument associated with van Maray and the one he
will toss into a lake at the novel’s conclusion.
That within German and European discussions of jazz the drums were
commonly associated with Blackness is well-known from chapter 1. As an in-
strument dedicated to rhythm in a culture that coded melody and harmony as
intellectually superior, before the introduction of jazz, the drums were gener-
ally viewed as an instrument of but minor importance for the future of Euro-
pean music. With the entrance (and popularity) of jazz during the first-half of
the 1920s, the instrument takes on exceeding importance and quickly became
the primary symbol of this music. As we’ve seen, the connection between the
jazz music and the drums was so strong that drummers were routinely called
“jazzers” and a trap drum set simply “jazz” or “jazz band.”75 By the time
Schickele was writing in 1929, the importance of the drums to jazz had receded
significantly. No longer were they the only or even primary symbol of jazz
music. Instead, that honor had shifted to the saxophone, which will see in-
creased popularity and production until the stock market crash in 1929 and
continue as a means of connoting jazz and modern, American, and foreign
dance music well into the 1930s.76
The shift reflected in German jazz culture generally and implied within
Schickele’s novel specifically can also be connected to the development of
symphonic jazz, however. For example, when German jazz critics like Alfred
Baresel advised saxophone players to be able to play more than one variant of
the saxophone, from bass to soprano, this was due to the practice of doubling
within symphonic jazz orchestras, something obviously tied to Whiteman’s
popularity, though by no means to his alone as this was also practiced by musi-
cians with Sam Wooding.77 Revealing a similar historicizing look at jazz in
Germany is Otto Dix’s famous Großstadt-Tryptychon (Metropolis-Triptych)
from 1927. In the background of the center panel of this masterpiece of New
Objectivity, one sees a caricatured Black drummer waving a drumstick in the
air, while the foreground features a band dominated by the white saxophone
player and in front of him stands a gigantic bass saxophone. The number of
saxophones in this very famous painting is thus neither coincidental, nor exag-
gerated, and here again the indirect influence of Whiteman’s symphonic jazz
on Weimar representations of jazz can be seen. Returning to Symphony for
Jazz—through the death of the drummer and the almost simultaneous rise of
the new jazz composer van Maray and his saxophone, Schickele restages the
dominant narrative of jazz’s development during the 1920s.
In one sense, the hotel jazz band functions as an historical remnant of jazz
history, and the death of its drummer stands for the ascension of the saxophone
and the white symphonic jazz composer—Lord Henry, John van Maray, and
Paul Whiteman. Yet within Schickele’s novel, this transformation from drum to
saxophone, from jazz band to symphony, neither removes race from jazz’s
identity, nor guarantees its aesthetic success. Like the German music establish-
ment and like Janowitz, Schickele will also render the age of symphonic jazz a
failure or, rather, as insufficient from a purely aesthetic perspective. Within
Schickele’s novel, there is a distinction between the material success John van
Maray’s “symphony for jazz, strings, and organ” will no doubt have and the
aesthetic potential of jazz to narrate the history of humanity. Regarding its
economic prospects: long before it is completed, photographs of van Maray
working on the symphony appear in the illustrated press, portending the suc-
cess to come (SFJ 188). Yet throughout his separation from Johanna and work
on the symphony, van Maray’s life swings back and forth between his career as
a popular jazz musician and the spiritual life as an artist-composer of a jazz
symphony. To help balance these and to escape the negative influence of the
jazz singer Ursel Bruhn, he works in concert with other artists, namely a sculp-
tor, as well as in a church. Yet even after van Maray seemingly overcomes these
difficulties and declares the symphony, this “great work,” complete (SFJ 277),
he finds himself continuing to compose in his dreams. In order to stop, he is
compelled to return to the world, to a “jazz music that does not speak as I do”
(SFJ 278). Van Maray, following the symphonic jazz model, sought to separate
the jazz of entertainment, the jazz of the world, through the creation of his own
artistic jazz of and within the symphony. Yet though he may be capable of
achieving this in the abstract, the completion of the symphony, not to mention
its commodification as “jazz symphony,” ultimately will not spare him the del-
eterious effect of the materialism symbolized by this jazz music of the world.
Failing to reach personal equilibrium through completion of the symphony,
he seeks refuge in the Black Forest and then in St. Moritz, where he meets An-
gelica, a young girl who turns out to be van Maray’s daughter from an earlier
affair. After she arrives, the two quickly become very close until Angelica leaves
one day to go out into the wintry landscape. When she doesn’t return, van Maray
goes in search of her, only to find her severely injured and alone in the snow. It is
only after she dies as a result of her injuries that van Maray realizes he was her
father. After her death, he retreats to his home on Lake Constance, and enraged
for having squandered his life and fearful that he will lose Johanna forever, he
goes to the lake intent upon destroying the symbol of the materialist side of his
life and of the jazz of the world: his saxophone. It has finally become clear to him
that this metallic instrument, no matter its potential, is not capable of creating a
form of art untainted by the materialism of modernity.
“Down with dancing Nigger bottoms (Niggersteiß)!” he called out and

lifted the instrument up so that he could smash it on the cliff.
“Down with black money (schwarze Kasse)!”
“Long live the forty-eighth parallel with all its fruits and vegetables and
wine and the women—if things like that also flourish there! Down with
I.G. Jazz-Industry!”
As he held the saxophone in his raised hand, about to execute the de-
structive blow, John noticed to his surprise how the silent water was wash-
ing a star on the stone, a magical movement, always the same, tiny star.
“I see,” he said—“Of course.”
And instead of continuing his rant, he went quietly into the house and
came right back out with a cord and an iron weight.
He took the saxophone and sank it, like a cat’s cadaver (krepierte Ka-
tze), into the lake. (SFJ 352)
Here van Maray does more than merely reject jazz and the racial difference and
materialism for which it stands to him; he simultaneously recognizes that his
pursuit of jazz was spurned on by a desire within himself to throw off the civi-
lization that would support it. That he does not destroy, but rather sinks, the
saxophone may result from the universal connection he sees between nature
and music; in other words, the potential reconciliation symbolized by the idea
of the jazz symphony may still be attainable, though not for him and not in this
life.78 As he looks into the lake, the water’s motion across the star’s reflection
on the stone reminds him the same daring combination of high and low, of
symphony and now sunken jazz that had once inspired him.
When Symphony for Jazz is viewed in comparison to Janowitz’s Jazz: A
Novel, a number of important parallels, as well as differences, emerge. In both
novels, an attempt is made to formally recreate the aesthetic principles of jazz
through language and innovative narrative form. While Janowitz carries this
experiment to a much further extent, both texts eventually abandon the ephem-
eral modernity of jazz in favor of tradition—death in Janowitz and nature in
Schickele. At the same time, in its deployment of race and Blackness as a
means of figuring jazz’s difference, Schickele’s work anticipates the turn taken
in the final example of symphonic jazz literature, Gustav Renker’s Symphony
and Jazz from 1931.
Requiem for the Jazz Symphony
If Schickele’s Symphony for Jazz and Janowitz’s Jazz: A Novel would seem to
generally fit within a modernist debate surrounding jazz, symphonic and oth-
erwise, and the possibility of a German jazz literature, the Swiss-Austrian au-
thor Gustav Renker’s contribution occupies a more tenuous position. Perhaps
best described as a melding of the jazz novel with the genre of the Heimatro-
man, this work fails to make any attempt at incorporating jazz, formally or
structurally, and instead narrates a fairly typical tale of city versus country,
young versus old, sick versus healthy. At the same time, Renker’s work is sig-
nificant not only for the ways it differs from Janowitz and Schickele, but for
how, in its own way, it continues the project of jazzing up German literature.
Selectively taking up the idea of the symphonic jazz novel as it had been devel-
oped in Janowitz and Schickele, in Renker’s work, key elements, such as the
saxophone, drums, the mountains, and, of course, the jazz symphony, receive
new meaning.
Whereas the previous two examples displayed an at times positive, if ulti-
mately negative, relationship to jazz, Renker’s Symphony and Jazz for the most
part dispenses with any such pretenses. Indeed, the binary relation between the
terms implied in the title is furthered through the splitting of the composer
character well-known from Janowitz and Schickele into two figures. First there
is Othmar Wehrberg, an aging composer residing in Vienna whose brightest
days seem to be behind him. As the novel opens, he is struggling to finish his
latest symphony and the reasons for this soon become clear: in the urban, “Jew-
ish” Vienna he has lost all relationship to his native Alpine village Maltatal. It
will only be through his return to his Heimat towards the end of the novel that
Othmar Wehrberg will regain his rootedness and once again be a creative com-
poser. The work of art resulting from this turn homeward will by no means
consist in his combining jazz and symphony, however. Instead, this task will
fall to his son, Richard “Ricki” Wehrberg, who, like Lord Henry and John van
Maray, will rise to international success through the composition of a jazz sym-
phony. His youth and interest in jazz and “primitive,” non-European music
mark his relationship to his father and, as Tobias Nagl notes, shape the narra-
tive as “an Oedipal conflict carried out through music.”79 Yet whereas the other
two jazz-symphony composers maintain an indirect and tenuous relationship
to Blackness, Ricki cultivates not merely a connection to African American
culture but to the African continent itself. Unlike the implicit historical devel-
opment of jazz within the previous two novels, in which the music progressed
from Blackness to whiteness, Ricki’s vision of symphonic jazz would seek to

return jazz to an original, “Black” state. As he notes of his artistic goals: “I
want to remain at the source, to go to it. With the first big royalty fee that I earn,
I will travel to Africa” (SUJ 29).80 He further states that supposedly great Ger-
man composers like Pfitzner, Strauss, Wagner, and Mahler are degenerate,
claiming that they are examples of “music that has lost its foundation. Music is
authentic only insofar as it is primitive” (SUJ 31). What emerges over the
course of the novel is that both father and son represent less opposites than two
sides of the same issue—the loss of Bodenständigkeit, or “rootedness,” in Ger-
man art. This lack in each is further highlighted through their shared relation-
ship to the “rootless” music critic Paul Hirsch, whose Jewishness and degen-
eracy are referenced throughout the novel.81
The ultimate terminus of the false path of the prodigal son Ricki is em-
bodied in the figure of Hesekiel Makua-Taka. In this African American figure
named after a Hebrew prophet, Renker remixes elements from Janowitz,
Schickele, and the German reception of Whiteman to create a monstrous im-
age of a Black mammonite, whose sole desire in the novel is to monetarily
exploit Europe for the last of its cultural potential. More than this, the align-
ment of an African American jazz musician with Jewishness, in addition to
the stereotyped presentation of the critic Hirsch, amount to something quali-
tatively new in the symphonic jazz novel. As I want to argue, Makua-Taka’s
inclusion is indicative of an important shift within the German theorization
of jazz that takes place towards the end of the 1920s and one that intensifies
with the rise of National Socialism. Specifically, the linkage effected here
between urban, foreign Jewishness and the modernist, popular music jazz
takes up the long-standing trope of “Jewish modernism” (“die jüdische Mod-
erne”) that, as historian Scott Spector has shown, was particularly pro-
nounced in German-speaking Central Europe. 82 This idea acts within discus-
sions of modernism and modernity as a trope for the fear over the dissolution
of deep rooted traditions and their substitution with a superficial, ephemeral,
nonunique urban popular culture. In other words, the discourse on “Jewish
modernism” enables speakers within this space to mediate between “true,”
“authentic” art and “mass culture” like jazz. As Spector summarizes: “The
complexity of the relations between the figures of modernism and of Jewish-
ness stems in no small part from the famously ambiguous status of modern-
ism itself, as well as its relationship to modernity on the one hand and popu-
lar culture on the other.”83 According to Spector, this notion of the
“Jewishness” of the modernism and modernity, which reaches at least as far
back as Richard Wagner, served this crucial role not only for conservatives
like Renker but also shaped the self-understanding of modernism itself. It is

thus important to see how Renker’s figuration of Makua-Taka profits from
both of these strains within German culture. As we will see in chapter 6, from
the late 1920s onward, this connection between Jewishness, Blackness, jazz,
and modernism will become increasingly prevalent, not only in the writings
of jazz’s detractors but, through the translation of Harlem Renaissance po-
etry, also in those of its modernist defenders.
At the same time, Renker’s characterization of Makua-Taka not only
draws on the idea of the “Jewish modernism” but on a Weimar jazz reception
caught between Black and white, between, for example, Sam Wooding and
Paul Whiteman. For Makua-Taka is not only Jewish and Black, he is also the
novel’s saxophone-playing “King of Jazz” (Jazzkönig) (SUJ 32).84 There were,
of course, Black jazz performers who were called or went by the name “jazz
kings” and/or “kings of jazz” during the 1920s, beginning at least with Mitch-
ell’s Jazz Kings in 1920 but also including George Barthelme’s 1919 reference
to James Reese Europe as “jazz master” and the Black jazz musician Evandale
Roberts in Berlin in the summer of 1921, not to mention the marketing of
Wooding as the “King of the Jazz Band” as early as August 1925.85 For Renker,
by contrast, one fundamental aspect of Whiteman’s symphonic project remains
inaccessible for the Black Makua-Taka: the composition of the jazz symphony
itself. The call for the creation of a corpus of jazz compositions, it will be re-
called, was an essential complaint by Berlin music critics against Whiteman’s
concerts. In Symphony and Jazz, Makua-Taka’s genius, however, is merely
imitative and the promethean act of creation is left to the white European Ricki
Wehrberg.
After enjoying initial success in America with a jazz piece, a “blues,”
Ricki next composes a jazz symphony, later premiered by Makua-Taka at an
American concert hall. The description of the concert reveals not only the suc-
cess but the construction of the difference between American culture’s produc-
tive primitivity and the stilting weight of cultural tradition in Europe:
If someone were to start dancing to Bruckner’s Fifth in one of our philhar-

monics, he would be thrown out with grand effect. In America the noble
benefactor of our Ricki [i.e., Makua-Taka] just played his jazz symphony
in a concert hall where the middle was open. This removed the ceremonial
constraints on our instinct to move. The band plays and people listen. But
if one of the listeners feels the need, if the rhythm sparks in him the need
to shake about (durchrüttelt), he is free to do so and to heed the call. (SUJ
161)
As with Makua-Taka’s use of the saxophone, Ricki’s jazz symphony mediates

between the body and the mind, between high and low culture, rhythm and
melody, and serves to reawaken the “natural” relationship between the Volk
and culture. At the same time, it is important that the success of the jazz sym-
phony takes place outside of Germany. While jazz and symphony may coexist
in America in a productive relationship, in Europe, jazz is a symptom of the
degeneracy of culture and its combination with the symphony but the worst
imaginable scenario. So though the novel may contain surprisingly positive
remarks about the jazz symphony, these primarily act as a reminder of what
European music has lost: namely the connection to its folk culture.
This didactic element of Symphony and Jazz becomes especially apparent
after father and son travel back to Maltatal and the Alpine community Wehr-
berg left when he departed for modern Vienna. Father and son are here aided
by a female figure, Hilde, who, through her gender and Swiss roots, still seems
to possess the healthy relationship to nature the two men lack. In Maltatal, all
three share experiences of beautifully simple local folk culture and the invigo-
rating natural surroundings. As we have already seen with Schickele and as is
the case in Ernst Krenek’s jazz opera Jonny spielt auf (Jonny Strikes Up), the
Alps function within the German jazz imagination as an inexhaustible source
of cultural invigoration.86 The corrosive influence of Hirsch and Makua-Taka
slowly recedes in this space, and once there, Wehrberg begins to understand all
he has lost in his twenty years in the city, overcomes his compositional difficul-
ties, and, finally, is able to produce a new work, albeit a requiem. This rural
paradise, acting as nature’s sanatorium, also comes with significant danger,
and in the novel’s climactic scene, a violent storm strikes the village. The sub-
lime power of Alpine nature causes within Wehrberg an epiphany that the
nearby Malta river will flood, destroy the house, and kill him and a little village
girl playing there. With this insight Wehrberg rushes into action, taking the
young girl into his arms and leaving the doomed house. Though he is success-
ful in his rescue of the girl, his exposure to the storm makes him ill, and he
soon lapses into a coma. Upon waking fourteen days later, he finds Hirsch at
his bedside and learns that his son Ricki’s latest work Das Weinen des Urwalds
(The Weeping of the Jungle) is at that very moment having its European pre-
miere in Munich. Though there is no radio, Wehrberg mystically hears the
music. Surprisingly, in his dying words, Wehrberg mollifies his opinion regard-
ing jazz, remarking of the saxophone, “I wouldn’t have thought one could get
so much from the instrument,” and praising his son’s work as “entirely new,
sounding like a distant call” (SUJ 233). If death brings the elder Wehrberg to at
least partially recognize all that he has lost and that which his son is attempting
to regain, neither the experience of his father’s Heimat, nor even his father’s
death alters Ricki’s path. Instead of embracing his Alpine heritage and a het-
erosexual pairing with the Swiss Hilde, following his father’s funeral, Ricki
embarks with Hirsch on a trip to Africa. Unmoved, unchanged, at the novel’s
end, the symphony embodied by the father exists only as a requiem, while the
false-folk culture of jazz continues to lure European youth ever further from its
cultural heritage.
Between Symphonic Jazz and Jazz Symphony
In this final act of cultural resignation, Renker’s novel joins those of Janowitz
and Schickele. Each of their separate attempts to reconcile the conflict between
ascendant jazz and declining symphony ends with resignation. For all three,
symphony and jazz may coexist, but never harmoniously and hardly in a man-
ner that can guide Europe towards a better future. Like the Berlin critics of
Whiteman, each author also sees in symphonic jazz the music’s apotheosis and
ultimate failure. Even so, it is equally clear that symphonic jazz became a
means for them to respond to the challenge of jazz in both modern and tradi-
tional aesthetic forms.
Behind this shift lies Whiteman’s symphonic jazz. In many ways legiti-
mizing the very idea of jazz as art, Whiteman’s music laid the groundwork for
a German jazz literature by showing that the music could also function as a
formal, aesthetic principle. Here, it is important to note that though clearly in-
fluenced by Whiteman, in their German form, symphony and jazz stand in in-
verted relation to Whiteman’s own experiment in modern music. Whereas
Whiteman desired to create a symphonic jazz and to make jazz music respect-
able for a bourgeois public, the novelists created jazz symphonies. In other
words, they sought to bring jazz to the symphony rather than the other way
around. The hierarchy in this envisioning clearly favors the symphony, which
remains the universal category of musical production, while jazz is tested as to
whether it can fulfill this promise, in a strange way echoing Warschauer’s con-
cern over the European method for judging new cultural forms, that is: “to
point a pistol at every new phenomenon with the demand that it reveal its ulti-
mate aim and pass the test of whether it can be designated art.”
If these experiments in symphonic jazz literature remain marked by ambi-
guity, both on their own terms and as attempts to incorporate jazz into German
literature, the persistent and repeated attempts to do so hint at a more funda-
mental change to the function of jazz within German literature ushered by
Whiteman’s idea of symphonic jazz. Before Whiteman, jazz in Weimar litera-

ture existed as a symbol— of chaos, revolution, disorder— and such one-
dimensional use of jazz is precisely the reason why so many other novelists
seemed to exhaust the subject with little discussion, through the addition of a
secondary character or a particularly salacious scene for example. Yet in the
wake of Whiteman’s concerts, jazz also became more than a symbol; it became
a project, a shifting, moving, living thing. It is thus significant that each fic-
tional composer of a jazz symphony, Lord Henry, John van Maray, and Ricki
Wehrberg is associated with water.87 While this certainly positions jazz as a
floating music and culture, aligning it with the mobility of modernity against
the fixity of tradition, the very same idea of fluidity can be applied to the proj-
ect of German jazz literature. Each author works with and through an almost
identical knot of questions in order to present a vision, not “just” of jazz but of
cultural production more generally. From Janowitz’s almost abstract represen-
tation of narrative form; to Schickele’s rumination on the relationship between
humanity, nature, and art in modern Europe; and finally to Renker’s requiem
for the lost relationship between them, these are less reflections of an abstract
Zeitgeist than variations, or rather, improvisations on a common theme. That
each chose to do so via the jazz symphony was neither accidental, nor coinci-
dental. For these three novelists, symphony and jazz were anything but an
empty field into which they inserted themselves, and Whiteman’s symphonic
jazz can be said to have legitimized the high stakes of their own literary, rather
than musical, experiments. Through Janowitz, Schickele, and Renker, as well
as the many other discussions and applications of symphonic jazz, Whiteman
became a figure of even wider cultural significance. For better and for worse,
Whiteman’s claim to have elevated jazz’s cultural status made possible the
creation of the grand, if flawed, literary genre of the symphonic jazz novel.
It is also clear, however, that these jazz novels were exceptions to the
many other literary works that sought to incorporate jazz. Yet even these excep-
tions followed one rule of representing jazz in Germany: women and, in par-
ticular, the “new women” of Weimar Germany were essential players within
Weimar jazz culture. From white women like Madame Mae R. or Johanna
dancing to jazz music, to the inclusion of a series of Josephine Baker clones,
and even the Swiss Hilde’s short cropped hair, these jazz novels draw upon the
debate over the shifting boundaries of gender identity and sexuality. Though
there were many cultural spaces where this debate was carried out, perhaps
none was as conspicuous as the popular revue stage.
Chapter 4
Syncopating the Mass Ornament:

Race and Girlkultur
Supposing truth to be a woman—how? is the suspicion not well founded
that all philosophers, as far as they have been dogmatists, have had a poor
understanding of women?
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1886)
Nietzsche’s homology between truth and woman raises more than the question
of (male) desire and the production of knowledge. His provocative assertion
also turns on the incongruous grammatical gendering of “truth” (Wahrheit) and
a pejorative term for “woman” (Weib) in the German language. While Wahrheit
is figured through the feminine definite article die, Nietzsche’s woman, das
Weib, at least grammatically speaking, is no woman at all. She is, rather, a sex-
less neutrum.1 To Nietzsche, this contradiction between truth (Wahrheit) and
woman (Weib) is indicative of much more than “some play on words, a gram-
matical seduction.”2 To him, this faulty logic reveals the falsity of philosophi-
cal knowledge itself, asking us to move away from the idealist construction of
truth as embodied in some otherworldly ideal and instead to concentrate on a
multiplicity of truths. Nietzsche’s configuration of women, truth, and philoso-
phy, of course, also begins to unravel the complex interweaving of women and
modernity in German culture. For in spite of Nietzsche’s warning, male Wei-
mar theorists will see in woman, in particular the “New Woman” (Neue Frau)
the origin and essence of modern life.3
As Rita Felski argues, the history and theorization of the modern is over-
determined through narrative oppositions of the feminine and masculine.4 Fel-
ski’s analysis of philosophical, sociological, and literary texts suggests not one
but multiple configurations of the modern and the feminine. In the Weimar
Republic, this relationship expressed itself to a large degree through a confla-
tion of the feminine with the mass, be it through the feminization of the masses
as irrational or through the ideal of an undifferentiated, monolithic, feminine
115
mass culture. Succinctly summarizing the Weimar modality of mass/feminine,

Andreas Huyssen writes: “The fear of the masses in this age of declining liber-
alism is always also a fear of woman, a fear of nature out of control, a fear of
the unconscious, of sexuality, of the loss of identity and stable ego boundaries
in the mass.”5 To this conflation of the feminine with the mass belonged the
discussion of the cultural significance of the New Woman as a unique creation
of modernity. In literature, theater, film, and music, the image of a liberated
and independent New Woman littered the cultural landscape of the 1920s. Like
her American counterpart, the “flapper,” Germany’s New Woman epitomized
the liberation, economically, politically, and sexually, of women from nine-
teenth century society. Of course, as Atina Grossmann and others have pointed
out, the reality for these “new” women was not so new at all and most lan-
guished under the double burden of housework and professional work.6
Within the culturally constructed image of the New Woman, as Lynne
Frame has argued, the abstract idea could be further divided into three ideal
types: Gretchen, Girl, and Garçonne.7 Essential here is that all three simultane-
ously signify racial, gender, and national identities of Germany, the United
States, and France, respectively. Of all three, the idea of the American Girl
represented a most foreign and threatening variation on the theme of the New
Woman.8 This was because she was structured as a synthesis of the two other
forms. She lacked the saturnine intellect of the French Garçonne, yet could still
rival the latter in her androgynous play with the masculine and feminine. With
the German Gretchen type, the Girl shared an innocence, in this case a resid-
uum of America’s supposedly pubescent culture from which she derived, but
also distinguished herself through corporeal and sexual rationalization.
During the Weimar Republic, there was no more quintessential expression
of the Girl than the Tiller Girl. Tiller Girls, the most recognized formation of
female dance troupes at the time, performed widely on the popular revue stages
of Berlin. Though originally founded by British businessman John Tiller, the
Girls themselves were viewed as archetypally American. The cultural impact
of the Tiller Girls derived from the precision and athleticism of their dancing.
Unlike the highly sexualized female dance numbers of the prewar period, the
athleticism of the Tiller Girls seemed to portend, or rather to index, the ratio-
nalization of entertainment and society.9 Further, the Tiller Girls were imag-
ined as an active and, for that very reason, threatening form of femininity.
Ideologically positioned as modernized popular culture for a modern republic,
the Tiller Girls and the revue stage they occupied became primary sites through
which the gender of modernity was imagined in Weimar Germany.
It is here, however, that Nietzsche’s suspicion regarding philosophers can
Syncopating the Mass Ornament 117
Figure 11: The Tiller Girls, the “Classical Form of American Group
Dance,” from Fritz Giese, Girlkultur. Vergleiche zwischen ameri-
kanischem und europäischen Rhythmus-und Lebensgefühl (Munich:
Delphin-Verlag, 1925).
be of aid. For all too often, a focus on rationality unwittingly leads to the es-
sentialization of the Girl as a young, healthy, white woman (figure 11). The
hypostatized legs of the Tiller Girls depicted in so many commentaries of the
time and in contemporary scholarship have themselves come to act as a synec-
doche of the Weimar vision of the Girl. In other words, they end up obstructing
our ability to get at the multiple truths of this discourse.10 In the following, I
want to suggest that the Tiller Girls and Weimar Girlkultur more generally
were not nearly as antiseptic as such images would lead one to believe and ar-
gue that Weimar Girlkultur should be seen as emerging out of the heteroge-
neous space of the theatrical revue that was populated with Black and white,
male and female, German, American, and many other nationalized bodies.11
Girlkultur: Visions in Black and White
Figure 11 derives from industrial psychologist Fritz Giese’s 1925 work

Girlkultur: Vergleiche zwischen amerikanischem und europäischem Rhyth-
mus-und Lebensgefühl (Girlkultur: Comparisons of the American and Euro-
pean Sense of Rhythm and Life).12 A foundational text of Weimar’s Girlkultur
discourse, Giese’s work contains over fifty such illustrations, taken from both
popular and scholarly sources and for which he provided original captions.
Introducing his object of study, the first illustration is of the Tiller Girls—legs
extended in the air, frozen in uniform majesty, and described by Giese as the
“classical form of the American group dance.” As they will later be for Sieg-
fried Kracauer, these icons of Weimar modernity are Giese’s starting point,
the surface phenomenon upon which he will build his argument. Turning the
page, however, one discovers two images captioned as “Models of primitive
ritual dance (Kulttänze) / The ancestors of Girl-culture.” These two images
depict dancing Black figures who are neither American nor European but non-
distinct “primitives” (in fact, at least one image is of the Aranda people from
Australia) intended to suggest a universalized age of primitive Blackness.13
With the next two illustrations, Giese leaves this eternal-primitive for the
world of the metropolis, not of Tiller Girls, but of African Americans, jazz
bands, and Black revues, specifically the Chocolate Kiddies—one photograph
shows performers from the Chocolate Kiddies revue, while another features a
caricatured image of a Black jazz band with the words “USA Made in Ger-
many” visible in the background.14 The ultimate connection between these
images and the Tiller Girls begins to emerge in the series’ final image. Dis-
played on the next page is the end product of Giese’s visual history of Girlkul-
tur: two photographs of the young, white Girls, one simply identified as the
“Ideal of Youth,” while the other, an image of Alaska Liederman, is captioned
as “An American Venus.” What this visual narrative suggests and what this
work as a whole argues is that, for Giese, Girlkultur is both mediated through
and directly influenced by non-Europeans and Blackness.
Such mediation is reflected within the very notion of Giese’s Girlkultur.15
At least since the late eighteenth century, there existed in German cultural-
political discourse an opposition between the supposedly profound, organic,
often German Kultur and a superficial and materialist Zivilisation, usually
French or American.16 In this context, the combination of the American Girl
with German Kultur (and not Zivilisation) is counterintuitive. It acts to unite
the “superficial” and modern Girl with the very traditional, natural idea of
Kultur. The “contradictory” nature of the concept was remarked upon by at
least one commentator, Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck. Neatly encapsulating
the German distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation, Huelsenbeck wrote in
his review: “Even the title of the book, Girlkultur, demonstrates . . . an extreme
misunderstanding. The work can really only be about Girl-Civilizations in that
the word culture implies a duration, consciousness (Besinnung), and valuation
of natural ties which are entirely foreign to American progress.”17 To the con-
trary, I would suggest that Giese did not misunderstand the import of his title.
Instead, in this provocative title, he consciously plays off this central opposi-
tion of the German discourse on modernity. Instead of constructing America
and Europe according to a binary logic of opposition, his concept of Girlkultur
begins to point towards the ways in which America and Germany are growing
closer rather than farther apart. Put differently, Giese’s text can be seen as an
attempt at mediation between what was for him the false opposition of Europe
and America in the Weimar Republic. To return to the question of race within
Girlkultur, one might argue that although Giese’s placement of the African
American at the center of his discussion must necessarily be interrogated, it is
equally important that one not dismiss it outright. For in it is displayed the
same type of cultural mediation that he endeavored to enunciate through his
combination of Girl and Kultur.
Adhering to sociology of the surface, Giese constructs a “pathology” of
the modern through analysis of its superficial manifestations—Girlkultur as
embodied in the Tiller Girls. “Every case has its prehistory,” he writes to open
his analysis, adding: “The doctor must learn from its anamnesis, if he wishes
to test the results or heal the sickness. Even our ‘case’ is in need of recollection
of the conditions which led to its fashionable behavior (Gebarung)” (GK 9).
Here, as elsewhere, Giese’s text hovers between phenomenological and norma-
tive modes of argumentation, between merely wanting to diagnose and want-
ing to cure modern culture. In this, he parallels Georg Simmel, for whom mod-
ern culture, though assumed to be deleterious to individual subjectivity, was to
be diagnosed, not morally judged. Giese’s text oscillates between a fatalistic
conceptualization of Girlkultur, i.e., as objective culture in control of and des-
tined to determine the future of humanity, and as an ambiguous marker of
transition between past and future. Thus at times, he argues, “The metropolis
has us, technology has us, the economy has us: not we them!” (GK, 27), while
at others he notes: “At the same time we want to be clear that Americanism as
a fashionable interest should be overcome. America has its advantages and its
serious dark side. What fascinates us here as a model are only the things we
lack, not those that we also or even more fully possess (noch besser besitzen)”
(GK, 141).
Giese’s anamnesis of Girlkultur proceeds along ten different axes of inter-
est. Each section presents an alternate version, or vision, of Girlkultur: aes-
thetically, philosophically, economically, politically, sexually, and racially.
Following the visual narrative of the illustrations discussed above, Giese con-
centrates in the first section, labeled “Time Movement and Rhythm,” on the
position of African Americans in American society. As was argued in chapter
2, the performance of the Chocolate Kiddies marks both a quantitative and
qualitative break within Weimar jazz culture. Written in the same year, 1925,
Giese’s text’s references to this group and their inclusion in the text’s initial
visual narrative provide yet further substantiation of this argument. Unlike
conservative rants against a soulless, calculating American modernity, Giese’s
America is a brutally and racially divided society that has been formatively
influenced by slavery and its colonial past.18 According to him, contemporary
American culture, society, and identity result from the complex triadic rela-
tionship between European male settlers, African slaves, and European women.
America was long seen in Europe as a “feminine” state, perhaps begin-
ning with the earliest representations of the Americas after Columbus’ “discov-
ery,” but certainly continuing in the belief that women in America possessed
inordinate power.19 The variant of this argument found in Giese is based on the
idea that colonial settlements would have been largely male, making the few
European women especially prized. With the introduction of slaves from Af-
rica, however, the issue shifts from a question of pure scarcity, to one of fear.
He writes: “The Negro and the white woman, this becomes a matter of pres-
tige!” (GK 64). Giese postulates that while the Euro-American male viewed
relationships between himself and African women as unproblematic, contact
between white women and Black men was construed from the beginning as
taboo. For Giese, the relative scarcity of white women in colonial America,
when combined with an emerging ideology of “racial purity,” granted white
woman a disproportionate amount of power in American society. Using Giese’s
terminology, this situation led to the dissolution of the masculine state (Män-
nerstaat) of early colonialism and to the creation of a female state (Frauen-
staat), in which women overpowered men because of their racial value. Of the
early colonial era of the United States, Giese summarizes that “in this mascu-
line state woman was scarce. She was so scarce as today the white woman in
Africa or in the colonies, as today still often scarce in areas of new oil sources
or gold mines. She was a jewel, an object worthy of fierce battle” (GK 105).
At this point, the colonial past of the United States becomes not just an
explanation of American Girlkultur but a direct corollary to the German pres-
ent. With the occupation of the Rhineland by French colonial troops from Af-
rica, the specter of interracial relationships between Black men and white
women was certainly on the minds of many Germans and, as we have seen in
previous chapters, an important element of German jazz discussions. Giese, as
well, draws upon the similarity between this homegrown example and Ameri-
ca’s racially divided history and present. “The Negro Question and the problem
of the ‘Black Horror,’” he writes, invoking both German and American vo-
cabularies of race as a problem or question, “they are related” (GK 64–65). As
modern nations existing in an era of colonialism, the United States and Ger-
many share fundamental similarities concerning the relationship between
Black and white. “We know from the south,” he continues, “know from the
colonies, that the relationship of the black man to the white woman is some-
thing entirely different than that of the white man to the black woman” (GK
65). Again, Giese’s German audience would have been familiar with his dis-
cussion of race and the role of women in (colonial) European society. Specifi-
cally, Lora Wildenthal argues that the racialized colonialist space became a site
for the articulation of German women’s political aspirations at home, a space
in which “self-defined colonialist women used ideas of race and gender in the
context of formal empire both to gain new freedoms as women and to assert
German superiority over ‘backward’ societies.”20 Around the issue of “race
mixing” in the colonies, divisions within and outside of Germany grew be-
tween those asserting the “right” of German colonialists to sexual relations
with colonial subjects and others who saw in any such relations a dissolution
of national and racial boundaries.
Yet if it appears as if for Giese the descendants of slaves were but psy-
chological projections through which an American national identity could be
formulated, he complicates this situation by ascribing to African Americans
various forms of cultural agency. In parallel to the mediation of “Girl” and
“Kultur” in the title, Giese’s reading vacillates in its description of African
Americans between the concepts of Kulturvölker (“cultured peoples”) and
Naturvölker (“natural peoples”). Giese states: “The Negro discovered and was
the first to artistically form the new rhythm of the metropolis” (GK 29). He
adds: “Not the primitive Negroes of Africa. At least not directly these, the first
generation. The natural people of the black portion of the world and other
foreign primitive peoples stand too close to the primal rhythm of nature” (GK
29). Placing the African American into a line of development from nature to
culture, Giese positions them as existing between these two poles. Within the
metropolis of the new world, the “natural people” of Africa became the
“grown cultural child (erwachsenes Kulturkind)” of America (GK 32). In-
deed, as many others had since around 1900, Giese mentions both W. E. B. Du
Bois and Booker T. Washington as examples of African American intellectual
achievement (GK 31). Implicit within such proclamations of advancement
was quite often a paternalistic attitude that such progress was predicated upon
the help of Europeans. In this, his reading of African American culture shares
a degree of similarity with other writers of the period, most notably with Ar-
thur Rundt, whose translations of African American modernist poets like
Langston Hughes are discussed in chapter 6.
Here, however, Giese unexpectedly argues that such progress carries with
it the possibility of critique, even revolt. He sees in jazz a form of critique pro-
duced out of interaction with the dominant white society and also, and equally,
a musical translation of modernity. Put differently, jazz functions as a musical
translation of the cacophony of modernity and the modern metropolis. The
African American, writes Giese, “was the first person to completely, intuitively
sense this rhythm of the metropolis, technology, the economic, and circulation
(Verkehr)” (GK 31–32). With this first moment, Giese falls neatly into Euro-
pean theories of the mimetic capacities of “primitive” peoples, with African
Americans appearing as children in a world of adults, blank slates through
which the modern environment could be seamlessly translated. Yet in jazz,
there also exists a critical impulse against white America and the figuring of
African Americans as “second-class civilized human beings” (GK 66). More
than a reflection of American modernity, jazz for Giese originates not only in
the mimetic recreation of modernity, but in its peculiarity and satire:
Peculiarity (Kuriosität) of the music as it is delivered (herausgeholt) by

high-spirited students on pianos, on whose resonance boards are laid
newspapers and cigarette butts and a round of beer poured on top. Satire,
revenge, and irony are practiced by the Negro on this world of the
whites . . . , which ostracizes, separates, and doesn’t consider him a full
human being and yet needs him. He imitates the acoustics of the metropo-
lis and mimics in this way the people and their rhythm. This is the first
hidden, let us say provincial bar beginning (Vorstadtkasinoanfang) of the
jazz band. (GK 33)
The jazz band for Giese is a satire of the metropolis, an ironic enactment of the
sounds through which modernity excludes and persecutes African Americans
and yet ideologically (and economically) needs them. It is an expression of the
repressed, repressive, and, as he suggests, “hidden,” elements of modernization.
The naïve mimesis with which he had described African American inter-
action with white culture is gone here, or at least supplemented by his ascrip-
tion of a critical agency to African Americans. Jazz is not only to be conceived
of as the mechanical reproduction of the sounds of city streets but as an ironic
and satirical commentary on white metropolitan culture. In this reading of jazz
as, amongst other things, an African American satire of white modernity, Giese
combines the reading of jazz as satire with racial critique. Jazz transforms
through innovative application and material mistreatment, in the case of the
piano, the very normative framework of acceptable and unacceptable sound.
Instead, as in the passage from Giese cited in chapter 2, listening to jazz music
recalls for him experiences of the disruptive, fragmentary, and terrorizing side
of modernity. Disjointed and discomfiting, it is brought forth via the marginal-
ized figure of the African American. In emphasizing the underside of moder-
nity, while at the same time refusing to seek refuge in an imagined pastoral
past, jazz articulates an alternate discourse of progress and modernization. It
registers both the inescapability of modernity and the danger it represents to
the individual.
Yet while Giese rhapsodized on the revolutionary parody of jazz music,
he was only imperfectly able to integrate it with his wider discussion of
Girlkultur and the Tiller Girls. The uncomfortable proximity of Black man and
white woman implied by his argument was perhaps too much. Towards the end
of his discussion, Giese suggests that jazz has meanwhile undergone a process
of “acculturation” and appropriation by imitative white bandleaders, and he
specifically names the London Sonora Band, which had visited Berlin in late
1924 (GK 33). In order to place jazz within the rationalized world of the Girl,
to emphasize the discipline of her rhythm over the raucous parody of the jazz
band, Giese must gradually strip jazz’s rhythm of syncopation.
The relatively belated entrance of African American jazz and African
American revues, however, complicates this move. In other words, he needs to
reconcile the fact that African American revues like the Chocolate Kiddies ar-
rive in Germany only after the Tiller Girls, while according to his developmen-
tal narrative, they should have appeared first.21 Of the appearance of African
Americans on the revue stage, he writes:
There were operetta troupes of colored peoples and one of their best per-
formances was the Chocolate Kiddies, who toured Berlin, London, and
the continent even after the first appearance of the American Girls. These
musically, rhythmically, and theatrically talented, outstanding Negro
troupes closed the ring of development and only served to make clear how
America in itself came to this novel phenomenon of the Girl troupe—
amongst other things. (GK 35)
In the end, though Giese is able to explore the relationship between white
women and African American males at the conceptual level, the actual encoun-
ter with African Americans in the contemporary disrupts his analysis, forcing
him to close “the ring of development.” It is here that one comes up against the
limitations of Giese’s analysis, as well as a further example of how African,
Afro-German, and African American performers in Weimar could resist Euro-
pean exoticism and primitivism and disrupt German representations of Ameri-

can modernity as ultramodern and ultraprimitive.
Girls and Saxophones, or Blackness

and the Weimar Revue Stage
As I want to suggest, the origins of Giese’s resistance are to be located on the

Weimar revue stage. Through the performances of African American stars like
Josephine Baker,22 Louis Douglas,23 and many others, this space quickly be-
came a racial “contact zone” in the middle of Weimar Berlin, to use this term
from Mary Louise Pratt.24 Epitomized by the productions of theater directors
Hermann Haller at the Theater im Admiralspalast, Erik Charell at the Grosses
Schauspielhaus, and James Klein at the Apollo-Theater, the revue was an espe-
cially important form of popular culture during the mid-1920s and acted, on-
and off-stage, as a site of the enactment and theorization of modernity and
modernism.25 Reflecting the move towards visuality and surface culture, the
revue distinguished itself from earlier theatrical modes through a fragmentary
narrative and emphasis on Schau, or show, over content.26 At the same time, it
is important to remember that the revue was not merely a show to be seen but
also a performance to be heard and jazz and syncopated popular music its per-
petual accompaniment. Theodor Lücke commented at the time: “A revue with-
out syncopation appears almost unthinkable today.”27 Or as Alfred Polgar
wrote: “Syncopation is the salt and pepper of the up-to-date dance music. And
not only dance music. Syncopation is a symbol of our unruly times, the symbol
of a world that has come out of time.”28 Here, I am less interested in quantify-
ing the actual extent of syncopation within German revues and their jazz sym-
phony orchestras, than in the framing of the revue under this term. Simply
stated, my argument here is that Lücke’s and Polgar’s use of the term “synco-
pation” reveals as much about Girlkultur as the more common tropes of
machine-like precision and/or its relation to Fordist production in relation to
Weimar women.29 Instead, like Giese’s racially hybrid genealogy of the Girl,
the following will attempt to sketch a counter narrative of the revue around the
question of race and gender, to listen for the syncopation of the jazz band, even
while seeing synchronized Tiller Girls.
In order to do so, it is first necessary to consider African American, Afro-
German, and other performers of African descent as essential, rather than as
ancillary to Weimar revue culture. Black performers were present within the
capital (and elsewhere) throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, both individu-
ally and as part of larger all-Black casts.30 Most notable in this regard is the
series of three “Negro revues” that appeared in the capital between 1925 and
1926: Chocolate Kiddies in May 1925; La Revue nègre in January 1926, fa-
mously starring Josephine Baker, Louis Douglas, and the jazz band of Claude
Hopkins;31 and finally, the production Black People in July 1926, choreo-
graphed and authored by the African American Louis Douglas.32 Though these
three shows are fairly well-known, they were by no means the last. In 1928,
Sam Wooding returned to Berlin with his Die schwarze Revue (The Black Re-
vue), which premiered in Berlin’s Ufa-Palast in June. Unlike the Chocolate
Kiddies, this show remained but a few days in Berlin. It featured Sam Wood-
ing’s jazz band performing symphonic pieces like Gershwin’s Rhapsody in
Blue alongside jazz standards such as “Tiger Rag.” According to the program,
it was choreographed in part by Louis Douglas, a figure who represents one of
the most important lines of continuity within this period for African American
performers on the Berlin revue stage.33 Performers listed in the program and in
advertisements include Johnny Hudgins, Greenlee and Drayton, U. S. Thomp-
son, Edith Wilson, Hilda Rogers, and Benise Dant.34 Finally, Louis Douglas
and Marion Cook starred in their revue Louisiana, which played in Berlin July
1931.35 Alongside jazz music by the “Louisiana-Jazz-Band,” the show included
the African American performer Rose Poindexter, who was also featured in the
German film Der brave Sünder (The Good Sinner, dir. Fritz Kortner, 1931).
Even later still, a unique theatrical space for Black performers was created
at the Biguine, an entertainment establishment named after the dance of the
same name, which had been popularized in 1931 through the Paris colonial
exhibition and the activities of musicians like the Martinican Alexandre Stel-
lio.36 The Berlin bar, which advertised for itself as “Germany’s first Negro-
Bar,” opened in February 1932 under the direction of Viktor Skutezky, a film
producer involved, for example, in E. A. Dupont’s Variete.37 If this late date
meant that the Biguine would enjoy an existence of less than one year, it was
frequented on two occasions by modernist Max Hermann-Neisse and was ref-
erenced in the Zeitschrift für Musik and the satirical Munich-based periodical
Fliegende Blätter.38 More specifically, Biguine featured jazz and other perfor-
mances of African Americans, such as Elisabeth Welch39 and Louis Douglas,40
as well as other Black performers like Dinah from Montparnasse,41 Berthe
Vitalien,42 and others. That in 1932 Skutezky opened a bar featuring Black
performers, music, and staff serves as an important reminder that Black per-
formers were present throughout the Weimar Republic.
Beyond such large-scale examples lay further, individual cases, in partic-
ular of former German colonials and African migrants, who, often because of
scarce employment opportunities elsewhere, took positions within the popular

variety theaters (Scala and Wintergarten), the film industry, and in the circus
acts of Hagenbeck and Sarassani, as well as in jazz bands. For some members
of the Afro-German and African migrant community, the entertainment indus-
try offered a modicum of economic stability when other work was difficult to
find.43 Similar to the situation Tobias Nagl describes for Black actors in Wei-
mar cinema and for jazz bands in early Weimar, the names of these performers
rarely surface in contemporary reviews and, because of their great mobility
within the European performance circuits, appear and disappear in official reg-
isters.44 In addition, determination of their identity can be complicated by the
fact that such performers regularly took on Anglicized names such as “Jonny,”
“Jimmy,” “King Charles,” “Louis,” or “Tom.”45 Still, one might mention here
the case of François Benga, better known in the period as Féral Benga, a Sen-
egalese dancer who had worked in Paris with Josephine Baker at the Folies
Bergère and whose signature act at the time was a parody of Baker. During late
1920s and early 1930s, Benga also worked in Berlin at Wintergarten, at the
Atrium-Beba-Palast, and the Alhambra, the latter two being primarily movie
houses.46 While working at the revue, such performers of African descent could
also encounter African American performers who found themselves in one of
the many revue theaters. Rarely stars in the German press, African American
performers like Ralph Grayson, Fernandes “Sonny” Jones, Marion Cook, Sa-
die Hopkins, Ruth Walker, Ruth Bayton, and Nina McKinney performed in a
variety of shows and venues and, in the case of Bayton, were seemingly able to
profit greatly.47
If this often meant the adoption of roles that fit with the mix of exoticism,
eroticism, and internationalism so typical of the revue, these representations
need to be interrogated as much for what they reveal about German images of
Blackness as what they conceal about them. On the Weimar stage, racial ste-
reotyping tended to work via the types of roles offered Black performers: they
were often, though not always, employed as dancers or as background figures
to indicate an exotic milieu. Yet as a result, the German revue became a space
of interracial encounter in which Black and white regularly came into contact,
often staging the very same racialized identity formation between Black man
and white woman analyzed by Giese. In the following, special attention will be
paid to instances of contact between Black performers and white Girls via jazz
and the saxophone. Though as discussed in chapter 1, such examples hardly
constitute the first or the only examples of Black and white performers on the
Weimar stage, their unique status, situated between discourses of gender, race,
sexuality, and music, position them as jazz effect.
Before proceeding, I want to take a moment to explain my focus on im-

ages containing the saxophone, an instrument that by 1926 had become an
important icon of jazz.48 In each of the jazz novels analyzed in the previous
chapter, the figure most representative of jazz possesses a saxophone (Lord
Henry, John van Maray, and Makua-Taka). As such, it functions as much
more than synecdoche for jazz writ large; those who possess the saxophone
also symbolically possess jazz. Given the racialized construction of jazz
within Weimar, Black performers were regularly depicted holding saxo-
phones, regardless of whether they played the instrument, to signify their
authentic relationship to jazz and jazz’s relationship to Blackness. The ex-
ample of Ernst Krenek’s Jonny from Jonny spielt auf (Jonny Strikes Up) is
again a paradigmatic example of this use. Though Jonny is a jazz fiddler (the
entire opera revolves around his theft of a violin) and also plays the banjo, he
is introduced carrying a saxophone.49 While he will blow a few notes on this
instrument in this opening scene, the saxophone has no significance for the
remainder of the plot. Of course, in promotional material, Jonny was regu-
larly depicted blowing on this saxophone in order to index his jazz bona fi-
des. A mobile icon of the jazz republic, the saxophone proved particularly
useful as a signifier of jazz legitimacy.
Given this context, it is significant that the saxophone and its attendant
associations also came to play a conspicuous role within the representation of
the Girl and New Woman. On the one hand, saxophone-playing Black men
were regularly depicted alongside white women in both avant-garde and more
popular representations.50 If in many cases the saxophone remained within the
hands of a Black performer, there exist numerous examples that depict not
African Americans, but New Women playing, i.e., possessing, the saxophone.
As Michael Cowan has shown, the phenomenon of the “Saxophonbläserin”
(female saxophone player) was widespread within Weimar culture, existing in
film (Saxophon Susi, dir. Carl Lamač, 1928), popular song (Die Susi bläst das
Saxophon / Susi Blows on the Saxophone) and the revue, marking the “female
saxophonist as the pinnacle of a new autonomous and career-oriented woman-
hood.”51 Indeed, images of saxophone-playing women are extremely common,
such as actress Brigitte Helm in publicity stills for Metropolis, cabaret per-
former Rosa Valetti posing in a shot for the magazine Uhu, actress Hertha
Schroeter in a photograph by Yva, a shot of the dancer Trude Hesterberg from
a revue, or even in the painting “The Female Saxophone Player” by the British
artist Laura Knight that accompanied Vicki Baum’s serialized novel Feme (Se-
cret Sentence) in the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung.52 These saxophone-playing
New Women can be said to appropriate jazz’s status as a cultural marker of
empowerment, as had the male jazz protagonists in Janowitz’s and Schickele’s

jazz novels. More than this, I would also argue that these solo performances
articulate the New Woman’s possession of jazz at the same time as they dis-
place the threat of Black masculinity. At once exorcizing and appropriating
jazz’s Blackness, such representations are powerful reminders of race’s pres-
ence within Weimar jazz culture, even when seemingly absent.
While the latter two image types, Black saxophone player with white
woman and solo white female saxophone player, are the predominant modes of
representation, there is one further modality. This form, which includes all
three elements, the Girl, the saxophone, and a Black man, also existed in rep-
resentations of the Weimar revue stage. The first example (figure 12) comes
from the Haller revue, Wann und Wo (When and Where), which premiered in
Berlin’s Admiralspalast on September 2, 1927. Haller’s fourth great revue of
the decade, the program was written by director Haller himself, along with
Rideamus (pseudonym for Fritz Oliven) and Willi Wolf, featuring the music of
composer Walter Kollo. Though none of the contemporary reviews mention
this fact, When and Where was also a revue featuring Black male and white
female performers sharing the same stage.
At the same time, there is also something unique and uniquely significant
to this scene’s placement of a Black performer alongside the omnipresent
Girls. This becomes clear when compared to standard representations of the
Tiller Girls. In images like those from Giese, the Girls are depicted in a linear
fashion, often encompassing the entire breadth of the image, and are presented
so that the individuality of the performers becomes overpowered by their sarto-
rial and physical uniformity. Further, the Girls typically are presented with
exposed legs, preferably performing some sort of recognizable motion which
functions to reference the synchronized movements for which they were best
known. Frozen and desiring of reanimation by the viewer’s imagination, the
Girls are abstracted from the original context of performance. By contrast, in
the image from When and Where, the Girls appear almost miniaturized in com-
parison to the overpowering scenery. Indeed, the set design plays a role equal
in symbolic power to the action on the stage. While images of naked women
were by no means exceptional on the Weimar stage, the scenery’s combination
of the nude woman with a saxophone is important as a further iteration of the
solo saxophone-playing Girl. In addition, her slick, short hair, large bracelets,
round hips, and faux banana skirt should be seen as in conversation with im-
ages of Josephine Baker and other Black performers circulating during this
time. Moving down from the scenery to the Girls themselves, one immediately
notices their asymmetrical grouping on either side of the saxophone’s bell. In
Figure 12: Marcelle Rahna and Fernandes “Sonny” Jones in the revue
Wann und Wo from 1927. Photo by Gabor Hirsch, courtesy of Dr. Hed-
wig Muller of the Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung University of
Cologne.
relation to the Black performer in the middle, the Girls are not only disrupted
by his presence, they are also displaced. Temporarily removed from the logic
of rationalization, the line formed by their bodies appears less refined than in
other images, despite this image’s obvious staging.
The fundamental importance of this image, however, is contained within
the relationship between the two central figures standing in the midst of the
girls. Positioned around the opening of the saxophone’s bell, an instrument-
less Black man stands facing a Girl holding a prop saxophone. The two per-
formers here are likely to have been Marcelle Rahna, the revue’s French star,
and the African American dancer Fernandes “Sonny” Jones.53 Jones was the
long-time partner of Louis Douglas, and he had first come to Europe and Ger-
many in the pre-war era as part of “Belle Davis and her Piccaninnies.”54 In
1917, he had also performed as a dancer in drummer Louis Mitchell’s Seven
Spades, an important example of early African American bands in Europe dur-
ing World War I. Jones’ presence in this jazz-age production is thus a further
reminder of how Weimar jazz culture is marked as much by rupture as by con-
tinuity in terms of the Black presence.55 Turning again to the image, while
Jones’ location vis-à-vis the oversized saxophone suggests his connection to
the instrument, his physically present partner draws away from him, holding
her palm up to him. What the image depicts, then, is a battle over representa-
tion, of jazz and the Girl. Though creating proximity and, indeed, contact be-
tween Black and white performers, the staging also suggests the attempt to
control this.
As the foregoing has argued, the more the Girl and New Woman came to
approximate her American counterpart, to not only dance to, but also perform
jazz via the saxophone, the more her identity threatened to “darken.”56 Specifi-
cally, the revue performer Jenny Steiner developed an act that centered around
a parody of Josephine Baker in performances between 1926 and 1929.57 If,
following Patrice Petro, one sees in the New Woman and Girl “as much a ra-
cialized as a gendered ideal,” 58 encounters like that staged in When and Where?
play off (and into) the German public’s concern over the racial health and pu-
rity of white German women, the fear, for example, that these women were
“becoming less motherly, both quantitatively and qualitatively.”59 Yet pushing
Petro’s argument a bit, one can suggest second that this racialization occurred
not only along the axis of German racial purity in opposition to Blackness, but
that the image of the New Woman itself bordered on a racially hybridized iden-
tity between Black and white.
Recuperating Jazz’s Whiteness and the

Rejection of the Black Revue
Towards the end of the 1920s, the revue underwent a period of crisis that ulti-
mately resulted in the end of the era of the grand revues. The live, theatrical
revue was gradually replaced, on the one hand, by the much more mobile and
potentially more profitable sound film and, on the other, by the less modern but
potentially less offensive operetta.60 For example, Charell quit the revue busi-
ness, eventually directing the grand film Der Kongress tanzt (The Congress
Dances) in 1931. Haller himself put on his last revue in 1928, Schön und schick
(Pretty and Fashionable) and the Admiralspalast would likewise turn to oper-
etta in the early 1930s. In the midst of this period of transition, Josephine Baker
returned to Berlin to star in the revue Bitte einsteigen! (All Aboard!) at the
Theater des Westens. The music for this production was composed by Friedrich
Hollaender, author of amongst many other things, the unforgettably jazzy mu-
sic featured in von Sternberg’s Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) from 1931.
Despite the combination of these two figures, the revue was an unmitigated
financial flop. As Alan Lareau argues, the show’s failure was due both to the
small size of the theater, the general crisis in the revue and its Blackness. He
argues that the show’s failure indicates that the interest in Baker had been pri-
marily a fad and that by 1928, “the discourse of the ‘primitive modernity’ of
blacks and jazz had already run dry.”61 Lareau is certainly correct to note that
this period witnessed a significant number of attacks on jazz and Blackness,
which can be seen across a wide range of issues—in the waning enthusiasm
over Wooding, the negation of the jazz symphony in Weimar literature, and
now in the apparent rejection of Baker. For me, however, the critiques of the
late 1920s reveal less the superficial nature of the investment than their oppo-
site, namely insecurity over the depth of connection between jazz and Weimar
culture. In other words, in Baker’s less than triumphal return to Berlin, one
witnesses not the death knell of jazz’s or Baker’s relevance for Germany but a
reinterpretation of the relationship.
At the same time, the turn “away” from jazz did impact the ways in which
the connection between the New Woman, the Girl, Blackness, and jazz was
framed. The period between 1929 and 1933 witnesses multiple voices within
the German jazz discussion, who figure Black jazz and its popularity as an
historical moment to be relegated to the background, an ephemeral fling with
modernity, despite the ongoing presence in Berlin of African American and
Black performers in revues such as Douglas’ Louisiana or at the Biguine. Just
as Giese tried to explain away the coexistence of Sam Wooding’s Black jazz
and the white Tiller Girls by suggesting the former closed the ring of develop-
ment, such writers and artists push against the ongoing presence of Black per-
formers. The 1931 film Die große Attraktion (The Great Attraction, dir. Max
Reichmann) represents a case in point of this tonal shift. Ostensibly a vehicle
for the tremendously popular singer Richard Tauber, the thin plot revolves
around the love life of the fictional tremendously popular singer Ricardo,
played by Tauber. It features numerous performances by variety show artists,
acrobats, strongmen, and tango dancers (one of which is played by the famous
Weimar-era actress Margo Lion). In fact, given that the film’s second act takes
place in Berlin’s Wintergarten, it is likely that these represent actual perform-
ers of the period. The Great Attraction is thus as much filmic representation as
rare document of Berlin popular culture in the early 1930s.
The manner by which Blackness and jazz are thematized within the film
reveals how their relation to the Girl and New Woman were reframed for this
period of crisis. Specifically, we see this in the narrative arc of the main fe-
male protagonist Kitty, played by the 21-year-old dancer Marianne Winkel-
stern, who had performed as a soloist for Charell at the Grosses Schauspiel-
haus during the latter half of the 1920s. During this period she performed
alongside Black revue performers, for example, in Charell’s 1927 production
of Madame Pompadour, which starred Fritzi Massary and Walter Jankuhn, but
also featured, in addition to Winkelstern, the African American Ruth Walker
and “Snowball,” whose real name was Charles Harris, an African American
youth who had appeared with Paul Whiteman in New York.62 Winkelstern’s
dance and revue background is put to use in the first scene of the film, which
takes place at a Parisian music hall. After a series of establishing shots that
overlay Parisian streets, the Eifel Tower, and blinking advertisements for Ri-
cardo’s performance at the Casino de Paris, the initial scene opens unexpect-
edly onto a shot of a blackfaced Winkelstern carrying a saxophone in her hand
in a manner reminiscent of Krenek’s Jonny. Wearing an Afro-wig that will
soon carry symbolic importance for the film, she performs on the instrument
while the background fills with a large troupe of dancing girls, later to be re-
vealed as the Jackson Girls, one of many Tiller Girl clones of the period. The
editing crosscuts images of Kitty’s racialized, sexualized jazz performance
with the chorus-line kicks of the Girls. In other words, this presentation tele-
scopes the two aforementioned image modalities: the blackfaced Kitty is both
the Black man playing a saxophone for white women and a New Woman play-
ing a saxophone solo. Further, it is significant to note that her name “Kitty,”
both infantilizes her as well as resonates with the description of Blacks as
“chocolate kiddies” following on the revue of 1925. Indeed, Rose Poindexter
portrayed the Black dancer “Kiddy” in the previously mentioned film The
Good Sinner, also from 1931.63
At the same time, in The Great Attraction, this intensification of Black-
ness vis-à-vis the white New Woman serves a primarily negative function in
the plot. After finishing her performance, the blackfaced Kitty runs offstage,
only to come to an abrupt halt as she sights members of Ricardo’s entourage.
Through shot-countershot editing, the viewer watches Kitty watch as she waits
for Ricardo. After entering the scene, Ricardo pauses for a moment before
looking directly in Kitty’s smiling direction. Though the viewer registers
through his pause that he has caught a glimpse of her, Ricardo does not stop
and merely continues on his way. At this point, Kitty looks to her right and left
and comes to see for herself what Ricardo (and the viewer) has already real-
ized: two bare-chested Black Africans are standing next to her (figure 13).
These two figures are in the far background when Kitty stops mid-run to look
for Ricardo and then suddenly appear, like a trick-shot effect from cinematic
history, the moment Ricardo’s gaze meets hers. Turning towards first one and
Figure 13: Still from

the film Die große At-
traktion (The Great
Attraction), 1931.
then the other Black male, she looks down at her own cosmetically darkened
skin and breaks out in laughter. Now realizing that Ricardo had ignored her
because he had taken her for Black, after a quick rub of her similarly black-
faced cheek, she takes off her wig, revealing the white skin around her hairline.
In an inversion of the well-known scene at the end of American film The
Jazz Singer (1927) in which Jack Robin (Al Jolson) applies blackface make-up
in front of a dressing-room mirror, Kitty, now seated in front of a mirror, re-
moves her blackface makeup for the audience. As Kitty continues to remove
her Blackness and reveal her whiteness, we witness, through a series of cross-
cuts, the first performance by Ricardo. Significantly, Ricardo is seen with a
modern dance band, which includes, amongst other instruments, a saxophone.
In this way, Ricardo himself can be considered part of Weimar jazz culture, a
culture that, while still foreign, has become Europeanized or, rather, whitened.
So if Kitty’s initial performance represents the dangers of Blackness and
Americanized femininity, Ricardo can be said to represent its overcoming
through white male masculinity. In other words, through the opposition be-
tween the “Black” jazz Kitty and the white jazz Ricardo, The Great Attraction
stages the whitening of jazz via the prism of gender.
The interweaving of these elements continues as the plot progresses with
Ricardo heading to Berlin and Kitty, leaving the Jackson Girls behind, follow-
ing him. When she next approaches Ricardo on the train, she has transformed
herself from the foreign, Black New Woman of Paris into a more suitable white
German woman. Nonetheless, Ricardo still resists her, at this point profes-
sional, advances. Her contractual obligations play a pivotal role here and even
though she will impress him in Berlin through an impromptu saxophone per-
formance (this time without blackface), he forbids her from officially joining
his troupe until she is released from her contract by Jackson. Given that the
film will end the heterosexual union of Kitty and Ricardo, the preexisting con-
tract functions both as economic and marriage contract, with possession of
Kitty transferring from one white male to the next.
It is important here to consider how jazz and its Blackness, or rather
whiteness, inform Kitty’s transformation. During the early 1930s in particular,
numerous authors sought to account for what they viewed as a disconnect be-
tween what European jazz musicians performed and the images and sounds
evoked by the word “jazz,” namely Black dancing and music, especially within
the right-wing and fascist politics. Here, it is useful to recall that in April 1930
in Thuringia, the Nazi culture minister Wilhelm Frick issued a “Decree Against
Negro Culture.”64 This decree was largely viewed as directed against jazz and
one of the ways jazz’s defenders came to its aid was to distance the music from
the “Negro culture” being attacked by the Nazis and others. Though as we will
see in the next chapter, this type of argument does not arise in the 1930s, it does
solidify during this period and, to no small degree, is due to the threat of state
intervention against jazz. In one such article published in 1932, the mathemati-
cian A. Sacher-Woenckhaus sought to “defend” jazz and its associated dances
by arguing “our modern dances are not nigger-dances anymore.”65 Indeed, this
statement echoes that given by “Bruno Weil,” potentially Kurt Weill, in re-
sponse to the April 1930 ban on jazz referred to above: “The claim that jazz
music, as it is exclusively practiced today, is Negro music, demonstrates a de-
gree of ignorance that calls into question Mr. Frick’s qualifications to carry the
title ‘minister of culture.’”66 Sacher-Woenckhaus goes further, however, argu-
ing for the progressive whitening of jazz, so that if it started out as Black, its
true value lies today in the hands of white European composers. He suggests:
“There are no Black Hindemiths, Honeggers, Weills, Stravinskys and others,
who have shown how to master jazz, to make it into a source of unheard of
tonal appeal . . .”67 Sacher-Woenckhaus’ broader point here is that the Euro-
pean dominance of jazz has reached the point at which the name jazz is no
longer useful to describe such works; while they have been influenced by jazz
and African Americans, their current form is due primarily to Europeans, and
just as one today accepts previously foreign cultural artifacts like tobacco or
potatoes as European, so too should Germans accept this new jazz.
Ricardo’s character and his music fall broadly into line with the argument of
Sacher-Woenckhaus and others: while Ricardo’s music is influenced by African
American culture, it is presented in a deracinated, universal, and nonthreatening
form. Significantly, Ricardo’s current status hides an earlier traumatic encounter
with dangerous female sexuality. As the viewer learns, Ricardo’s initial resistance
to Kitty’s advances was rooted within the trauma of his ex-wife’s decision to leave
him to pursue an illicit affair with another man and a career in America. It is only
after Ricardo himself confronts this, his own jazz past, that his masculinity can be
fully recuperated. In a scene occurring towards the end of the film, Ricardo’s
wife’s ex-lover appears in a bar where Ricardo, Kitty, and other members of the
troupe are dining. In Ricardo’s rage at seeing him, he grabs the man by his coat
and drags him outside of the restaurant. After the tussle, the two men leave and go
to another establishment, with an appropriate text appearing on its window: “Res-
tauration.” In the following scene, the former lover hands Ricardo a picture of his
ex-wife, revealed in a close-up to be a young cigarette smoking New Woman.
After contemplating the image, Ricardo tosses the photograph back to him, sig-
naling his complete break with her. Having finally overcome the trauma inflicted
by the New Woman, Ricardo is now ready to return to normalcy and to do so with
the equally transformed Kitty.68 The film’s final scene features a joint perfor-
mance by Ricardo and Kitty of the song “Du warst mir ein Roman” (“You were a
Novel to Me”).69 Yet when Kitty emerges from the back of the music hall to ac-
company his singing on her saxophone, the Blackness ascribed to her, to the saxo-
phone, to the New Woman and jazz, has all but been erased.
In the early 1930s, the ideas surrounding the whiteness of jazz and female
sexuality served to disperse the threat of Blackness and the New Woman that
had been central to Giese’s Girlkultur from 1925. Across a variety of cultural
works, this shift can be seen as an important index of a conservative turn in
German culture, something accelerated, though by no means initiated, by the
Great Depression in 1929 or by governmental actions taken against jazz by the
National Socialists beginning in 1930. Nonetheless, this shift had important
ramifications for the German engagement with jazz in the late 1920s and early
1930s, which will be discussed in the following chapter in greater detail. Still,
as should also be clear, the revue stage played a central role in the contestation
and construction of both jazz and the New Woman. From Josephine Baker to
Louis Douglas, Fernandes “Sonny” Jones and beyond, the African American
and Black presence on the stage did not merely exist alongside, but lay at the
very heart of the debate over Girlkultur, with the whiteness of the Girl, like that
of Kitty, emerging at their points of intersection.
Rereading Kracauer and the Mass Ornament
One question arising out of the foregoing analysis is whether (and how) the
connection between Blackness and the Girl entered the work of surely the most
famous commentator on the subject, Siegfried Kracauer. Or, as James Donald

suggestively asks: What if Kracauer met Josephine Baker?70 Certainly, given
the prevalent use of Black performers in Weimar revues, it is unlikely that Kra-
cauer did not have opportunity to meet any number of Black performers, and
so it is less a question of counter-factual history than whether he chose to
document these encounters in his writings. As Hans Pehl notes, Kracauer did
in fact review the performance of the African American dancers “Myron and
Pearl” in late 1928, yet he did so without mentioning that they were Black.71
Given this and other examples of Kracauer’s response to Black performances
discussed below, the more relevant question to ask is why Kracauer’s work, in
particular that on the revue, generally elided discussion of race.
Before proceeding to address this question directly, it is first necessary to
look at Kracauer’s perspective on the revue and the Tiller Girls. Kracauer’s
texts on revue culture and the Tiller Girls act, as in Giese, as an object of
analysis through which to model his unique methodology for analyzing seem-
ingly insignificant cultural ephemera like the Tiller Girls. In his 1927 “Mass
Ornament,” the Tiller Girls come to stand for an entire era, one struggling to
comprehend the radical changes resulting from a totalizing and rationalizing
capitalist system. Of course, as Miriam Hansen has recently argued, what
makes Kracauer’s essay so valuable is not the comparison between the legs of
the Tiller Girls and hands of the workers on Ford’s assembly lines, each stan-
dard tropes of Weimar-era discourse on Girlkultur.72 Instead, she argues that
“in contrast with either enthusiastic or lapsarian accounts, Kracauer’s essay
assumes a more dialectical stance towards the phenomenon, reading it as an
index of an ambivalent historical development.”73 For Hansen, the Tiller Girls
in Kracauer’s theory are “heuristic and symptomatic”: they both suggest the
extent to which capitalist rationality has inserted itself into the natural world
(here, the human body) as well as point towards what is missing, namely con-
scious understanding on the part of the audience, i.e., more enlightenment.74
As Kracauer once wrote, capitalism’s shortcoming is not that “it rationalizes
too much but rather too little.”75 At the same time, it is precisely this function-
alization of the Tiller Girls within his broader theory of modernity that lends
itself to the antiseptic portrayal one often finds in Kracauer: they are syn-
chronic, rather than syncopated, abstracted rather than contextualized on the
Weimar stage, geometry machines rather than the imperfect human bodies we
see in the image from When and Where? Closer inspection of Kracauer’s texts
from the period reveals a series of questions relating to racial contact that are
nonetheless present within his work. While in his texts on the revue and Tiller
Girls these tend to exist as traces, other texts of his, in particular those on jazz
performances and Blacks in Paris, push their presence to the foreground.76
Generally, and much in tune with his discussion of gender, racial differ-
ence functions primarily as an absence with Kracauer’s thought. Just as the
Tiller Girls cease to be feminine individuals within the mass ornament and in-
stead serve primarily to “point [ . . . ] to the locus of the erotic,” Africans and
African Americans, as well as cultural expressions like jazz, cease to be
“Black” in his work. 77 They point instead to the function of race as a sign of
ideologically constructed difference. One intention behind this negation of dif-
ference is to show the global reach of capitalist rationality. With this argument,
one imagines, he hopes to convince his European readers to forego the exoticist
escapism of the revue or travel films and to instead focus on becoming con-
scious of the inner workings of their world’s reality.
Kracauer’s method here is to simultaneously point towards the banality of
things treated as radically different by mainstream culture, while highlighting
the exoticness and strangeness of mainstream, middle-class German culture. In
this, he invokes the idea of a dialectics of identity in difference and difference
in identity, a procedure that simultaneously serves to familiarize the foreign
and defamiliarize the self in an act of enlightenment. A particularly striking
example of this tactic occurs within the initial framing of his 1930 study of
white-collar workers, Die Angestellten (The Salaried Masses). As Kracauer
implies, the white-collar worker, at least according to a Marxist theory of de-
velopment, should have been in steady decline. Yet during the Weimar Repub-
lic, their ranks swelled as much as their politics appeared to veer to the right.
Yet another non-synchronous moment of capitalism, their existence is to him
an example of the “exoticism of a commonplace existence.”78 Turning the ta-
bles on the white-collar workers, Kracauer writes that their daily life is “more
unknown than that of the primitive tribes at whose habits those same employ-
ees marvel in films.”79 Indeed, Kracauer sees himself as a Kurtz of sorts, jour-
neying into the heart of darkness that is the modern metropolis, suggesting that
his exploration of the salaried masses’ culture is “perhaps more of an adventure
than any film trip into Africa.”80 This satirical and self-deprecatory gesture in-
dicates the extent to which Kracauer’s use of tropes relating to Blackness was
a highly self-reflexive one, simultaneously eliding and invoking a crude dialec-
tic of primitivism and modernity.
The most explicit example of Kracauer’s ironic deployment of this vo-
cabulary is the 1928 article “Negerball in Paris” (“Negro Ball in Paris”).81 The
mise-en-scene of Kracauer’s short vignette is a small, inconspicuous Parisian
locale for Black Parisians in the Quartier de Grenelle. He uses this setting to
hint at the distinction between the Black inhabitants of Paris and Black enter-
tainers and performers, like Josephine Baker, to whom visitors flock in order to
experience “exoticism.” Yet, as he suggests, even these rather uninteresting
Blacks of the suburbs are hunted by white tourists as entertainment game, hav-
ing had to repeatedly change gathering locations in order to avoid what Kra-
cauer calls “white curiosity.”82 For Kracauer, this is but a “futile game of hide-
and-seek, as the foreigners always follow again on their heels.”83 This inversion
of foreign and foreigners is central to his argument. Blacks are identified not
through their difference but through their identity with their fellow Parisians.
Meanwhile, the foreigners are the white (German?) visitors seeking to find
their vision of Blackness reinforced through “real” experience. Throughout the
text, Kracauer plays with the primitivist imagination of his readership. For
example, he writes of the scene inside as being marked by the “impenetrable
darkness of the haircuts, the red, green, and yellow vestments glisten like trop-
ical flowers towards the heavens.”84 His language here mirrors the organic
metaphors typically used to describe Black subjectivity. However, he inverts
their normal meaning when he corrects himself, stating: “This is no Negro ball,
this is a Parisian provincial ball, which just happens to be put on by blacks.” In
a word, these Blacks are “indigenous products,” with little other than their skin
color to differentiate them from other Parisians.85 As the Tiller Girls point to-
wards the erotic, these figures point towards the exotic, and in revealing their
ideological function within the capitalist entertainment system, Kracauer seeks
to disrupt the myth of Blackness within Europe and Germany.86 Having de-
luded his reader into imagining the people of the hall forming an organic forest
of “Black savages,” he instead proceeds to unmask the European public’s im-
age of Blackness as an artificial, white projection.
Kracauer concludes his short discussion by considering the symptomatic
meaning of the scene. For him, these Blacks’ non-difference signals not merely
the interrelation and ultimate similarity of different groups but is a “sign of the
exoticism of the Parisian population, that true exoticism that cannot be derived
from geography.”87 We have already encountered this double move of familiar-
izing the “exotic” and “exoticizing” the familiar before, namely in his better-
known studies of the white-collar workers and the Tiller Girls. Yet here, Kra-
cauer also, even surprisingly, suggests the existence of actual, rather than
merely ideologically, produced difference. Kracauer’s own “exotic” is neither
defined by nor reducible to race; instead, his exotic is something metropolitan,
modern: “Paris takes Africa into itself too. For this reason it can become a
harbor for the Negroes.”88 As Theodore Rippey suggests, Kracauer potentially

has in mind “Paris as exotic zone a vision of a necessarily urban, modern space,
in which different groups experience continuous, multifocal [contact], and
where equal cultural footing guarantees each group the freedom to appropriate
any other’s ways on its own terms.”89 To be sure, such a situation was hardly
common, and one might counter that Kracauer’s optimistic vision of the equal-
ity experienced by Africans in Paris is overstated. At the same time, both this
text as well as the ethnographic framing in The Salaried Masses point to the
important role Blackness and Black cultural expression could play in his work.
Working with the same methodology employed to decipher the mass orna-
ment, i.e., working “through the center of the mass ornament, not away from
it,” Kracauer deciphers the meaning of Black performance for white European
audiences. While validating its desire for the exotic, for difference in the undif-
ferentiated mass metropolis, he wants to redirect such energies by debunking
the associated natural-organic vocabulary and by gesturing towards a concep-
tualization of modern identity that would welcome, rather than extinguish or
ideologically exploit, such difference.
Still, as Kracauer would have been aware, this ideal was all but impossible
given the economic, social, and cultural position of Africans, Afro-Europeans,
and African Americans in Europe. Indeed, in a short review article written a
few months before “Negro Ball in Paris,” Kracauer himself struggles with his
own fascination with Blackness, the revue, and jazz. Not coincidentally, it is a
review of a 1928 performance of Sam Wooding, who was this time performing
in Frankfurt’s Schumann Theater. Though he devotes but a paragraph to their
contribution to the show (which also featured Russian, French, and Chinese
performers), the dancing girls, step dances, and singers do not fail to leave an
impression on him. Of the music, he writes: “It rustles as if from jungles, deri-
sive laughter brays into the sweet pianissimo and the desire wallowing in the
darkness is disenchanted by loud tumult.”90 An aural analogue to match his
own unique methodology, Sam Wooding’s jazz sets out from the audience’s
primitivist inclinations only to break with them. And just as he was wont to
place himself alongside the pleasure-seeking white-collar workers, here too he
finds himself enthralled by the music. In a passage similar to Lion’s later ac-
count of his first experience of Wooding or the discussion of the fictional jazz
concert in America by Makua-Taka, Kracauer notes: “It’s a hard lot to only be
allowed to look; the music drives into your legs and they want do dance along
at any price.”91 Of course, Kracauer doesn’t dance, doesn’t take part, both be-
cause of the setting and, one suspects, because he didn’t allow himself to. To
have danced, with the girls, to jazz, would have been to collapse what he
viewed as a necessary critical distance, no matter how slight, so that he could
point the way out from within.
Yet if Kracauer ultimately resists the temptation to create jazz, rather than
merely enjoy it from a distance, a unique experiment in jazz was already un-
derway in Frankfurt, little more than a mile away from where Kracauer was
sitting in the Schumann Theater. In January 1928, the local music conserva-
tory, Dr. Hoch’s, began teaching American jazz to its German students, devel-
oping an entire program of study devoted to the music under the direction of a
22-year-old Hungarian composer Mátyás Seiber. Bringing the bar, revue, and
street into its esteemed institution, the creation of the Jazzklasse unleashed a
debate about jazz and its role in Weimar society that has few parallels.
Chapter 5
Bridging the Great Divides:

Jazz at the Conservatory
Jazz could be a bridge between entertainment music and high art. For it
makes not only in technical aspects the highest demands on the performer,
it also demands improvisatory, in other words, real musical abilities—
entertainment music should not be fought, it should be raised. Its eradica-
tion would be utopia.
—Alfred Baresel (1927)
In late 1927, the director of Hoch’s Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main, Bern-

hard Sekles, issued a circular announcing that a program in jazz instruction, a
Jazzklasse, would begin next January at the conservatory. News of Sekles’ plan
spread quickly as it moved through the daily press to the German music press,
the Prussian state parliament, and even across the Atlantic, where the New York
Times recapitulated the debate for its American readership under the somewhat
misleading headline, “Jazz Bitterly Opposed in Germany.”1 As the first exam-
ple of post-secondary education in jazz, in Germany and in Europe, there was
something unique to this announcement from Frankfurt am Main. From the
point of view of jazz’s opponents, talk of jazz colonizing German music and its
institutions no longer appeared mere idle chatter. This very real incursion of
jazz into a conservatory pointed to them to the dangers of the contemporary
moment. Both American and African, jazz symbolized the absolute worst the
contemporary musical world had to offer. Those voices supportive of jazz, on
the other hand, viewed in Sekles’ plan a pragmatic approach towards adjusting
musical education to the realities of the modern music profession. Specifically,
they referred to the large number of musicians who depended on jazz and pop-
ular music for their livelihood, without, however, ever having undergone any
systematic training in such music. Interestingly, few questioned whether jazz’s
translation into the academy would result in something essential about it being
lost. For most, it was of little concern whether jazz gained or lost through the
141
Jazzklasse. It seemed the more pressing question was rather: Did Germany and
German music and musicians have anything to gain from it?
Bound up with these particular, musically oriented questions is a number
of other, broader cultural thematics of the period. Sekles’ announcement ig-
nited, among others, smoldering debates about the relationship between music
and race, the fate of German national identity in modernity, and the division
between high and low culture. This chapter will look specifically at the latter
question in order to highlight the ways in which the question of “jazz at the
conservatory” became a moment of crystallization in this wider discussion.
The Jazzklasse debate undoubtedly marks an intensification of the struggle to
define the changed and ever-changing relationship between high and low cul-
ture. A central cause of much of the acrimony aroused by the Jazzklasse re-
sulted from a generalized anxiety over the apparent disintegration of the
boundary between these spheres of art. While such anxiety certainly does not
stem exclusively from jazz, throughout the Weimar Republic, this music from
across the Atlantic consistently acted to disrupt and problematize long-standing
assumptions regarding the division.
As we have seen, during the early 1920s and then with greater intensity
after the concerts of Sam Wooding and Paul Whiteman, jazz became a main-
stay of German popular music and could be heard, often in its symphonic form,
in bars, cabarets, and cafes from Berlin to Frankfurt and beyond. Equally im-
portant, however, were developments within so-called art music, symphonies,
operas, and other works by contemporary composers that seemed to be draw-
ing increasingly upon the low world of jazz for inspiration, rather than from the
three Bs of Bach, Beethoven or Brahms. Paul Hindemith, Darius Milhaud, and
George Antheil, not to mention Kurt Weill, all produced works inflected by
what they took to be the jazz idiom. And their works were often massively suc-
cessful. Perhaps no better example of this exists than Ernst Krenek’s “jazz
opera,” Jonny spielt auf (Jonny Strikes Up).2 Whether one would today term
the music employed by Krenek “jazz,” the piece was incessantly discussed
under the rubric of the “jazz opera” and, for better and worse, few questioned
whether this “jazz opera” was at all jazzy. Enjoying around 500 performances
across cities stretching from the Baltic to New York, the seemingly unending
run of Krenek’s Jonny in 1927 appeared to have ushered in a new era in which
jazz’s popularity had reached critical mass. In a word, by November 1927
when Sekles made his announcement, jazz seemed to be conquering the world,
both high and low, through its invasion of the concert and opera hall and now
something perhaps even more sacrosanct: institutions of higher learning. The
combination of jazz, a mass-produced, racially foreign cultural commodity,
Bridging the Great Divides 143
with a tradition-rich conservatory such as Dr. Hoch’s left little doubt, for pro-
ponents and opponents, that the dividing line between the high culture of op-
eras, symphonies, and conservatories and the low culture of jazz, jazz bands,
revues, and cafés was vanishing before their very eyes.
Still, the Jazzklasse was never only a debate carried out in the press, a
theoretical encounter over ideological abstractions. Instead, its very creation
and five-year existence are testament to the concrete ways by which jazz
changed the cultural landscape of Weimar Germany. In order to explain why it
was in Frankfurt am Main, rather than elsewhere in Germany, France, or Great
Britain that the first academic program in jazz was created, it is necessary to
consider, after a short history of Dr. Hoch’s Conservatory, the social impact of
the hyperinflation that culminated in 1923. Next, through an examination of
the writings of Bernhard Sekles, the program’s initiator, both material and aes-
thetic reasons are presented as to why it was Hoch’s and nowhere else that of-
fered the first formal academic instruction in jazz in Germany. After which, I
turn to the discussion sparked by Sekles’ November announcement, with spe-
cial emphasis on how the Jazzklasse occupied a privileged position in the crisis
of the high/low ideology during Weimar. Yet, my consideration concludes not
with this debate but with discussion of the activities and writings of the Jazzk-
lasse’s director, Mátyás Seiber, who, through radio concerts, publications, and
pedagogical innovations, practiced what so many others merely preached: the
jazzing up of German culture.
A Conservatory in Crisis
In 1923, due to the disastrous effects of almost a decade of inflation, the once
well-funded Hoch’s Conservatory was in financial dire straits and saw itself
confronted with the increasingly real threat of a state takeover of the institu-
tion. Though only four years would pass before Sekles would make his scan-
dalous announcement, there was at the time little to indicate that this esteemed
conservatory would begin teaching a low and popular music like jazz. Indeed,
the conservatory movement in Germany, which began in the nineteenth cen-
tury, had been pivotal to defining the boundary between high and low culture.
For the creation of conservatories like Dr. Hoch’s can be understood as one
important element in the growth of bourgeois culture in Germany in that such
institutions occupy a new space within social hierarchies. French economist
and cultural theorist Jacques Attali sees the conservatory movement as belong-
ing to a much larger process of what he calls the “normalization of the musi-
cian.” By this, he means to indicate a process by which universal aesthetic

forms and practices were imposed on music practices. Attali writes that conser-
vatories “were charged with producing high-quality musicians through very
selective training. Beginning in the eighteenth century, they replaced the free
training of the jongleurs and minstrels with local apprenticeship.”3 Neither
courtly nor sacred, conservatories grew out of the perception of a lack of pro-
fessionalism and training in music with the intent to remove the stain of the
dilettante from music and to transform it into a distinct and honored form of
art. Conservatories thus mark a disciplining of musicians in both senses of the
word. They appropriate the dispersed power of local musicians and create a
system under which these institutions possess great power in the conferral of
aesthetic legitimacy. Simply put, conservatories served to distinguish between
those who belonged to the “higher” realm of the musical artist and those who
remained at the “lower” level of untrained or amateur musicians.
As is so often the case, it was a dilettante, lacking cultural capital and thus
legitimacy in the eyes of the guardians of culture, who provided the financial
capital necessary for the founding of Frankfurt’s first conservatory. Born in
1815, Dr. Joseph Hoch began his life in a relatively wealthy family and is said
to have had pretensions to a career in the diplomatic service. He also seems to
have fancied himself a musician, taking piano and violin lessons in his youth.
Hoch eventually became a lawyer, accumulating a tremendous amount of
wealth over his lifetime. When he died in 1874, his will decreed that were he
to have no offspring (he did not), “it is my dearest wish that my entire estate
serve the purpose of founding and maintaining an institute for music under the
name Dr. Hoch’s Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main, the city of my birth.”4
His original endowment was a tremendous sum of over 900,000 Goldmarks to
be managed by a board of seven trustees. Dr. Hoch’s Conservatory opened on
September 19, 1878, four years after his death.
With teachers such as Clara Schumann and students like Hans Pfitzner,
Percy Grainger, and Paul Hindemith, Hoch’s Conservatory became a highly
reputable and successful institution over the course of its first thirty years. Its
enrollment increased from an original number of 139 in 1878 to over 400 in the
academic year directly preceding the First World War.5 The period between
1914 and 1923 was to be a very difficult one for Hoch’s Conservatory, as it was
for most such institutions in Germany. For one, it faced diminishing enrollment
numbers due to the war, although it did not suffer as terribly as female students
had from the beginning outnumbered male students. More importantly, the
conservatory had to cope with a steadily rising rate of inflation, which began,
at first only slowly, to diminish the size of its endowment.
Yet, it was not merely the economy that was impinging on the desires of
the Frankfurters. With the November Revolution of 1918, the Social Demo-
cratic Party had come to power, bringing with it a general belief in greater edu-
cational opportunity for all citizens and the idea that the state was the best
means to achieve this. Under Leo Kestenberg, Social Democrat and head of the
music division of the Prussian Ministry of Science, Art, and Education (Volks-
bildung), a major reform of the music education system was undertaken. A
musician by training, Kestenberg felt strongly that music was an essential com-
ponent of a general humanist education. His overall goal, as he put it in his
programmatic Musikerziehung und Musikpflege (Music Education and the
Cultivation of Music) from 1921, was to help realize music’s potential to create
“a new humanity according to the law of community and music.”6
During his tenure as head of the music division between 1918 and 1932,
he attempted to bring about radical change in the area of music pedagogy. The
so-called “Kestenberg Reforms” were in some ways an extension of the profes-
sionalization of musicians to which the founding of the conservatories also
belonged. Yet this time, it worked against rather than for the conservatories.
Kestenberg began by standardizing teacher training, which now required of all
instructors an Abitur, as well as the successful completion of a state examina-
tion. To this end, Kestenberg envisioned the creation of state committees to
design the test and state music colleges to prepare students for it. Of all Kesten
berg’s reforms, this last one was most disconcerting to private institutions like
Hoch’s Conservatory. In cities like Frankfurt, Kestenberg did not foresee the
construction of a new school, opting instead to simply take over the existing
institution. Of course, had the hyperinflation not decimated the conservatory’s
original endowment, there would have been much less to fear. Yet, because it
was now forced to rely on the city of Frankfurt and the state of Prussia for its
funding, Hoch’s Conservatory had lost the autonomy from state and market
that had defined its early history. Indeed, a state takeover of a previously pri-
vate conservatory was not without precedence. One had to look no further than
the city of Cologne. The Cologne Conservatory, which had stood since 1850,
became a public institution in 1925, and Kestenberg was overtly working to
achieve the same result in Frankfurt.7
It was under these circumstances that Bernhard Sekles became director of
Hoch’s Conservatory. In 1923, Sekles was appointed director of Hoch’s Con-
servatory against the explicit wishes of Kestenberg, who had supported another
candidate for the position, Hermann Scherchen.8 Kestenberg’s resistance to
Sekles proved well founded. Under Sekles, Hoch’s Conservatory was revital-
ized through a period of reform and rebirth that helped to stave off a takeover
by the state until 1938, long after Sekles had been “relieved” of his position by
the Nazis. One such reform was the Jazzklasse.
Bernhard Sekles, the Jazzklasse, and the

Reform of Dr. Hoch’s Conservatory
Before looking at the reforms put through during these years, it is necessary to
understand Bernhard Sekles, who was to become a central figure in the debate
about the Jazzklasse. Born in Frankfurt in 1872, the son of a Jewish business-
man, Sekles studied under Iwan Knorr at the institution he was later to head.
After successfully completing his studies, he acted for a short while as the
Kapellmeister of the Heidelberg and Mainz Operas. Thereafter, he returned to
Frankfurt, where he began teaching at Hoch’s Conservatory in 1896. There,
Sekles oversaw courses in music theory, instrumentation, and composition. It
was in the latter function that he met an aspiring young Frankfurt musician,
Theodor Adorno, who will later play a crucial role in German jazz reception
and theory as is discussed further in chapter 7. Equally notable amongst Sekles’
students was Paul Hindemith, who studied under Sekles between 1912 and
1913. Not merely an instructor, Sekles was also a composer in his own right,
authoring works such as Scheherazade (1917), a three-stage opera after 1001
Nights, the comedic opera Die Hochzeit des Faun (The Marriage of Faun)
(1921), and Die zehn Küsse (The Ten Kisses), a light opera from 1926.9 His
earliest work revolved around the Lied and it was in this general arena that he
produced what was to be his most famous work, Aus dem Schi-King (From the
Shijing), op. 15 (1907), a cycle of eighteen songs for high voice and piano.10 As
can be gleaned from the titles of these works, Sekles drew consistently upon an
imaginary East for inspiration, be it Eastern European, Middle Eastern, or
Asian. Further, from the few theoretical writings left by Sekles, the image of
music that emerges from them is one defined by his concept of nature, which
Sekles declares to be the ultimate aim of all music. As he writes in his unpub-
lished Grundzüge der Formenlehre (Fundamentals of the Theory of Form),
“The organism is the highest miracle in nature as well as art.”11
This proclivity for the natural qua exotic other will surface again in the
announcement for the Jazzklasse. In it, Sekles will use the metaphor of blood
transfusion to describe the transfer of jazz from the new to old world. Although
it appears he never wrote explicitly about jazz outside of the announcement,
Sekles did in fact compose at least one jazz-influenced piece. Contained in the
1927 Das neue Klavierbuch (The New Piano Book), this song, “Kleiner
Shimmy” (“Little Shimmy”) is demonstrative of the fact that Sekles was poten-
tially more than casually interested in jazz and jazz music.12 More important in
this context are his comments on what will later become a central issue for
defenders of the Jazzklasse: improvisation. In Fundamentals of the Theory of
Form, Sekles points out that what differentiates an improvised piece from one
composed in advance is precisely the formers’ lack of form. “Improvisation,”
he writes, “is a skill of the moment. With it, therefore, the time to form the re-
ceived is lacking.”13 In other words, the perfection of form achieved in the
works of great composers cannot be achieved in the improvised work. At the
same time, this does not mean that improvisation is without musical validity.
Sekles argues: “That which it [the improvised piece] lacks and must necessar-
ily lack in final formal boundaries (Formgebundenheit), it replaces in greater or
lesser degree through the musical mental readiness (Geistesgegenwart) of the
improviser.”14 The musical justification of improvisation comes from the act of
the performance, from the performer’s intellectual and/or spiritual presence,
his/her bodily and mental quick wittedness.15
This appreciation for improvisation, coupled with Sekles’ Orientalist in-
clinations, constitute essential components of the conditions of possibility for
the Jazzklasse. While by themselves insufficient, they reveal a certain level of
receptivity to the idea of teaching jazz at a conservatory. Equally necessary,
however, was the fiscal crisis of the post-war years. For without the hyperinfla-
tion, it is highly unlikely that the reforms undertaken by Sekles would ever
have come about. In response to the Kestenberg reforms and the conservatory’s
need to improve its financial situation, Sekles instituted an internal reform of
the conservatory’s structure. He resurrected the conservatory’s orchestra,
founded an opera school at the conservatory, and, as a countermeasure to the
Kestenberg reforms, in 1926/27 offered courses designed to prepare students
for the state examinations. As he wrote on the occasion of the fiftieth anniver-
sary of the conservatory’s existence: “An art institute that ignores the legiti-
mate demands of the times ultimately loses its connection with reality and
thereby simultaneously its right to exist.”16
It is then as part of this broader set of institutional reforms that the deci-
sion to offer a program in jazz can best be understood. That such a program
would be controversial was without question, though it is hard to believe that
Sekles had even the faintest inkling of the scandal his decision would provoke.
Be that as it may, Sekles personally authored the announcement, and in No-
vember 1927, he sent copies to an unknown number of publications, though the
Zeitschrift für Musik, Deutsche Tonkünstler-Zeitung, and Der Auftakt reprinted

the advertisement in full. Addressing the question of jazz’s place vis-à-vis the
music establishment, he begins:
Does a seriously conducted conservatory have the right to erect a program

in jazz?
Not only the right, but even the duty, assuming that the head of this
program is not any slick jazz drummer (geschickter Jazz-Schläger), but
has studied jazz on-site, i.e. in America. More than this, he must possess
a most thorough general education and above all have at his disposal mas-
terful compositional technique as well as possess the pedagogical ability
to systematize the material in a progressive manner. Today, more than half
of all musicians are forced to regularly or occasionally play in a jazz en-
semble, without ever having learned it. Jazz accordingly appears in a dis-
torted image that goes far towards explaining many people’s aversion to
it. Of course there are nasty excesses in jazz, and Siegmund von Hauseg-
ger is correct, when he publicly protests that included among these is the
jazzing of the motifs of our great symphonic masters. He is incorrect,
however, to judge an aesthetic branch against its degenerations. Not only
for opportunistic reasons, but also for pedagogical ones can a cultivated
(gepflegter) jazz be of use to the youth.17
Adorno once described the Sekles’ compositional style as one of “mild exoti-
cism,”18 a description that goes to the heart of the conceptualization of jazz
expressed here. Sekles’ thought straddles the two worlds of the folkish and
primitive and technical mastery. This ambivalence, this position between
“high” and “low,” structures the announcement as it slides in and out of these
worlds. Sekles begins by contesting the belief that jazz and conservatories are
inherently opposed and asserts not only that he is justified in his actions, but
that he sees the teaching of jazz as an ethical duty. Part of Sekles’ reasoning
here remains pragmatic. If, as he says, more than half of all musicians are al-
ready playing in jazz ensembles, should they not also be educated in the correct
way of playing it? By offering a program in jazz, one could ensure a higher
quality of the music that will be played, regardless of whether there is a Jazzk-
lasse or not.
To this practical and pragmatic argument, he couples the idea of taming
jazz, of creating a cultivated form of jazz. While he does not clearly delineate
this concept, such jazz would most likely have been a version of Whiteman’s
symphonic jazz. As Sekles’ thought remained torn between his desire for the
organic, natural, and unaffected and his adoration of form, the announcement
for the Jazzklasse balances these two sides of his musical personality by incor-
porating the exotic in a highly technical manner. Further evidence of this am-
bivalence is demonstrated by his discussion of the ideal program head. Sekles
derides the “slick jazz drummer” and says instead that the person must not only
be a classically trained musician, but also have experienced jazz firsthand in
America. As we will see, the man who eventually headed the Jazzklasse, Má-
tyás Seiber, could claim to fill both these requirements.19 Acquiring such a
person, Sekles hoped, would dispel the idea of jazz as a chaotic, revolutionary
music that must necessarily signal the end of dominance for European and
German music within the conservatory.
It is easy to see Sekles as a hero of jazz fighting against the reactionaries
who rejected his plan. However, any such romanticization of the progressive
and sympathetic Sekles falters under the weight of his own language. In the
second half of the announcement, he writes:
In the creations of our day an increasingly abstract-speculative moment is

coming to light. Here, only a transfusion of unspent nigger blood, if medi-
ated by a tactful musician, can be of aid. For music without any impul-
siveness (Triebhaftigkeit) does not deserve the name music any more. If
jazz is a good pedagogical means for the producer, then it is to no less a
degree for the reproducer. Though difficult to explain, it is a fact that the
German, who after all has achieved the highest in music, demonstrates
conspicuously little joy in the rhythmic, despite the fact that it is generally
recognized that rhythm is to be seen as the pulse of all music. One can,
however, view the sense of rhythm as a special discipline—in other words,
removed from all the other musical elements—in that it can be taught only
inadequately. No one knows this better than the head of a conservatory
who can continually observe how students perform the most neck-
breaking rhythmic arts in gymnastics without, however, it ever having the
least use value for their musical practices. Jazz, on the other hand, is so
totally constituted by the rhythmic that, under a superior and systemati-
cally led practice, it can develop the rhythmic feeling in an incomparably
surer way. Dr. Hoch’s Conservatory wants therefore to be the first to at-
tempt, with sufficient enrollment, to form a program in jazz. The instruc-
tion will apply not only to the typical jazz instruments, as they are: drums,
saxophone, banjo, trumpet, and trombone, but also to practicing ensemble
performance. Eventually there should also be a corresponding vocal pro-

gram connected. Instruction begins in the middle of January 1928. Bro-
chures can be requested from the offices of Dr. Hoch’s Conservatory.20
Like many before him, Sekles saw contemporary music as hyper-rationalized

and overly abstract, perhaps even overly civilized. Implied here is that the Neue
Musik (New Music) of Schoenberg, as well as the Neue Sachlichkeit of his
former student Hindemith, has led German music down the false path of ab-
straction. Against this, jazz could function as a transfusion of cultural vitality,
promising to bring with it a spontaneity, even carnality, absent to him in con-
temporary German art music. Not just the stylized version as he felt his own
compositions to be, in jazz he felt he had found an “unspent,” untainted, pure
source of vitality. For Sekles, then, jazz was to become part of the academy, not
as an equal of European music but as raw material to be turned into a finished
product. Despite its revolutionary call for the inclusion of jazz at the conserva-
tory, in many ways, Sekles’ announcement remains true to the ideal of the
conservatory: to create a distinction between artist and amateur, between high
and low.
The Jazzklasse Debate
Nonetheless, jazz’s opponents immediately saw in the announcement a direct

attack on German culture and music and seized upon Sekles’ wording and
the transfusion metaphor in particular.21 Already by late November, a chorus
of disapproval issued forth from the conservative press. Sekles’ call for a
“transfusion of unspent nigger blood” was explicitly quoted and referred to
ad nauseam, supplemented by a hefty bantering about of racial epithets
against Africans, African Americans, white Americans, and Jews. Deriding
the Jazzklasse as another example of Germany suffering under a “Black Hor-
ror,” cultural reactionaries rejected Sekles’ claims about the faltering rhythm
of German music, and it was this debate that caught the attention of the
broader public, including the Prussian state parliament and the New York
Times referred to at the outset.22
Alongside such ad hominem and ill-informed rants, there proceeded an-
other, equally revealing debate. This concerned the question of whether Unter-
haltungsmusik, or music for entertainment, belonged at all in the halls of con-
servatories, private or otherwise. Sekles’ announcement raised a number of
important questions relating to jazz and its status vis-à-vis European art music.
For example: Is it necessary to teach jazz music to “serious” musicians? Fur-
ther, is all entertainment music to be banned from the conservatories? Finally,
what is, in fact, jazz? Is it African or American, a Volksmusik, art music, or
merely a commodity?
One of the first to react to Sekles’ circular was the conservative Allgeme-
ine Musikzeitung, which published a piece by Paul Schwers entitled “Jazz als
akademisches Lehrfach!” (“Jazz as Academic Subject!”).23 Schwers vehe-
mently rejects Sekles’ arguments and demands that the latter “justify” himself:
“How will you justify yourself now? You will have to do so, if your name is not
to suffer permanent damage.”24 The personalization achieved by Schwers was
generative of a split within the debate. On the one hand, there existed personal,
often anti-Semitic, attacks on Sekles, while on the other, a discussion of jazz’s
contribution and relation to European music took form.25 In the attacks of
Schwers and many others, one again sees the linkage of Blackness, jazz, and
Jewishness encountered in Renker’s novel Symphonie und Jazz. It is, moreover,
an element of German jazz reception that will reach fever pitch in the reaction
to the operetta Schatten über Harlem by Russian-Jewish dramatist Ossip Dy-
mow to be analyzed in the following chapter. Following a strategy of bonding
Jewishness to Blackness (and vice versa) as a means of rejecting popular cul-
ture, Schwers denies jazz any aesthetic value.26 Employing the same organic
language Sekles had used in the announcement, Schwers demonizes jazz as a
plague and chides him for wanting to help bring the “filth of the every day”
into the conservatory.27 Referring to the many German musicians who play
jazz, he writes:
It is hunger which drives by far the most to choke down this repulsive nig-
ger food [ . . . ] These young people will tell you that even a “cultivated
jazz” cannot be the object of academic instruction. For every musician, as
far as he is prepared for public ensemble performance can without diffi-
culty master the essentially stereotypical rhythmic structure of jazz mu-
sic, which incidentally is not and can never be music in the pure sense. In
the best case it is a music substitute: rough and in the long run an abhor-
rent, superficial surrogate (widerlich anmutendes Surrogat).28
The racialized descriptions of the economic situation will repeatedly be called

upon to reject the Jazzklasse. To Schwers, jazz is merely another example of
how high culture is no longer able to remain “above” the everyday, profane,
and racially other world of popular music. Schwers’ description of jazz as an

impure surrogate can be read as an attempt to redraw the boundary between
high and low and, at least partially, to do so along racial lines.29
Schwers’ attack on Sekles and jazz did not go unnoticed, and counterat-
tacks came from both the practical and theoretical side. For the professional
musicians who read Der Artist, jazz was much more than an ideological bogey-
man; it was an artful means to earn a living. It is hardly surprising then that
Schwers’ words hardly struck a chord there and were severely criticized by
Leon Lencov. Reprinting Schwers’ comments for his readers, Lencov writes:
“The presumption is hard to resist that while Paul Schwers is unquestionably
well versed in many musical matters, he has occupied himself with jazz only in
a most superficial manner.”30 Further, from the Frankfurter Zeitung came an-
other positive response. In his discussion from November 25, 1927, music
critic Karl Holl highlights three positive aspects to the idea of the Jazzklasse.31
First, he maintains that the Jazzklasse could be valuable not only in “raising the
general standard of the culturally much too little attended to entertainment
music, but also in the strengthening of the German musician’s relatively under-
developed rhythmic sense.”32 Like Sekles, Holl sees jazz as a means to invigo-
rate German music. Against nationalist conservatives like Schwers, he ironi-
cally adds that it is only through the adoption of an “unspent foreign substance”
that degeneration through musical incest is to be averted.33 Lastly, Holl valo-
rizes the effort to bring folk and serious music together. He argues that anyone
who fully grasps the contemporary situation in music,
will still have correctly understood the great severity of the problem of
folk art and high art, entertainment music and intellectual music, when, as
in the present case, the attempt at a bridging of that opposition, lamented
again and again as a “tear” in our cultural situation, is introduced with
inadequate propagandistic means.34
Though without embracing what he sees as Sekles’ unfortunate choice of vo-

cabulary, Holl does view the Jazzklasse as an opportunity to revisit the opposi-
tions within music between high and low culture. It is an attempt to repair the
torn halves of art, to bridge, in other words, high with popular culture.
Yet this recognition is coupled with the disdain Holl exhibits for Sekles’
conceptualization of jazz as art in the strong sense of the word. In this, the
liberal Holl and the conservative Schwers are united. “Jazz,” he writes, “is truly
not to be placed on the same level as our received forms of art music. It is, if
we wish to use the concept responsibly, as it has been handed down by our
great cultural tradition, not musical art at all, but . . . ‘musical arts and crafts.’”35
Holl reproaches Sekles for overestimating the aesthetic value of jazz, seeing
“dangerous irony” (gefährliche künstlerisch-ethische Spitze) in Sekles’ con-
cept of cultivated jazz.36 Unlike Holl, Sekles appeared to judge all works of art
by the same fundamental premise; that they should strive to reproduce the inef-
fable formal beauty of the natural. Sekles cared little from where it originated,
whereas Holl, although positively reacting to jazz’s use as a bridge between
entertainment and serious music, wished to retain a conceptual distinction be-
tween art and the economy.
Each author can be seen as representative of a different bridging strategy
available to Weimar-era commentators. In the case of Sekles, one encounters a
strategy of “Romantic reaction,” while in Holl, one sees an attempt at what I
wish to call “bourgeois reconciliation.” Sekles represents a strategy of Roman-
tic reaction in that his organic concept of art and culture signify a desire to
overcome the division between high and low through recourse to an idyllic,
even atavistic, precapitalist unity of art and nature. This form of bridging seeks
to unite high and low through a circumvention of their division in capitalism.
Romantic reaction calls for a return to a form of art that is capable of unifying
the two realms. To be sure, Sekles had been forced to recognize their ultimate
unity largely as a result of the incursion of the economy into the academy,
something that explains much of the tension between his practical and aes-
thetic grounding in the Jazzklasse announcement. Ultimately, however, his
conception of art elides these economic aspects in favor of the notion of art as
natural organism.
Holl’s mode of argumentation, conversely, is indicative of a strategy of
bourgeois reconciliation in that while he desires a unification of the two realms,
he envisions this process as taking place under the hegemony of high culture,
much like the authors of the symphonic jazz novels previously encountered.
While he appears to argue for an equalization of the relationship, for Holl, the
Jazzklasse also signifies a moment for high culture to reassert its dominance
over popular culture. Central here is his idea that low culture and non-European
cultures in general have little to add to high culture. At best, they can allow
Europeans to regain lost or forgotten aspects of their past. In the Jazzklasse
debate, the primary example of such remembering was the lost ability to im-
provise that was now to be regained through jazz.
In response to the debate generated by his announcement, Sekles issued a
second declaration to clarify his original position.37 This second circular avoids
any reference to the blood transfusion metaphor and instead concentrates on
the gains to be made from the inclusion of jazz in formal music education.
First, Sekles repeats his argument that regardless of one’s personal opinion,
one cannot ignore the fact that a high percentage of contemporary musicians is
forced to play in a jazz ensemble without being either stylistically or techni-
cally prepared.38 Second, he raises for the first time the issue of improvisation,
which will later become a centerpiece of the defense of the Jazzklasse. Ex-
panding on his original statement that jazz could serve to bring rhythmic joy
back into German music, he now states that instruction in jazz could be used as
a means to relearn the lost art of improvisation. “For the reproducer it [jazz]
represents the most vital means of rhythmic education known to me. Further-
more, it revives the capacity to improvise which has almost become lost to
us.”39 The ability to improvise is recast in this second statement as a primary
quality of jazz, which, to the European, is something not foreign, but forgotten.
Mixing his own Romanticism with the bourgeois sensibility of Holl and others,
Sekles’ turn towards improvisation in this second statement marks an impor-
tant shift within the debate.
While Sekles and the Jazzklasse continued to be critiqued from the con-
servative camp, his argument that jazz ought to be conceived of as a means to
revitalize German and European music found support with the progressive mu-
sic critic Heinrich Strobel.40 In “Unzeitgemäße Proteste” (“Untimely Protests”)
from the modernist periodical Musikblätter des Anbruch, Strobel maintains
that jazz is valuable insofar as it not only has engendered a return of rhythm to
German music but also a return of improvisation. Citing Hindemith, Stravin-
sky, and Weill as examples of high art that would be unthinkable without jazz,
Strobel praises the incorporation of jazz into art music. Of improvisation spe-
cifically, he notes:
The art of improvisation which was jettisoned in the 19th century is re-
born in jazz. We have known for a long time that it is not so much about
the piece itself, but about what the jazz band makes of it. The jazz band
demands creative activity from the individual. It awakens the joy in ele-
mental music making. It is a sign of accountability vis-à-vis our time
when a leading conservatory takes up these problems of today.41
Strobel’s impassioned defense of jazz and the Jazzklasse does not necessarily
view jazz as existing on a distinct plane from European art music. Nonetheless,
Strobel as well falls at times into the strategy of bourgeois reconciliation in
that, in the final analysis, his justification of jazz assumes European primacy in
music. In other words, the joy in rhythm and the art of improvisation that are to
be found in jazz are desirable primarily as remnants of the European past. In a
sense, one might say that for Strobel, what the civilized European has forgot-
ten, the barbarians of jazz will allow them to master once again.
In the attention paid to the European elements of jazz, one sees evidence
of an attempt on the part of these liberal defenders to come to terms with the
transformation of music and art under capitalism. By arguing that one could
return via jazz to a musical quality believed to have been lost to progress, sup-
porters were able to point towards an alternative vision of modernity, one not
completely determined by the market or racial others. Developing this idea
most fully was Leipzig music critic Alfred Baresel, a figure previously encoun-
tered in the discussion of Paul Whiteman. A prolific writer, Baresel wrote nu-
merous articles on jazz and entertainment music and authored the first German-
language study of jazz music in 1925, Das Jazzbuch (The Jazz Book).42 Through
his Jazz Book, as well as numerous other essays, in many ways Baresel became
Weimar Germany’s authority on jazz music. Given his stature, it is not surpris-
ing that on two separate occasions he commented on the scandal in Frankfurt,
first in the Neue Musik-Zeitung and then in Melos.
Predictably, Baresel entered the debate as a defender of the Jazzklasse and
attempted to dispel certain myths about jazz propagated by the program’s an-
tagonists. He begins his article from the Neue Musik-Zeitung by suggesting
that only through music education can the split between high and low be
bridged. To him:
The baleful division of our present music in edifying and entertaining can
only be bridged through pedagogy . . . . This division is especially notice-
able today in Germany, where the extremes are marked by the small intel-
lectual circle around Schoenberg and the large art-averse masses, on
whom musical influence is possible only at places of entertainment.43
For Baresel, contemporary music has split into, on the one hand, an intellec-
tualized form characterized by Schoenberg, and, on the other, the Schlager-
consuming masses. In this situation, he argues that it would be best to raise
the level of music at such establishments to that of high art. At the same time,
he makes clear that, for him, entertainment music has certain advantages
over art music, especially in the area of rhythm. Equally important in this
regard is the economic side of the argument, namely, because German musi-
cians are not entirely competent in the field of entertainment music qua jazz,
they have suffered financially. “For years,” he writes, “German musicians
have been waging a difficult battle against the preference for their foreign
colleagues, who because of more thorough, specialized training (Durchbil-
dung) are mostly superior.”44 In other words, a program in jazz such as the
one planned by Sekles could enable them to compete more ably against their
non-German competition.
This defense of the Jazzklasse, oriented as it was towards the practical
advantages to be gained through education in jazz, was supplemented by a
second, more ideologically charged article in the journal Melos. In this second
article, “Kunst-Jazz” (“Art Jazz”), Baresel focuses specifically on the relation-
ship between jazz and art music, seeking to determine the extent to which jazz
has already been absorbed by European art music. To a certain extent presaging
Sacher-Woenckhaus’ later argument, Baresel begins by commenting:
I do not see anything more or less in the dust raising decrees of the Frank-
furt jazz conservatory than the first, extremely necessary attempt to put
control back into the hands of responsible music authorities over this, in
the final instance inherently foreign, but no longer removable entertain-
ment art.45
The watchword here is control. For him, pure American jazz is less an expres-
sion of musical development than a reflection of a society in transformation. It
is mass music for the masses. Referring twice to jazz’s “sporty” quality, Bare-
sel maintains that it has been left up to Europeans to make jazz into “actual”
music.46 Already before the war, he argues, Debussy’s ragtime pieces displayed
the impact of African American music on Europe. Baresel thus repositions
later pieces like Stravinsky’s ragtime works, not as belonging to a post-war
invasion from America but as an extension of an already existent trend in Eu-
ropean, especially French, art music. Of this, he writes:
Jazz, as it came to us from America, was . . . in many ways already perme-

ated by elements of the new art music, namely of the French kind. Even
its most characteristic instrument, the saxophone, is of French invention.
[ . . . ] The motoric element attributed to jazz, the stomping rhythm
amongst the syncopation is found just as well in Stravinsky and Bartok’s
gravitation towards indigenous folk music (Hinstreben zur heimatlichen
Folklore).47
The emphasis here on the European elements of jazz can in part be read as
overcompensating for the depiction of jazz as foreign and barbaric, as “inter-
national” and “anti-German.” Yet, it is equally evident of an attempt by Baresel
and others to reassert European mastery against jazz.
In raising jazz from mere entertainment to European art form, there is not
only a desire to avoid the fate of atonality and its unpopularity with the popu-
lace at large but to circumvent the colonization of European music by racial
others. As he wrote in the passage cited at the beginning of this chapter: “En-
tertainment music should not be fought, it should be raised. Its eradication
would be utopia.” The potential utopia Baresel glimpses in jazz’s eradication is
one in which the deleterious effects of capitalist production on European music
are negated through a reinvigoration of the European high cultural tradition.
Such a turn was only possible, however, through the strategic reconfiguration
of improvisation as European. Through the idea of improvisation, jazz enabled
liberal critics like Holl, Strobel, and Baresel to postulate the rebirth of a Euro-
pean past once thought destroyed but that could now be regained through the
modern entertainment music known as jazz.
Interrupted Crossing: The Jazzklasse between Theory and Praxis
Despite the vehement protest, Sekles carried on with his plans and the Jazzk-
lasse opened in early 1928. Enrollment in the program hovered around 15, and,
through the activities of its director Mátyás Seiber, made substantial contribu-
tions to the local Frankfurt music scene. Still, after but a five-year existence, it
was forcibly closed in April 1933, and its Jewish faculty members notified of
their impending dismissal. As with other short-lived examples of Weimar jazz
culture, it is crucial that we recognize the Jazzklasse as much for its five years
of existence as for the debate recounted above and its inevitable closure. As
such, I would like to conclude with a consideration of the jazz practices of the
program and its director.
Mátyás Seiber’s biography is fascinating, yet in many ways also typical
of this period’s jazz innovators.48 Hungarian by birth, his particular path led
first to Budapest and Zoltán Kodály, where he studied Hungarian folk songs.
After completing his studies, but before landing at Hoch’s Conservatory,
Seiber took a temporary position as a musician on a transatlantic ship’s or-
chestra and worked for a few months in late 1927 on a ship of the famous
Hamburg-America line. 49 Though it is highly unlikely that Seiber procured
an education in jazz on these short travels between Hamburg and New York,
they are nonetheless important reminders of the flow of peoples, cultures,
and ideas across the Atlantic in the period. More interesting in terms of
Seiber’s engagement with popular music were his associations with the Süd-
westdeutscher Rundfunk (Southwest German Radio Station), or SWR, based
in Frankfurt. Beginning in 1925, SWR had its own jazz band, which was led
by Paul Hindemith’s brother, Rudolf.50 At its peak in 1927, SWR’s jazz band
played weekly on German radio, though in years afterward the regularity of
its performances dropped off noticeably.51 The radio also supported profes-
sional, non-academic music from the Amar Quartett, which premiered a
“Jazz Dance Concert” in September 1926.52 Even before taking over the
Jazzklasse, Seiber participated in two small ensemble formations, the Ca-
féhaus Trio and the Lenzewski-Quartett, the former headed by Erich Itor
Kahn and the latter by Gustav Lenzewski, many of whose members were also
part of SWR’s house band. Thus, by the time Seiber took over the Jazzklasse
at the beginning of 1928, he not only had a claim of having years of practical
experience but could demonstrate thorough knowledge of European classical
and folk music. Each of these traits came into play over the course of the next
five years; these years witnessed the Jazzklasse presenting its and Seiber’s
work to the public through performances by his students, which in a few in-
stances were broadcast on the radio.53
Yet even before then, Seiber entered the ongoing debate on the program in
a 1928 article “Jazz als Erziehungsmittel” (“Jazz as Educational Method”)
published in Melos.54 Deftly extricating himself from the dominant terms of
the debate, Seiber is the first to ask whether instruction in jazz is at all possible.
As other defenders, he points to the great number of musicians who are already
playing and for whom jazz instruction certainly would do no harm. But this
argument remains too abstract, especially for someone who must develop a
program of academic training in what had up to this point been an informal,
commercial practice in Europe. The difficulties of systematizing the study of
jazz into different courses and instructional principles are potentially in his
mind when he writes that, in addition to the provocative question of whether
one should teach jazz, one must add: “whether one can instruct jazz (and how
one can do this).”55
Seiber next discusses the rhythmic particularities of jazz and from there
moves onto the art of improvisation. For both these aspects, Seiber argues on
the basis of cultural, rather than racial, difference. He sees rhythmic syncopa-
tion in jazz as, for the most part, determined by the creation of Scheintakte, or
“pseudo-measures,” a concept later taken over by Adorno.56 As Seiber wrote in
his Schule für Jazz-Schlagzeug (Manual for Jazz Percussion):
One group among the shifts of accent is of particular importance, one

which stands out for its regularity. For example, if in a row of 4/4 mea-
sures one continuously emphasizes every third quarter-note, in this way
an impression of many 3/4 measures is produced. Thus are created a form

of “pseudo-measures” against the original measures. These are of extraor-
dinary importance for jazz.57
Seiber later served as jazz expert to Adorno for his essay “Über Jazz” (“On
Jazz”) from 1936, and Adorno will make much of the false, apparent, or
pseudo-character of these measures. Yet for Seiber, the term “pseudo-measure”
is less an ideological critique of jazz’s originality than an attempt to frame jazz
rhythm for a German audience unfamiliar with it. In other words, this concept
makes jazz rhythm understandable through its translation into preexisting Eu-
ropean musical vocabulary. In this regard, it is also important to note that
Seiber places quotation marks around this term. It is as if he were aware of the
terminology’s insufficiency, yet unable to proceed without it. In “Jazz as Edu-
cational Method” and his jazz manual, Seiber consistently emphasizes the in-
completeness of the study of notes and repetition of rhythms. For him, these
are necessary, but not sufficient, to jazz performance.
Seiber further develops this position in his comments on improvisation.
Though to a certain extent Seiber also relies on the idea of jazz as a reawaken-
ing of improvisation, his execution of the argument is unique. Seiber’s essen-
tial point about improvisation, and one that reinforces his faith in the idea that
jazz can be taught and is not an “inborn” ability, is that improvisation, too, can
be instructed. The problems with improvisation that seem to plague Germans
and not Americans (he does not specify white or Black) have to do with the
context of musical instruction in Europe. As he writes:
Certainly the Americans do it [improvise] entirely “unconsciously,” i.e.

similar to the way the Gypsy in Hungary decorates the melody, plays
around “by ear,” adds “countermelodies,” etc. But we must consider that
the American grows up in the middle, so to speak, of this music. He hears
it resounding from every street corner, before every store, every house,
through speakers, gramophones or in the orchestra itself. This music plays
in America the role of a sort of “folk music” and “popular music,” it has
its own tradition and through the repeated acts of hearing “sits” in the
strictest sense of the word in every American’s “blood.”58
It is important to read Seiber’s use of the “blood metaphor” in relation to its use
in the Jazzklasse debate by Sekles, Schwers, Holl, and others. Though seeming
to rely on an assumption of naiveté within non-European cultures, it is also
evident that Seiber wishes to signal the fundamentally questionable nature of
such concepts through his repeated use of scare quotes. As with the term
“pseudo-measure,” Seiber’s text carefully navigates, albeit without transcend-
ing, the given framework of the debate.
Another powerful example of such ambiguity is contained in Seiber’s
references to the use of improvisation in the European past. This section of
his argument comes after his cultural definition of improvisation. He begins
by looking to European handbooks on improvisation from the sixteenth cen-
tury. These he sees as analogous to the current use of such handbooks within
jazz instruction in Germany, for example his own Manual for Jazz Percussion
published a year later. Seiber is acutely aware that learning improvisation
through a handbook would seem to be a contradiction in terms. Yet what crit-
ics of German jazz practices in the 1920s often miss, and conversely what
Seiber recognizes here, is that, given the dependence on the written note in
European musical life, it was perhaps unavoidable that the path to freeing
oneself from notes had first to begin with them. As Seiber himself puts it,
these handbooks and their formulas for improvisations and breaks are “natu-
rally only a teaching aid for beginning . . . , both today and in the past; the
ultimate goal towards which one strives was and is . . . to gain such practice
in the matter that the book is no longer necessary and one is capable of play-
ing in an impromptu manner.”59 This piece is perhaps the most optimistic of
Seiber’s. Written at the beginning of his career in jazz instruction, at a time
before the economic slump and the rise of the Nazis, it displays a rare open-
ness to jazz and the music’s aesthetic potential.
Seiber, like so many others, shifted his position on jazz during the final
few years of the republic, and scholarship on Seiber’s jazz writings has some-
times focused its attention on later, more skeptical moments in his work.60 Yet
here, one must be attentive to the fact that the general tenor of writing on jazz
during the late 1920s and early 1930s would take a critical turn, with many
voices declaring the jazz revolution of the early and mid-1920s to be at an end.
For example, composer Alban Berg, who would incorporate elements of rag-
time into his work, most notably the later Lulu opera, responded to Sekles’
plans that while he found the idea laudable, he feared jazz’s time was already
past.61 Or as Seiber himself wrote in 1930, “Jazz has its stormy youth behind
it. It stands now in the mature ‘prime of its life.’ We ought not expect many
surprises from it.”62 Seiber’s position here can not only be compared with that
of Berg, but also with that of Kurt Weill, who in 1928 proclaimed that “today
we are doubtlessly standing at the end of the epoch during which one could
speak of the influence of jazz on art music.”63 Yet Weill closes his essay with a
demand that jazz practices, in particular of collective music making, be used to
break apart the “rigid system of musical practice in our concerts and theaters.”64
Like Weill, Seiber’s “negative” comments regarding jazz belie his continuing
faith in jazz’s potential for development. Yet while Weill’s thoughts remained
at the level of abstraction, Seiber developed a theoretical and practical basis for
achieving such a jazz breakthrough.
In his 1931 article, “Jazz und die musikstudierende Jugend” (“Jazz and
Youth Music Learners”), Seiber follows up on his earlier claim of jazz having
left its wild childhood behind, claiming that the music has entered a “quieter,
more measured, and more orderly phase of life.”65 Indeed, he at first seems to
abide by a developing undercurrent of German jazz criticism during the early
1930s that jazz’s Blackness is a “fable” rather than fact, yet another element of
Seiber’s writings later propagated by Adorno.66 If Seiber here diminishes the
Black contribution to jazz, he is equally concerned with debunking the essen-
tialized ideology of Black jazz that embraced groups like The Revelers and
Singing Sophomores as “Negro Quartettes,” only later to learn they were just
“conventional (bieder) whites.”67 As in his other writings, Seiber is as much
concerned here with the proper production of jazz as he is with its conditions
of possibility. For him, America’s vanguard position in jazz music has nothing
to do with race but with the American “milieu,” put another way, the social
context. “Playing jazz well is not . . . a question of race, but one of familiariza-
tion. The German musical youth can—or rather could—play jazz just as well
as the American, if the conditions were the same as in America.”68 While he
understands that conditions in the two societies and cultures will never be iden-
tical (nor does he feel they should be), there are specific measures that can be
taken to raise the level of German jazz. This begins for him with the creation
of a jazz milieu, a “‘jazz culture’” in Germany.69 He suggests that this is al-
ready happening to an extent in bars and other entertainment establishments
across Germany where jazz has become part of the lived environment. But,
argues Seiber, it is also necessary to promote its creation through training like
that offered by the Jazzklasse, because, as he rightly claims, the public will
only take jazz seriously when German musicians take it seriously.
One of the primary means through which Seiber and the Jazzklasse as-
pired to take jazz seriously and thereby change the public perception of the
music was through radio broadcasts. The Jazzklasse presented itself for the
first time in a radio concert on March 3, 1929. The program featured various
Tin Pan Alley tunes like “Igloo Stomp,” “Miss Annabelle Lee,” and “Virginia
Stomp.” It also featured Stravinsky’s “Suite Nr. 2.”70 Amongst the performers
for that first concert was the German-Jewish musician Eugen Henkel, playing
banjo and guitar. Henkel later became a significant figure in popular music and
jazz during the Third Reich.71 After praising Henkel’s performance in particu-
lar, the reviewer from Frankfurt’s General-Anzeiger concluded: “It was a nice
success . . . for the new jazz program and for all future Paul Whitemans, Jack
Hyltons, and Bernhard Ettés. Maybe you’ll even make it to ‘Jazz Doctors.’”72
A “symphonic jazz concert” then took place on February 20, 1930, featuring
Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, selections from Weill’s Dreigroschenoper, and
Jazzolette, an original composition by Seiber. This same concert was then of-
fered as a matinee performance on March 11, and nationally broadcast on the
Berliner Funkstunde.73 Yet another appearance of the Frankfurt Jazzklasse oc-
curred in November 1931.74 Additionally, Seiber and in all likelihood the stu-
dents of the Jazzklasse were part of the performance of the German-version of
Vivian Ellis and Richard Myer’s operetta Mr. Cinders (German title: Jim und
Jill) when it debuted in Frankfurt in December 1931, and also took part in nu-
merous performances of Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera in Frankfurt’s
Neues Theater in October 1928.75
If these concerts and Seiber’s own compositions from the period indicate
that his approach to jazz was heavily indebted to Whiteman’s symphonic jazz
rather than African American jazz musicians, they equally reveal a high degree
of public engagement on the part of Seiber.76 Through these concerts, locally
and nationally broadcast as some were, the Jazzklasse remained in the public
eye long after the fury of the initial debate had subsided. In what was for him
an extremely positive review, Adorno wrote of the first concert: “The Jazzk-
lasse of Hoch’s Conservatory, which brought its initiator, Sekles, so many stu-
pid (töricht) attacks, introduced itself to the public under the extraordinary and
knowledgeable leadership of Mátyás Seiber and legitimated itself splendidly.”77
The concert also provided the opportunity for Adorno to comment on the al-
ready cold Jazzklasse debate. Against the attackers of Sekles and Seiber,
Adorno maintains that jazz is an unavoidable fact of contemporary music cul-
ture and that without question jazz will have a positive effect on the reproduc-
tive capacities of German musicians. At the same time, he relativizes jazz’s
importance and hints that with the Jazzklasse, i.e., with jazz as a pedagogical
subject, the music no longer seems as modern as it once did.
Yet, the ultimate significance of the Jazzklasse may not lie with such radio
concerts or reviews but with the program’s students themselves. Along with
their teachers, the students who came through the Jazzklasse’s doors were daily
dedicating themselves to jazz.78 As such, I would like to conclude with a mo-
ment of unique insight into Seiber’s pedagogical method, which comes in the
form of a November 1932 article on the Jazzklasse from the Frankfurter Zei-
tung.79 Written on the eve of Germany’s descent into National Socialism, the
tone of this piece betrays little of the high stakes associated with the earlier
debate. Quickly rehashing the now-forgotten scandal, the text reveals what a
typical hour of instruction at the Jazzklasse looked like. It describes how Seiber
stood before the class, directing its members with various commands: to repeat
a particular passage, go over a section without the melodic line, repeat it again,
but this time now only with the horn section, etc. Seiber emerges in the piece
as a demanding and serious instructor, someone who expects as much of his
jazz students as he would of classical musicians. Tellingly, it suggests how se-
rious the issue of jazz remained for him.
Perhaps most interesting, though, is the reference to the “real” instructor
of the class: the gramophone. Seiber’s instructional method was to have his
“syncopators,” as the article calls the program’s students, repeatedly and inten-
sively practice with each other as described above. Yet, the moment of truth
was not faithfulness to a text or to Seiber’s ideas alone. For afterwards, the
group sat in a circle around a record player, listening to a jazz record, compar-
ing it with that which they were playing and answering technical questions
from Seiber about the piece as performed on the recording. The article does not
reveal which jazz album the students were practicing to, and it is unlikely to
have been a name like Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, or Louis Arm-
strong. But, to paraphrase Seiber’s comments about the jazz culture he was
aspiring to create with his class, it might have or, more precisely, could have
been had the experiment of the Jazzklasse not been cut short, forcing this
emerging jazz culture into hiding and exile.
Still, Sekles’ and Seiber’s Jazzklasses had a long-lasting effect on Frank-
furt, Germany, and, indeed, European jazz history. Part of this jazz culture in
hiding was Frankfurt’s Hotclub Combo, a formation that included two students
from the now jazz-less Hoch’s Conservatory,80 Carlo Bohländer and Emil
Mangelsdorff (brother of the world famous jazz trombonist Albert Mangels-
dorff).81 More to the point, one of the Jazzklasse’s actual students, Dietrich
Schulz-Köhn, became a pivotal figure of the German jazz scene, both during
and after the Third Reich. Though he never officially became a “jazz doctor”
as the reviewer of the first concert by the Jazzklasse had suggested might occur,
he did choose “Dr. Jazz” as his moniker and purchased letterhead to reflect
this.82 I reference him here because during the 1950s, Schulz-Köhn was also a
player in yet another rediscovery of Weimar culture in the Federal Republic.
While visiting the United States in late 1957, he acquired the address of the
African American poet Langston Hughes. Though he wasn’t able to personally
visit Hughes at that time, he began corresponding with him after returning to
Germany. It was as “Dr. Jazz” then that Schulz-Köhn sent Hughes clippings
from German articles in which the poet’s name had been mentioned. In one
letter, Schulz-Köhn tells Hughes that he and his wife have been working to
make Hughes’ poetry known in Germany.83 Though Hughes doesn’t mention it
in his response, he was certainly aware of the German interest in his work. In-
deed, he had been corresponding with German-speaking fans like Schulz-Köhn
since the 1920s when his jazz and blues poems, and with them the African
American modernist movement known as the “Harlem Renaissance,” first be-
came known to a German-speaking audience.
Chapter 6
Singing the Harlem Renaissance:

Langston Hughes, Translation, and
Diasporic Blues
The mood of the Blues is almost always despondency, but when they are
sung, people laugh.
—Langston Hughes (1927)
In June 1932, “loaded down with bags, baggage, books, a typewriter, a victrola,
and a big box of Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington and Ethel
Waters records,” the African American modernist poet, jazz and blues fan
Langston Hughes embarked from New York on a trip that eventually took him
across the Soviet Union, Central Asia, and, for one, maybe two nights, to Ber-
lin, Germany.1 Already widely recognized as one of the most important poets
of the New Negro modernist movement also known as the Harlem Renais-
sance, Hughes set sail with a small group to film “Black and White,” a Soviet-
financed depiction of racism in the United States. On this journey, Berlin and
with it Weimar Germany were but temporary stops and his first experience of
the German capital was not a particularly positive one. About this “wretched
city,” he later commented: “The pathos and poverty of Berlin’s low-priced mar-
ket in bodies depressed me. As a seaman I had been in many ports and had
spent a year in Paris working on Rue Pigalle, but I had not seen anywhere
people so desperate as these walkers of the night streets in Berlin.”2 Yet it was
also in Berlin that Hughes came to experience the African American presence
in Germany. At the Haus Vaterland’s Turkish café, Hughes observed a Black
waiter pouring coffee, whom he describes as a “Blackamoor in baggy velvet
trousers, gold embroidered jacket and a red fez.”3 Assuming him to be African,
none in his group attempted to speak to this foreigner in a foreign land, but
when the waiter heard the group speaking English, he burst out: “‘I’m sure
165
glad to see some of my folks!’ [ . . . ]‘Say, what’s doing on Lenox Avenue?’”4

If Hughes relates no further information regarding who the waiter was or why
he was in Germany, the presence of this Harlemite in Berlin can stand in for the
current state of knowledge regarding the Weimar encounter with the Harlem
Renaissance and its jazz poet laureate Langston Hughes: virtually unknown,
often misrecognized, and yet there, waiting to speak.5
Indeed, the German translation of Langston Hughes began in 1922, at a
time when Hughes was but 21 years old, long before he became a dominant
figure of African American poetry, and it continued almost unabated until
1933. Translators of the period were particularly attracted to his work—all
told, there were seventeen different translators of his poetry into German, who
produced more than sixty individual translations of his work. To be sure, these
are not evenly distributed, neither chronologically nor geographically—most
were published between 1929 and 1931 and had at least some connection to the
Austrian capital, Vienna. Still, the poems, their translators, and the various
modalities, personal, textual, and political, by which German-speaking authors
came to engage with his work have much to say to us. They speak not only
about the importance of Hughes and Harlem for Weimar culture but also about
the need to develop new methodologies to account for cultural transfer and
translation in the interwar period.
For one, the interpenetration of jazz, blues, and other forms of African
American music in Hughes’ work shows how the impact of jazz, in America
and Germany, was by no means limited to music alone. So if discussion of an
African American poet would at first glance seem misplaced here, it is impor-
tant to recall the broader categorization of jazz in the 1920s: as music, as dance,
as drum, but also as art and culture. In other words, we would do well to heed
Hughes’ claim in “To a Negro Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret”—that jazz has
“seven languages to speak in / And then some.”6 More concretely, like no other
artist associated with the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes embraced jazz and the
blues in his work as a means of validating the originality and value of African
American vernacular culture. As Brent Hayes Edwards writes of this poem:
“The many languages in the poem are a means of apprehending a music so
intimately concerned with dialogue and exchange among a group of perform-
ers and the audience that it can be approached only through a kind of critical
multilingualism.”7 Indeed, German interest in jazz and interest in Hughes and
the Harlem Renaissance reciprocally reinforced one another, regularly bleed-
ing into each other through the translation of Hughes, “the original jazz poet.”8
Tobias Nagl writes of the interest in jazz that it “was conceptualized in the best
of circumstances as a means of communicating to Europe the political and
Singing the Harlem Renaissance 167
cultural emancipatory movements of the Black diaspora, the Harlem Renais-

sance, Pan-Africanism, and Civil Rights Movement.”9 And yet a monolingual-
ism nonetheless rules over current scholarly discussions of jazz in Germany, a
mode of inquiry in which German jazz reception can only ever include reac-
tions to jazz music, rather than the culture of jazz; its fans; and, as I argue here,
its poetic language. Breaking out of this monolingualism, this chapter will at-
tempt to learn how to speak one of jazz’s languages, that of African American
modernist poetry.
For one, Hughes’ suggestion regarding the polyglot nature of jazz can be
taken to also refer to the fact that jazz has always existed in multiple places and
forms at the same time. Just as the famous jazz bands and African American
revues of the period did not impact German cultural history alone, but rather
the entire American and European continent, so too should it come as no sur-
prise that the German translation of Langston Hughes weaves in and out of
European national boundaries.10 Indeed, Hughes’ peripatetic life in many ways
mirrors that of his translators, many of whom were of Jewish descent. Born to
communities that after World War I had lost their prior national belonging or
migrated to one of the major German-speaking metropolises like Berlin or Vi-
enna, they often found themselves caught between national boundaries during
the interwar period. More to the point, Hughes’ poetry and its call for self-
recognition and empowerment resonated particularly powerfully with many
German-language translators, be they Zionist, socialist, or otherwise affiliated.
Specifically, I want to suggest that in the German translations of Langston
Hughes and other poets of the Harlem Renaissance, German-language writers
of Jewish descent took part in what Edwards calls an act of diasporic reciproc-
ity. “Reciprocity,” for Edwards,
is less an originating appeal that is answered than a structure of mutual

answerability: articulations of diaspora in tension and in dissonance, with
necessary resolution or synthesis. [ . . . ] Diaspora can be conceived only
as the uneasy and unfinished practice of such dialogue—where each text
both fulfills the demand of the other’s “call” and at the same time exposes
its necessary “misrecognitions,” its particular distortions of the way race
travels beyond the borders of nation and language.11
At the most basic level, the diasporic reciprocity of the Jewish and African dia-
sporas is evidenced in the personal contact between Hughes and three such
translators (Hans Goslar, Arthur Rundt, and Anna Nussbaum), even while such
individual contact never meant that the translators or their translations were
without prejudices, of nation and language. That the diasporic reciprocity of

the Jewish and African diasporas was both a point of contact as well as conflict
is not particular to German-language translations of Hughes but is rather, as
Edwards shows, the very definition of the practice of diaspora.
The most significant moment of diasporic reciprocity between Hughes
and his Central European translators of Jewish descent occurred via the trans-
lators’ focus on the multivalent idea of voice. In this focus on the voice,
Hughes’ translators repeatedly showed themselves to be exceptional. While
much writing on jazz and African American culture shares a focus on the in-
eluctable rhythm of the jazz band, its saxophones and drums, Hughes’ transla-
tors instead tended to focus on the human voice and its expression in song.
Voice should be understood here musically, but it is important to recognize
how voice could be understood politically—as an agent of self-assertion in the
face of constant oppression, as protest against pressure to assimilate, and, fi-
nally, as a call to value one’s origins. As one commentator, the Austrian writer
Else Feldmann noted, these works of poetry showed how African Americans
“are no longer dependent on someone white coming and ‘representing’ them.
They, the ‘savages,’ sing their life themselves and they don’t sing it any less
beautifully than the best whites.”12
Yet if Hughes’ translators for the most part avoid direct reference to jazz,
their work reveals a potentially even deeper engagement with jazz and the cul-
ture from which this music springs. So if it is often not jazz that dominates their
work, then it is the culture and music standing behind jazz—what Hughes calls
“that tune / That laughs and cries at the same time”—namely the blues.13 The
blues are a foundational aesthetic of Hughes’ work, both in terms of form such
as in his blues poems and also in terms of an overarching ethos of African
American culture.14 This blues disposition of Hughes’ work is perhaps best
expressed in the lyric: “When you see me laughing, I’m laughing just to keep
from crying.” This combination of laughter and tears, comedy and tragedy was
essential to Hughes’ deployment of the blues and jazz. Against a view of Afri-
can American culture as one-dimensional, either comic or tragic, Hughes’ po-
etry works dialectically, imbuing the frenetic rhythms of the jazz band with
tragedy and the languid despondence of the blues with comedy. This message
was undoubtedly heard by his translators and their focus on voice and song
invoked this dialectical sense of the blues not only implicitly but, as we shall
see, quite explicitly. As the translation of the African into the Jewish diaspora,
as an example of the sounding of repressed voices in Weimar culture, the sig-
nificance of the translation of Langston Hughes into German is hard to overes-
timate. On the one hand, it opens up study of the African American diasporic
voice within Weimar culture by the revealing of the tragi-comic blues song
behind the joyous dance of the jazz band. On the other hand, it offers a moment
to theorize the relationship between African American and Jewish diasporic
identities in the interwar period. In sum, the translation of Langston Hughes
into German is a call to view in the exchange and contact between an African
American modernist and his Central European Jewish interlocutors a complex
and contradictory act of communication.
“Negro”: From Harlem to Berlin and the Rhine15
In January 1922, Crisis, the main periodical of the NAACP published its third
poem by Langston Hughes. Entitled “Negro,” it was to become one of Hughes’
most famous works and can today be found in almost all anthologies of his
work. Hughes himself would shortly thereafter end his time as a student at
Columbia University; meet Alain Locke and Countee Cullen; and eventually
embark as a seaman for Europe, Paris, and the West African coast. In the mean-
time, he floundered financially, searching for a job in a city still very much
closed to African American workers but embraced the culture of Harlem, its
cabarets, and jazz. Then in April 1922, something curious happened. Hughes
learned that one of his poems had appeared in a Berlin newspaper.16 Ironically,
or better yet tellingly, Hughes’ poem had traversed the Atlantic before he had
himself and long before he ever visited Berlin.
This first translator of Hughes’ work was Hans Goslar, at the time a senior
civil servant within the Prussian government and later press secretary of the
Prussian ministry of state. Born to a German-Jewish family in Hannover, Gos-
lar was known at the time equally as Zionist and journalist. Through important,
if controversial, works like Die Sexualethik der jüdischen Wiedergeburt (The
Sexual Ethics of Jewish Rebirth) and Jüdische Weltherrschaft! Phantasiege-
bilde oder Wirklichkeit? (Jewish Dominance of the World! Figment of Imagina-
tion or Reality?), Goslar was a recognizable public figure within Berlin and a
strong supporter of Weimar democracy. Arriving in New York on December 28,
1921, during his travels in America Goslar sent home articles about American
life and then collected these in his travelogue Amerika 1922.17
Goslar’s activities in the early 1920s are themselves indicative of the
widespread interest in the United States by Weimar Germans. Many journalists
and authors went to the United States in this period and returned home with
strong impressions of this land of “unlimited possibilities” and, in the process,
produced a staggering number of publications.18 Learning about and speaking
to African Americans was an important part of the travel itineraries of many

visiting German writers. As the impact of the Great Migration became unmis-
takable in northern urban centers like New York, acquainting oneself with Af-
rican American culture meant trips not only to the American South but, above
all to the wondrously unique “black city” Harlem, as it was described in many
contemporaneous accounts. Such interest may have peaked in the late 1920s,
but, as Goslar’s early texts show, it was present from the very beginning and in
dialogue with the early jazz enthusiasm of Siemsen and Tucholsky discussed
in chapter 1. For example, the important journalist and theater critic Alfred
Kerr undertook his own visit to New York in 1921. While there, he witnessed a
major moment in the history of Black musical theater, Noble Sissle and Eubie
Blake’s Shuffle Along at Daly’s 63rd Street theater. Shuffle Along was an im-
portant step not only in Josephine Baker’s career, who wowed German audi-
ences in 1926, but also in Adelaide Hall’s, who performed with the Chocolate
Kiddies in 1925. As Kerr presciently wrote of Shuffle Along, it “is at once
striking . . . and inward. At once entertaining . . . and deeply felt —A symbol
of the future?”19 Still, it was not only Goslar and Kerr who took note of Har-
lem, two further articles appeared in the Vossische Zeitung in 1922, discussing
its Black millionaires and the new sense of racial empowerment expressed in
movements like Garveyism.20 So while Goslar’s inclusion of Hughes may be
the earliest known German translation of his work, its treatment of African
American culture and the city of Harlem was by no means isolated or unique.21
Like many other translations of Hughes into German, Goslar’s was not
published as a stand-alone work of poetry. Instead, his setting of Hughes’ poem
was embedded within a broader, journalistic account of African American cul-
ture and society, first within the April article “Der amerikanische Neger” (“The
American Negro”) and then later within his travelogue.22 In his chapter “Afrika
in U.S.A.,” an expanded version of the article from April, Goslar attempts to
dispel any number of prejudices against African Americans, both those of Eu-
ropeans and of white Americans. Though his tone tends towards paternalism,
referring on more than one occasion to the childlike nature of African Ameri-
cans, his argument is more historically than racially rooted. For him the fact
that African American children tend to do well in early grades, only to falter in
later ones, is “a given with a race that has not yet been intellectually trained,
one unaccustomed to mental work.”23 Goslar further argues that differences
between whites and Blacks in political, economic, and social matters are
shrinking and that, for the most part, it is only a matter of time and opportunity
before they disappear. He ends his section on the African American in the
United States calling for “the complete emancipation of Negroes and the sys-
tematic education of this group of 11 million to morally full-fledged, socially

and politically equal Americans.”24
Goslar’s interest in the struggles of African Americans did not emerge
from mere curiosity alone. As a German-Jewish Zionist, it was also personal
and political. He takes note of a tendency within the African American com-
munity towards a self-understanding as belonging to a wider community of
Africans living in diaspora. “Even if the great majority of American Negroes
feel themselves thoroughly rooted within their home country and there do not
remain many traditions of the homeland,” he suggests, “there nonetheless ex-
ists in many circles a general feeling that is not dissimilar to what is happening
today under the name Zionism amongst the Jews of the world.”25 Both the
growing Pan-African movement and the awakening of racial pride in the Afri-
can American community following the war struck a chord with his own expe-
riences as a German Jew.
In this, Goslar’s writings fit the mold of “Jewish traveling cultures” out-
lined by historian Nils Roemer. Looking at works by Arthur Holitscher, Joseph
Roth, Egon Erwin Kisch, and others, Roemer traces the development of travel
writing by Central European Jews to Eastern Europe, Palestine, America, and
the Soviet Union as a “cultural practice that involved transcending cultural,
political, and national boundaries.”26 While traveling necessarily involved re-
flection about differences between the foreign and the home, for German-
speaking Jewish writers like Goslar, “traveling became more often a search
than an experience of homecoming that testified not only to a great deal of
curiosity but betrayed a profound sense of not feeling at home at home.”27 In
other words, Goslar’s notes about African American cultural strivings can also
be read as a reflection of the lack of acceptance he would have to face when he
returned home. Given the June 1922 murder of Walther Rathenau, the German-
Jewish industrialist and presiding foreign minister, it was a struggle that re-
mained all too present for German-Jewish writers like Goslar.
Yet if the connection drawn by Goslar between Zionism and the Harlem
Renaissance was one typical concern of the translators, so too was the frame-
work by which he sought to understand Hughes’ work: music and voice. Un-
like so much of the early jazz discussion, which focused almost exclusively on
rhythm, Goslar frames his account of African American musical achievement
via the voice. It is thus not only as a poetic work of art but also as a “little song”
that he offers his “loose translation” of Hughes’ poem “Negro.”28 Tellingly,
though many changes to sentence structure and wording are present throughout
the translation, it is the fourth stanza on music that Goslar most radically alters.
Compare Hughes’ words on the left to Goslar’s translation on the right.
I’ve been a singer: Aber immer hab’ ich gesungen,

All the way from Africa to Auf dem Wege von Afrika nach
Georgia I carried my sorrow Georgia ertönten meine
songs. traurigen Lieder.
I made ragtime.29 Und dabei tanzte ich im
Rhythmus.30
Curiously, the translation gives music an almost greater power than it holds in
the source text. The addition of “aber immer” (“but always”) to the opening
line marks the musical voice as a continuing source of resistance to the oppres-
sion that surrounds it. Goslar’s gloss on the musical genre of ragtime, “Und
dabei tanzte ich im Rhythmus” (“and I danced around to the beat”), is equally
telling because it is less a future point in the development of African American
song than an act taking place in parallel.
For a variety of reasons, I want to argue that Goslar’s setting of Hughes’
“Negro” follows what translation theorist Lawrence Venuti has called a domes-
ticating, rather than foreignizing, method of translation. Following Friedrich
Schleiermacher, Venuti distinguishes between “a domesticating method, an
ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to target-language cultural values,
bringing the author back home, and a foreignizing method, an ethnodeviant
pressure on those values to register the linguistic and cultural difference of the
foreign text, sending the reader abroad.”31 Most striking in this regard about
Goslar’s translation is that while each stanza of Hughes’ poem begins with “I”
or “I’ve,” the German translation does not once begin a line with the equiva-
lent, transforming, for example, the first line “I am a Negro” into “Ein Neger
bin ich” (“A Negro am I”).32 Later translators like Anna Nussbaum will not
follow him in rigid adherence to German stylistic rules; and with good reason.
Though Hughes’ original poem structures the identity of the lyric “I” through
its copula with “Negro,” this equation is part of a complicated enunciation of
African American identity that takes place in and against a temporal element.
In Goslar’s rendition, however, the individuality of the poem’s lyrical subject
is diminished through this series of inversions that, when taken together, act to
place an ahistorical racial identity over individual, historical subjectivity.
While this is in tune with Goslar’s use of the poem as a demonstration of the
feeling of solidarity with Africa, of Pan-Africanism qua Zionism, this abstract
framing of the Black subject will take on a different tone when the political
stakes of the context shifted from the left to the right.
Attesting to the broadening interest in African American culture that al-
ready existed in the early 1920s, Goslar’s Zionist reading of Hughes was to be
ripped out of its context and inserted into a proto-fascist critique of the French
occupation of the Rhineland in Georg Widenbauer’s “Die schwarze Weltge-
fahr” (“The Black Threat to the World”) from 1923. As discussed in chapter 1,
the French occupation of the Rhine, which began in 1919 and continued until
1930, involved some 80,000 soldiers in total, of which between 30,000 and
40,000 were African. It will further be remembered that the debate was marked
by a vitriolic comingling of racial, national, and sexual metaphors, leading to
discussion of the occupation as a violation and defilement of the nation. In
“The Black World Danger,” Widenbauer sees in the occupation more than Ger-
man suffering at the hand of Blacks. He argues instead that it marks but the first
stage in a worldwide revolt of non-whites against whites. “By itself,” he writes,
“the Black Horror encompasses only a part of the horror facing the entirety of
white humanity, should the black race awaken.”33 For Widenbauer, the African
American is the pivotal figure in this awakening of the Black race as he is rep-
resentative of not one but two victors of the war: American modernity and
non-white races.
It is into this racial phantasmagoria of globalized Black rebellion that
Widenbauer plunges Goslar’s translation of Hughes, though, significantly,
without attributing the translation to the Jewish Goslar. At the same time, Wid-
enbauer’s text, like Goslar’s, contains surprising moments of identification
with Hughes and African Americans. As he writes to introduce the poem: “We
understand the deep melancholy that speaks from the sorrow song of the Amer-
ican Negro Langston Hughes.”34 Just as Goslar had set up a parallel between
Jews and African Americans, Widenbauer implicitly places the white German
and the African American on equal footing, as both are, at least to him, victims
of the victors. Commenting on Hughes’ poem, he writes: “This sorrow song of
blacks breathes life not only from an insatiable longing for the motherland
Africa. Alongside this homesickness there resounds in the soul of the black
resentment (Groll) over his previous oppression as well. From this, he creates
the indestructible hope of throwing off his yoke of oppression.”35 Were one to
replace in this passage “Black” with “German” and “Africa” with “Germany,”
it could very well describe the revanchist sentiment of right-wing radicals re-
garding the occupation and loss of eastern territories after the Treaty of Ver-
sailles.
At the same time, Widenbauer’s argument as a whole and the presence
of Hughes in particular act to reestablish distance between white Europe,
Black Africa, and a racially suspect America. Again revealing the crucial role
played by music within Hughes’ German-language reception, though Widen-
bauer makes but two changes to Goslar’s translation, they both occur in the
fourth stanza on music. First, he Germanizes the proper name “Georgia,”

which Goslar and later Nussbaum retained. By turning “Georgia” into “Geor-
gien,” he thereby furthers Goslar’s domesticating strategy and replaces a
clearly American location with one that also carries connotations on the Eu-
ropean continent. More significantly, Widenbauer removes the point of ori-
gin, Africa, from line 11, which now begins “Auf dem Wege nach Georgien”
(“On the way to Georgia”) rather than “All the way from Africa to Geor-
gia.”36 Through this deletion, Widenbauer’s translation abstracts Black musi-
cal culture from any specific historical context. Hughes’ poem had insisted
that African musical traditions have not only been preserved in spite of the
arduous journey wrought by the Atlantic slave trade but have developed
(from sorrow song to ragtime) and become historical. In sum, Widenbauer’s
subtle alterations act to figure the African American as a dancing “Negro”
from nowhere, always on a journey, always the same, and always marching
in a foreign land a la Germany’s Rhineland.
“I, Too”: Of German Mimicry

and African American Originality
In the mid-1920s, travel to New York, and by extension also to Harlem, con-
tinued. This led to a number of further cases of Hughes appearing in the Ger-
man press in both translated and untranslated form.37 The most significant
examples of the translation and transmission of Hughes in the mid-1920s
derive from Arthur Rundt, a German-Jewish journalist born in Katowice, to-
day in Poland, but at the time part of the disputed territory of Upper Silesia.
Rundt himself was an especially mobile figure, spending much of the early
twentieth century in Vienna before finally emigrating to New York where he
passed away in 1939. His life and works exist between and beyond Germany
and Austria, an element characteristic of many of Hughes’ translators. It was
in 1924/25 that he undertook his first trips to New York, arriving on April 20,
1924, and then returning on January 17, 1925. During this period and after-
ward, Rundt wrote extensively for German-language newspapers and jour-
nals between Berlin and Vienna on issues related to America. More impor-
tantly, it was through his travels and writings that he came personally to
know Alain Locke and Langston Hughes. Between 1927 and 1929, Rundt
corresponded and met with Locke, in both New York and Washington, D.C.,
where Locke was a professor at Howard University.38 Sending his greetings
to Hughes in one of his letters to Locke, Rundt also seems to have met
Hughes personally on at least one occasion.39 Yet while in New York, Rundt
not only met with African Americans but gave a lecture at the New York La-
bor Temple based upon his recent trip to Palestine.40 As such, one can count
Rundt as well as belonging to Roemer’s “Jewish traveling cultures,” whose
third main destination, the Soviet Union, Rundt also visited.41 Finally, note
should also be made here of Rundt’s attempt to publish a German edition of
Locke’s seminal anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation with one of the
most important German publishers of the period, the S. Fischer Verlag.
Though this project did not come to fruition, Rundt’s personal contact with
Locke and his attempt to publish a translation of this central work of the
Harlem Renaissance yet again show how German knowledge and engage-
ment with African American culture were rarely produced within a vacuum.42
Unlike Goslar or Widenbauer, Rundt generally portrays African Ameri-
cans not in terms of their difference from the American mainstream but in their
similarity to it. Harlem may excite him as “a complete, enclosed social ma-
chinery . . . , a black city,”43 yet it is not the city’s Blackness, but its American-
ness, ultimately meaning its whiteness, that fascinates him. Rundt’s interpreta-
tion of African American culture is that it is fundamentally determined by a
need to mimic and recreate white culture. As he writes: “Over and over again
there sounds in the speaking and writing of the Negro this passionate cry of
blood: for sameness (Gleichsein).”44 “Sameness” for Rundt oscillates between
demands for political and social equality and a racially rooted drive towards
cultural assimilation. Yet while Rundt does retain the idea of “blood” race as an
ultimate marker of difference, the assimilation of African Americans to (white)
American culture is part of his general interpretation of American culture as
the result of racial contact and hybridization. As Dorothea Löbbermann writes,
“The culture of modernism (Moderne) in which creative people come into con-
tact with each other and with their audience is for Rundt the result of a racial
mixture to which African Americans have made decisive contributions.”45
In total, Rundt translated five pieces of African American poetry and pub-
lished them, along with numerous references to Hughes’ work in periodicals
and newspapers in Prague, Vienna, Berlin, and Frankfurt.46 Yet, it is his transla-
tion of “I, Too” that is most deserving of mention.47 Again highlighting the
speed with which Hughes’ poetry was translated into German—while “I, Too”
debuted in America in March 1925, it was already being read in Rundt’s Ger-
man translation in May of that very same year. More importantly, Rundt uses
his translation of “I, Too” as the lynchpin of his interpretation of African Amer-
icans as mimetic. Indeed, he employs the English title “I, Too” as a leitmotif
throughout these writings. For example, in his article “Die schwarze Welle”
(“The Black Wave”), Rundt constructs a parallel between the concept of mim-
icry and Hughes’ title, writing: “I, too! I, too! Mimicry! Mimicry.”48 While in
his travelogue Amerika ist anders (America Is Different), he glosses the title by
writing: “‘I too! I too!’—‘I also want to be like that! I too.’”49 In yet a third
context, he notes: “The ‘I too’ of the American Negro, the call for sameness
(Gleich-Sein), the will to mimicry is most clearly present in the New York Ne-
gro quarter Harlem.”50 In point of fact, it is hard not to suspect that for Rundt,
the “too” of Hughes’ title was also to be understood as its English homophone
“two,” in which the African American “I” is but a doppelgänger of the white
American.
Accordingly, Rundt’s translation of the poem revolves around and re-
solves into mirrored pairs. Though slight variations exist between the pub-
lished versions of his translation, in all, he adds the words “I, too” to the end of
the first line of the poem and consistently punctuates this new sentence with an
exclamation mark. Rundt also adds an exclamation point to Hughes’ line 13.
These additions may make the poem seem more overtly political, but in their
repetitiveness, these screams also read as childishly impertinent. In a more
substantive manner, he achieves this mirroring effect through alterations to the
structure and language of the second stanza of “I, too.” These become espe-
cially clear when Rundt’s translation is compared with Hughes’ source text.
Tomorrow, Morgen
I’ll be at the table Will ich bei Tische sitzen,
When company comes. Wenn Gäste kommen.
Nobody’ll dare Morgen
Say to me, Wird niemand sich trau’n,
“Eat in the kitchen,” Zu mir zu sagen:
Then.51 “Iß in der Küche!”52
It should further be noted that Hughes’ original second stanza is bookended by

the temporal modifiers “tomorrow” and “then.” These are certainly parallel but
not identical. The concluding “then” exists as a part of a series, an embedded
moment that follows on the past but occurring at an uncertain, i.e., historically
dependent, point in the future. Rundt’s restructuring removes this carefully
composed temporality by translating the indeterminate “then” with a repetition
of “tomorrow” and moving it to the middle of the stanza. In this way, Rundt’s
translation undercuts the development implied within the poem, just as Widen-
bauer and to a lesser extent Goslar had done in the stanza on music from “Ne-
gro.” Moreover, in the second line, Rundt has exchanged the future tense for
the modal verb “wollen,” meaning to want or intend.53 In switching out future
reality for desire, Rundt subtly shifts the message of the poem away from the
importance of African American belief in oneself and towards the desire to
repeat, to copy whiteness.
In the example of Rundt, German mimicry of Hughes’ English reveals itself
to be a distorted mirror, reflecting as much Hughes’ own poetics and politics as
that of his German mediators and translators. If much of the original was lost in
translation as it made its way back and forth across the Atlantic, it is equally
significant that Rundt knew both Hughes and Locke personally. That he should
have not only have traveled to Harlem but brought back the very latest work by
one of its greatest representatives speaks to the growing significance of Harlem,
not only as an important site for African American but for German culture as
well. If the case of Rundt presents a deeply ambiguous example of how Hughes’
poetry was both recognized and misrecognized, such damage was not always
irreparable, as we will see in the case of Anna Nussbaum.
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers”: Cultural Flow between

African Americans and German-Speaking Europe
By the time Langston Hughes first heard from Anna Nussbaum in late 1927, he
was well aware of the interest in his work in the German-speaking world. At
the same time, Nussbaum quickly eclipsed all others, both in the number, qual-
ity, and impact of her translations. Through the publication of Afrika singt.
Eine Auslese neuer afro-amerikanischer Lyrik (Africa Sings: A Selection of
Recent Afro-American Poetry), she was responsible for the publication of al-
most forty translations of his poetry and around one hundred translations of
contemporary African American poets. Born in Eastern Galicia in 1877, the
Austrian-Jewish Nussbaum moved sometime in her childhood to Vienna. First
attending university in Switzerland, she eventually received her doctorate from
the University of Vienna in 1907. Following the war, her activities focused on
two areas, translation and journalism. To begin with, during the first half of the
1920s, she was active as a translator of French authors, translating the works of
Rousseau and Rabelais, as well as Henri Barbusse.54 She also took great inter-
est in American authors and, in 1929, published a translation of Theodore Drei-
ser’s novel Sister Carrie.55 Nussbaum additionally worked as a journalist for a
number of Viennese newspapers, first for Die Neue Freie Presse and then more
consistently for Der Tag. She was further engaged in socialist and feminist or-
ganizations like the Internationale Frauenliga für Frieden und Freiheit. This
combination of journalism and activism, according to historian Lisa Silver-
man, was typical of Vienna’s Jewish community: “In an era when a filiative
identification with Judaism declined, many Jews felt the pull of more affiliative
cultural networks such as journalism and socialist organizations.”56 In the case
of Nussbaum, one such affiliative network became the Harlem Renaissance.
Already in 1922, the same year as Goslar’s visit to New York, she had
taken note of African American culture, jazz music, and spirituals. In an article
appearing in the Sozialistische Monatshefte, Nussbaum reviewed three works
in French by or about members of the African diaspora. Discussing novels by
Paul Reboux, Rene Maran, and Lucie Cousturier, she demands greater realism
within fictional portrayals of Africans. In the present context, however, it is the
short note at the end of her article that will prove most germane to her future
activities as translator of Hughes. There, she writes with passion about a per-
sonal experience with African American music:
Recently I had the opportunity to get to know the exceptional musical and
rhythmic talents of Negroes, their fine feeling for humor and parody. For
some time, they’ve been playing, dancing, and singing at the Prater. Of
course, they’ve done so according to the demands of the public, above all
the frenetic vitality of jazz band melodies, but at personal request they’ll
also sing their wondrous, old nigger songs, in which a centuries-old long-
ing for freedom, a heartfelt, intimate (rührend-innig) love of home is ex-
pressed. May the best amongst the whites finally find the courage of con-
viction to raise their voice for justice and understanding for a race that like
everyone has a right to pursue, according to its individuality (Eigenheit),
a beneficent development in its own, free country.57
Here in its earliest form is Nussbaum’s ambiguous understanding of African

American culture, in which received tropes of African American culture are
interwoven with unique insight. On the one hand, she repeats the idea of a
rhythmically and musically superior Black subject, so often present in Euro-
pean appraisals of jazz music, not to mention her use of racially insensitive
vocabulary. On the other hand, she senses that what African American per-
formers offer to the public is not always a true reflection of their own culture
but rather a show for the public. Furthermore, she recognizes the necessity of
Africans and African Americans to develop their own culture without Euro-
pean and/or American domination, echoing, if only faintly, Goslar’s reading of
Pan-Africanism via Zionism.
The performers to which she was responding are as important as what

Nussbaum has to say, however. Nussbaum’s comments were written in re-
sponse to the performances of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra (SSO) in
Vienna, which took place at the Prater between May and September 1922 and
featured many of the most famous African American artists of the period, jazz
and otherwise. Aside from Sidney Bechet, Buddy Gilmore, and the composer
Will Marion Cook, one must also make note of singer Abbie Mitchell, first
mentioned here in the discussion of the Chocolate Kiddies. In a curious twist
of fate, Mitchell will cross paths with Nussbaum via her translation work once
more. In 1931, Mitchell will give concert performances in America of Nuss-
baum’s German translations of Langston Hughes. Given Mitchell’s perfor-
mance of these songs and her involvement in the prehistory of the Chocolate
Kiddies, it is thus fitting that the likely impetus for Nussbaum’s process of
discovery began with an encounter with the SSO and Abbie Mitchell.58
Between Nussbaum’s experience of the SSO and the beginning of her
writings on African American music and translation of Harlem Renaissance
poetry, five years elapsed. There were numerous modalities through which
Nussbaum might have come into contact with African American performers
and artists, jazz and otherwise, in these intervening years.59 Still, the exact
details of how her interest spread from the experience in the Prater to the
translation of African American modernist poetry remain unknown. What is
known is that from late 1927 onward, she took a great interest in this subject,
beginning with an article in September of that year. Entitled “Neger-Musik”
(“Negro Music”), the immediate occasion for this was an upcoming perfor-
mance of the Utica Jubilee Singers, one of the African American vocal groups
that regularly toured European metropolises in the 1920s.60 In this piece, she
discusses the history of ragtime and jazz, as well as African American spiri-
tuals via collections by Stephen Foster, James Weldon Johnson, and J. Rosa-
mond Johnson, and presents information about figures such as Ira Aldridge,
George Bridgetower, Sissieretta Jones, Roland Hayes, and Paul Robeson.
Just three months later, Nussbaum began writing about and to African Amer-
ican modernists like Hughes. In her first letter to Hughes from December 7,
1927, she introduces herself, asks permission to publish translations of his
work, and, because a young composer is interested in setting his poems to
music, for an example of the blues.61 On December 25, she then publishes a
short article on Hughes’ life, his thought, and his poetry in the Vienna news-
paper Der Tag, calling him “a poet of the colored proletariat, of the prole-
tariat as such,” closing the article with two translations of Hughes’ work,
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “Porter.”62 As she had with her other cor-
respondents, she sent a copy of this article to Hughes himself, something,

which as we’ve seen, Frankfurt jazz fan Dietrich Schulz-Köhn would also do
some thirty years later.
The intellectual and material exchange between Nussbaum and African
American modernists that took place between 1927 and her untimely death in
1931 produced a flood of translations and publications out of the trickle that
had come before. For Hughes was but the first of many African Americans that
she reached out to: W. E. B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, George
Schuyler, and Georgia Douglas Johnson can all be counted amongst her cor-
respondents. Though unlike Goslar and Rundt, she never travelled to America
or Harlem, Nussbaum’s words and thoughts traversed the Atlantic many times
through her prodigious letter writing. Her contact with Du Bois proved espe-
cially useful, as through him she was able to contact other figures and acquire
a subscription to the Crisis, as well as access important works by African
American authors. Indeed, she profited so much from this exchange that
Hughes and her other African American correspondents can be said to have
shaped her anthology Africa Sings. To begin with, her interlocutors supplied
Nussbaum with works to which she would otherwise have had no access. Be-
fore she began corresponding with Hughes in late 1927, Nussbaum seems to
have possessed Hughes’ Weary Blues and his Fine Clothes to the Jew, as well
as Locke’s The New Negro.63 Yet by the time the anthology was published, it
contained works from ten separate poetry collections as well as poems from
the journals the Crisis, Opportunity, and Carolina Magazine. In other words, it
was only after Nussbaum began corresponding with Hughes that the breadth
and variety of texts and authors began to take shape, and it is this element more
than any other that makes Africa Sings so unique.64
As was the case with her initial correspondence with Hughes, Nussbaum
not only received texts from African American authors, she returned her own
works to them. With her letters to Hughes, Du Bois, or Cullen, she included
press clippings from the German and Austrian press discussing or defending
African American culture. Writing in the Pittsburgh Courier, George Schuyler
relays that she contacted him in 1928 asking for facts and materials related to
African American life.65 He responded by giving her photographs of African
Americans from a variety of professional backgrounds as well as further ad-
dresses. When a racially motivated campaign emerged in Vienna to protest a
planned performance by Josephine Baker, Nussbaum had the materials and
knowledge to intervene. She quickly published an article in Der Tag, “Die afro-
amerikanische Frau” (“The Afro-American Woman”), presenting in both tex-
tual and pictorial form a diverse image of Black women in the arts, education,
entertainment, and politics.66 As Schuyler, who received a copy of the article,

noted: “With the information obtained from this side of the water, Dr. Nuss-
baum has written several articles on the Negro which appeared in leading Aus-
trian and German newspapers. She has made the public in those two countries
familiar with artistic development among Negroes along all lines. Thousands
of people over there are now aware of the poetry of Langston Hughes, Countee
Cullen, and Arna Bontemps.”67
Indeed, transfer between Nussbaum and the Harlem Renaissance was in
at least one case reciprocal. Nussbaum’s “The Afro-American Woman” was
itself translated and appeared, likely via Du Bois’ help, in the Norfolk Journal
and Guide, an important African American periodical.68 Comparison between
the translation found in Du Bois’ papers, likely Nussbaum’s work, and the
published version reveals key differences and points towards conflicts over the
representation of African American culture between German-speakers like
Nussbaum and African Americans themselves. For one, while Nussbaum
translates her original reference to the “einfache Verse” of Phillis Wheatley as
“simple verses,” the published version takes instead “plain verse,” a selection
that shifts the meaning of “einfach” from uncomplicated to unadorned. Fur-
ther, while Nussbaum writes in reference to African American perseverance in
the face of racism and violence that “Der Geist läßt sich nicht morden” (“One
cannot murder the spirit.”), the published English version reads: “His [the Af-
rican American] spirit won’t allow him to perish.”69 Localizing Nussbaum’s
universal claim written from a socialist and Jewish diasporic perspective, the
English translation refocuses the energies of the piece towards the more im-
mediate political ends of African Americans. As this and the preceding exam-
ples demonstrate, Anna Nussbaum and Africa Sings reveal not a one-sided
German-Austrian interest, but cooperation, collaboration, and an example of
diasporic reciprocity with diverse African American artists and intellectuals
like Schuyler, Du Bois, and Hughes.
The collaborative quality of Nussbaum’s work on Africa Sings was fur-
thered through the participation of three other translators. In addition to Nuss-
baum, Anna Siemsen (sister of early jazz commentator Hans Siemsen), Josef
Luitpold Stern, and Hermann Kesser each contributed translations and each of
them had their own views on African American culture and poetry. This re-
sulted in many of the translations engaging in domesticating strategies reminis-
cent of those analyzed in Goslar and Rundt.70 Yet Nussbaum’s own transla-
tions, all poems by Hughes, are marked by Venuti’s strategy of foreignization.
Consider, for example, her translation of Hughes’ fourth stanza on music from
“Negro,” in particular in relation to Goslar’s (see above).
I’ve been a singer: Sänger war ich:

All the way from Africa to Weit her von Afrika nach Georgia
Georgia Brachte ich meine Leidgesänge.
I carried my sorrow songs. Ich habe Ragtime geschaffen.72
I made ragtime.71
In wording, structure, even punctuation, Nussbaum models her translation on

the source text, retaining, for example, the proper names “Georgia” and “Rag-
time,” rather than replacing them with German equivalents as had Goslar and
Widenbauer and as would later translators Hannah Meuter and Paul Therstap-
pen.73 Further, her early use of the term “afro-amerikanisch” (“Afro-American”)
in the collection’s subtitle is yet another indication of the foreignizing tendency
of her translation strategy. Such remnants of the source text demand that the
reader understand the poet Hughes as much on his own terms as on the terms
of the language into which he has been translated. To speak with Venuti, Nuss-
baum’s translation sends the reader abroad, rather than back home.
The reasoning behind such, albeit relative, fidelity is laid out in Nuss-
baum’s preface to Africa Sings. She begins by justifying the peculiar title. Fol-
lowing Alain Locke, Nussbaum defines such poems not as “Negro poetry,” but
as “Afro-American poetry: songs of Negroes living in America that are first
and foremost rooted in race feeling, in solidarity with Africa.”74 This “race
feeling” is not the triumph of biology over individuality, but, as she explains,
“a thoroughly noble feeling grounded in the human experience (im menschli-
chen Gemüt).”75 It is a feeling that is both aesthetically productive and a means
of aiding, rather than inhibiting, understanding between cultures and peoples.
In addition, if the title’s reference to Africa would seem to emphasize the past
rather than present of African Americans, it is important to point out that Nuss-
baum’s anthology contains only works produced in the contemporary, i.e., the
1920s, and the timeliness of the poems works dialectically with the title’s Af-
rican framing, allowing the works to be understood in a modern, political, and
historical context.
This dialectical movement linking past and present is further expressed in
the anthology’s ten thematic divisions. These are “I am a Negro,” “The White
God,” “The New Homeland,” “Work,” “You Whites,” “The Black Woman,”
“Harlem,” “Poet’s Dream,” “Love,” “Liberation,” and “In Folk Sound (Blues)
(Im Volkston [Blues]).” These divisions can and should be read chronologi-
cally, but it is neither a timeless nor a reductive history. Instead, they document
the re-articulation of African American history by the poets themselves, in
which progress is marked both by a growing independence from white culture
as well as by the development of racial pride. So while the beginning four sec-
tions focus on the legacy of slavery and dislocation, beginning with the seventh
section on Harlem, there is a shift towards issues facing African Americans in
their own community. For example, the poems collected under the heading
“Liberation” are not about liberation from physical, but rather the mental and
spiritual, bondage of pervasive racism and racial oppression. It is this logic that
justifies the anthology’s closing with Hughes’ blues poems. For Nussbaum,
these blues have been “invigorated” by Hughes “with a new spirit and timeli-
ness” and reveal the soul of his people in a way that is free from the deformities
of white representations of Blackness.76 Despite these major differences from
other translators, Nussbaum’s conception of African American culture and
many of the individual translations themselves remain to a large degree in-
formed by European and German cultural notions of African vitality, musical-
ity, and naïveté. Their difference lies in the fact that unlike other translations
these were to no small degree counteracted through her direct contact and ex-
change with the African American artists themselves.
Further, if translations like those of Goslar and Rundt were scattered
throughout the press, appearing at irregular intervals, Africa Sings’ status as an
anthology containing around one hundred translations quantitatively and qual-
itatively altered the German-language encounter with Hughes. What makes the
anthology noteworthy, then, is not simply Nussbaum’s personal contact with
figures like Hughes and Du Bois, but the amount of publications it inspired
about African American poetry and its translation into German, and their im-
portance abroad and at home. Indeed, the work’s cultural resonance upon pub-
lication was striking. For one, Africa Sings was widely and positively reviewed,
receiving discussion in the German, Austrian, and even American press.77 In
Crisis, African American chemist Percy Julian, who had studied at the Univer-
sity of Vienna, wrote that Africa Sings “marked a new epoch in European effort
at interpretation of American Negro Youth.”78 Of the impact of the work on the
broader public sphere, he notes: “in 1930 one found a copy of ‘Afrika Singt’ on
the bookshelf of nearly every cultured German home.”79 If this is surely an
exaggeration, partial confirmation comes from the unlikely source of novelist
Hermann Hesse, author of his own jazz-influenced novel, Der Steppenwolf
from 1927. Indicative of the type of informal circulation amongst left-leaning
artists and intellectuals likely to have been prevalent at the time, Hesse writes:
Recently while travelling I found a book lying in the guest room of a

friend in Munich. For three nights I read in it with excitement and great
interest. It is called Africa Sings and contains a selection of Negro poetry,
not from Africa, but America, that were translated into German by various
translators. I will buy this book, it captivated me. Ancient things sound
there in a new key and move the heart.80
If someone like Hesse could come across the work in the guest room of Rein-
hold Geheeb, editor of the journal Simplicissimus, others need not have known
such literary luminaries or have left their exposure to mere serendipity. For
there were three further means by which Africa Sings came to exert its influ-
ence on the German and Austrian public sphere.
The first of these occurred through the republication of the poems in a
variety of journals and newspapers. In the many reviews of the work, the min-
iature form of the poem proved particularly advantageous to spreading Hughes’
name, with examples of his poetry and the poetry of others easily reprinted.
Between 1929 and 1933, Africa Sings’ translations of Langston Hughes appear
in at least nine further publications in Germany and Austria.81 This also in-
cluded the reproduction of Nussbaum’s translation of “Negro” in Alfons Gold-
schmidt’s 1931 pamphlet in support of the Scottsboro Boys 8 Menschen in der
Todeszelle (8 People on Death Row).82 This global movement to free a group
of African American youths who had been falsely imprisoned and convicted of
rape in 1931 had a surprisingly broad impact in Germany, as we shall see in the
next chapter. Beyond such republications, Africa Sings also spurred others on
to translate Hughes, producing a total of seven further translations. In the so-
cialist journal Urania, Anna Siemsen, co-translator with Nussbaum, intro-
duced four new translations by “comrade Kurgass,” likely Paula Kurgass,
noted feminist and later German-Jewish exile.83 Then there is the case of
Thomas Otto Brandt. During the 1920s, Brandt was part of a group of young
Austrian writers involved with a short-lived journal Literarische Monatshefte,
in which two new translations of Hughes appeared.84 Though the readership
for this journal was extremely small, these poems later made their way across
the Atlantic to the pages of Crisis where Percy Julian reproduced them for his
African American readership. Finally, Africa Sings gave speakers of German
outside of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland access to Hughes’ poetry, and
Slovene translations of Hughes, based not on the originals, but upon the trans-
lations in Africa Sings, were published in the early 1930s.85 Such reprintings
and new translations, within and outside of Weimar Germany, not only magni-
fied the effect of Africa Sings, they stand as an index of a broad European and
German-speaking interest in African American culture and modernism. Like
ripples in the water, the translations of Africa Sings spread out from Vienna and
Germany throughout Central Europe and then back to the United States, com-
pleting the cycle begun by Goslar’s first translation and the letter back to
Hughes in 1922.
Still, perhaps the most lasting way Nussbaum’s translation work moved
beyond the containment of the poetry anthology was through music, in par-
ticular through song. Between 1929 and 1931, no less than eight composers
set the poems of Africa Sings to music: Helmut Bornefeld, Wilhelm Grosz,
Werner Richard Heymann, Fritz Kramer, Edmund Nick, Kurt Pahlen, Eric
Zeisl, and Alexander Zemlinsky (figure 14).86 Further, Ossip Dymow and
Béla Reinitz produced an operetta, Schatten über Harlem (Shadows over
Harlem) with songs based on poems from Africa Sings.87 Named after McK-
ay’s 1922 poem and anthology of the same name, this important work will be
discussed below. Still, working only from the uneven translations of Africa
Sings, these young composers often found themselves in a difficult posi-
tion.88 Even if in such imperfect form, their musical interpretations of
Hughes’ work soon found their way onto German, Polish, and Czech air-
waves.89 Both Pahlen (1930) and Zemlinsky (1935) had their works debuted
on Radio Brünn and, in an unlikely squaring of the circle, Grosz’s Afrika
Songs premiered in February 1930 on the Schlesische Funkstunde simultane-
ously broadcast to Berlin, Leipzig, and Cologne under the musical direction
of Edmund Nick, himself author of a composition inspired by Africa Sings.90
Importantly, the reach of Nussbaum’s translations and their musical settings
was not limited to Europe alone. As referenced above, between the spring
and fall of 1931, the African American singer Abbie Mitchell, whom Nuss-
baum had first seen in Vienna in 1922, gave a series of concerts in Chicago
and New York in which she performed songs from Pahlen’s settings.91 Like
the translation of Nussbaum’s “The Afro-American Woman” and Brandt’s
poetry, Hughes’ poetry, transposed into music and translated into German,
went back across the Atlantic where it was heard anew.92
Through these reprintings, new translations, musical productions, and na-
tional radio programs, the poems of Africa Sings reached a German-and non-
German-speaking audience outside, but also inside, Weimar Germany. Through
the constant endeavors of Nussbaum, but also the actions of others like Kur-
gass, Brandt, Bornefeld, Goldschmidt, and Mitchell, Africa Sings was elevated
beyond the isolated endeavor of one exceptional woman in Vienna. In giving
access to Hughes’ poetry and providing a focus to such energies, Africa Sings
and Anna Nussbaum were able to bring to surface a subterranean flow of inter-
est. Of course, when such interest surfaced, it could also provoke, and the his-
tory of Ossip Dymow and Bela Reinitz’s Shadows over Harlem is a prime ex-
ample of the tragic (and comic) fate of Langston Hughes in German translation.
Figure 14: Sheet

music for Wilhelm
Grosz’s Afrika Songs,
1931. Used with per-
mission from Univer-
sal Edition.
Weimar Gets the Blues:

New Negro Culture Meets Nazi Politics
In the early evening of October 19, 1930, a group of brown shirts lingers in a
park to the north of Stuttgart’s city center on a plane tree path.93 They gather in
preparation of Shadows over Harlem, a musical comedy that at 7:30 that eve-
ning will have its premiere at the Kleines Theater. With a Jewish author and
African American culture as its subject, to them, the piece is a prime example
of the cultural bolshevism seemingly so prevalent in Weimar Germany and an
affront to the German nation and race. They are, however, not the only group
on alert that evening. Having become aware of the Nazis’ intentions, the Stutt-
gart police has increased their forces in the area and taken measures to block
the way leading from the theater to the nearby state parliament.94 Should things
get out of hand, they have two extra squadrons standing at the ready.95 Both
groups will play their role tonight.
Regrettably, for the Nazis at least, the play has first to be performed be-
fore it can be protested. To this end, a group of them enters the theater, where
they intend to disrupt the performance. Yet because this is a premiere and no
one is aware of the particularities of the piece, the group must lie in wait for an
offending scene or utterance. In fact, the first act will proceed relatively qui-
etly, with only a single whistle of disgust issuing from the audience. The sec-
ond act will not proceed so smoothly. During a salacious song-and-dance
scene, the youths finally take sufficient offense and seize the moment to halt
the performance (figure 15). As Karl Konrad Düssel described the scene in the
Stuttgarter Neues Tagblatt: “It is a scene played with virtuosity. Both charac-
ters, the acting, the songs, the dances, everything magnificent [ . . . ] But it is a
rather direct scene. An extremely unseemly scene, the protesters must have
said to themselves. And now there’s no more restraint. Now it breaks loose.
Whistling, noise, yelling. ‘Filth’ is the least one hears.”96 Some audience mem-
bers decide to protest the protesters and cries to play on compete with the
chants of the Nazis.97 The house lights are turned on, restoring order and weak-
ening the protest, but as soon as the room is once again darkened, the shouting
match begins anew. This process repeats itself, until, after a delay lasting sev-
eral minutes, the scene can finally be completed. Despite further incidences,
though none as memorable, the play eventually reaches its finale, after which,
with author and cast standing on stage, another battle of wills, hands, and
voices takes place between the Nazi scandalizers and members of the audience
supportive of the piece. Yet the scandal has by no means reached its climax.
Departing audience members are met outside by the group of young men from
the park. Here, the theatergoers will endure, amongst other insults, repeated
chants of “Deutschland erwache. Juda verrecke” (Germany awake. Die Jew)
lasting for around thirty minutes. Eventually, the police enter with their re-
serves and forcefully clear the area with nightsticks, arresting many of the
protesters and finally restoring order.
Shadows over Harlem will have only two more performances, after which
it will be permanently cancelled. The official reason given is the failing health
of Emil Heß, Toomer from the offending scene, but neither its proponents nor
opponents put much stock into that explanation. Instead, the cancellation of the
play, alongside the scandal of its premiere, stood as a sign of the increasing
power of the National Socialist movement, in particular as the scandal oc-
curred directly on the heels of the Nazis’ breakthrough performance in the
September 1930 elections. Bolstered by the Nazis’ success in disrupting and
then removing the play from the theater, local right-wing politician Franz Mer-
genthaler gave a speech in the state parliament calling for a review of the the-
Figure 15: Scene from Ossip Dymow’s Schatten über Harlem in Stutt-
gart, 1930. Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg of the Landesarchiv Baden-
Wurttemberg.
ater’s funding and leadership. In a related incident, Stuttgart’s Nazi leadership

threatened to send all 21,000 of their supporters to the theater should the play
ever be performed again.98 Like the counter-protesters in the theater, the liberal
press, local and national, defended, if not the piece itself, then the theater’s and
Dymow’s right to free expression.99 The socialist press as well criticized the
Nazis’ actions and was generally more sympathetic to intentions of the piece,
if it also found fault with the execution.100
As can be gleaned from these notes based upon the vast press coverage,
the actual content of Shadows over Harlem quickly receded behind its scandal,
and, other than those present at the premiere, it was not only forgotten but
never known.101 To this day, it has enjoyed but those three performances in
Stuttgart in 1930. Current scholarship on interwar German culture contains but
the barest of details concerning the piece, and, when mentioned at all, Shadows
over Harlem exists primarily through the Nazi scandal recounted above. As
Hans-Martin Ulmer notes in his study of antisemitism in Stuttgart, the focus on
the idea of the scandal then (and I would add now) amounted to the “adoption
of the National Socialist topos of the ‘theater scandal.”’102 In order to extricate
discourse from this Nazi bind, we need first to rethink this work’s history and
performance, not with an eye towards its disappearance but towards the condi-
tions of its very appearance in an attempt to give voice back to an author, cast,
and cultural movement silenced that evening.
The first note to make about Shadows over Harlem is that it was a col-
laborative effort uniting cultures and artists across Europe and the Atlantic. In
addition to musical settings by the Hungarian composer Béla Reinitz and ad-
ditional song texts supplied by the German communist poet Erich Weinert, its
Russian-Jewish American author, Ossip Dymow, was heavily inspired by the
New Negro movement, with which Dymow was potentially familiar from the
time he spent in America and New York between 1913 and 1925.103 The title
references the poem “Harlem Shadows” by Afro- Caribbean poet Claude
McKay, first published in 1922. Furthermore, the cast reads as if it came from
a roman à clef of the New Negro movement. The lead character is named
Langston Johnson, a combination of Langston Hughes and James Weldon
Johnson, author and first African American secretary of the NAACP. Dymow’s
Langston also has a love interest, Gwendolyn, referencing the poet Gwendolyn
Bennett whose poetry also appears in Africa Sings. Then there is Toomer, the
Black millionaire, clearly inspired by the author Jean Toomer, whose novel
Cane serves as the basis for two songs set by Reinitz. Though such references
would have likely remained opaque to the audience, potentially explaining
much of critics’ and audience members’ difficulties with the work, these refer-
ences to the Harlem Renaissance are crucial to understanding the cultural

stakes of Dymow’s project.
The plot, which covers a single day, takes place in a Harlem cabaret
named “Afrika.” The cabaret contains three levels: a kitchen where African
Americans work almost without any contact with whites, a second level for the
offices of the white owner Joe Hopkins, and a restaurant above where Blacks
serve white guests. In this regard, the cabaret “Afrika” may have been modeled
on the famous Cotton Club in Harlem, which showcased some of the greatest
African American jazz bands and performers of the period, in particular Duke
Ellington, but which was owned by the white bootlegger Owney Madden,
hired light-skinned female dancers, and remained off-limits for most African
Americans in Harlem. At any rate, the racial dynamics at the fictional cabaret
reflect to a large degree the realities of Black-white relations in American so-
ciety during the 1920s. For example, while the external conditions of segrega-
tion continue, they are beginning to fray as a result of ever-greater numbers of
African Americans in northern cities and their demands for equality. Concret-
izing the link between his play and the New Negro movement, Dymow sets the
club “Afrika” not just anywhere in Harlem but at 135th street, a location that
has been called “the heart and soul of Black Harlem.”104 This street was the
location of the Harlem YMCA, where Langston Hughes and other famous fig-
ures from the Harlem Renaissance lived, as well as the site of the 135th Street
Library, now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
The plot revolves around the two figures Langston and Gwendolyn, both
recent transplants from the South, or “Dixieland” as it’s referred to in the play.
Early on, Gwendolyn is given a mysterious telegram by the owner Hopkins and
commanded to deliver it to Mr. Williams, a white guest, whose sexual advances
she has already rebuffed in an earlier scene. Knowing that bringing anything to
his room will result in Gwendolyn’s rape, Langston volunteers to deliver it for
her. Yet, Langston’s motives are not entirely altruistic. As he says to Gwendo-
lyn: “I want to tell you something. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time:
We work—but the whites make the money. And how do they do that? Not with
work [ . . . ] With telegrams. Whites make love with the telephone and make
money through telegrams. I need money at the moment.”105 Opening the tele-
gram, he discovers that it is an offer to purchase a huge tract of land in the
American South, but payment in full must be made within the next twenty-four
hours. This telegram sparks in Langston the idea of Harlem pooling its money
to buy a kingdom for African Americans.
The cabaret workers choose their leadership and Langston serves the dual
role of treasurer and messiah. For the constitution of their new country, Dy-
mow ironically models it on the democracy of the United States. As the stoker
Esra, newly elected president of the republic, says: “We will lynch the whites!
We will hang them. We will have a democracy. We will douse them with gaso-
line and burn them alive!”106 Parts of the German audience would surely have
recoiled in shock at such images and some conservative commentators refer-
enced the “Black Horror” in their critiques of the play. Yet, the horrible acts
recounted here are based not on German but American conditions, and in all
likelihood, it is the savagery of whites recounted here, such as the brutal lynch-
ing and burning of the African American George Hughes in Sherman, Texas, in
May 1930 that was reported on in Germany as well.107 In referencing the bru-
tality of what was known as “lynch justice,” Dymow may have been attempting
to bypass the racial prejudice of the audience by, however clumsily, having the
white German audience imagine itself as victim of this order. In the right-wing
press, this strategy played into the hands of those who viewed in Blacks an
animal and savage race. Thus, in the report issued by conservative media-
mogul Alfred Hugenberg’s Telegraphen-Union, which appeared in numerous
newspapers across Weimar Germany, the play’s plot was summarized as de-
picting Black longing for “bloody revenge against their white oppressors.”108
Naming their new country “Aetiopia,” the leadership further declares its
intention to create a union of peoples of color, which will include their nation,
as well as China and the Soviet Union. As was to be expected, the positive
references to communism, along with a Jewish author, became the main points
of reactionary attacks on Shadows over Harlem, which tended to interpret the
piece as an allegory of communistic Zionism. The Nazi newspaper Der Angriff
commented: “Threatening, muffled, future-oriented [zukunftsschwangere] re-
volt against centuries of injustice? Fine. One might forget that the author says
‘the Negroes’ and means ‘the Jews.’”109 Meanwhile, the Süddeutsche Zeitung
will summarize the plot as a “grotesque, failed experiment in a Zionism for
colored people.”110 While such attacks can be rejected for the ideological fan-
tasies they are, it is also noteworthy that like Goslar, Rundt, and Nussbaum
before him, Dymow’s Shadows over Harlem also plays off resonances between
Zionism and Pan-Africanism.111 As we have seen throughout, German-speakers
of Jewish descent not only were some of the most important translators of
Hughes, they also framed their work in ways that invited parallels between
their experience of diaspora and that of African Americans.
In this way, the German translation of Hughes’ modernist work, including
its rejection as “cultural bolshevism” by the right, shares an investment in the
trope of “Jewish modernism” (“die jüdische Moderne”) previously discussed
in chapter 3. Here again, I will follow Scott Spector’s consideration of the con-
tradictions and tensions that surround the overdetermined relationship between

“Jewishness” and modernism in Central European discourse, as it is something
clearly at work within the translation and reception of Hughes in German,
though in ways that differ from its treatment in Gustav Renker’s Symphony and
Jazz. Spector describes this idea as an “elusive object that is not a body of work
nor a register of authors, but a way of thinking about oneself and one’s place in
relation to the past, the future, and creativity.”112 In other words, modernism
and Jewishness are, for better and worse, intimately related within the Central
European cultural imaginary; it is a way of thinking that produces such strange
bedfellows as Goslar and Widenbauer, Dymow and his Nazi critics. More im-
portantly, attempts to revalue the connection through inversion of the Nazis’
racist reading or even through disavowal of the connection are equally prob-
lematic. In Spector’s view, both the valorization of modernist works like Shad-
ows over Harlem, as having been decidedly shaped by Central European Jews,
as well as its opposite, namely the insistence upon the “Gentile” origins of
modernism, share particularly discomfiting Nazi analogues: in the rhetoric of
“cultural bolshevism” on the one hand and in the Nazi requirement of baptis-
mal certificates to prove “Aryan” heritage on the other.113
In the case of works like Shadows over Harlem, Spector’s argument sug-
gests, scholars must both avoid reading it solely as a “Jewish” text, while at the
same time striving to uncover the specific ways Dymow’s experience of dias-
pora informs the piece’s modernism. In the examples of Dymow, Goslar, and
Nussbaum, this could begin with an acknowledgement of the multiple ways in
which their displaced, peripatetic lives created a situation that fostered dia-
sporic reciprocity between their own experience and that of the African Amer-
ican authors they were translating. At the same time, to view their works pri-
marily through their “Jewishness,” in other words, to replace Dymow’s African
American characters with Central European Jews, would, in many ways, repro-
duce the same ideological matrix that led to the right-wing rejection of the
piece. A reading of Shadows over Harlem as an allegory of European Zionism
would depend not only upon erasing the history of contact and exchange be-
tween African American and German-language Jewish authors, it would also
ignore the ways in which Dymow ironizes, indeed undercuts, the plan of the
cabaret workers through comedy and exaggeration. Rather than allegorizing
Zionism through the New Negro movement, Hughes’ Central European Jewish
translators and adaptors Dymow, Goslar, Rundt, and Nussbaum are all after
something rather more complicated.
In Shadows over Harlem, Dymow intends not only to depict the exploi-
tation and persecution of African Americans but also their strategies for
countering it. Though by no means wholly successful in this endeavor, the

finale of Shadows over Harlem points towards such a deeper engagement
with the aesthetics of the New Negro movement. Towards the end of the
work, Langston is duped into handing over the telegram to the callous Black
millionaire Toomer, who promises to pay for the land himself and then share
it with the others. When Langston realizes that Toomer’s real intent is to ex-
clude him and the rest of Harlem, he protests, only to have Toomer call the
police and claim that Langston has stolen money from him. The police dis-
cover $250 on Langston, the money collected from the cabaret workers, and
arrest him. Though he adamantly denies having stolen the money, he also
refuses to say where it is from. As the police investigate further, they eventu-
ally speak with Gwendolyn. She deceives them, saying that the money is
hers, earned as a prostitute for Langston. This explanation suits the white
policemen and Langston is promptly released. Now freed and back amongst
the cabaret workers, he admits to having lost the telegram to Toomer. Upon
learning this, the cabaret workers turn on Langston and threaten to lynch
him. Fleeing the mob, Langston escapes and finds refuge in one of the caba-
ret’s private rooms. There he finds Gwendolyn and the telegram’s original
owner Mr. Williams. It is at this point that Williams reveals to both of them
that the telegram was a fake all along, an invention meant to lure Gwendolyn
to his room. In other words, Gwendolyn and Langston learn that there never
was any land to be bought, never any republic to be founded, and that the
entire dream of independence had been built upon white deception.
Without any time to let this fact set in, the Black lynch mob breaks into
the room and is told of Williams’ machinations. Yet, the assembled cast neither
cries nor rises up in anger but laughs heartily and goes immediately, quietly
back to work. As Dymow writes in the final stage directions: “One after the
other, the Negroes begin to laugh, ever wilder and louder. A sympathy of
laughter comes into being.”114 For critics, on the left and right, it was at this
point that the integrity of the piece eroded entirely.115 They simply could not
grasp why the situation should provoke laughter; it was clearly a tragic, rather
than comedic, ending. As Düssel wrote: “A tragic, frantically wailing conclu-
sion to a comedy simply makes no sense.”116 This seemingly inexplicable
laughter is followed by the assembled cast’s recitation of Hughes’ 1922 poem
“Laughers,” in its English original no less. The poem includes the lines:
“Dream-singers, / Story-tellers, [ . . . ] / Loud laughers in the hands of Fate.”117
As mentioned earlier, for Hughes, laughter is not only a product of hap-
piness but is part of a blues aesthetic in which the absurdity of American ra-
cial realities intertwines comedy and tragedy so fully that they become indis-
tinguishable. As he writes in his gloss on the genre cited at this chapter’s

outset: “The mood of the Blues is almost always despondency, but when they
are sung, people laugh.”118 Or as he states elsewhere, the blues is a form de-
fined by “hopeless weariness mixed with an absurdly incongruous laugh-
ter.”119 Blues qua laughter acts as a survival strategy of African Americans in
the face of oppression. For such laughter is, amongst other things, also a
mask, a projection of happiness and docility that can function as subterfuge
amongst those aware of its ironic intent. This type of laughter, like that oc-
curring at the end of Shadows over Harlem, provokes laughter of laughter,
ironizing and indeed inverting the agreement normally associated with the
act. The African American characters at the end of the piece laugh neither at
their dream nor its failure but in the face of oppression. Their laughter sug-
gests they will carry on and live to dream again. As Dymow wrote less than
six months after the play’s cancellation in a piece about Harlem and its poets
Hughes, McKay, and Toomer in the Vienna newspaper Das kleine Blatt:
“Their poems reveal what is hidden behind the ever-friendly, naively-sincere
(kindlich-aufrichtig) smile of the American Negro.”120 One might suggest,
therefore, that under the cover of comedy, Dymow has smuggled in an Afri-
can American aesthetic form and that Shadows over Harlem can stand as a,
albeit awkward, translation of the blues for German theater.
Such an endeavor in Germany in 1930 was ultimately destined to failure
in a very important sense: its call to understanding and sympathy could not
depend on a knowing response from the Stuttgart audience, and Dymow’s rich
web of allusions fell mostly on deaf ears, its irony taken by many critics for
literalness. Yet, the play’s transatlantic call did elicit a response in the African
American press. In the Baltimore Afro-American, there appeared a short note
on the scandal.121 After referring to the plot of the play as a depiction of the
“oppression of the Negro in America” and recounting what it terms the “riot”
of October 19th, the short review concludes: “The play was objected to be-
cause a group known as the ‘Nazis’ believe that the new Negro culture is ruin-
ing the German culture.”122 Unlike other articles in the American press, this
piece adds an important, if seemingly trivial, detail. In this report, the Nazis
don’t merely object to African American culture, “Negro culture,” as the New
York Times put it,123 they object to the “new Negro culture.” To its African
American readership, this would have meant, amongst other things, the mod-
ernism of the Harlem Renaissance. No author is given for the report, and it is
unclear whether this addition was based on knowledge or merely surmised. Of
course, such a quiet moment of dialogue between Weimar culture and African
American modernism is all but inaudible against the loud chants of the brown
shirts outside the theater. Still, the message it carries, of a neglected history of
communication and miscommunication between African and Jewish diasporic
communities between Russia, Vienna, Berlin, Stuttgart, and Harlem, is cer-
tainly one worth hearing.
“As I Grew Older:” Weimar Culture

and African American Modernism
Back in Vienna, Anna Nussbaum followed the events surrounding Shadows

over Harlem and reported on the situation to W. E. B. Du Bois, on November
7 and December 29, 1930.124 She continued to correspond with him through
the spring of 1931, sending him a final note on May 31, after which she unex-
pectedly passed away on June 28.125 In her death, the focus and drive behind
the dissemination and translation of African American poetry in Germany and
Austria had suffered a loss from which it did not recover until the after the
Second World War.126 With Nussbaum’s death, the economic downturn, and
the rise of the Nazis, the Weimar encounter with Hughes is one that seemed to
go missing after 1933. After 1945, new translators worked to make Hughes,
once again, known to the German public in the East and West. While such
postwar efforts perhaps bore greater fruit in terms of the overall public recogni-
tion of Hughes,127 Dymow’s Shadows over Harlem and Nussbaum’s Africa
Sings, as well as the other examples analyzed here, cannot simply be written
off as islands of insight in a sea of “jazz age” ignorance. Instead, they need to
be seen as having been on the forefront of something much larger and deeper:
a new sense of the aesthetic and cultural achievements of African Americans
and peoples of African descent. And if the Stuttgart audience had not been able
to answer the transatlantic call of Dymow’s text, the translation of Langston
Hughes more generally can be viewed as an example of Edward’s idea of “dia-
sporic reciprocity” as a “call to translate.”128 This unique state of affairs was
indebted as much to the status of German-speaking Jews in Central Europe as
to the transnational reach of Black modern expression. It is only as a result of
the modernist movement of the Harlem Renaissance and the concomitant inter-
est in jazz across the United States, Europe, and Germany that writers like
Goslar, Rundt, Dymow, and Nussbaum, along with many others, were no lon-
ger merely speaking about African Americans but, rather, also having African
Americans like Langston Hughes speak through them.
To be sure, the translation of Langston Hughes’ poetry was not the only
example of American and African American culture speaking in Weimar Ger-
many. As we have seen throughout, exposure to American culture produced

complex responses on the part of Weimar Germans as they struggled to recon-
cile the seemingly irreconcilable elements of music, race, and American cul-
ture. If many of these instances like those of Dymow and to a lesser extent
Nussbaum were largely forgotten, the struggles of one young philosopher cum
musician to make sense of this new culture have remained especially audible
within the history of jazz in Germany. This is Theodor W. Adorno, whose
works such as The Dialectic of Enlightenment (cowritten with Max Hork-
heimer) have influenced generations of scholars. From the 1930s to 1960s,
Adorno and other philosophers associated with the Frankfurt School, such as
Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse, supplied scholars and radical thinkers
with a new vocabulary to analyze and critique capitalist culture. In the most
positive sense, Adorno and the Frankfurt School were amongst the first to dis-
cuss popular culture with the same theoretical rigor that had previously re-
tained for high culture alone. In a more negative way, they used the standards
of high cultural analysis to do so. Of course for many, no better example of the
limitations of Frankfurt School critical theory can be found than in Adorno’s
thoroughgoing and long-standing rejection of jazz. From the 1930s to the
1950s, Adorno repeatedly sought to debunk jazz as reactionary, rather than
progressive, as repressive, rather than liberatory; a position that could lead to
inflammatory statements such as that “jazz and the pogrom belong together.”129
Still, as I want to explore in my final chapter, even as staunch a critic as Adorno
was not free from the influence of Weimar’s jazz republic.
Chapter 7
Jazz’s Silence: Adorno, Opera, and the

Decomposition of Weimar Jazz Culture
It is hardly an exaggeration to claim that every consciousness today that
has not appropriated the American experience, even if with resistance, has
something reactionary to it.
—Theodor W. Adorno (1968)
Like so much else that had defined the first decade of Germany’s democracy,
jazz was very much under attack during the final years of the Weimar Republic.
A critical turn set in around 1930 that had as much to do with transatlantic
trends in popular music as with the crises in politics and the economy that
dominated the republic during the last years of its existence.1 If jazz, and with
it jazz effects, nonetheless continued to be produced—through musical works
like Shadows over Harlem, films such as The Great Attraction, and concerts by
the Jazzklasse—as we’ve seen throughout the past chapters, jazz’s position
within Weimar culture was also clearly threatened, evidenced not in the least
through the ban on “Negro culture” and its expression through “jazz bands,
drum music, Negro dances, Negro music, negro songs (Negerstücke)” by the
National Socialist Wilhelm Frick in Thuringia in April 1930.2 It was during this
period of Weimar jazz culture’s decomposition that Theodor W. Adorno first
achieved and then lost his academic position at the Goethe University in Frank-
furt, produced an opera on America, rejected jazz, and, like many others, left
Germany for England and then the United States.
It is, of course, the Adorno of a few later years who will come to loom
over so much of the historical discussion of jazz in Germany, casting a shadow
over German jazz criticism that stretches back into Weimar and forward into
the present. Between his “Über Jazz” (“On Jazz”) in 1936 and “Zeitlose Mode:
Zum Jazz” (“Perennial Fashion–Jazz”) from 1953, Adorno repeatedly rejected
jazz as a progressive, revolutionary, or otherwise critical music. 3 Indeed,
Adorno’s earliest extended treatment of jazz, “Abschied vom Jazz” (“Farewell
197
to Jazz”) published in April 1933, would seem to put Adorno’s loathing of this
music on early display. Just two months after Hitler became chancellor and in
the midst of severe economic depression and continuing political violence,
Adorno responded with apparent sanguinity to the prohibition of jazz by the
Berliner Funkstunde, a national radio station based in Berlin. Whether as foil
or as model, his scathing critique has informed most scholarly thought on the
subject of jazz in Germany and no account of jazz’s presence in early twentieth-
century Germany can get around Adorno.4
For the present purposes, the most important aspect of Adorno’s anti-jazz
legacy is that his appraisals have, for various reasons and to various degrees of
success, consistently been applied to the study of jazz in the Weimar Republic.
Specifically, scholars of the past twenty years have tended to read Adorno’s
post-1933 writings as a continuation of Weimar-era jazz discourse, bolstered in
this contention by the fact that Adorno’s terminology and overall stance on the
music would appear to remain unchanged over the course of his lifetime. As J.
Bradford Robinson argues: “Adorno’s jazz writings, although post-dating the
Weimar Republic, must be read within the context of Weimar Germany’s com-
mercial music scene as a whole.”5 In one way, such an interpretation acts as a
defense of Adorno’s critique of jazz—not as a valid interpretation of jazz but
as an incisive critique of German and European ideologies of jazz in the 1920s
and early 1930s. Robinson’s work is but the most compelling and nuanced of
many attempts to remove the stain of Eurocentrism, cultural snobbism, and
even racism from Adorno’s jazz texts by anchoring them in Weimar.6 At the
same time, this defense of Adorno rests on one very important assumption,
namely that the jazz of Weimar Germany was out of touch with the develop-
ments in America and the rest of the European continent, with Weimar’s sup-
posed ignorance ultimately functioning as scapegoat for Adorno’s. While there
are many problematic elements to this idea, most relevant in this context is the
idea that Weimar Germany was somehow backwards in its understanding of
and engagement with jazz and that writers such as Adorno were free to make
their jazz theory as they pleased. Adorno and jazz, Adorno and America, are
thus ideal candidates to evaluate the present work’s primary argument, namely
that Weimar culture was produced through fractious contact with American
culture and the Gordian knot of music and race via jazz.
At the same time, any attempt to uncover Adorno’s experience of jazz and
his engagement with the music, its performers, and its cultural significance
must confront the fact that Adorno wrote relatively little about the music be-
tween 1918 and 1933. Still, Adorno’s works from the 1920s and early 1930s do
Jazz’s Silence 199
contain telling, if scattered, references to notable figures from Weimar’s jazz

culture such as Paul Whiteman, The Revelers, Josephine Baker, Frankfurt’s
Jazzklasse, and the Louis Douglas revue Black People, under the musical direc-
torship of jazz icon Sidney Bechet no less.7 So if there can be little doubt that
Adorno was exposed to a wide array of jazz styles and potentially as early as
1925, when he may have heard Arthur Briggs, another veteran of the SSO, such
references and biographical details can only hint at what ultimately remains an
absence in his early work.8 Expressed more positively, Adorno’s relative si-
lence on jazz during the period does not mean he wasn’t listening, that he
wasn’t paying close attention to questions of music, race, and American culture
as part of his philosophical and musical education in the 1920s.
On the other hand, Adorno may not be as silent on these matters as it
would at first appear. For the relative scarcity of his comments on American
and African American culture disappears as soon as one considers his incom-
plete musical work Der Schatz des Indianer Joe. Singspiel nach Mark Twain
(The Treasure of Indian Joe. Singspiel after Mark Twain). (Hereafter referred
to as Treasure.)9 Initially produced between November 1932 and August 1933,
I want to suggest this unique work was the result of Adorno’s cultural appren-
ticeship during the 1920s. Indeed, though Treasure is a piece very much of its
time, it is in certain ways out of step with Adorno’s later works, on jazz and
otherwise, that have defined his legacy as one of the most important thinkers in
twentieth-century European thought. Tellingly, and unlike his jazz writings,
this work has largely been ignored, both by critics and defenders. Excluded
from the twenty volumes of his collected works, the libretto was published as
a limited edition in 1979, and the two compositions he completed for the work
were published a year later in a separate volume.10 After offering an insightful
reading of the libretto in the context of Adorno’s work, Adorno scholar Rolf
Tiedemann closes his afterword to the publication by noting:
If one were to offer Schatz des Indianer Joe as pre-Christmas entertain-

ment . . . the piece would hardly fail to impress. But one must not, as this
would almost certainly be the exact opposite of what Adorno himself had
intended to bring to the stage. Only the composition is capable of fully
bringing out what the author has let seep into the text. Unfortunately, too
little of the composition is extant for the work to be completed. Adorno
did not plan to publish the libretto independently of the music; he knew
too much about literature (Literatur) to consider the libretto by itself to be
poetry (Dichtung).11
Following these notes from Tiedemann, few authors have tackled the libretto or
its place within Adorno’s thought. Indeed, as much as, if not more so than, his
jazz writings, Adorno’s American opera has become an open secret of Adorno
scholarship, though recently it has begun to garner more interest.12
When read as belonging to the complex of the jazz republic, however,
Treasure can be viewed as a singular achievement of Adorno’s early thought
and marks an important moment in his development as a thinker. For in this
fragment of an opera, Adorno not only entered into dialogue with the great
American author Mark Twain but with the thorny issue of race and Blackness
in US culture via music. As I want to show, his attempt to imagine American
society as operatic text pushed him to confront questions of racial difference in
ways that his later analyses of jazz did not.
Adorno’s American Opera as Anti-Zeitoper
The first step in locating Adorno’s work within the jazz republic is to put aside
Adorno’s authorship of the work for a moment. When one considers Treasure
purely from the perspective of a Weimar-era musical work set in America, it
immediately enters into conversation with a host of further works from the pe-
riod. In particular, Adorno’s American setting invites comparisons to the group
of Zeitopern (“operas of the times”) produced roughly between 1927 and 1930
that broadly share an American theme: Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf (Jonny Strikes
Up) (1927), Max Brand’s Maschinist Hopkins (1928), Eugen d’Albert’s Die
schwarze Orchidee (The Black Orchid) (1928), Karol Rathaus’ Fremde Erde
(Foreign Soil) (1930), Kurt Weill’s Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Rise
and Fall of the City of Mahagonny) (1930), and George Antheil’s Transatlantic
(1930). Such Zeitopern, as Susan C. Cook shows, were above all a response to
the perception of a crisis in opera. Confronted with diminishing demand for this
baroque product, composers of Zeitopern sought to incorporate modern culture
into their works as a means of speaking to the audience’s contemporary life.
Zeitopern prominently feature technology like automobiles and trains; new me-
dia like film, radio, and phonographs; and urban locales such as bars and hotels.
These are introduced not only to reflect current society but also to critique and
parody it. As Cook explains:
The Zeitoper was firstly a comic genre and typically relied on parody,
social satire, and burlesque as dramatic tools. [ . . . ] Zeitopern were obvi-
ous expressions, even celebrations, of modern life. Composers tried to

incorporate as many attributes of contemporary life into all facets of the
operatic production as possible. The libretti were set in the present; char-
acters were typically everyday people or were presented as recognizable
modern stereotypes.13
A crucial component of Zeitopern was their use of jazz and other forms of
syncopated popular music, be it through instruments like saxophones and ban-
jos and/or through music written in the style of blues, foxtrot, and tango. While
one may certainly question the authenticity of the terminology, the intention of
the composers was to signify popular music and jazz to their audience. More-
over, the music of these Zeitopern is without question some of Weimar cul-
ture’s most memorable. The collaborations of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill
have longest remained in the minds of German and not only opera but also jazz
and rock enthusiasts. From Louis Armstrong’s or Ella Fitzgerald’s perfor-
mances of “Mack the Knife” to The Doors’ rendition of the “Alabama Song,”
Weimar’s “operatic” jazz has enjoyed a spectacular afterlife.
In choosing to set his first opera in America, Adorno was consciously
engaging with this tradition. Yet, he was also faced with a difficult proposition.
How does one, for example, satirize satire and how can one avoid the danger of
this critique of modernity being read in a prelapsarian, reactionary manner?
Adorno’s solution, I argue, was to create an anti-Zeitoper, a work that critiques
both the form and musical content of a Zeitoper without suggesting a return to
the past as a means of escaping the present. The first point to make here is that
he sets his opera not in contemporary, urban America but in the rural, pastoral
American past of the mid-nineteenth century. Yet this space, as I discuss below,
represents neither escape from nor an antithesis to the present. Instead, the li-
bretto highlights both consonances and dissonances between present and past
that work together to track the origins of the contemporary crisis in the 1930s.
Second, Adorno’s incomplete opera is the only one of these operas to have
been based on an American literary source, let alone of the caliber of Twain.
That this was a risky endeavor on Adorno’s part cannot be ignored. The end
result is no doubt messy, and the difficulty he faced in adapting Twain goes a
long way to explain the uneven reception of the work. Third, Adorno is the
only composer not to use jazz and jazz-like elements. Setting the opera in the
past freed him in many ways from the necessity of incorporating jazz but not
entirely, as in his score, he also does not attempt to reproduce nineteenth-
century music, American or otherwise. Instead, in the two completed composi-
tions, Adorno has produced twelve-tone serial compositions.14 While it would

surprise few that Adorno does not include jazz and instead composes a la
Schoenberg and Berg, jazz’s absence is nonetheless significant.
As this point, it is important to consider in some detail the music he did
produce. The two completed songs are “Hucks Auftrittlied” (“Huck’s Entrance
Song”) and “Totenlied auf den Kater” (“Death Song to the Tomcat”). In each,
Adorno overlays his dystopian vision of American society with an atonal score,
producing a disorienting and chilling effect, particularly for anyone approach-
ing Twain or Tom Sawyer with naïve notions. At the same time, music and text
exist in dialogue with each other, at least according to musicologist Martin
Hufner. Of “Huck’s Entrance Song,” Hufner writes: “the musical structure
(Gestaltung) is in essence based upon the text. One can almost hear the dog’s
‘barking at the moon,’ the ‘catching of flies with the mouth’ . . . . These textu-
ally based impressions have their musical analogies. They are almost executed
as program music (musikbildlich umgesetzt).”15 Although it is impossible to
know how other songs would have dealt with the relationship between music
and text, Hufner suggests that the music would have underscored, rather than
introduced or contradicted, key elements of the text.
By breaking with the established rules of the Zeitoper such as the jazz
milieu of the modern metropolis, yet still remaining in dialogue with the genre
through its setting in America, Adorno’s opera may have been able to reconfig-
ure the question of American culture and, by extension, the cultural meaning of
America and American jazz for Weimar Germany. In particular, in refusing to
relegate jazz music either to an impossible and implausible utopian promise or
even to satirize and ironize it, jazz’s silence in the opera could have acted as a
negative space that, in concert with the libretto, might have created a new
model of critical engagement with both the American present and past. Still, all
these thoughts must ultimately be attenuated through the use of the subjunc-
tive. The fact that Adorno never completed the opera is as telling as the frag-
ment that exists. The missing music points not only towards a lack within his
opera, it also hints at the fragility of the jazz republic and much else at Weimar
Germany’s end.
Between 1932 when Adorno began work on the project and his departure
for England in 1934, Adorno’s personal situation grew untenable. Already, the
first nine months of the Nazi dictatorship had brought terrible, if uncertain,
change: from the suspension of civic liberties, to the dismissal of politically
and racially undesirables from state-funded positions, to even more ominous
events like the construction of a concentration camp for political opponents in
Dachau. Adorno’s own experience of the events of 1933 was unexceptional, if
no less tragic.16 While visiting in Berlin with his future wife, Gretel Karplus,
the Institute for Social Research was forcibly closed and Adorno’s work at the
University of Frankfurt ended that year as well.17 On a more personal note, his
house in Frankfurt was searched, and he feared that his mail was being opened.
Then, when he attempted to switch career paths to music instruction, he was
informed that because of the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil
Service,” he would only be allowed to instruct “non-Aryans.”18 In sum, every
month the Nazis held power, Adorno’s prospects seemed to grow bleaker. As
he wrote to his mentor, composer Alban Berg, on November 13, 1933:
At the moment things are not going very well with my own work. My
venia legendi has now indeed been revoked as a result of the Aryan para-
graph and I’m spending a great amount of time and energy looking for a
new teaching position. This by itself would not be so terrible, but for
weeks I was so generally depressed that I lacked the freedom to compose.
I have to work at gradually (mühsam) reacquiring it. [ . . . ] Nevertheless,
I believe that my libretto [i.e. to Treasure] and the pair of pieces I com-
posed (which already exist as scores) are meaningful (etwas taugen). But
such an ambitious (weitschichtige) work truly demands a more open hori-
zon of fantasy than I have today.19
In this note to his friend and teacher, one senses the thirty-year-old’s frustration
and desperation. By the end of 1933, Adorno no longer felt he possessed the
“freedom to compose,” the intellectual space to create a work of art that could
speak, if only from a place of privilege, to the injustice surrounding and im-
pacting him.
In his inability to progress in his own work and through the institutional,
legal, and social repression mounting around him, Adorno’s place in Weimar
culture, along with his opera, was decomposing before his very eyes. This state
of affairs no longer supported the idealized stakes of Weimar’s engagement
with music, race, and American culture that it had even as late as 1932. In other
words, it no longer provided for a “horizon of fantasy” in which a meeting of
the American author Mark Twain and a German philosopher-composer could
mean something significant. It did not matter that text and music were effective
in themselves—they were losing their addressee.
In the Ruins of the Jazz Republic
After more than a decade of critics, authors, musicologists, and artists rhapso-
dizing on the dangers and dreams of contemporary America across Weimar
culture, for Adorno, there seemed to be no place better suited to tracing the
origins of the current crisis than in the American past. At the same time, Ador-
no’s choice of source material is both curious and significant: Mark Twain’s
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). Perhaps the best-known American nov-
elist at the time, Twain was widely read in Germany, and his works were regu-
larly translated into German. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, moreover, is a
founding myth of childhood and children’s literature in America. Though writ-
ten in the 1870s, Twain sets his novel in the antebellum South in the fictitious
town of St. Petersburg on the Mississippi river. In episodic manner, it tells the
story of the rapscallions Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Tom’s companion
and titular hero of Twain’s later novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1885). The narrative is propelled by the boys’ witnessing of a murder by “In-
jun’ Joe,” a half-Native American, half-white criminal. The boys swear an oath
to never speak a word about the murder, for fear that Joe will seek retribution
if he ever found out that they had witnessed the act. After the murder is blamed
on Joe’s innocent associate, Muff Potter, Tom breaks his oath of silence by
testifying in court against Joe. Yet Tom’s testimony only serves to put him in
immediate danger, as his appearance in court is promptly followed by Joe’s
escape. Living for the remainder of the novel in fear, Tom eventually meets up
with Joe in a labyrinthine cave located on the outskirts of town. There, the
criminal will fall to his death in an act that ends both Tom and Huck’s fear as
well as makes them rich. It turns out that the cave was the hiding place of Joe’s
treasure, the inspiration for Adorno’s title. Twain’s novel thus ends on a rela-
tively happy note with both boys ostensibly reborn as wealthy, respectable fig-
ures of the town.
Taking place across seven scenes, Adorno’s libretto retains the central
episodes and overall arc of the novel, yet also makes key alterations and addi-
tions.20 Most glaringly, Adorno shifts the setting of the story from the fictitious
St. Petersburg to the real birthplace of Twain, Hannibal, Missouri. Though
based in reality, the name Hannibal is significant because of the associations
the city’s namesake would have had for the classically educated Adorno. The
historical figure Hannibal possessed, for at least one important figure of the
period, special significance for the situation of Jews in Europe: Sigmund
Freud. Having engaged with Freud’s writings at least since 1927, Adorno was
thus likely familiar with the following passage from Freud’s Interpretation of
Dreams: “To my youthful mind Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict
between the tenacity of Jewry and the organization of the Catholic church. And
the increasing importance of the effects of the anti-Semitic movement upon our
emotional life helped to fix the thoughts and feelings of those early days.”21
Indeed, Adorno was potentially motivated in his choice of Twain for reasons of
solidarity. Twain was rumored by those on the right to have been a Jewish
writer (he was not), and in the 1933 edition of Handbuch der Judenfrage
(Handbook of the Jewish Question), Twain is described as having a “Jewish”
writing style.22 Hannibal, however, was not just a “Semitic general,” he was an
African general, and it is in this doubling of Africanness and Jewishness that
the shift from “St. Petersburg” to Hannibal takes on further significance. In
thereby invoking the interweaving of Blackness, Jewishness, and American-
ness that was so common during the final years of the Weimar Republic,
Adorno positions his text in response to the poisoned atmosphere of early
1930s Germany and the function of jazz therein. Further indicating that ques-
tions of race and Blackness in American culture were on his mind is Adorno’s
important alteration to the mise-en-scéne. Whereas Twain clearly sets his novel
in the antebellum period of Southern slave society, Adorno indicates that his
story takes place in the 1860s.23 Because he does not specify an exact date, but
only a decade, emphasis is placed on this period’s transitional nature, one in
which the slave-holding South lost the Civil War, African Americans were
freed from slavery, and the entire region underwent rapid transition to free-
market capitalism. Though the analogy remains intentionally imprecise, the
implied connection between the revanchist American South and the radical
right wing in Germany, between anti- Black racism in America and anti-
Semitism in Germany, powerfully informs the libretto.
At the same time, though Treasure sets up parallels between 1860s Amer-
ica and 1930s Germany, between African Americans and German Jews, it
would be a mistake to view this work as but an allegory of the present. Ador-
no’s choice of a relatively outdated author like Twain shows that he is equally
interested in highlighting dissonances between the eras. By 1932, Twain’s
popularity in Germany had diminished, with fewer editions of his works and
fewer discussions of his work appearing in the press.24 In a word, Twain’s work
had become passé for an audience beginning to discover modern American
authors like Fitzgerald, Dreiser, Hemingway, not to mention African American
authors like James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes. Second, Adorno’s
choice of translation intensifies the distance between Twain and the German
present. Adorno bases his text not on the most recent translations of the 1920s,
but on Margarete Jacobi’s 1892 translation, Tom Sawyers Abenteuer und St-
reiche.25 Adorno not only adapted Jacobi’s translation, he leaves significant
portions of the translation untouched.26 This means that Adorno’s libretto at
times hardly reads like Adorno, whose own writing style was notoriously dif-
ficult and dense. It should then come as no surprise that, like Tiedemann, Wal-
ter Benjamin took offence at the libretto’s language, calling out Treasure for
the “straightforward, rustic tone of the dialogue.”27 Yet this, I would argue, was
Adorno’s intention. The datedness of the language and of Twain himself are
crucial coordinates within the force field linking, but never telescoping, Twain’s
America of the mid-nineteenth and Adorno’s Germany of the early twentieth
centuries. Together, the elements of Twain’s Americanness and “Jewishness,”
the overdetermined place of Hannibal in the 1860s, and its rural setting, in ad-
dition to the archaic language, act to simultaneously historicize the present and
actualize the past.
One reason for this complicated procedure is that Adorno viewed Trea-
sure as an opportunity to provide an aesthetic response to his and Walter Ben-
jamin’s theorization of the ruin in capitalism. Indeed, he understood Treasure
to be of a piece with Benjamin’s Arcades Project and the ideas of allegory and
ruin undergirding it. Viewing in Benjamin Treasure’s “ideal reader,” after com-
pleting the libretto, Adorno sent him a copy for his reaction.28 When Benjamin
finally responded after several months of delay, he critiqued the work not only
for its language but more fundamentally suggested that, in its present form,
Treasure amounted to a “reduction to the idyllic.”29 Adorno in turn delayed for
over a month before reacting. In his response, he insists regarding the tone
specifically:
The hearty language is not the heartiness of real children, so much as that
encountered in the literature written for children; [ . . . ]; if it doesn’t
sound too arrogant, I would perhaps suggest that I have smuggled a great
deal into the piece, that nothing is quite intended in the sense in which it
immediately appears, and that I am using the childlike imagery to present
some extremely serious things.30
These “serious things” may refer to the theoretical import of Treasure as a re-
flection on the aesthetic of the ruin, an important synthesis of his philosophical
and musical investigations up to this point in his career.
This idea of Treasure as an enactment of the Benjaminian ruin comes into
particular focus when the work is read in relation to Adorno’s lecture on
Naturgeschichte, or “natural history.” Delivered to the Frankfurt Kantgesell-
schaft in July 1932, that is just three months before he began work on Treasure,
Adorno elaborates in this lecture on his ideas about nature and history in ways
that not only pay homage to Benjamin but also prefigure the central arguments
of his and Horkheimer’s later Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno begins with
a discussion of the traditional understanding of nature and history. Following a
strategy of immanent critique, he accepts these terms for the moment in order
to push “these concepts to a point where they are mediated in their apparent
difference.”31 As Adorno well knew, while the enmeshing of nature and history
represented an important step away from the idealist tradition, it was not
enough. Instead, the purpose of natural history had to be a reorientation of the
very practice of philosophy, a “change of perspective” as he put it.32 This was
to be achieved through an allegorical deciphering of the ruin.
For Benjamin, as for Adorno, the ruin stands as the physical embodiment
of the idea of natural history. “In the ruin,” Benjamin writes in his Origin of the
German Tragic Drama, “history has physically merged into the setting. And in
this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so
much as that of irresistible decay.”33 Ruins signify not only the meeting of na-
ture and history, they also reveal the lie of historical progress and lay waste to
the idea of capitalist society as a harmonious self-identical totality. As Susan
Buck-Morss notes about the ruin in capitalism: “The debris of industrial cul-
ture teaches us not the necessity of submitting to historical catastrophe, but the
fragility of the social order that tells us this catastrophe is necessary.” 34 Due to
the split vision of natural history, the world as experienced by the subject loses
its appearance of wholeness, transforming itself into shards and rubble in need
of signification and (allegorical) interpretation.
It is this idea of natural history as ruin that lies at the center of Treasure
and one Adorno makes quite explicit within the text itself. While Tom and
Huck dig for buried treasure in a haunted house, Tom stops to pick up a brick.
Holding it in his hand, he comments to Huck: “with a brick like this we could
have a nice game of treasure” (S 62). Here, Tom resignifies the search for gold
into a game in which the ruins of commodity culture become the object of de-
sire. Tom elaborates that these “stones were made by people long ago in the
brickworks on the river. You still feel that they were baked in the mold. Now
they are a ruin. They lie there broken like real stones, as if they had been lying
there forever. Just like the treasure” (S 62). Tom’s immediate insight here is to
recognize the social construction of wealth, with the bricks’ ruinous state
breaking down the perception of capitalist value as impervious and solid. Yet,
this passage also acts as a map to Adorno’s text. In connecting the ideas of the
ruin and treasure, it suggests that the treasure(s) of Adorno’s opera will be
found precisely in such collisions of nature and history, of myth and reason.
To achieve his natural historical reading of nineteenth-century Ameri-
can society, Adorno strategically intertwines three groups that represent an
enmeshing of nature and history: animals, children, and marginalized racial
groups. What potentially drew Adorno to Tom Sawyer was that Twain him-
self uses the negativity of these groups in relation to the bourgeois’ self-
definition in order to achieve his own critique of American society. In
Adorno’s Treasure, however, the exclusion of these groups attains theoreti-
cal weight. Their mistreatment and exclusion, individually and in concert,
mark the space of the freedom that remains unfulfilled, yet that is promised
by Enlightenment reason.
Of Dogs, Cats, and Nature’s Repression
Adorno maintained a life-long fascination with animals, something he shared

with Twain.35 Adorno had pet names for his family members and friends, in-
cluding “giraffe” for his wife and “mammoth” for his long-time collaborator
Max Horkheimer. More to the point, Adorno consistently used animals
throughout his philosophical work, and according to Christina Gerhardt, in his
works this fascination became a subject “inscribed in a whole network of theo-
retical concerns.”36 In the early 1930s, these ideas were still in embryonic
form. Writing to the composer Ernst Krenek in 1934, who shortly thereafter
received a copy of the libretto, Adorno asked that Krenek pay particular atten-
tion to “the consistent animal symbolism of dog and cat, for which I have no
theory, yet is perhaps the most important thing.”37 Gerhardt’s arguments about
animals in Adorno’s oeuvre generally line up with this missing theory. Ger-
hardt suggests that in Adorno’s work animals and “animality function [ . . . ] as
an index of what reason has repressed.”38 Specifically, they act as a rejoinder to
Kantian ethics, which in part sought to define humanity through its opposition
to animals. Animals, their treatment by and interaction with humans, act dia-
lectically to denote humanity’s in/humanity. In the opera’s libretto, cats, dogs,
bats, and flies, as well as unidentifiable animals, are present or referred to
throughout the text and signify a liminal sphere of intersection between reason
and the repression of nature under capitalist culture.39
As Adorno makes clear in his letter to Krenek, it is domestic animals, cats
and dogs, that stood for him at the center of this problematic in Treasure. Such
animals are enchanted, mythical figures for Tom and Huck, imbued with the
power to invoke an otherworldly, uncanny sphere of haunted houses and cem-
eteries. Cats, dead ones in particular, carry significant symbolic weight in both
Twain and Adorno. In Twain, Tom gives his cat Peter a painkiller originally
intended for him, resulting in the animal jumping through a window, never to
return. In Adorno’s version, Tom also gives Peter the painkiller, but instead of
an ambiguous fate, Adorno specifies that the cat eventually dies from the med-
icine, an addition meant to link violence against animals with violence against
humans. Despite a proclamation of guilt over Peter’s death in the opera’s first
song, “Death Song to a Tomcat,” Tom will merely discard the cat’s dead body
and move on. It is at this point that his comrade Huck enters and claims Peter’s
corpse for use in a ritual ceremony to cure him of his warts. Both in Twain’s
original and Adorno’s setting, a dead cat thus serves as the intermediary for
Tom and Huck between the living and dead worlds, a ruin of life imbued with
the power not only to invoke but to control the spirit world. Both Tom and
Huck’s proximity to the cat serves to animalize the boys. Indeed, it can hardly
have escaped Adorno’s attention that Tom Sawyer’s first name is also that of a
male cat in English, and, as in the case of the painkiller, what happens to Tom
and what happens to the cat reciprocally inform each other. Furthermore, Huck
communicates with Tom as a cat, signaling his presence to him through a
meow in the night.
While cats are primarily linked to the children, who suffer at the hands of
others, dogs are more closely aligned with the perpetrators of such violence.
This association of dogs with perpetrators potentially led Adorno to choose the
pseudonym “Hektor Rottweiler” when publishing his highly controversial “On
Jazz” in 1936. As he later explained to Peter von Haselberg, the name “ap-
peared so German and dangerous that no one would suspect a Jew behind such
a name.”40 Meanwhile in Treasure, the criminal of the story, Indian Joe, is
consistently related to dogs. Tom calls him a “dog catcher” (S 26) and Huck
will later term him an “Indian dog” (S 34), while Joe himself says at one point
that he is “dog tired” (S 66). Still, though Joe may be the tormentor to the boys,
as a person of Native American descent in a world defined by whiteness, he
also belongs to a group in danger of eradication. The exclusion and repression
suffered by Indian Joe due to his race simultaneously animalizes and human-
izes him. In a word, he is the beaten dog who has bitten back at society through
his criminality. I will return to the function of racial others later in my analysis,
but it is important to see how the character Indian Joe functions both as perpe-
trator and victim.
Models of Childhood in Modernity
The connection in Treasure between reason’s repression of nature and the vio-
lence of and against humans is echoed in its portrayal of children and child-
hood. For indeed, children stand in Twain and Adorno on the precipice be-
tween animality and humanity, nature and history. To an even greater degree
than domestic animals, children and childhood represent a troubled area for
defining humanity against nature within Enlightenment thought. Though chil-
dren were said to lack the reason through which humanity’s difference from
animals was defined, children also obviously possessed human form and would
eventually acquire reason. As Anthony Krupp notes in his study of childhood
in early modern philosophy, within encyclopedias and dictionaries of the eigh-
teenth century: “The higher cognitive faculties (namely, reason and intellect)
define . . . what it means to be fully human; since children lack these faculties
and adults possess them, childhood per se is defined negatively, as a period of
‘lack,’ an age under the sign of ‘not yet.’”41 Given this model of childhood, it
is unsurprising that, in Treasure, children are so intimately linked to animals.
Yet rather than imbuing childhood with any utopian ideal, Adorno seeks to
uncover the bourgeois model of childhood as a period of “lack” for what it is:
a projection exposing the return of bourgeois humanity’s repressed nature
through its representation of children.
Treasure’s representation of children and childhood is, as is the case of
domestic animals, represented through a dialectical pair. The two main figures,
Tom and Huck, embody competing ideals of childhood that stand in tension
with each other. On the one hand, Adorno’s Tom begins as a capitalist entrepre-
neur, who, instead of money, trades in remnants of the adult world that have
fallen into children’s hands—apple cores, a kite, marbles, a piece of blue glass,
a glass stopper, a piece of rope, etc. (S 12). Famously, Tom acquires these
goods by having the neighborhood children pay him to paint a fence, a task
which had been intended as punishment for his bad behavior. Though the other
children at first resist his offer, Tom convinces them, telling those who would
mock him: “Can you paint a fence everyday? There’s something to this punish-
ment (Strafarbeit). For Tom Sawyer it’s a lot of fun” (S 13). Transforming
work into fun is Tom’s capitalist trick, and like their elders, the neighborhood
boys fall for his deception. Indeed, Tom earns a bounty so plentiful that he
delights in wasting one of his valuable matches by stomping on it, comment-
ing: “never before have I had so much. There’s no telling what one can do with
it” (S 12).
While Tom busies himself with the acquisition of objects for their ex-
change value, the lumpen Huck needs them for their use value alone. When
Huck first emerges from the barrel he lives in, Adorno describes his clothing as
the “utterly ragged clothing of an adult, folded-up pants with only one sus-
pender, a much too long jacket, and a hole-filled hat” (S 14). Like Tom’s profit,
Huck’s clothing consists of the ruins of adult society; ill- fitting and ill-
preserved, they are composed of capitalism’s waste. In his embodiment of that
which this society no longer values, Huck is marked as the “pariah of Hanni-
bal” (S 21) and, like Joe, remains as an outsider and, as such, a potential threat
to the community.42 Huck is not only a threat to capitalism as a class system,
he also threatens its ideologies of masculinity. To wit, Adorno’s Huck is both
hypermasculine and effeminate. While he may physically best Tom in their
initial encounter, any such masculine prowess would have been upset by Ador-
no’s choice to have the character sung by a soprano.43 In the end, then, the two
boys signify competing models of childhood development. Tom, the bourgeois
man-child, is well prepared to become fully human for this system, to forever
leave behind this period of “not yet,” while Huck’s position as ambiguously
gendered vagrant guarantees that his humanity will likely remain partial.
Though counterpoised to each other, the two figures nonetheless remain
in a state of dialectical enmeshment: Tom’s maturation into the fullness of
white male humanity is constantly threatened by his youth and association with
Huck, while Huck, through the treasure he and Tom acquire at the story’s close,
will become wealthy enough to be accepted into Hannibal’s high society. Yet if
both carry the potential of turning one way or the other, each makes a decision
within the opera that ensures he will stay on the path laid out for him in their
initial introductions. In Tom’s case, his downward trajectory is halted by break-
ing the oath he swears with Huck, i.e., to never speak of Indian Joe’s murder of
Dr. Robinson. As Adorno explained in his letter to Krenek: “Tom becomes
‘free’ through the violation of the oath and the exploding of the mythic-ethical
sphere of the oath, just as in a certain sense the entire thing is the fulfillment of
a dialectical de-mythologization (Ent-Mythologisierung).”44 Read in the con-
text of nature-history, the initial oath in the cemetery, signed on a piece of bark
in the boys’ own blood, signals the boys’ acquiescence to the mythic, natural
world. In breaking with this oath, Tom is able to escape from it. However, as
Tiedemann astutely notes, Tom’s emancipatory act would have been followed
by another oath, this time before the court of Hannibal.45 So though Tom may
have escaped the mythical-natural world, he now enters the historical-rational
world symbolized by the bourgeois legal system. One might therefore suggest
that Tom commits an Odyssean act of Enlightenment in the sense developed in
The Dialectic of Enlightenment: in breaking the initial oath, Tom overcomes
his fear and thereby breaks with the mythical past, yet in this very act, he is
simultaneously sworn into the new mythic structure of capitalist logic and in-
strumental reason. With his entry into this realm, that which is dangerous and
threatening to Tom changes. No longer a societal outsider, he is free to enjoy
the privilege of white, male power. As Christopher D. Morris writes, “Adorno
depicts [Tom] as the Enlightenment spirit that remains unconscious of its pre-
conceptions, its hermeneutic circle, its imperialism.”46 While Tom ultimately is

able to find safety in this space, it is one that remains inaccessible to the mar-
ginalized members of this society, most notably Joe, Huck, and, as we will see,
African Americans.
Given how true to Twain and the translator Jacobi Adorno’s libretto re-
mains, it is all the more telling that Adorno makes an important addition con-
cerning race and the possibility of justice. After Tom and Huck have taken their
oath of silence, they reflect on its implications for others. In Twain’s original
text, Huck makes reference to the fact that their silence will likely result in a
hanging. While nineteenth-century readers of Twain may also have understood
him to mean the hanging, or lynching, of an African American, Adorno not
only makes explicit this subtext of Twain’s text, he uses this moment as an op-
portunity to further differentiate the social position and consciousness of Tom
and Huck.
TOM: If the doctor dies, someone will be hanged.

HUCK: It’ll be a nigger that gets hanged.
TOM: But he didn’t even do it.
HUCK: No one was there. A nigger will get hanged. (S 31)
Other than the initial line, which had been originally spoken by Huck, these
words are wholly of Adorno’s invention and have no correlate in Twain’s text.
Significantly, they reveal Tom’s naïve assumptions about the bourgeois legal
system as well as Huck’s more pragmatic and realist position that has been
informed by his position as town pariah. While Tom’s words reflect his un-
flinching faith in the legal system as rational arbiter of guilt and innocence,
Huck understands that, whether real or imagined, a violation of one of this
society’s members (here, the murder of Dr. Robinson) must be recompensed.
Though Adorno’s libretto follows Twain and it is ultimately not an African
American who is to be hanged but the white Muff Potter, such additions sug-
gest that race, Blackness, and “half-breeds” like Indian Joe were not only on
Adorno’s mind in 1932/33, but they potentially serve an important function
within Treasure.
At the same time, the full extent of the importance of racial others within
this constellation of oaths, testimony, witnessing, and justice remains opaque,
limited in part by Twain’s blunted vision of race in Tom Sawyer. Yet Adorno’s
adaptation of Twain’s text was never meant to stand for the 1860s alone, but it
was intended to speak with and to the early 1930s; in the minds of many Ger-
mans, Europeans, and Americans, reference to the execution of an African
American for a crime he did not commit had a very contemporary resonance:
the tragedy of the Scottsboro Boys.
Adorno and the Scottsboro Boys
On March 25, 1931, nine African American youths were travelling on the
Southern Railroad’s Chattanooga to Memphis freight train.47 Their names were
Charles Weems, Clarence Norris, Ozie Powell, Olen Montgomery, Eugene
Williams, Willie Roberson, Roy Wright, Andy Wright, and Haywood Patter-
son. Aging in range from 13 to 19, they, along with some sixteen other, mostly
white male youths, were riding the train illegally. After a white rider stepped
on the hand of an African American rider, a fight broke out between the two
groups, with most of the white riders soon jumping off board. After the de-
feated whites informed the stationmaster in Stevenson, Georgia, that a gang of
African Americans had attacked them, the train was stopped in the town of
Paint Rock, where local sheriffs and a hastily organized group of men met the
train. Authorities then discovered nine African American youths, a white male,
and two young white women, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price. The two women
would soon report that they had been raped. The implication of this charge was
clear for the African American riders. As Clarence Norris later stated: “I was
scared before, but it wasn’t nothing to how I felt now. I knew if a white woman
accused a black man of rape, he was as good as dead.”48 A mere twelve days
later the first of the so-called “Scottsboro Boys Trials” was held. Splitting up
the defendants, Weems and Norris were the first to be prosecuted, and the all-
white jury quickly delivered a guilty verdict with a sentence of death by elec-
trocution. In all, four separate trials of the defendants were held in 1931, each
with the same result. The only aberration to this rule was the trial of thirteen-
year-old Roy Wright, whose case ended in mistrial because the jury refused to
acquiesce to the prosecution’s request for life imprisonment, with jury mem-
bers insisting on the death penalty.
While the injustice perpetrated against these young men remains shocking,
the case might have been forgotten were it not for the national and international
campaign against the injustice at Scottsboro. The movement to free these inno-
cent young men resulted in protests across the globe and a series of retrials and
appeals, eventually reaching the Alabama and United States Supreme Courts. In
particular, the communist International Defense League (IDL) elevated the status
of this small-town Southern matter to a level of notoriety equal to that of Sacco
and Vanzetti. As historians Miller, Pennybacker, and Rosenhaft write:
The Scottsboro case has been called one of the great defining moments of
the twentieth century, providing a vocabulary and constellation of images
not only for its own time but for subsequent generations as well. . . . The
mythic power of the case did not derive from the fact of injustice alone. It
depended on the way the case was publicized— and its outcomes
shaped—by the campaign on behalf of the defendants organized by the
international Communist movement.49
News of Scottsboro quickly reached Germany, and a campaign in support of

the defendants was organized through the Berlin offices of the Internationale
Rote Hilfe (International Red Aid) and Willi Münzenberg’s Liga gegen Imperi-
alismus (League Against Imperialism).50 Exposure to the case was heightened
through the speaking tour of the mother of Roy and Andy, Ada Wright, who
arrived in Hamburg on May 7, 1932, and appeared in Berlin on May 12.
Though Wright was officially prohibited from publically speaking in many cit-
ies, as was the case in Berlin, her tour publicized the plight of the African
American youths for the German public. As Louis Engdahl, who accompanied
Wright on her travels, reported: “The total result . . . has been to set all Ger-
many thinking about the Scottsboro case to the extent that on trains, in street-
cars, and even on the public highways, the Negro mother, her likeness being
made familiar by pictures and publicized everywhere, was continuously asked
by those interested, ‘What can we do to help?’”51 If the extent of discussion
referred to by Engdahl can be questioned, his remarks nonetheless contain a
great deal of truth about the breadth of the impact of Scottsboro on the German
public. For example, Das Komitee zur Rettung der Opfer von Scottsboro (The
Committee for the Rescue of the Victims of Scottsboro) founded in 1932 under
the leadership of Alfons Goldschmidt, worked to increase awareness of the
case and to stop the planned executions. This group issued a political pamphlet
8 Menschen in der Todeszelle (8 People on Death Row) that explained the his-
tory of the case and of lynching in America. It ended with poems by Langston
Hughes and Claude McKay from Nussbaum’s Africa Sings. Indeed, a protest
letter against the injustice of Scottsboro reprinted in 8 People on Death Row
included signatures of two of the most important public figures of the time,
Thomas Mann and Alfred Einstein. Far from a trivial event, through the visit of
Ada Wright, communist demonstrations, the organizational efforts of Gold-
schmidt and others, Scottsboro was on the minds of many leftists in the spring
and summer of 1932.
If Adorno never made any public remarks on the Scottsboro case, this is
not definitive proof of his ignorance either. Scottsboro was widely and publicly
discussed, especially in the left-leaning intellectual circles in which Adorno

traveled. More concretely, Adorno may have learned about the case through
Godo Remszhardt, a Frankfurt associate at the Institute for Social Research. In
the early 1930s, Remszhardt wrote the African American activist William Pick-
ens, discussing with him his plans for a ten-volume series on African American
culture.52 Remszhardt also wrote to Langston Hughes, requesting his permis-
sion to reprint his work and asking him to pass along his address to Alain
Locke, whom Remszhardt had apparently met on one of the latter’s visits to the
city of Nauheim located near Frankfurt.53 Adorno could thus have known of the
Scottsboro case either through the general public discussion or through per-
sonal contact with someone like Remszhardt.
By the same token, despite the reference to injustice against African
Americans in his 1932 libretto, Adorno never made any knowledge of the case
explicit. Here, one would do well to recall another philosopher’s silence re-
garding race in an important early work, namely Hegel’s. Susan Buck-Morss
has recently offered a provocative reading of Haiti and the enslavement of Af-
ricans throughout the Western Hemisphere as an inspiration for Hegel’s fa-
mous master/slave dialectic in The Phenomenology of the Spirit. Though the
precise reasons for Adorno’s silence on Scottsboro may differ from those of
Hegel, Buck-Morss’ description of Hegel’s precarious professional and finan-
cial position at the time of his writing of The Phenomenology of the Spirit
shares some similarity to Adorno’s position in 1932/33. As she argues, the
negative repercussions Hegel would have incurred for overt criticism of the
state or for explicit references to Haitian revolution likely made him wary of
making the connection overt.54 Indeed, given Adorno’s equivocal response to
his status as racial outsider within Nazi Germany, he had many reasons to re-
main silent on Scottsboro.
I bring up Hegel and Haiti because, as Buck-Morss suggests, Hegel’s si-
lence is not only personal but carries methodological implications. As she
writes in Hegel and Haiti: “What happens when, in the spirit of dialectics, we
turn the tables, and consider Haiti not as the victim of Europe, but as an agent
in Europe’s construction?”55 With this question, Buck-Morss challenges us to
read European history from the “margins,” to investigate how, in the age of
colonialism, European history, including that of its philosophers, was in very
important ways written from the outside in, shaped in turn by historical actors
and events long considered unimportant. In order for this method to work to its
fullest extent, one must begin not from an assumption of the insignificance of
“minor” events but of their potential significance. In other words, Buck-Morss
calls upon scholars to shift issues from the margins to the center of European
history through exploration of provocative juxtapositions like Adorno and

Scottsboro.
Indeed, when one compares the major fault lines of the Scottsboro trials
and Adorno’s Treasure, the points of contact between the two take on focus,
namely witnessing, oath taking, and the possibility of justice for socially stig-
matized groups. Throughout the Scottsboro trials, witnesses contradicted each
other, equivocated, recanted, and adapted their testimony. To begin with, the
testimony of Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, the two young women who levied
the charge of rape, could not have been more disparate. While Price was gre-
garious and quick-witted, offering a compelling description of what had hap-
pened to her, Bates’ testimony was halting and even contradicted Price’s in
certain points. In addition, while two local doctors provided evidence that im-
motile semen had been found in both girls, each also stated that they found
little evidence to corroborate the violent acts described by Price. The defen-
dants themselves contributed to the confusion. All initially denied that a rape
had taken place, but, after Price and Bates’ testimony, together with the hostile
atmosphere outside the courtroom and mounting guilty verdicts, three of them
testified that they had seen the others rape the girls but had themselves not
taken part.56 Further trials (and convictions) would ensue throughout the 1930s,
each offering a new iteration of the same fundamental question: What claim on
truth does witness testimony have in relation to guilt or innocence in an atmo-
sphere poisoned by racial animus and oppression?
Further points of confluence exist between the case and Adorno’s opera.
Like Tom and even more so the proto-hobo Huck, Victoria Price and Ruby
Bates existed on the margins of Southern society and lived lives that, in the
words of Goodman, “mocked the white South’s most sacred ideal,” namely
that of Black and white separation.57 Bates and Price were raised and lived in
interracial settings, and they, like the African Americans on the train, were
subjugated to the system of agricultural and industrial exploitation that existed
in the American South, though not to the same extent. Yet once they were dis-
covered on the train, their accusation of rape against the African American
youths invoked an as yet unclaimed privilege of whiteness. Again in the words
of Goodman, Price and Bates:
knew that the Black youths had not raped them or bothered them in any
way. But they also knew that if they had said nothing or no—‘No, those
Negroes didn’t even speak to us’—the people who asked [the deputies]
would have thought of them the way respectable white men and women
had always thought of them: as the lowest of the low, vagabonds, adulter-
ers, bootleggers, tramps. If, on the other hand, they complained or said
yes, the same people would suddenly have thought of them as rape vic-
tims and treated them as white southern women, poor but virtuous, for the
first time in their lives.58
As with the case of Tom, Bates and Price’s testimony served as their entrance
into the community from which they had previously been excluded. The court-
room acted as the symbolic site of their initiation.
“If No One’s Looking”: Race, Vision,

and the Impossibility of Escape
As would be expected from an author interested in the role of race and the pos-
sibility of justice, as I believe Adorno to have been in 1932/33, Treasure ac-
cords to African Americans and their social exclusion and stigmatization a
central place. At four moments in the libretto, African Americans figure prom-
inently and, in at least two of these instances, in ways at odds with Twain’s
original novel. The importance accorded Blackness and African Americans in
the libretto is particularly noteworthy because, other than in his jazz writings,
where its significance is downplayed, Blackness as a meaningful category of
social difference does not have a place within Adorno’s thought, neither prior
to nor after Treasure. Yet because of his source material, Twain, an author fa-
mous not only for his humor but for his controversial deployment of racial at-
titudes in America, as well as the debate about race, capitalism, and justice
stirred by the Scottsboro case, African Americans become a fulcrum point of
Adorno’s text from the early 1930s. Like animals and children, they demarcate
a space of violently repressed non-humanity, a space from which Tom will flee
and into which Huck will attempt to escape.
The first appearance of an African American character occurs in the op-
era’s opening scene: the previously discussed exchange of labor (fence paint-
ing) for childhood treasure. This episode has already been analyzed in relation
to Tom’s proto-bourgeois status. While Twain also uses an African American
character, a young boy named Jim, there are vast differences between Twain’s
and Adorno’s staging of the episode. Twain narrates the painting of the fence
chronologically, proceeding from Aunt Polly’s assignment of the task as pun-
ishment through its completion via Tom’s cunning deception of his playmates.
In Twain, the sequence begins with Tom’s initial attempt to trick Jim into doing
his work for him. But before Jim can accede, he is struck from behind by Aunt
Polly’s shoe and immediately runs down the street and away from Tom. When
Adorno’s opera begins, by contrast, Tom has already succeeded in tricking the
other neighborhood boys and, rather than desiring that Jim work for him, Ador-
no’s Tom merely requests that Jim look at the painted fence. The opera opens
with the following dialogue.
TOM: Have a look, Jim.

JIM: Can’t look. The old aunt says I shouldn’t do anything but fetch water,
my head’ll be ripped off if I look.
TOM: Don’t be fooled, she always talks like that, she can’t even really hit,
no one feels it (das spürt kein Mensch).
JIM: I’m afraid (Ich Angst habe) (S 9)59
If in Adorno’s version Tom’s status as proto-bourgeois has already been estab-

lished through his trickery and the accumulation of childhood treasure, the
obvious question arises as to why he is so insistent that Jim gaze upon the
fence? Unlike in Twain, where the focus is on the exploitation of labor, Adorno
is interested in the culture that results from such exploitation. In a word: Tom’s
prompt is intended to initiate Jim into the realm of commodity culture. This is
a culture where to look is to desire (and vice versa), and Tom’s demand that Jim
look is also an imperative to enter the realm of bourgeois capitalism. Further,
Jim’s fear of violence regarding Aunt Polly (read: the white adult order) is
well-founded; as in Twain, Adorno’s Jim is also struck by Aunt Polly, not by a
slipper, but by the corpse of Tom’s dead cat Peter. That Jim is struck in the
opening scene by this symbol of reason’s violent repression of nature and met-
aphor for children means that racial others, children, and animals are linked
from the very moment of the opera’s beginning. Threatened by the same sys-
tem that will seek to exterminate and oppress these other groups, the African
American Jim immediately comprehends the stakes of acceding to Tom’s re-
quest, saying: “my head’ll be ripped off if I look.” Attempting to allay Jim’s
fear, Tom responds that Aunt Polly cannot really hit, that “no one [kein Mensch]
feels it.” As an almost fully white male bourgeois, Tom need not take the threat
seriously. The problem for Jim is that for this system he is not a human, can
never become one, and most certainly does feel it when Aunt Polly does strike
him with the weight of Peter’s limp body.
Significantly, Jim’s exclusion at the libretto’s outset removes African
Americans from all subsequent direct action in the plot, and there are no fur-
ther Black characters present within the text—other than those referred to by
Huck. For it is through Huck that race will be repeatedly brought into the li-
bretto. Huck’s relationship to African Americans is most clearly suggested at

the end of the libretto. In the opera’s penultimate scene, Tom and Huck over-
come their fear of the cave, Indian Joe perishes, and they discover his treasure,
an act which transforms them into the richest people in Hannibal. Yet, that this
victory is more pyrrhic than real is quickly revealed through Adorno’s descrip-
tion of their entrance into the celebration being held in their honor: “Suddenly
Tom and Huck appear in an unspeakable condition, in utter contrast to the
gathering. They wear the oldest suits; Huck is totally ragged and scared. Both
are smeared all over with soot and stearin” (S 94). Adorno thematizes here the
fact that though Tom has inwardly appropriated the values of this society, he
still appears to them as an outsider, symbolized in the tattered clothes he wears
and in the boys’ faces that at once display both whiteness (stearin) and Black-
ness (soot). Yet once the boys reveal the riches they have brought with them to
the gathered party, each is given a new suit to put on. While Tom immediately
begins to change, i.e., adapt himself externally to his new status, Huck remains
unmoved and instead leans up against a window through which he will shortly
escape. As Tom continues to change his clothes, he attempts to convince his
skittish friend to stay. When Huck remains steadfast in his refusal, Tom makes
a final request of him:
TOM: Huck, one more thing: Are you going to be back in your barrel to-
morrow? We have to bury Peter.
HUCK: Who?
TOM: The cat.
HUCK: You think. If it rains or is too hot, I’ll be in the Rogers’ barn. Ben
doesn’t mind. There’s an old nigger there who’s often given me some-
thing to eat. I much prefer to eat lunch with him, if no one’s looking, at
the same table, than here. Bon appétit, Tom. (S 101–102)
In Huck’s departing statement are united all the major components of the op-
era: death, animals, race, and the powerful violence of looking and witnessing.
Huck’s ensuing flight through the window, like that of the cat Peter or Jim’s
down the street, is anything but an escape into freedom. If Huck can now refuse
this bargain, his incorporation into white bourgeois society, like that of Ruby
Bates and Victoria Price, is but a moment away. Like the vagabond youths on
a train from Chattanooga to Memphis, Huck lives on the edge of this world, but
it is certain that he will again be confronted with the opportunity to join and
with ever-increasing pressure as he ages.
While Treasure remains silent about jazz, Adorno himself did not, and as
he worked on the libretto to an opera that was to forever remain a fragment, he

published his first major treatment of the music in Europäische Revue.60 Enti-
tled “Farewell to Jazz,” it has long served as testimony to Adorno’s stubborn
resistance to jazz and his flawed understanding of it. Lacking in specific ex-
amples, the article appears to conflate the Central European experience of the
music for jazz itself, to measure it not against Ellington and Armstrong but
against the jazz-like music of The Revelers and Zez Confrey. Yet if Adorno
would seem to judge the art form by outdated examples that highlight not jazz
itself but its white appropriation, this is not necessarily attributable to a lack of
knowledge regarding issues faced by African Americans, musicians or other-
wise. As my analysis of Treasure has shown, Adorno was hardly unaware of (or
unaccustomed to) the ideological use of racial difference towards exclusionary
ends. Instead, “Farewell to Jazz,” its apparent agreement with the Nazi ban of
the music, as well as its lack of reference to major figures from the jazz tradi-
tion, are part of an interpretive strategy dependent upon the power of silence,
in particular of jazz’s silence. While the ultimate end of this strategy remains
opaque within the dense theoretical network of Treasure, “Farewell to Jazz”
will make explicit that Adorno’s intention is not to celebrate jazz’s silence but
to make it heard.
Adorno’s Farewell to Jazz
“End of April 1933”—These words appear above Adorno’s controversial arti-

cle and confront the reader today as a paratext to the piece’s original presenta-
tion. Punctuated with a colon, they almost seem to linger over the text: a ques-
tion to which it responds, or, perhaps, an explanation of what follows. For
despite his precarious personal and professional situation in early 1933, Adorno
nonetheless took time to write a farewell to jazz. From one perspective, it is not
so much Adorno’s argument as the historical context of its publication that
should give one pause. Had Adorno issued this farewell before April 1933, his
argument would have fit relatively neatly into a main strain of critical writing
on jazz in Germany in the early 1930s. In fact, 1932 saw Adorno himself de-
clare in a short concert note that jazz had reached its end.61 Further, even Ador-
no’s title was not new. As will be remembered, Hans David had issued an
identical “Farewell to Jazz” in 1930 on the occasion of one of Sam Wooding’s
final performances in Berlin.62 What such appraisals do not share with Ador-
no’s is their relative innocence vis-à-vis National Socialism. Earlier declara-
tions of jazz’s end had not been written directly in response to the music’s
prohibition but to what was seen as the music’s decline as an avant-garde musi-
cal genre. Thus for Adorno to say what had been already said, what he himself
had already said, and at the most inopportune of moments, seems to be without
logic, unless Adorno genuinely disliked jazz and agreed with the ban; sought
to curry favor with the new government; attempted to smuggle in dissent
through apparent approval; or, finally, wanted to use the opportunity provided
by the ban to critique Weimar culture. There may be some truth to all of these
ideas.
In order to fully understand his position in “Farewell to Jazz,” there is first
need for clarity regarding its exact target. The prohibition referred to by Adorno
did not create a new legal situation as he implies but was independently issued
by the new political leadership of Berlin’s oldest public radio station, the Ber-
liner Funkstunde.63 The recently appointed and soon to be replaced National
Socialist director Richard Kolb, issued a decree on March 8, 1933, announcing
the elimination of jazz from the station’s programming.64 Despite the provoca-
tive title, Kolb’s ban was anything but clear. It begins: “In the first years after
the war Germany came to know in ‘jazz music’ a form of dance music that was
ruled by an unbridled, excessively sharp and accentuated rhythm, character-
ized by the piercing tone of horns and a diverse complex of percussion and
noise instruments.”65 This opening frames its target as the jazz of the immedi-
ate postwar period, interpreting such early jazz as the musical analogue to the
political anarchism of the November Revolution. In point of fact, the Funks-
tunde ban directs its ire almost exclusively towards such early jazz. Contempo-
rary jazz, it insists, is a stabilized, non-revolutionary music in which the mu-
sic’s African American roots no longer play a significant role. “In the most
recent developments,” it continues, “much of the unaesthetic, the grotesque
and provocative elements of jazz music have been taken out.”66
In essence, the ban attempts to delineate a politically innocuous form of
jazz from the dangerous and subversive jazz of the past. Thus, the actual word-
ing of the prohibition runs:
The Funkstunde bans all dubious dance music, that designated as ‘Negro
music’ by the common sense of the people (vom gesunden Volksempfin-
den), in which a salacious rhythm dominates and the melody is violated
(vergewaltigt). But the Funkstunde will continue to support modern dance
music, insofar as it is not inartistic in its musical elements or offensive to
German sensibility. The mere use of instruments favored by jazz, such as,
for example, the saxophone and banjo, do not suffice to define a music as
jazz.67
The Funkstunde prohibition walks an ideological tightrope between the op-

posed needs of popular music and politics. While it is clear that something
called “Negro music” will disappear from the Berlin station, it is entirely un-
clear what, musically or aesthetically, differentiates such music from other
types of jazz and dance music, other than what the leadership of the Funks-
tunde designates as Black dance music, or jazz.
Adorno’s response in “Farewell to Jazz” acutely diagnoses the illogic of
the ban. In anticipation of a centerpiece of the culture industry thesis, Adorno
refuses to recognize the, for him, purely ideological distinction between Black
and white jazz postulated by Kolb. Rather than accurately reflecting actual,
musical differences, for him, such distinctions ultimately serve to conceal the
essential uniformity of all mass culture. Adorno begins:
The regulation that forbids the radio from broadcasting “Negro jazz” may
have created a new legal situation; but artistically it has only confirmed by
its drastic verdict what was long ago decided in fact: the end of jazz music
itself. For no matter what one wishes to understand by white or by Negro
jazz, here there is nothing to salvage. Jazz itself has long been in the pro-
cess of dissolution, in retreat into military marches and all sorts of folk
music.”68
In asserting the end of jazz as a revolutionary music of modernity and hence

the meaninglessness of the ban, Adorno draws not only on the widespread be-
lief of jazz’s pastness but also adds to this thesis in interesting ways. What
concerns him in this opening remark is not whether jazz was destined to disap-
pear overnight; he clearly felt that, despite the superficial actions of the govern-
ment and individual institutions, jazz would for the most part continue uninter-
rupted under National Socialist rule. Instead, ironically employing the
terminology of the new regime, he specifies that the target of his ire is not: “big
city degeneration or deracinated exoticism. . . . Jazz no more has anything to
do with authentic Negro music, which has long since been industrially falsified
and smoothed out here, than it is possessed of any destructive or threatening
qualities.”69 Indeed, the strength and weakness of his argument lie in this rebut-
tal of the dominant terms of Weimar and now Nazi jazz discourse. For what
Adorno suggests is that critics of jazz unwittingly miss their target (race) when
they aim at jazz (commodity).
One way to look at “Farewell to Jazz,” then, is to frame the text as an at-
tempt to turn the reactionary tendencies of National Socialism towards pro-
gressive purposes. What Adorno seems to have desired was recognition of the
implications of the very real break between Weimar culture and National So-
cialism within the consciousness of the public. That is to say, for Adorno, only
through intensive critique of the present, through direct commentary on the
events of the day, rather than merely proceeding as if nothing had changed,
would contemporary consciousness be in a position to confront the new politi-
cal and cultural landscape. What Adorno hoped, to be sure naïvely, was that the
ban could be seized as an opportunity to extricate music culture from the false
utopia of unmediated freedom represented by jazz.
Towards this end, Adorno moves explicitly to historically locate jazz’s use
by the bourgeoisie. Shifting to the past tense in the third paragraph, he states in
a declaratory manner: “Jazz was the Gebrauchsmusik of the haute bourgeoisie
of the post-war period”70 Gebrauchsmusik is to be understood here in the two-
fold sense of a music for everyday use, and as one to be used for ideological
ends; it is a music that, for Adorno, is determined to be exploited. One mode of
the bourgeoisie’s exploitation of jazz was its elevation to a music freed from
the contradictions of modern capitalism. Summarizing the dream given form in
their jazz ideology, Adorno writes:
The virtuoso saxophonist or even percussionist, who made audacious

leaps in between the marked beats of the measure, who displaced the ac-
cents and dragged out the sounds in bold glissandi—he, at least, should
have been exempted from industrialization. His realm was considered to
be the realm of freedom; here the solid wall between production and re-
production was evidently demolished, the longed-for immediacy restored,
the alienation of man and music mastered out of vital force.71
It is the, for Adorno, necessary inability of jazz to occupy this realm of freedom
that makes it “false.” Its failure, in other words, resides in the discrepancy be-
tween jazz as promised by cultural critics and as delivered by musicians.
Seeking to demonstrate his thesis in the musical material through a struc-
tural examination of jazz, Adorno shifts the level of his critique from one of the
specifically German conception of jazz to an ontological reading of jazz in it-
self. Ultimately, his interpretation here reduces jazz either to a simple recapitu-
lation of Western art music since the mid-nineteenth century (chromaticism
and rhythmic complexity) or to its failure to develop these tendencies to the
same extent. Structurally, then, jazz can do no right for Adorno: it either fails
to measure up to atonal music or, if it does so, will exist only as a second-hand
copy.72 Yet as Adorno would have been aware, this argument, though partially
unique in its Marxian inflection, is nonetheless an equally standard variant of
Weimar jazz discourse. As such, why make it at all? Adhering to an argumenta-

tive structure common to Adorno’s writings, the darkest and bleakest moments
of his analysis immediately precede the slightest of hopes. He writes:
Jazz has left behind a vacuum. There is no new Gebrauchsmusik to take

its place, and it will not be easy to launch one. But this vacuum is not the
worst thing. In it is expressed, wordlessly, like the alienation of art and
society, a kind of overall state of reality that words are lacking to express.
This vacuum may be wordless, but it is no false consciousness. Perhaps in
the silence it will grow loud.73
Specifying the space vacated by jazz as the space of freedom is essential here.
During the Weimar Republic, jazz had occupied this space as part of Weimar
culture’s desire for renewal and redemption after the war. When critics began
to take leave of jazz, to declare jazz’s present past, this did not erase the pos-
sibilities signified by the music—these remain intact but now empty. For this
reason, the vacuum left behind by jazz becomes the most objective representa-
tion of the present for Adorno. And it is precisely in its negativity that this
fragile space takes on extreme importance. Only by remaining unoccupied,
only by remaining silent, is it capable of acting as the necessary and constant
reminder of both freedom’s possibility and impossibility under the current
state. To occupy it with the “false freedom” of jazz, or anything else, could
only degrade it. Not because jazz is low or racially other, but because like all
products of capitalism, including so-called “high” or “serious” art, jazz cannot
alone deliver on the promises made on its behalf.
Though in vastly different ways, Adorno’s jazz theory of 1933 and his
incomplete opera each mark an important moment within the decomposition of
Weimar’s jazz culture. If Adorno had still believed at the time of writing “Fare-
well to Jazz” that something like his Treasure could serve as an intellectual
bridge between the positive liberation of Weimar jazz criticism and the nega-
tivity of jazz’s absence, even this hope would eventually be extinguished. As
his previously cited letter to Berg reveals, by late 1933, Adorno felt himself to
have lost “the freedom to compose,” to have lost “the horizon of fantasy” nec-
essary to such a grand project as Treasure.74 As Lydia Goehr suggests, Treasure
was never completed not because Adorno’s compositional talents failed him or
simply because his personal situation grew untenable, but because he was con-
fronted with something even more devastating, with “increasing awareness of
the extreme difficulty, if not the impossibility, of composing an opera for the
sake of a possibility he believed had a minimal chance of being realized in
contemporary times: the possibility of social justice.”75 Neither Adorno’s deci-

sion to abandon Treasure nor to leave Germany were taken lightly. He vacil-
lated between remaining in Germany and emigrating either to Vienna, Eng-
land, or Constantinople. Oxford and a position as an “advanced student”
eventually won out in April 1934.
A little over a year later, Adorno returned to jazz, this time to collaborate
with Mátyás Seiber, former head of the Jazzklasse and now fellow exile in
England.76 The result of their work together was Adorno’s first substantial
piece of jazz criticism, which, as noted earlier, he published under the pseud-
onym “Hektor Rottweiler.” By the time “On Jazz” was published in the
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in 1936, Treasure lay fallow and Adorno’s life
in Britain was hardly marked by the jazz’s silence.77 In February 1938, Adorno
landed in New York and soon thereafter began work with Paul Lazarsfeld on
the Princeton Radio Project. His first days in America not only saw him tack-
ling new issues, they also saw him returning to old ones. In early 1938, he went
back to work on Treasure and began composing three new songs, “Kinder im
Labyrinth” (“Children in the Labyrinth”), “Huckleberry Finn,” and “Säufer im
Wasserturm” (“Drinker in the Water Tower”).78 Yet, America in 1938 was not
Weimar Germany in 1932 and much had happened in between—to Adorno,
America, and, of course, Germany. After working on these new compositions,
the opera was abandoned once more, this time permanently.
Still, if his primary concerns in both Treasure and “Farewell to Jazz” were
showing themselves to no longer carry the personal or political importance
they had but a few years earlier, Adorno’s late Weimar texts do something
much greater than merely diagnose the lacunae of a culture in decomposition.
More than transcending what Adorno viewed as the limitations of the German
use of jazz and Blackness in 1920s musical culture, Adorno’s American opera
project provides an aesthetic and literary counterweight to the negativity of
jazz within his “Farewell to Jazz.” Emerging at the nexus of German and Amer-
ican history and society and mediated in a literary meeting with Mark Twain,
Adorno’s Treasure does indeed approach its subject with resistance, but so too
does it put on display a consciousness that has appropriated the American ex-
perience like few others had during the Weimar Republic.
Conclusion
Good bye, Jonny
You were my best friend.
One day, one day, [ . . . ]
We’ll be together again.
—Kreuder and Beckmann (1939)
The end of the Weimar Republic in 1933 meant, amongst many other things,
that the stakes of jazz for German culture changed fundamentally, and Ador-
no’s incomplete opera is but one example of this. Around the same time as
members of Germany’s internationalist avant-garde took leave of jazz as a pro-
gressive art form, the Nazi attack on “cultural bolshevism” further wed the re-
jection of “Jewish modernism” with Blackness and jazz.1 What this ultimately
meant for jazz was that, by 1933, there were but few voices remaining to de-
fend the music and many more, including Adorno, invested in its critique. Hav-
ing been so thoroughly identified with a now defunct and discredited republic,
under National Socialism, the music was subjected to repeated attacks. Yet,
jazz’s fate under the Nazis was not to be systematically eliminated but to suffer
sporadically according to the caprices of the new dictatorial regime. At times,
the Nazis proceeded vigorously and publically against jazz and the “foreign”
musicians associated with it—through radio bans in 1933 and 1935, through
the prohibition of listening to foreign radio stations in 1939, or Goebbels’ 1941
prohibition not of jazz but of music featuring muted horns, atonal melodies, or
with a “deformed rhythm (verzerrte Rhythmen).”2 Perhaps the most infamous
example of jazz’s pariah status during the Third Reich was the Entartete Musik
(Degenerate Music) exhibition of 1938, which prominently displayed jazz,
Jewish, and Black musicians as racial antipodes to National Socialist culture.
To these instances of the Nazis’ public war on jazz, however, must be added
curious moments of toleration. For example, musical practices associated with
jazz, like syncopation, even saxophone solos, by no means disappear in 1933.
226
Conclusion 227
Instead, they can be found in German popular music throughout the 1930s.
Paralleling the Funkstunde’s ambiguous ban on jazz, during the first half of the
Nazi regime at the very least, German musicians remained to a large extent free
to connote jazz.
Obviously, the short space afforded by a conclusion can by no means
serve as a thoroughgoing discussion of jazz under the Third Reich. As the work
of scholars like Michael Kater, Bernd Polster and others has shown, jazz’s fate
under National Socialism was both complicated and convoluted.3 What I offer
instead is an attempt to trace the afterlife, or aftereffects, of the jazz republic
during this period. Though jazz did not act in this period as an object through
which Nazi culture defined itself, neither did Weimar jazz culture disappear
overnight. Instead, certain elements, personalities, and figures from it lived on
in the early Nazi era.
Following on Erica Carter’s analysis of the role played by Weimar’s cin-
ematic ghosts of Marlene Dietrich in Nazi cinema, I would like to suggest that
Weimar jazz culture lived on during National Socialism as specter of this time
past. As Carter’s study shows, Nazi cinema is filled with doubles of Weimar
cinema, most notably the actress Zarah Leander, who filled in for absent stars
like Marlene Dietrich. One strategy deployed within Nazi cinema in terms of
compensating for the loss of émigré stars was to recall performances and roles
from the Weimar period, such as the femme fatale, only to, in Carter’s words,
“obliterate that image in the actual or symbolic death of the characters.”4 At the
same time, for Carter, such doubles not only registered a loss but could also
serve the production of a new, National Socialist public sphere.5 Weimar jazz,
as well, existed as an uncanny double of a culture lost to emigration, incarcera-
tion, and death. Nazi-era evocations of Weimar jazz can be said, in Carter’s
terms, to compensate “by disavowal of that loss . . . with a fantasied double,
copy or facsimile.”6 Though one could explore Weimar jazz culture’s contin-
ued existence into the 1930s through a variety of examples, Willy Fritsch, Theo
Mackeben, or via instrumentation, perhaps the most publically visible of these
is the Jonny figure. This figure has shadowed the present work from almost the
very beginning. First seen as Friedrich Hollaender’s 1920 “Jonny (fox erotic),”
it burst onto the national stage in Krenek’s 1927 Jonny spielt auf (Jonny Strikes
Up), the succés de scandale of the decade. From there, it fractures into almost
innumerable forms: cigarettes, photographs, operettas, recordings, etc. In other
words, by 1933, Jonny had achieved a form of iconic status and could thus
stand to a large degree for the entirety of Weimar jazz culture.
Before exploring how the Jonny figure lived on during the 1930s, it is
important to consider it in relation to the broader situation of jazz and African
American popular music during the Third Reich. Only in comparison with the
wider question of jazz under the Third Reich does the Jonny figure’s unique
status come into view. For one, jazz and later Swing presented a number of
practical difficulties in terms of governmental attempts to control them. Not
only were they almost impossible to define in any objective, verifiable manner,
as Guido Fackler suggests, the development towards Swing in the early to mid-
1930s actually made the music less susceptible to Nazi control, at least for a
time. With a new name, a more orchestral, more melodic sound, Swing enjoyed
a degree of tolerance in the mid-1930s, in part due to Nazi censors’ unfamiliar-
ity with the genre.7 By contrast, Jonny was most certainly a known quantity,
closely associated with the “decadence” of the Weimar Republic and thus a
likely target of Nazi censors.
And yet, the Jonny figure remains in the public eye during the period be-
tween 1933 and 1939. The examples of its use range from oblique to explicit
and can be found within the political as well as cultural spheres. Already in
1934, Weimar’s Jonny reappears in the 1934 popular song “Ich wünsche dir
Glück, Jonny” (“I Wish You Luck, Jonny”) with music by Ludwig Schmid-
seder and lyrics by Rudolf Grau.8 Telling the story of a woman and her lover
Jonny, this song’s lyrics clearly took their impetus from Hollaender’s original
song and were read as such by at least one writer within the musical press.9
Though recorded by three different female vocalists, in the following, special
attention will be paid to the performance of Marita Gründgens. This is not only
because she, sister of the famous actor Gustaf Gründgens, is the best known of
the three, but, more importantly, because her fame in part derived from her
ability to impersonate voices and take on various alter egos.10 In fact, she is
today best known for songs like “Ich wünsch’ mir eine kleine Ursula” (“I’m
wishing for a little Ursula of my own”) in which she imitates the voice of a
little girl asking her mother for blond-haired, blue-eyed little sister.11 Less
well-known is the fact that she apparently made a name for herself during the
late 1920s through impersonation of, amongst other figures, the American
blackface performer Al Jolson.12 Equally germane to the present argument is
that Gründgens was an exquisite mimic of Marlene Dietrich, who had previ-
ously released what was to become the most famous recording of Hollaender’s
“Jonny” in 1931. Gründgens’ uncanny ability to mimic Dietrich is demon-
strated on the September 1933 recording “Filmsucht” (“Film Addiction”).13
Featuring lyrics written by Gründgens and set to the well-known Hollaender
tune of “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt” (“Falling in Love
Again”), she mimics the voices of three Weimar film divas: Marlene Dietrich,
Greta Garbo, and Lilian Harvey. The apolitical song is an amazing display of
Conclusion 229
her abilities and, though relatively obscure, deserving of rediscovery. At the

same time, it is significant that all three performers invoked here were absent
from Germany at the time (though Harvey would return in 1935). Within this
context, Gründgens’ mimicry of Dietrich, Garbo, and Harvey lends itself to a
reading of the song as Nazi-era doppelgänger for an absent Weimar culture.
In “I Wish You Luck, Jonny,” Gründgens impersonates not a specific per-
son but the genre of the Weimar Jonny song more generally. Described as a
chanson and blues,14 the recording begins with three deep tones from a bassoon
over which the piano adds a series of light arpeggios. As the listener soon
learns, these initial tones indicate the sounding of a ship’s horns at a nearby
dock, from where Jonny will tomorrow leave. The year 1934 was a time of
departure for many figures of Weimar jazz culture, and quite a few jazz musi-
cians of the 1920s were already absent: Dajos Béla, Marek Weber, and Wein-
traubs Syncopators. Further, by November 1933, the Reichsmusikkammer
(RMK, Reich Music Chamber), a subdivision of Goebbels’ ministry of culture,
had decreed that foreign musicians needed to register with the RMK and carry
an identity card issued by this agency. This meant that they also would have to
declare their race and religion, a potentially dangerous prospect for Jewish and
Black artists.15 As Jonny’s lover, the female singer seems to sense that the
sound of the ship’s horn might have distracted him, and so her first words com-
mand him to “drink, drink, drink my blond Jonny / don’t talk to me about to-
morrow.” While most immediately these lines refer to her concern over separa-
tion and the ensuing heartache both will suffer, here she is singing not to any
lover, but to Jonny, whose name marks him as foreign. Continuing over a plain-
tive piano accompaniment, she consoles him, saying that nothing matters other
than that: “I wish you luck, Jonny.” Significantly, each time she sings this line,
the song’s tempo speeds up and a drum brush technique adds a syncopated,
percussive element that enlivens both the piano and Gründgens’ delivery.
Viewed in parallel to Gründgens’ mimicry of Dietrich, this flirt with jazz in-
strumentation intensifies the song’s self-conscious play with Jonny as an icon
of Weimar jazz culture. Exasperated at the recording, critic Kurt Herbst writes
of Gründgens’ song in Die Musik: “This sort of subject is too unimportant to
discuss from the perspectives of morals, music, rhythm or anything else. It is
simply boring, because this Jonny—pars pro toto—is simply overdone and
with it the outmoded worldview (abgeklapperte Gesamtschematismus) from
which we have to liberate ourselves.”16
At the same time, I would suggest that “I Wish You Luck, Jonny” not only
invokes Weimar jazz culture but it also situates itself outside of this culture,
that is to say within a post-jazz, post-Weimar era. For one, the lyrics stabilize
Jonny’s potentially ambiguous racial identity, referring to him as “blond

Jonny” in the first line. Further, the overall tone to the song borders on mockery
of Jonny—his anxiety and impending exile. Concurrent to a timbral change in
her voice that suggests a smile, she tells him: “one day you’ll come back to me
anyway. So I wish you luck, Jonny, really, good luck.” Whereas Weimar-era
songs tend to position Jonny as a figure who will soon leave to return to his
home, in Nazi-era versions, the figure’s impending absence is often coupled
with the promise of his, albeit indeterminate, return. While this surely compen-
sates for Jonny’s absence, marking it as but a temporary interruption within a
long-standing relationship, Gründgens’ delivery of this line is punctuated by
an awkward, almost ominous laugh. As such, the song leaves the nature of his
return open—will the two be united in a future in which they can once again be
together, i.e., in a post-Nazi, post-Weimar state, or, given her mocking tone,
will Jonny come to see his departure as an overreaction and return willingly?
The second verse continues on in this vein, with Jonny being told to laugh and
forget the sadness of tomorrow. At the song’s close, the ship’s horn returns and
adds a tonal layer of dissonance to the piano accompaniment, reminding listen-
ers of Jonny’s and jazz’s departure from their lives. Neither pro-nor anti-jazz,
“I Wish You Luck, Jonny” addresses and compensates for jazz’s absence in a
manner that reflects, rather than rejects, the Third Reich’s ambiguous relation-
ship to the music.
In 1935, Jonny again reappears, in both popular song and a controversial
radio program. The first of these occurs in the song “Jonny hat Sehnsucht nach
Hawaii” (“Jonny’s Yearning for Hawaii”) with music by Hans Reinfeld and
lyrics by Bruno Balz. It is described as a “Hawaiian Waltz” available in an ar-
rangement for “jazz voice” and vocal trio.17 While the word “jazz” appears
regularly within the music publishing industry in this year and beyond (though
rarely in titles), it is in fact the title “Jonny” that is unique. In the year of its
release, the song was recorded by at least three separate groups, Hans Bund,
Fritz Domina, and an anonymous male quartet for the discount label Woolco.18
Before addressing the song itself, we should note the significance of the lyricist
Balz, a homosexual songwriter from the Weimar cabaret scene who first be-
came well-known for his work on the film Viktor und Viktoria (Victor and
Victoria) (dir. Reinhold Schünzel 1933). During the 1930s, he survived, though
not without being at one point imprisoned in a concentration camp, by exploit-
ing his usefulness as a songwriter, in particular for the aforementioned Zarah
Leander.19 Like other Jonny songs from the 1930s discussed here, Balz’s “Jon-
ny’s Yearning for Hawaii” would become an evergreen of the German popular
music industry.20 The song itself, though unique in its use of the topos of Ha-
Conclusion 231
waii, once again positions Jonny in an unnamed harbor. Rather than a young
man, however, in Balz’s version, he is a sailor past his prime, longing to escape
the dreariness of his present life. As with “I Wish You Luck, Jonny,” the male
singer seeks to console Jonny. Though longing to go to Hawaii, the singer tells
him: “Poor Jonny, forget your pain / Everything is past and everything is over.”
More sedate than anything, Balz and Reinfeld’s version transforms Jonny into
a non-threatening old man, longing to return home but unable to do so.
In the same year, Jonny’s continued relevance and relationship to jazz
returned in an even more direct manner. This occurred in the form of satirist
Hugo Hartung’s radio play Jonny spült ab (Jonny Does the Dishes),21 which
featured music by the composer Bernhard Eichhorn.22 Its immediate purpose
was to parody Weimar jazz culture and Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf (Jonny
Strikes Up) specifically. Perhaps best known today for authoring the novel Wir
Wunderkinder (Aren’t We Wonderful), at the time, Hartung was working as a
dramaturge for the Bavarian radio station.23 Broadcast in the evening of Febru-
ary 25, 1935, Jonny Does the Dishes is described as “a cheery play with deep
meaning and a grand piece of opera parody.”24 Though other plot members are
listed with the name of the actor who will portray them, the listing for “the
Negro Jonny” remains blank, substituted by the presence of two question
marks. In fact, the title and its obvious reference to Krenek’s jazz opera created
a difficult situation for Hartung. Though this would obviously be a satire, so
directly invoking Blackness, jazz, and Jonny also carried the danger of attrac-
tion. Patrick Merziger summarizes the dilemma in the following manner: Har-
tung “wanted to eradicate Jonny by writing a satire on him, but the satire only
kept his memory alive.”25 For Merziger, examples like Hartung’s Jonny Does
the Dishes are indicative of the broader failure of politically motivated satire
during the Nazi era, which, according to him, became increasingly unpopular
with critics and audience members alike.26
The tension within National Socialist satire of Jonny and other specters of
the Weimar past is put on display in the published plot summary: “The piece
takes place in a German cosmopolitan hotel in the age of inflation and the glo-
rification of niggers. Interested in profit, the hotel’s director Knölle pays hom-
age to the fashionable interest in this rootless taste by hiring the world-famous
Negro violinist Jonny for a guest appearance. We won’t yet say how this affair
(der ganze Spuk) ends.”27 Though the description invokes the vocabulary of
“cultural bolshevism” and insists on the pastness of Jonny and his jazz, its sug-
gestive use of the word “Spuk” (affair, ghost) also invites questions about Jon-
ny’s potential relevance to the Nazi present. Even more clearly demonstrating
the idea that Jonny Does the Dishes is as much about the present as it is a par-
ody of the past is the mock interview between the “Negro jazz king” Jonny and
Hartung that appeared in Der Deutsche Rundfunk.28 In this “Conversation with
Jonny,” Jonny and jazz’s irrelevance are repeatedly called upon to satirize their
popularity in the “golden twenties” and, one suspects, their continued presence
in the new Germany. Of the 1920s, Hartung’s Jonny says: “Those were the
days! When I think back to the finale of this opera [Jonny spielt auf]—I struck
up the band—and old Europe lay at my feet . . . A lot has changed since then—
everything!!”29 Hartung responds by saying: “Yes, actually you’ve been com-
pletely forgotten. More forgotten than forgotten. I don’t think that even one
young person today knows your name.”30 As Merziger argues, a problem in
this interview is that it fails to justify the need to parody a so unimportant and
irrelevant matter like Jonny.31 The only justification for the parody comes from
Jonny himself, who, after again hinting at a secret plot element, insists: “maybe
it’s not so bad to bring this forgotten so-called ‘art’ back into the light of day
again and present it as reflected in parody.”32 Here, as in the plot description,
the language struggles to contain the implicit power of Jonny and his jazz.
Unsurprisingly, the official reaction to Jonny Does the Dishes was severe.
Writing in Der Deutsche Rundfunk, one critic bemoaned the fact that while
satire of this depraved era and its music is a laudable endeavor, here it is super-
fluous and without impact.33 While the plot begins as a satire of Weimar cul-
ture, according to the reviewer, by the end, it had turned into “a typical theater
intrigue with masquerading,” with the result that the piece’s main targets, ac-
cording to this critic racial and cultural miscegenation, were missed entirely.34
Even more directly, another critic felt the only good thing about the work was
its title, otherwise it, like its purported object of parody, lacked “sharp wit and
trenchant satire. A copy, instead of parody.”35 Similarly, the same Kurt Herbst
who had chided Gründgens for her Jonny recording, complains that Hartung’s
Jonny Does the Dishes is less parody than an example of base cultural produc-
tion “for the purpose of ‘popular’ entertainment,” i.e., kitsch.36 Herbst addi-
tionally implies that this same tendency towards kitsch is present in further
productions by Hartung and Eichhorn. Indeed, in an internal report on Hartung
from 1937 by Willy Reichartz for the Reichssendeleitung, their use of satire as
such is found to be “highly questionable.”37 Reichartz feared, for example, that
the general public could not distinguish between the parody of Weimar jazz
culture in Hartung’s Jonny and the real thing.38
Though the relationship is in all probability coincidental, it is also note-
worthy that 1935 is the last appearance of Jonny in popular song until 1939.39
In the meantime, though, the Jonny figure will make one important detour in
1938. In this year, Jonny will again be mobilized towards propagandistic ends
Conclusion 233
as part of the “Degenerate Music” exhibition. Held in the city of Düsseldorf

and organized by Hans Severus Ziegler, this exhibition had been inspired by
the more infamous visual exhibition “Degenerate Art” of a year earlier.40 It was
the occasion for the Nazis to present their ideological vision of jazz–the hor-
rific caricature of a Black saxophone player, portrayed as more simian than
human, that has in many ways come to stand in for the fate of jazz under the
Nazis (figure 16). Here, one not only confronts National Socialism’s racialized
theory of culture but also an intensification and condensation of cultural motifs
from the Weimar encounter with jazz. Though the figure bears the name
“Lucky,” as others have pointed out, in both form and content, the image clearly
belongs within the genealogy of the Jonny figure.41 For one, this image, created
by the graphic artist Ludwig Tersch, draws on colonialist images of Africans,
as seen, for example, in the figure’s oversized hoop earrings. Further, we rec-
ognize in the Black saxophone player not only Jonny from Krenek’s Jonny
spielt auf but the broader visual trope of the Black saxophone player and his
threat to the “racial health” of German women. Finally, the Star of David
placed on the figure’s lapel telescopes Nazi rejections of Blackness and Jew-
ishness, a foundational element of the Nazi discourse of “cultural bolshevism.”
If hardly ambiguous in its depiction, the image nonetheless depends on and
indeed invites comparison to jazz imagery and jazz musicians once present in
Weimar and now missing. Still, the figure carries not the name “Jonny,” but
“Lucky.” Thus, while the image depends on a visual vocabulary clearly legible
as Weimar’s Jonny, the title conspicuously avoids directly referencing it, con-
tenting itself with connoting, rather than denoting this figure, who for many
stood not only for jazz but for Weimar culture more generally.
Yet if Jonny was publicly, if obliquely derided as “cultural bolshevism,”
the figure still had not yet disappeared from popular music in the Third Reich.
Jonny will make one final curtain call in the 1939 hit “Good bye, Jonny!” fea-
turing music by Peter Kreuder and lyrics by Hans-Fritz Beckmann. Though
this song will enjoy an important afterlife during the 1950s and beyond as an
evergreen of German light entertainment, the song originates in the 1939 Was-
ser für Canitoga (Water for Canitoga, dir. Herbert Selpin), a frontier film tak-
ing place in 1905 in Canada and featuring the Third Reich’s most important
male star, Hans Albers. Lutz Koepnick has analyzed Albers’ two versions of
the song that appear in the film as examples of the reassertion of masculinity
within Nazi culture. With this film and song, Koepnick argues, “Albers estab-
lishes himself as a roughneck whose aim is to evacuate women and uncon-
trolled passion from the Far West. [ . . . ] Albers’s song intends to make lan-
guage rough and dangerous again, to transform orality into a conduit for manly
Figure 16: “Entartete Musik” (Degenerate Music), 1938. Brochure pub-
lished by the Weimar National Theatre. Courtesy bpk, Berlin/Art Re-
source, NY.
Conclusion 235
action.”42 Yet the versions presented in the film are not the only ones and, given
the number of recordings of the song that exist by Albers and others, hardly the
most familiar ones.
As released in a separate recording for the Odeon label, both the orches-
tration and lyrics to the film version of the song are substantially changed.
Here, the misogyny referenced by Koepnick is excised in favor of the homo-
social bond between the German Albers and his departed, foreign friend
Jonny. “My friend Jonny was a fine boy (Knabe),” laments Albers at the
opening of the song. Continuing on in this vein, he sings: “He was a tramp
and had no home.”43 As in Krenek, Hollaender, Grau, and Balz, Jonny’s sta-
tus as wandering vagabond remains pivotal to his characterization. To these
lyrics, Peter Kreuder, veteran composer of German film and revue music,
added a very specific musical texture with important connotations in German
popular song. In a word, Kreuder’s composition (on the Albers’ recording
performed under the direction of Werner Eisbrenner) is jazz-inflected. In
terms of instrumentation, it uses muted trumpets, clarinets, and saxophones,
while rhythmically, it displays a slight syncopation throughout and features
an instrumental break filled with a rich big band sound.44 The success of the
song’s combination of Hans Albers, one of the remaining major film stars
from the Weimar era, and American Swing reveals much about the vicissi-
tudes of jazz in National Socialism.
Such partial tolerance of jazz on the part of National Socialist functionar-
ies, however, did require implicit (and often explicit) acceptance on the part of
artists of the entirety of the Nazi ideological system. Put differently, the mu-
sic’s continued existence depended upon musicians voicing jazz from within
the hegemonic order, rather than outside of it, let alone against it. If they failed
to toe this broader line, Nazi authorities could and did intervene.45 It is thus no
accident that the song as performed by the public star Albers begins with the
death of Jonny, acting in parallel to the treatment of Weimar film stars and
types in Nazi film.46 In other words, any emotional cathexis Albers and his
audience are allowed to exhibit vis-à-vis Jonny presupposes this figure’s ab-
sence from the material world. So whereas in “I Wish You Luck, Jonny” and
“Jonny’s Yearning for Hawaii,” Jonny still exists, however temporarily, within
physical proximity to the singer, Albers’ “Good bye, Jonny!” will only venture
hope for reunion in the afterlife. “One day, one day,” screams an emotional
Albers in the song’s concluding line, “whether in heaven or hell. / We’ll be
together again.” What Koepnick suggests about the film as a whole thus applies
to this recording as well: it seeks to control the passion for the foreign and ra-
cially suspect Jonny by channeling such desire through rather than against the
Nazi vision of contemporary Germany.
Still, while Albers’ is the most famous, it is hardly the only version of
“Good bye, Jonny!” Indicative of the song’s broad popularity, there were at
least six further recordings of the song issued that year, one instrumental ver-
sion and five with vocals.47 Each in its own way engaged with the legacy of
Jonny, jazz, and Weimar, often in ways at odds with the more controlled re-
cording by Albers. For example, not only are the recordings by Otto Stenzel
and Egon Wolff stylistically closer to Swing, but they feature substantially dif-
ferent lyrics. Most importantly, in their versions, Jonny is no longer a dead
figure from the past. While in Albers’ version, an exploding bomb kills Jonny
at the song’s openings, these recordings reinterpret the sound of the explosion,
its “boom,” as the pop of a bottle for the two to drink together. Accordingly,
German listeners to these versions can imagine themselves meeting Jonny “on
earth or in heaven.” The closer proximity of Jonny to the Nazi present meant,
in turn, that there was greater latitude in these recordings to connote jazz cul-
ture. Consider the presence of a slide whistle within Stenzel’s recording. This
instrument, today used primarily for sound effects in animation, was known in
the 1920s as the “Swanee whistle” and had been a common instrument with
1920s jazz instrumentation, notably in Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf.48 Of course,
Stenzel’s use of a slide whistle functions at most as an inside joke to those al-
ready in the know. Instead, this hardly rebellious detail, to draw again upon
Erica Carter’s work, reminds and compensates German listeners for Jonny’s
and Weimar jazz’s absence with a Nazi Swing fantasy.
This is not the only version of “Good bye, Jonny!” to directly reference
Weimar jazz culture. As it were, Krenek and Jonny meet once again in Iska
Geri und die Neun Casaleon’s recording of the song.49 Though two years later
Geri will record “Känguruh” (“Kangaroo”), a parody of Swing music and
dancing, her recording of “Good-bye, Jonny!” is one of the least identifiably
jazzy of the group, for example, in its prominent use of the accordion.50 Still
Geri’s recording is significant for two reasons. First, she is the only female
singer to record this song in its entirety, whereas the Jonny songs during the
1920s and early 1930s had been primarily sung by female singers or from a
female perspective. Second, though altered to fit her status as woman, her ver-
sion uses the original lyrics as sung by Albers rather than the alternate version
of Wolff and Stenzel. For these reasons, Geri’s recording acts more directly
than even Albers’ as a Nazi double of the Weimar Jonny tradition. Most strik-
ing in this context is that after Geri concludes the second to last chorus, the
instrumental break that follows begins by quoting the first two measures of
Conclusion 237
Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” (better known as “Swanee River”).51 In

referencing this foundational nineteenth-century American song, Geri’s re-
cording inserts itself into the long chain of German encounters with African
American music and its appropriation by white Americans. These flow through
blackface minstrelsy to ragtime, most notably Irving Berlin’s Alexander’s Rag-
time Band’s citation of Foster’s song and George Grosz’s reference to Berlin’s
song in his “Song to the World,” to Sam Wooding and the Chocolate Kiddies
who performed “Swanee River” in 1925,52 and finally to Ernst Krenek, who
recycles the same two measures in Jonny spielt auf.53 More than any other re-
cording, Geri’s version unearths Jonny’s Black, American, and, of course, Wei-
mar German heritage. Yet, this unearthing is framed within the restrained lyrics
used by Albers. To a certain extent, Geri’s “Good-bye, Jonny!” rewrites the
history of German engagement with African American music and culture as
simultaneously pre-and post-jazz. In a word, the non-jazz of Geri’s recording
erases Weimar jazz, even as it depends upon it for its legibility. In this, but a
four-second instrumental flourish invoking the twisted history of African
American music and culture, Geri’s recording, like that of Gründgens, ac-
knowledges and simultaneously negates Germany’s own jazz history.
Reflected in the three competing versions of Albers, Stenzel/Wolff, and
Geri, “Good bye, Jonny!” in many ways stands for the complex, if ultimately
negative, deployment of Weimar Germany’s jazz legacy in the Third Reich.
This is even more so the case as 1939 was to be the last year in which a song
featuring the Jonny figure was released during the Nazi era.54 Soon new regula-
tions forbidding the use of English and other foreign words in German popular
song severely impacted the use of the figure, transforming, for example, “Good
bye, Jonny!” into “Leb’ wohl, Peter!” (“Long live Peter!”).55 Though Kreud-
er’s song was hardly the sole target of such regulation, it is nonetheless tempt-
ing to see in the quantitative number of Jonny recordings and their connota-
tions of Weimar jazz culture something troubling for Nazi functionaries in this
first year of the Second World War.
Be that as it may, it is clear that by 1939 and the outbreak of war, the
curious combination of music and race, American and German culture, that
had produced Weimar Germany as jazz republic had reached the outer limits
of its immediate cultural and historical impact. Six years of Nazi rule had
driven into exile, hiding, or death almost all the major figures encountered in
preceding chapters. While some found temporary refuge in France, at least
until 1940; England; or the United States, it is telling that by 1940, few of the
major figures discussed throughout The Jazz Republic could be found inside
of the borders of what was once Weimar Germany. From the perspective of
1939, let alone 1945, Weimar jazz culture appears remarkable as much for its
brilliance as its seeming impermanence. Perhaps this is a reason why the met-
aphor of Weimar Germany as a “dance on a volcano” has had such lasting
explanatory strength. The idea of people enjoying themselves before their im-
minent demise seems uniquely suited to capturing the precariousness of this
experiment in German democracy.
Yet as the current work has argued, such jazz dancing on a volcano should
stand less as evidence of a different, repressed Germany than as a pivotal link
of the cultural history of the Weimar Republic. Attempting to move beyond the
appearance of jazz as an ephemeral flare that simply burst onto the scene only
to later disappear, The Jazz Republic began by looking at the ways in which
jazz’s entry, as music and dance, was embedded within preexisting ideas about
music, race, and American culture. It is a history defined by a series of musical
encounters between Germans and jazz, mediated by very different experiences
and traditions. Yet as I’ve also insisted throughout, Weimar Germany’s jazz
effects are in no way simple projections of the German cultural imaginary, let
alone reducible, to indulgences in primitivist and/or modernist fantasy. Jazz’s
non-German origins did not merely function as a passive surface through
which Germans could engage in discursive shadowboxing and simply create a
new identity for themselves after World War I. Instead, jazz consistently acted
to bring to the surface elements of discomfort and disjuncture, particularly as a
result of its confounding racial origins. A presence at once at home within and
alien to Weimar culture, German representations of jazz bring into focus both
the overlap and friction between German and American society in the early
twentieth century. As the cases of the syncopated Girl and symphonic jazz
demonstrate, German understandings of white America were very much bound
up with representations of Blackness, American and otherwise. To be sure,
German discussions of African Americans and white Americans differ in sig-
nificant ways. Yet, their respective treatments remained powerfully framed by
each other. That Sam Wooding and Paul Whiteman could at times function as
antipodal, ideal types of German jazz theory was due not only to an under-
standing of jazz in terms of race but because from the very first, white and
Black America existed in close, if troubled, proximity to each other.
The new framework for understanding the German encounter with Amer-
ican culture developed in the introduction made it possible to attend to mani-
fold configurations of jazz and jazz culture in the Weimar Republic. Most im-
portantly, I’ve shown how early attempts at theorizing and practicing jazz in
Germany did not emerge in isolation and according to a logic of their own.
Instead, the Weimar-era understanding of jazz and jazz practices emerged at
Conclusion 239
points of contact and conflict with American and wider European culture.
Transcending the long-standing emphasis on the Germanness of Weimar jazz,
in turn, yielded any number of fascinating and, at first glance, “exceptional”
cases, yet which lay at the very heart of Weimar Germany as jazz republic.
These stretch from the jazz band’s entry into Berlin in 1921, to Frankfurt con-
servatory students being taught by jazz records, to the curious history of Langs-
ton Hughes’ translation into German, and finally to Adorno’s operatic adapta-
tion of Twain via the Scottsboro Boys.
Weimar’s experience of jazz left few of this period’s ideas, artworks, and
people unchanged and moving jazz to the center of Weimar culture has in-
volved much more than the addition of detail to well-known facts and figures.
Instead, The Jazz Republic shows how a cultural shift towards jazz and other
forms of American culture in the 1920s shaped this period’s modernism and
modernity. Whether in the Dadaism of Grosz and Mehring, Herwarth Walden’s
Expressionism, the New Objectivity of Dix and Janowitz, or Kracauer and
Adorno’s initial elaborations of what became Frankfurt School critical theory,
the German encounter, engagement, and theorization of jazz was in many ways
elemental, rather than accidental to Weimar culture. From the high-cultural
halls of conservatories and operas to the lowly spaces of bars and revue and
variety theaters, not to mention those private moments enjoyed around a pho-
nograph player, jazz produced an aural world of its own, both impressive and
expansive. It is a world without which the culture of the Weimar Republic
simply cannot be understood.
Notes
Introduction
The quotation cited in the front matter is from Hans Janowitz, Jazz. Roman [1927]
(Berlin: Weidle, 1999), 8. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the German are
my own. This novel is further discussed in chapter 3.
1. The following details regarding the Admiralspalast are based upon Jost Lehne,
Der Admiralspalast. Die Geschichte eines Berliner “Gebrauchs” Theaters (Berlin:
Be.bra-Wissenschaft Verlag, 2006), 53–79.
2. Alfred Lion, interview in documentary film Blue Note: A Story of Modern Jazz
(dir. Julian Benedikt 1997).
3. Significantly, Lion and his later label partner Francis Wolff (see below) were to
no small degree responsible for making Wooding’s Berlin recordings known to an
American audience. Based upon their personal collections, there appeared in 1941 a
short discussion of Wooding in the periodical Jazz Information (“Sam Wooding and His
Orchestra,” Jazz Information 2:16 [November 1941]: 89).
4. Lion arrived in New York on the SS München from Hamburg on September 16,
1926, and indicated that he had an aunt in Brooklyn. At the time, he was 18 years old
and gave his profession as merchant (Ancestry.com. New York, Passenger Lists, 1820–
1957 [database online]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010).
5. John S. Wilson, “Twenty Years in a Jumping Groove: The Blue Note Story,”
High Fidelity Magazine 8:12 (December 1958), 41.
6. On Blue Note Records and Alfred Lion, see Richard Cook, Blue Note Records:
The Biography (Boston: Justin, Charles & Co., 2004), esp. 6–9; Carla Garner, “Alfred
Lion,” Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to
the Present, vol. 5, ed. R. Daniel Wadhwani (German Historical Institute). Last modi-
fied June 26, 2013. www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/entry.php?rec=112
7. Francis Wolff saw Wooding and the Chocolate Kiddies in 1925, though it is
unclear whether Lion and Wolff saw the show together or separately. On Wolff’s activi-
ties in the 1930s, see Michael Kater, Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi
Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 75–77.
8. Cornelius Partsch, Schräge Töne. Jazz und Unterhaltungsmusik in der Kultur
der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000); Pascale Cohen-Avenal, Si on a du
jazz, pas besoin de schnaps: Jazz, négritude et démocratie sous la République de Wei-
mar (New York: Peter Lang, 2011).
241
242 Notes to Pages 3–8
9. Nora M. Alter and Lutz Koepnick, eds., Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics
of Modern German Culture (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004).
10. There is a growing number of works in the field of sound studies, some of the
most significant include: Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1999); Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins
of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Timothy Taylor,
Strange Sounds: Music, Technology, and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001). See
also the more recent collections: Daniel Morat, ed., Sounds of Modern History: Audi-
tory Cultures in 19th and 20th-Century Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014);
Florence Feiereisen and Alexandra Merley Hill, eds., Germany in the Loud Twentieth
Century: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Further, Alexan-
der G. Weheliye’s Phonographies: Grooves in Afro-Modernity (Durham: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2005) is a theoretical intervention into the field of sound studies as well as a
probing account of the role of sound and technology within African diasporic thought
and culture in the US and globally.
11. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, eds., Music and German National Identity
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Celia Applegate, “How German Is It?
Nationalism and the Origins of Serious Music in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany,”
19th Century Music 21 (Spring 1998): 274–96; Celia Applegate, “What Is German
Music? Reflections on the Role of Art in the Creation of a Nation,” German Studies
Review 15 (Winter 1992): 21–32; Pamela Potter, The Most German of Arts: Musicology
and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1998).
12. Applegate and Potter, “Germans as the ‘People of Music,’” Music and German
National Identity, 21.
13. For representative texts of the Amerikanismus debate in Germany, see Anton
Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 393–411.
14. Adolf Halfeld, Amerika und der Amerikanismus: Kritische Betrachtungen eines
Deutschen und Europäers (Jena: Eugen Diedrichs, 1927); Bertolt Brecht, “700 Intelle-
ktuelle beten einen Öltank an,” Werke, eds. Werner Hecht et al., vol. 11 (Berlin: Aufbau-
Verlag, 1988): 174–76.
15. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Die Kultur der Niederlage: Der amerikanische Süden
1865, Frankreich 1871, Deutschland 1918 (Berlin: Alexander Fest Verlag, 2001), esp.
294–303. On the prehistory of Germany’s image of America in relation to jazz, see
Cohen-Avenal, Si on a du jazz, pas besoin de schnaps, 28–30.
16. Rudolf Kayser, “Americanism [1925],” The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 395.
17. Tobias Nagl, Die unheimliche Maschine: Rasse und Repräsentation im Wei-
marer Kino (Munich: Edition text+kritik, 2009), 762.
18. Ralph Ellison, Shadow and the Act (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 49–50.
19. Ronald Radano, Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2003), 12–13.
20. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk [1903] (New York: The Modern Li-
brary, 1996), 6.
21. Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, The German
Notes to Pages 8–10 243
Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2010).
22. Sara Lennox, “From Postcolonial to Transnational Approaches in German Stud-
ies,” Hybrid Cultures—Nervous States: Britain and Germany in a (Post) Colonial
World, eds. Ulrike Lindner et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), lxii. Sebastian Conrad
and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds., Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt
1871–1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004).
23. Lennox, “From Postcolonial to Transnational Approaches in German Studies,”
lxxi.
24. Fatima El-Tayeb, Schwarze Deutsche: Der Diskurs um Rasse und nationale
Identität 1890–1933 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2001), 18–38.
25. Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 (Durham: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2001).
26. Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft, Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking
of a Diaspora Community, 1884–1960 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2013).
27. On African migrant workers in Weimar, see also Robbie Aitken, “Surviving in
the Metropole: The Struggle for Work and Belonging amongst African Colonial Mi-
grants in Weimar Germany,” Immigrants & Minorities 28:2–3 (2010): 203–23.
28. Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western
Popular Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
29. David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Ger-
many (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 2011.
30. Eric Ames, Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 2008); Rainer Lotz, Black People: Entertainers of African Descent
in Europe, and Germany (Bonn: Birgit Lotz Verlag, 1997).
31. Fred Ritzel, “Synkopen-Tänze: Über Importe populärer Musik aus Amerika in
der Zeit vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” Schund und Schönheit: Populäre Kultur um 1900,
ed. Kaspar Maase and Wolfgang Kaschuba (Cologne: Böhlau, 2001), 161–83. On avail-
ability of American popular music and ragtime in particular, see further the discography
by Rainer Lotz, German Ragtime and Prehistory of Jazz (Chigwell, England: Storyville
Publications, 1981).
32. Astrid Kusser, Körper in Schieflage: Tanzen im Strudel des Black Atlantic um
1900 (Bielefeld: transcript, 2013). See also her English-language article “Cakewalking
the Anarchy of Empire around 1900,” German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Mod-
ern Memory, ed. Volker Max Langbehn (New York: Routledge, 2010), 87–104.
33. To be sure, numerous researchers have long shown the significance of African
American performers and other peoples of African descent in Europe in the pre-1914
era. On this, see Jeffrey Green, Rainer E. Lotz, and Howard Rye, Black Europe: Sounds
and Images of Black People in Europe Pre-1927, 2 vols. (Hambergen: Bear Family
Records, 2013).
34. Horst Lange, Jazz in Deutschland. Die deutsche Jazzchronik bis 1960, 2nd edi-
tion (Hildesheim: Olms Presse, 1996). Errors in Lange’s work, originally published in
1966, have been corrected and amended in numerous works, e.g., those of Rainer Lotz
and Konrad Nowakowski, but have long remained the foundation for “facts” regarding
which jazz bands played where and when. To take but one example, Lange claims that
in 1924, the “Ohio Lido Venice Band” was the very first American jazz band to play in
Berlin. As is discussed in chapters 1 and 2, this can no longer be considered the case.
35. Scott DeVeaux, “Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography,” Black
American Literature Forum 25:3 (Autumn 1991): 525–60.
36. Ibid., 531.
37. On Duke Ellington’s role in Weimar jazz culture, see the discussion in chapter
2.
38. J. Bradford Robinson, “Jazz Reception in Weimar Germany: In Search of a
Shimmy Figure,” Music and Performance during the Weimar Republic, ed. Bryan Gil-
liam (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 107–34.
39. Ibid., 131.
40. One further issue with Robinson’s work is that he does not differentiate between
Germany and Austria, which share some similarities but are hardly identical histories in
terms of their exposure to jazz. For criticism of Robinson’s application of his analytic
model to Alban Berg and Austria, see Konrad Nowakowski, “Jazz in Wien: Die An-
fänge,” Anklaenge 2011/2012, Special Issue: Jazz unlimited. Beiträge zur Jazz-
Rezeption in Österreich (Wien: Mille Tre Verlag, 2012), 127–31.
41. Ibid. Ellington and Armstrong were hardly known in the US mainstream press
during the early 1920s, especially compared to Paul Whiteman (Damon J. Philips,
Shaping Jazz: Cities, Labels, and the Global Emergence of an Art Form [Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2013], 59). Indeed, even in the African American press,
references to Armstrong remain irregular through 1926 and only in the final years of the
decade will he and Duke Ellington become more common subjects of reporting (see
Charlene B. Regester, Black Entertainers in African American Newspaper Articles, 2
vols. [Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2002/2010]).
42. Scott DeVeaux, “Core and Boundaries,” The Source 2 (2005), 24.
43. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 80. Jürgen Heinrich’s develops the con-
nection between Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and the visual iconography of jazz during the
Weimar Republic in his “Blackness in Weimar:” 1920s German Art Practic and Amer-
ican Jazz and Dance (Yale University, PhD diss, 1999).
44. For example: Heribert Schröder, Tanz-und Unterhaltungsmusik in Deutschland
1918–1933 (Bonn: Verlag für Systematische Musikwissenschaft, 1990); Michael Stap-
per, Unterhaltungsmusik im Rundfunk der Weimarer Republik (Tutzing: Hans Schnei-
der, 2001); Christian Schär, Der Schlager und seine Tänze im Deutschland der 20er
Jahre: Sozialgeschichtliche Aspekte zum Wandel in der Musik und Tanzkultur während
der Weimarer Republik (Zurich: Chronos, 1991).
45. Thomas Saunders, “How American Was It? Popular Culture from Weimar to
Hitler,” German Pop Culture: How “American” Is It?, eds. Agnes C. Mueller (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 56.
46. As Philips shows, Berlin had more record labels involved in the production of
jazz than either Paris or London and issued more jazz records than Paris in the same
period. For Philips, the reason jazz produced in Germany is relatively unknown today is
not its difference or aberration from the norm of jazz in the 1920s, but its very same-
ness. As he notes, “Germany was unique within Europe as it had the most advanced and
intensive record production, but the bulk of the jazz produced from this system stylisti-
cally replicated the symphonic jazz from places like New York and London” (Philips,
Shaping Jazz, 75, see further 53–62).
Chapter 1
The quotation cited in the epigraph is from Hans Siemsen, “Jazz-Band,” Die Weltbühne
10 (March 1921), 288.
1. Ignoring its presence within contemporary writings, Siemsen’s article was one
of a few German ruminations on jazz to garner mention in the US press. See “Jazz
Would Have Saved World from War, He Says,” Baltimore Sun, April 10, 1921, 5;
George Seldes, “German Writer Asserts America Now ‘Drinks’ Jazz,” Washington Her-
ald, April 11, 1921, 10.
2. For biographical information on Siemsen, see Wolfgang Delseit, “Siemsen, Jo-
hannes Hermann Ernst,” Neue Deutsche Biographie 24 (2010), 383–84. Online: http://
www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd11884699X.html
3. Damon J. Phillips, Shaping Jazz: Cities, Labels, and the Global Emergence of
an Art Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 53–76.
4. Henry Ernst, “Meine Jagd nach der ‘Tschetzpend,’” Der Artist 2134 (November
11, 1926). Der Artist contains no page numbers. This text is also reprinted, with some
minor passages omitted, in Heribert Schröder, Tanz-und Unterhaltungsmusik in
Deutschland 1918–1933 (Bonn: Verlag für systematische Musikwissenschaft, 1990),
274–77.
5. Other than in Schröder, one finds discussion of Ernst’s article in J. Bradford
Robinson, “Jazz Reception in Weimar Germany: In Search of a Shimmy Figure,” Music
and Performance during the Weimar Republic, ed. Bryan Gilliam (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1994), 117–19; Cornelius Partsch, Schräge Töne: Jazz und
Unterhaltungsmusik in der Kultur der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler,
2000), 61. Most recently, Michel J. Schmidt uses Ernst’s story to argue for jazz recep-
tion in Weimar as predominantly marked by visual, rather than sound, culture (Schmidt,
“Visual Music: Jazz, Synaesthesia and the History of the Senses in the Weimar Repub-
lic,” German History 32:2 [June 2014], 201–2).
6. Theo Freitag, “Henry Ernst †,” Der Artist 2154 (April 1, 1927).
7. “Henry Ernst †,” Der Artist 2153 (March 25, 1927). On Ernst in Dortmund, see
further “Kapellen und Ensembles,” Der Artist 1323 (June 19, 1910). See as well his
advertisement for “Henry Ernsts Wiener Salonorchester,” then performing in Hamburg,
where it is claimed he has been performing since 1904 (Der Artist 1349 [December 18,
1910]).
8. In October 1919, Wieninger published one of the first German compositions
with the word jazz in it, “Ducky. Jazzband Rag” (Leipzig: Schuberth, 1919), as adver-
tised in Hofmeisters Musikalisch-literarischer Monatsbericht 91 (October 1919): 122.
On similar compositions from the period, see the appendices in Rainer Lotz, “That
Foolishness Rag: Ragtime in Europa—Neue Gedanken zu alten Tonträgern,” Jazzforsc-
hung = Jazz Research 21 (1989), 110–35.
9. Ernst, “Meine Jagd nach der ‘Tschetzpend.’”
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Jazz’s entry into Berlin via the zones of occupation was first discussed in Kon-
rad Nowakowski, “Jazz in Wien: Die Anfänge,” Anklaenge 2011/2012, Special Issue:
Jazz unlimited. Beiträge zur Jazz-Rezeption in Österreich (Wien: Mille Tre Verlag,
2012), 43–44. Along with Nowakowski, Hans Pehl, an independent researcher in Frank-
furt am Main has contributed to this project through several crucial discoveries about
the presence of early jazz bands in Wiesbaden, most notably the Original Piccadilly
Four (see below).
13. Harry A. Franck, “Through Germany on Foot, Part II: Coblenz under the Stars
and Stripes,” Harper’s Magazine (June 1, 1919), 322. See further: Raymond S. Tomp-
kins, “Living among Germans Has Become ‘War Horror,’” Baltimore Sun, March 9,
1919, 1, 3.
14. Keith L. Nelson, Victors Divided: America and the Allies in Germany, 1918–
1923 (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 126.
15. Schröder, Tanz-und Unterhaltungsmusik, 272.
16. George Bartheleme, “Jazz,” Kölnische Zeitung, June 5, 1919. Unfortunately, the
occasion for Barthelme’s article is the tragic death of Europe, who was murdered in
May 1919.
17. “A German Interpreter of Jazz,” Literary Digest (August 23, 1919), 31. The
translation was heavily edited, making the ironic tone of the source text all but invisible.
Reference to Barthelme within the American literature on jazz can be found, for ex-
ample, in Lawrence W. Levine, “Jazz and American Culture,” The Jazz Cadence of
American Culture, ed. Robert G. O’Meally (New York: Columbia University Press,
1996), 441.
18. Barthelme, “Jazz.”
19. Ibid.
20. Advertisement for the Apollo Restaurant, “Tanz mit Jazz-Band. Zum erstenmal
in Deutschland!” Wiesbadener Bade-Blatt, December 13, 1919. The name of the group
is specified in the same paper on December 18 as “Marcel’s American Jazz Band and
the Comic Trap-Drummer Harry,” with the further detail that they are the jazz band
from the Folies Bergére coming on February 1–2, 1920, in the Wiesbadener Bade-Blatt.
This French jazz band, better known as “Marcel’s Jazz Band des Folies Bergére,” re-
corded in Paris in Spring 1919 before disappearing from the discographical record
(http://www.redhotjazz.com/marcelsjazzband.html).
21. Advertisement in Der Artist 1862 (October 21, 1920). See Nowakowski, “Jazz
in Wien,” 44.
22. Advertisement in Der Artist 1872 (February 3, 1921).
23. Advertisement in Der Artist 1881 (April 7, 1921).
24. Advertisement in Der Artist 1880 (March 31, 1921).
25. Advertisement in Der Artist 1878 (March 17, 1921).
26. Advertisement in Der Artist 1903 (August 8, 1921).

27. Ibid.
28. Advertisement in Der Artist 1880 (March 31, 1921). See further Aitken and
Rosenhaft, Black Germany, 150.
29. Advertisement for “Neger-Orchester” in Wiesbadener Bade-Blatt (October 1,
1921). My thanks to Hans Pehl for alerting me to the presence of this advertisement.
Despite joint efforts, it has not been possible to further document this group.
30. On the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, its history, and its evolving roster, see
Howard Rye, “The Southern Syncopated Orchestra,” Black Music Research Journal
29:2 (Fall 2009): 153–228; Howard Rye, “Southern Syncopated Orchestra: The Ros-
ter,” Black Music Research Journal 30:1 (Spring 2010): 19–70. See also Catherine Par-
sonage, The Evolution of Jazz in Britain, 1880–1935 (Aldershot, England: Ashgate,
2005), 143–62.
31. Ernst-Alexandre Ansermet, “Sur un orchestre nègre,” La Revue romande 3 (Oc-
tober 15, 1919), 10–13; translated as “Bechet and Jazz Visit Europe, 1919,” Reading
Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now, ed.
Robert Gottlieb (New York: Vintage, 1999), 741–46. As noted in chapter 2, individual
members of the SSO, such as Arthur Briggs, George Clapham, and Buddy Gilmore, did
play in Berlin and as early as 1924.
32. “Carlisle and Wellmon,” Black Europe, eds. Jeffrey Green, Rainer Lotz, Howard
Rye, vol. 2 (Hambergen: Bear Family Records, 2013), 26–30.
33. On the performances of the SSO in Vienna, see Konrad Nowakowski, “‘30 Ne-
groes (Ladies and Gentlemen)’: The Syncopated Orchestra in Vienna,” Black Music
Research Journal 29 (Fall 2009): 229–82. Further details, as well as new information
regarding the development of the SSO in Vienna and beyond, can be found in Nowa-
kowski, “Jazz in Wien,” 58–77.
34. Bernhard Etté, “Zurück zur Geige!” Berliner Montagspost, September 6, 1926.
36. Byjacco, “Dolores Jazz. Three Step. Creiert von Chitta und Prof. Arthur Dolo-
res,” (Songa Verlag: Berlin, 1919).
37. For example, Siegwart Ehrlich’s “Erry-Merry. Jazztanz” was similarly named
for the dance pair Erry & Merry, as was Bernhard Minte’s “Damarow-Jazz. Threestep”
for the duo Damarow. All three songs, as well as Garter and Spink’s “Jazz. American
Dance,” the song whose advertisement marks the first incidence of the word “jazz” in
Der Artist, are listed in the June issue of Hofmeisters Musikalisch-literarischer
Monatsheft 91 (June 1919): 64–65. A reproduction of the advertisement in Der Artist
1790 (June 1, 1919) can be found in Schröder, Tanz-und Unterhaltungsmusik, 267.
38. Advertisement for Simplicissimus in 8 Uhr Abendblatt, April 16, 17, and 22,
1919. The advertisement is also present on April 20, 1919, in the Vossische Zeitung.
39. Jeffrey H. Jackson, Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar
Paris (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 21–22; Parsonage, The Evolution of Jazz
in Britain, 16–18.
40. Jed Rasula, “Jazzbandism,” The Georgia Review 60:1 (2006), 65.
41. There are two Berlin recordings of “Dolores Jazz” along with a few others that
carry the word “jazz” in their title from fall 1919. The dance orchestra of a Kapellmeis-
ter Tauber recorded Byjacco’s “Dolores Jazz” (Polyphon 15598) as did Marek Weber
(Parlophon 1058–1). “Cuyaba Jazz” was recorded on Homokord (15852) in 1919 by an
unnamed orchestra. For recordings and further examples, see: http://grammophon-plat-
ten.de/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?8393
43. Ibid.
44. Advertisement in Der Artist 1873 (February 10, 1921).
46. On dancing and its politics within the immediate postwar period, see Wolfgang
Schivelbusch, Die Kultur der Niederlage: Der amerikanische Süden 1865, Frankreich
1871, Deutschland 1918 (Berlin: Alexander Fest, 2001), 319–26.
48. Fth., “Silvester in Berlin,” Berliner Tageblatt, January 1, 1919.
49. Karlernst Knaatz, “Der Tanz,” Vossische Zeitung, January 1, 1919. Ellipses in
original.
50. Ibid.
51. As Catherine Parsonage writes: “The fact that American syncopated styles had
been the basis for most popular dance music in Britain from the late nineteenth century
meant that jazz was perceived, initially at least, as merely another dance craze” (Parson-
age, The Evolution of Jazz in Britain, 16). On the situation in France, see Mathew Jor-
dan, Le Jazz: Jazz and French Cultural Identity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2010), 45–47.
52. Poldi Schmidl, “Berlin,” Der Artist 1772 (January 26, 1919).
53. A high-resolution digital copy of this image can be found at: http://www.loc.
gov/pictures/item/2004665821/
54. The poster itself seems to have been constructed by the artist van Santen, who
had ties to both the Anti-Bolshevist League and the German Publicity Office. See Sher-
win Simmons, “Grimaces on the Walls: Anti-Bolshevist Posters and the Debate about
Kitsch,” Design Issues 14:2 (Summer 1998), 27. See further Kate Elswit, “‘Berlin . . .
Your Dance Partner Is Death,’” The Drama Review 53:1 (Spring 2009): 73–92.
55. Walter Mehring, “Dada-Prolog 1919,” Das politische Cabaret (Dresden: Rudolf
Kaemmerer, 1920), 9. Though another song in this collection bears the title “Berlin,
dein Tänzer ist der Tod,” it does not reference foxtrot or jazz dancing specifically (Ibid.
21–22).
56. Further information on this recording, long assumed to have been the product of
a misguided German Kapellmeister, can be found at http://grammophon-platten.de/
page.php?477
57. On jazz’s use within American and European modernism in the period, see Ra-
sula, “Jazzbandism,” 61–124.
58. George Grosz, Briefe 1913–1959, ed. Herbert Knust (Reinbek bei Hamburg:
Rowohlt, 1979), 65–74. On Grosz’s use of American popular music, see Jeanpaul Go-
ergen, “Apachentänze in Futuristenkellern: Dada—Grosz—Musik,” George Grosz:
Berlin—New York, ed. Peter-Klaus Schuster (Berlin: Ars Nicolai, 1994), 219–23.
59. Advertisement in Jedermann sein eigner Fussball 1:1 (February 15, 1919), n.p.
The advertisement is reprinted in Goergen, “Apachentänze in Futuristenkellern,” 221.
60. Jeanpaul Goergen, ed. Urlaute dadaistischer Poesie: Der Berliner Dada-Abend
am 12. April 1918 (Hannover: Postskriptum, 1994), 9.
61. Ben Hecht, “Dadafest,” Dada Performance, ed. Mel Gordon (New York: PAJ
Publications, 1997), 80–81. See also Beth Irwin Lewis, George Grosz: Art and Politics
in the Weimar Republic (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 38–39.
62. On these examples as well as others, see Rainer Lotz, Black People: Entertain-
ers of African Descent in Europe, and Germany (Bonn: Birgit Lotz Verlag, 1999), as
well as the more recent two-volume Black Europe (2013). On minstrel imagery in Ger-
man advertising, see David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Advertising (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
63. Fred Ritzel, “Synkopen-Tänze: Über Importe populärer Musik aus Amerika in
der Zeit vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” Schund und Schönheit: Populäre Kultur um 1900,
eds. Kaspar Maase and Wolfgang Kaschuba (Cologne: Böhlau, 2001), 167.
64. The first example is “Stepptänzer” from 1915 (reprinted as plate 12 in Serge
Sabarsky, George Grosz: Die Berliner Jahre [Passau: Das Museum, 1993]). The second
is “The Christmas Brothers” (reproduced in Sell Tower, Envisioning America: Prints,
Drawings, and Photographs by George Grosz and His Contemporaries 1915–1933,
91). The third carries the title “Niggertanz,” but Grosz himself had labeled it “Neg-
ertanz” (Schall und Rauch [February 1920], 3).
65. On the history of the discourse surrounding the French occupation in Germany,
see Christian Koller, ‘Von Wilden aller Rassen niedergemetzelt’: die Diskussion um die
Verwendung von Kolonialtruppen in Europa zwischen Rassismus, Kolonial-und Mil-
itärpolitik (1914–1930) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2001), 201–314.
66. Koller, “Von Wilden aller Rassen niedergemetzelt,” 202.
67. The term “Schmach,” meaning “shame,” “dishonor,” is regularly translated as
“horror” within English discussions due to the popularization of the terms “Horror on
the Rhine” and “Black Scourge on the Rhine” by E. D. Morel. The term “Schmach,”
however, also carries connotations with the Treaty of Versailles, which Hindenburg and
others termed a “Schmachfrieden” (“shameful peace”). On Morel’s role within the de-
bate, see, for example, Jared Poley, Decolonization in Germany: Weimar Narratives of
Colonial Loss and Foreign Occupation (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 157; Robert C.
Reinders, “Racialism on the Left: E. D. Morel and the ‘Black Horror on the Rhine,’”
International Review of Social History 13 (1968): 3–28.
68. Koller, “Von Wilden aller Rassen niedergemetzelt,” 220.
69. In addition to Koller, Poley, and Reinders, on the “Black Horror,” see, amongst
others, Sally Marks, “Black Watch on the Rhine: A Study in Propaganda, Prejudice and
Prurience,” European Studies Review 13 (1983): 297–334; Tina Campt, Pascal Grosse,
and Yara-Colette Lemke-Muniz de Faria, “Blacks, Germans, and the Politics of Impe-
rial Imagination, 1920–1960,” The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and
Its Legacy, eds. Sara Lennox, Sara Friedrichsmeyer, and Susanne Zantop (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1998), 208; Iris Wigger, Die “Schwarze Schmach am
Rhein”: Rassistische Diskriminierung zwischen Geschlecht, Klasse, Nation und Rasse
(Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2007).
70. Partsch, Schräge Töne, 80– 86; Schröder, Tanz-und Unterhaltungsmusik,
350–51.
71. Tom Black is described as a “Negro” (Neger), whose dances enthralled the audi-
ence at the relatively up-scale establishment in Berlin West (Poldi Schmidl, “Berlin,”
Der Artist 1839 [May 13, 1920]). See also advertisements for Adi-Haus in Berliner
Tageblatt, May 8, 15, 22, and 29, 1920.
72. Popular theater and revue culture in Berlin is discussed further in chapter 4.
73. Advertisement for Haremsnächte in Berliner Tageblatt, October 1, 1920.
74. M. H. [Marie Happrich], “Berlin,” Der Artist 1807 (September 28, 1919).
75. On Brody, see Tobias Nagl, Die unheimliche Maschine: Rasse und Repräsenta-
tion im Weimarer Kino (Munich: edition text+kritik, 2007), 559–90.
76. Quoted in Poley, Decolonization in Germany, 172. See further: “Varieté und
Kino. Apollo Theater,” Welt am Montag, November 18, 1920; “Das Apollo-Theater,”
Vossische Zeitung, October 6, 1920.
77. Poley, Decolonization in Germany, 172–74.
78. J. H. Morgan, Assize of Arms: The Disarmament of Germany and her Rearma-
ment (1919–1939) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 246.
79. The two affected groups were the Lola-Bach Ballet and its own Haremsnächte
as well as the scene “Erotik” by the Erna Offeney Ballet. These prohibitions were issued
not because of lewdness but out of concern for “public order” (Peter Jelavich, Berlin
Cabaret [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993], 174–75).
80. Poley, Decolonization in Germany, 172–75.
81. Reinhard Mumm, “201. Sitzung, Montag den 3. April 1922,” Verhandlungen
des Reichstags, vol. 354 (Berlin: Norddeutsche Buchdruckerei und Verlags-Anstalt,
1922), 6826.
82. Nagl, Die unheimliche Maschine, 155n5.
83. Alan Lareau, The Wild Stage: Literary Cabarets of the Weimar Republic (Co-
lumbia, SC: Camden House, 1995), 23–69.
84. George Grosz, “Niggertanz,” Schall und Rauch (February 1920), 3.
85. Advertisement for Schall und Rauch, featuring “Kirchner’s Original- Jazz-
Band” Berliner Tageblatt, April 15, 1921, while a later advertisement references “The
High Life Jazz-Band” (Berliner Tageblatt, May 1, 1921).
86. Tucholsky’s activities within Sound and Smoke are documented, for example, in
Lareau, The Wild Stage, 28–32, 39–49. Jaap Kool, discussed below, appears in the pro-
gram for Sound and Smoke as providing music for one of Anita Berber’s dances (Pro-
gram for “Schall und Rauch,” April 1920, Schall und Rauch [April 1920], 4).
87. Klabund, “Rag 1920,” Hoppla, wir beben! Kabarett einer gewissen Republik,
ed. Völker Kühn, vol. 2 (Weinheim and Berlin: Quadriga, 1988), 61. Originally pub-
lished in Schall und Rauch (September 1920), 11. Set to music by Friedrich Hollaender,
it was sung by Mady Christians, who also performed Klabund and Hollaender’s “Mady
Foxtrott.”
88. “Dada-Trott,” Schall und Rauch. Dada-Heft (May 1920), 1mm [sic].
89. Friedrich Hollaender (words and music), “Fox macabre. (Totentanz.),” (Berlin:
Heiki, 1920). Translation from Lareau, The Wild Stage, 45.
90. Like his “Jonny (fox erotic),” which is discussed below, the music for this song
was announced in December 1920 (Hofmeister Musikalisch-literarischer Monatsberi-
cht 92:12 [December 1920], 203).
91. Friedrich Hollaender, “Jonny (fox erotic)” (Berlin: Heiki Verlag, 1920).
92. In a 1922 discussion, Herwarth Walden references recordings by early jazz art-
ists Eric Borchard and the Original Piccadilly Four in addition to Hollaender’s “Jonny”
(“Von den schönen Künsten,” Der Sturm 13 [May 5, 1922], 71).
93. On these two versions as well as “Jonny” and Blackness within Weimar popular
song, see Alan Lareau “Jonny’s Jazz: From Kabarett to Krenek,” Jazz and the Germans:
Essays on the Influence of “Hot” American Idioms on 20th-Century German Music, ed.
Michael J. Budds (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2002), 19–60.
94. In late 1919, the Austrian composer Robert Stolz, composer of “Bobby Jazz,”
released “Am Kongo und am Nil (Jonny um Mitternacht)” (On the Congo and on the
Nile [Jonny at Midnight]), Op. 345 (Vienna: Bohéme-Verlag, 1919). Also predating
Hollaender’s piece are Franz Fischbach, “Jonny, mein Nigger” (Vienna: Rosé, 1920);
Karl Weinstabl, “Jonny. Jazz f. Pfte” (Vienna: Pölzl, 1920); Siegwart Ehrlich, “Jonny
vom Trokadero,” (Berlin-Wilmersdorf: Hansa-Verlag, 1920); Ralph Benatzky, “Jonny-
Foxtrott aus der Operette Yuschi tanzt” (Leipzig: Weinberger, 1920). Further discussion
of Hollaender’s work in relation to Fischbach’s song can be found in Lareau, “Jonny’s
Jazz,” 28.
95. Mehring’s version was performed by cabaret artist Gussy Holl and set to music
by Werner Richard Heymann (Walter Mehring, “If the man in the moon were a coon,”
Chronik der Lustbarkeiten: Die Gedichte, Lieder und Chansons, 1918–1933 [Düssel-
dorf: Claasen Verlag, 1981], 95–98). Originally published in Das politische Cabaret:
Chansons, Songs, Couplets (Dresden: Rudolf Kaemmerer, 1920): 71–74.
96. On Mehring’s cabaret work, see Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret, 146–53; Lareau, The
Wild Stage, 33–38.
97. Mehring, “If the man in the moon were a coon,” Chronik der Lustbarkeiten, 96.
English in original italicized.
98. As noted above, the first documented appearance of the word “jazz” this author
has found for Berlin is the April 16, 1919 advertisement for Bella Chitta and Arthur
Dolores’ jazz dance in the 8 Uhr Abendblatt. It is, of course, possible that earlier ex-
amples will be found. These would likely resemble one of three examples of the article
“Die ‘Jazz band’ in Paris,” which were published in Vienna (Neues 8 Uhr-Blatt, October
16, 1918), Bern (Intelligenzblatt, October 18, 1918), and Constance (Konstanzer Zei-
tung, October 30, 1918). As Konrad Nowakowski has shown, the Vienna article derives
from critic Clement Vautel’s column “Mon Film” in Le Journal, here from September
27, 1918 (Nowakowski, “Jazz in Wien,” 34–35). There are thus potentially other ver-
sions of this article that appeared around mid-October 1918, but the Konstanzer Zei-
tung’s publication is currently the first published reference to jazz music within Ger-
many’s political boundaries. This article is discussed, albeit in a different context, in
Wilfried Witte, Erklärungsnotstand: die Grippeepidemie 1918–1920 in Deutschland
unter besonderer Berücksichtigung Badens (Herbolzheim: Centaurus-Verlag, 2006),
102.
99. There is some indication that “jazz bands” may have been present in the capital
before January 1921 (Franz Wolfgang Koebner, Jazz und Shimmy: Brevier der neuesten
Tänze [Berlin: Eysler, 1921], 3). However, thus far no evidence has surfaced regarding
their presence, either in the form of advertisements or critical writing.
100. Rasula, “Jazzbandism,” 70–71. As Arthur Briggs, who performed in Austria,

Germany, France, and elsewhere, later stated: “For the French people the jazz band was
the drums. They called [the drums] the jazz band” (Arthur Briggs, quoted in Mark
Miller, Some Hustling This: Taking Jazz to the World [Toronto: Mercury Press, 2005],
72). On the terminology of jazz bands and jazz in Australia, see John Whiteoak, “‘Jazz-
ing’ and Australia’s First Jazz Band,” Popular Music 13:3 (October 1994), 279–95.
101. Beginning in January, one finds advertisements for jazz bands in the B.Z. am
Mittag and 8 Uhr Abendblatt, while they begin in other newspapers (Berliner Tageblatt,
Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, Vossische Zeitung, Berliner Montagspost) in March and April.
Though not included in this list, a second wave of jazz bands comes to Berlin in Sep-
tember 1921.
102. Advertisement for the “Cosmo Jazz Band” at Wien-Berlin in Berliner Lokal-
Anzeiger March 6, 1921. Most advertisements repeat over a few days, in some cases
longer, and appear simultaneously in multiple newspapers, e.g., the advertisements for
“Cosmo Jazz Band” in B.Z. am Mittag, March 5, 1921, or the Berliner Tageblatt, March
6, 1921.
103. Advertisement for “Jimmi-Jazz-Band” at the Rokoko in Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger
April 21, 1921. This formation may be identical to earlier advertisements for “Jimy
Tanz mit Jazz Band” at the Palais des Westens, which began appearing in early March
(Berliner Tageblatt and B.Z. am Mittag, March 5, 1921).
104. Advertisement for “Ballorchester Boesing mit Original Jazz Band” at the Palais
der Friedrichstadt in Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, April 3, 1921.
105. Advertisement for the “High Life Jazz-Band” at the Schall und Rauch in Ber-
liner Tageblatt, May 1, 1921.
106. Advertisement for “Jazz-Band Max de Groot” at the Luna-Palais in Berliner
Tageblatt, May 8, 1921.
107. At the Apollo in Wiesbaden, they are first advertised as “Neuer JAZZ-BAND.
Die Original Piccadilli [sic] direkt von London” in Wiesbadener Bade-Blatt, October
14, 1920. They perform in Wiesbaden at the Apollo at least until January 1 (Wiesbad-
ener Bade-Blatt, January 1–3, 1921). The group’s presence in Wiesbaden was first dis-
covered by Hans Pehl.
108. See Journal de Geneve, January 14, 1922; Neue Zürcher Zeitung, April 5, 1922;
Feuille d’avis de Lausanne, June 16, 1923. This last advertisement refers to perfor-
mances by the “Merry Harmony Makers and the Piccadilly Jazz Band.” Whether this
band is identical to the Original Piccadilly Four or merely an imitator is, at this point,
unclear.
109. An overview of the group’s discography and discussion of previous speculations
regarding the group’s personnel, in addition to recordings and reproductions of records
and advertisements are available at: http://grammophon-platten.de/page.php?397
110. Advertisement for the Scala-Casino in B.Z. am Mittag, February 19, 1921. This
band, too, may have come from Wiesbaden. In the Wiesbadener Bade-Blatt, one finds
the last advertisement for an Original American Jazz Band on February 10, 1921, which
fits well with the information regarding Eric Borchard contained in footnote 112. My
thanks to Konrad Nowakowski for pointing this out to me.
111. Horst J. P. Bergmeier and Rainer Lotz, Eric Borchard Story (Menden: Jazz-
freund, 1988), 1.
112. At the outbreak of the war, Borchard was working as a variety theater actor in
England and traveled from there to New York in 1914. He arrived on the SS St. Paul
from Liverpool on September 21, 1914, with his wife Marie Borchardt, originally
from Hamburg (Ancestry.com. New York, Passenger Lists, 1820–1957 [database on-
line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010). He registers for the
draft on September 12, 1918, giving his date of birth as February 7, 1886 and again
listing his wife as Marie Borchard (Ancestry.com. U.S., World War I Draft Registra-
tion Cards, 1917–1918 [database online]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations
Inc., 2005). Borchard’s name and profession as “actor” also appear in conjunction
with other entertainers in “Thousands Register in Draft,” New York Clipper, Septem-
ber 18, 1918, 29. Though specifics regarding his activities during the war remain
unknown, this information fits with American Banjoist Mike Danzi’s recollection that
“Borchard arrived in the U.S. a full-fledged Vaudeville artist, doing a Ted Lewis style
of clarinet playing—had a partner for short period” (Quoted in Bergmeier and Lotz,
Eric Borchard Story, 1). Some further details regarding Borchard’s life and career
have been documented by Ulrich Biller, who independently made the same discovery
regarding Borchard’s presence in New York City (http://grammophon-platten.de/
page.php?447).
113. Borchard is cited on at least three occasions in the US press, and in all three, he
references having played jazz in the US army in the German occupation zones. At the
same time, this claim remains unsubstantiated. See: H. J. Mann, “Berlin Night Life
Gayest in Europe,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 26, 1922, G12; “Germans Taught
Jazz by Music Machines,” Washington Post, January 20, 1924, EA17; “Germans Com-
ing to Seek Jazz Singers Here to Satisfy Craze Started by Phonograph,” New York
Times, April 8, 1927, 4.
114. Though Borchard’s earliest recordings had originally been dated to October
1920, this has been corrected to May 1921 (Rainer Lotz and Horst Bergmeier, Der Jazz
in Deutschland, vol. 1 [Hambergen: Bear Family Records, 2008], 80). Though not in-
cluded in the above discussion, note should be made of one further German jazz pio-
neer, Fred Ross, who recorded six sides for Beka in July 1921. Pianist Fred Ross, likely
born as Erwin Rosenthal in Berlin, may also have spent time in the United States as
indicated in advertisements for his group as “Ross Brothers from New York with Jazz
Band” (B.Z. am Mittag, April 8, 1921). Unlike the case of Borchard, documentation of
residency in the United States for Ross has yet to be found.
115. Roberts had originally come to Germany in the prewar era to study music from
either Trinidad or Barbados, but, as a British subject, he was interned during the war.
When the hostilities ended, he continued to perform music, only this time it was as a
jazz drummer, in Wiesbaden, Berlin and beyond. My thanks to Konrad Nowakowski for
sharing with me information on Roberts’ background gleaned from his son, Ronald
Roberts’ memoirs (Ronald Roberts, “Autobiographical Account,” Personal Papers and
Correspondence 1913–1994, The Wiener Library, London).
116. “Köln,” Der Artist 1904 (September 15, 1921).
117. Advertisement for Philipps-Neger-Jazz-Band at the Scala-Casino in B.Z. am

Mittag, November 26, 1921.
118. Hans Erich Winckler, “Der rote Jazz,” Das schiefe Podium: Ein buntes Brett’l
Buch, ed. Walter Wenng (Berlin: Eysler, 1921), 104–6; Walter Mehring, “Grotesksong,”
Die Weltbühne 17:13 (March 31, 1921), 364; reprinted as Walter Mehring, “Jazz-band,”
Das Ketzerbrevier (Munich: Kurt Wolff, 1921), 36–38. Winckler’s piece was set to mu-
sic by Hermann Krome, reproduced in part in Das Schiefe Podium, while in 1923,
Mehring’s “Jazz-band” was set to music by Mischa Spoliansky (Lareau, “Jonny’s Jazz,”
38–40).
119. Franz Wolfgang Koebner, Jazz und Shimmy: Brevier der neuesten Tänze (Ber-
lin: Eysler, 1921).
120. Of all the writers involved in this project, Kool had the most lasting impact on
German jazz discussions, authoring important pieces on the history of jazz music for
the German and US press as well as a book on the saxophone. See Jaap Kool, “Vom
Negerdorf zur Philharmonie,” Uhu 1 (November 1924): 31–41, 121–22; translated as
Jaap Kool, “The Triumph of the Jungle,” Living Age 324 (February 7, 1925): 338–44;
Jaap Kool, Das Saxophon (Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1931). Kool further authored works on
non-Western dance culture, Tänze der Naturvölker: Ein Deutungsversuch primitiver
Tanzkulte und Kultgebräuche (Berlin: Adoph Fürstner, 1921). On Kool in relation to
dance and jazz, see Toepfer, Empire and Ecstasy, 167–70, as well as Michael Cowan,
Technology’s Pulse: Essays on Rhythm in German Modernism (London: Institute of
Germanic and Romance Studies, 2011), 202–3.
121. Like “jazz” and “jazz band,” the word “shimmy” was given a variety of spell-
ings, most notably “Jimmy.”
122. “Jazz-Band. Der neueste Berliner Rummel,” Berliner Tageblatt, March 11,
1921.
123. “Jazz-Band. Die Modetänze in Berlin,” Berliner Tageblatt, March 13, 1921.
Jazz und Shimmy, 11–14; C. M. Roehr, “Von neuen Tänzen,” Der Artist 1878 (March
17, 1921). On Roehr, see Schröder, Tanz-und Unterhaltungsmusik in Deutschland,
1918–1933, 268–72.
124. “Der Jimmy und der Shimney [sic],” Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung 30 (April 17,
1921), 232.
125. Herwarth Walden, “Von den schönen Künsten,” Der Sturm 13 (May 5, 1922),
71.
126. Siemsen, “Jazz-Band,” 288.
127. Kurt Tucholsky also refers to the girth of the jazz band players, though he spec-
ifies them as fat banjo players and fat clarinetists (“Die neuen Troubadoure,” Die Welt-
bühne 17 [March 24, 1921], 343).
128. Koebner, Jazz und Shimmy, 109.
129. R. L. Leonard, “Jazz, Shimmy, Steinach & Co.,” Jazz und Shimmy, 120. Ellipsis
in original.
130. Wedderkop, “Shimmi greift ein,” 88.
131. Pol., “Yazz-Band und Jimmy,” Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung 30 (February 17,
1921), 116. This author here is likely Heinz Pollack, who wrote an early treatment of
popular dance Die Revolution des Gesellschaftstanzes (Dresden: Sibyllen- Verlag,

1922).
133. Alice Gerstel, “Jazz-Band,” Die Aktion 12 (February 4, 1922), 90. Translated as
“Jazz Band,” The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, eds. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Ed-
ward Dimendberg (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994),
554.
134. Richard Effner, “Etwas über den Jazz,” Der Artist 1890 (June 6, 1921).
135. Poldi Schmidl, “Berlin,” Der Artist 1872 (February 3, 1921).
136. Kool, “Tanzmusik,” Jazz und Shimmy, 103.
137. George Antheil, “Jazz,” Der Querschnitt 2 (Weihnachtsheft 1922), 172.
138. On Dada and Expressionism in relation to jazz, see Partsch, Schräge Töne, 17–
44; 75–92.
139. Futurism is referenced in Koebner, Jazz und Shimmy, 4, as well as in the three
texts by Curt Max Roehr from Berliner Tageblatt, Der Artist, and Jazz und Shimmy, 11.
140. Cubism is referenced in Koebner, Jazz und Shimmy, 106; Siemsen, “Jazz-Band,”
288; Gerstel, “Jazz-Band,” 554 [90]; Bie, Das Rätsel der Musik, 98.
141. Herwarth Walden writes: “The musical arts are being Einsteined (vereinsteint).
All knowledge is relative” (“Von den schönen Künsten,” 70–71).
142. Herwarth Walden, “Shimmy,” Der Sturm 13 (April 5, 1922) and Wedderkop,
“Shimmi greift ein.” These two authors will continue the debate over jazz in 1925 on the
occasion of the Berlin performances of the African American revue Chocolate Kiddies.
See chapter 2.
143. Gerstel, “Jazz Band,” 554.
144. Tucholsky, “Die neuen Troubadoure,” 46.
145. Ibid., 46, 47.
146. Pol., “Yazz-Band und Jimmy,” 116.
147. Wedderkop, “Shimmi greift ein,” 89.
149. Leonard, “Jazz, Shimmy, Steinach & Co.,” 122.
150. Koebner, Jazz und Shimmy, 106.
153. Wedderkop, “Shimmi greift ein,” 88–89.
154. Bie, Das Rätsel der Musik, 100.
155. Schmalhausen’s image is found on page 41 of Jaap Kool, “Vom Negerdorf zur
Philharmonie” and is available online at: http://magazine.illustrierte-presse.de/die-
zeitschriften/werkansicht/dlf/73406/53/0/
156. For example, both Kool’s “Tanzmusik” and Siemsen’s “Jazz-Band” frame their
judgments of jazz with prewar experiences of Black musicians (Kool, “Tanzmusik,”
Jazz und Shimmy, 100; Siemsen, “Jazz-Band,” 167).
157. Jeremy F. Lane, Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism: Music, “Race,” and Intel-
lectuals in France, 1918–1945 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 1–18.
158. Walter Kingsley, “Whence Comes Jass?” New York Sun (August 5, 1917), 3. See
further Rasula, “Jazzbandism,” 66–67. Indeed, Kingsley’s work is equally notable for
its speculation regarding the origin of the word “jazz.” He suggests it derives from the
vaudevillian term “jasbo.” This is noteworthy as already by 1920 this idea had been
taken up by Koebner via Paul Whiteman (Das neue Tanz-Brevier [Berlin: Eysler, 1920],
55). More generally, Kingsley’s term “jasbo” can be further related to the apocryphal
Black jazz musician from Chicago, “Jasbo Brown,” who is often referenced in German
discussions of the word’s origin. This figure first appears in the United States and is
picked up by the broader press in the United States and Europe (Alan P. Merriam and
Fradley H. Garner, “Jazz-The Word,” Ethnomusicology 12:3 [September 1968], 373–
96, for “Jasbo Brown,” 373–76). Examples of German use of “Jasbo Brown” include:
Paul Bernhard, Jazz: Eine musikalische Zeitfrage (Munich: Delphin, 1927), 65–66;
“Wie die Jazzband entstand,” Berliner Morgenpost, January 1, 1926; Heinrich Wiegland,
“Jazz,” Kulturwille, Special Issue: “Yankeeland” 2 (1929), 33; E. F. Burian, “Revue!”
Der Auftakt 8 (1928), 182; A. Sacher-Woenckhaus, “Unsere modernen Tänze sind keine
Niggertänze mehr,” Uhu 8 (April 1932), 85; Eduard Duisberg, “Jazz Band,” Das Maga-
zin 4 (May 1928), 2266–67. Via a variation on another origin story from American jazz
musician Vincent Lopez, Kool propagated a similar story, but surrounding the figure of
“Jack Washington” (Kool, “Vom Negerdorf zur Philharmonie,” 32–33; Merriam and
Fradley, “Jazz-The Word,” 378). This version was later taken up by Bernhard Egg in his
Das Jazz-Fremdwörterbuch (Leipzig: W. Ehler & Co., 1927), 4.
159. Harry Kessler, Berlin in Lights: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler (1918–
1937), trans. Charles Kessler (New York: Grove Press, 1999), 282.
160. Joseph Roth, “Jazzband,” Werke I: Das journalistische Werk, 1915–1923, ed.
Klaus Westermann (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1989), 545. First published May
1, 1921, in the Berliner Börsen-Courier.
161. Tucholsky, “Die neuen Troubadoure,” 342.
162. As Schmidl writes: “A true jazz band despises everything that is even somewhat
musical and instead prefers Negro melodies. Now we understand why the drum plays
such a tremendously important role” (Poldi Schmidl Der Artist 1872 [March 2, 1921]).
163. Theodor Leisser, “Der ‘Jimmy,’” Berliner Volkszeitung, April 2, 1921.
164. Albert Held from the Neues Wiener Journal, September 15, 1921. Cited in
Nowakowski, “Jazz in Wien,” 134n389.
165. Poldi Schmidl Der Artist 1922 (January 19, 1922).
166. Ibid.
167. That Schmidl also has the occupation in mind is evidenced when he writes to-
wards the end: “Let’s assume that the French and with them their brothers, the honor-
able Senegal Negroes, marched out from the occupied territories and some of the Sen-
egal Negroes stayed in Germany. This will one day likely be the case. With the blacks,
the French will leave us a legacy undesirable to the civilian population, but that will be
embraced as a sensation by the German audience of the entertainment establishments”
(Schmidl, “Berlin,” Der Artist 1922 [January 19, 1922]).
168. Susan Laitkin Funkenstein, “Man’s Place in a Woman’s World: Otto Dix, Social
Dancing, and Constructions of Masculinity in Weimar Germany,” Women in German
Yearbook, 21 (2005), 163–64.
169. Though he is listed as a dancer for the first two appearances at Chemnitz in
1924, Tom Boston is elsewhere billed “the American Original-Jazz-Band-Canon,”

likely meaning that he was the drummer, in Das Programm (Hans Pehl, personal cor-
respondence with the author, March 1 and 3, 2013; Rainer Lotz, personal correspon-
dence with the author, January 22, 2013).
170. Both Dix and Gotsch were active in Dresden during the same period and in the
same year, 1922, when Gotsch produced the woodcut “Jimmy [Tanzbar]” (“Jimmy
[Dance Bar]”). On Gotsch, Dix and “Tom Boston,” see Sell-Tower, Envisioning Amer-
ica: Prints, Drawings, and Photographs by George Grosz and his Contemporaries
1915–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Busch-Reisinger Museuam, Harvard University, 1990),
92; Reinhold Heller et al., eds., Stark Impressions: Graphic Production in Germany,
1918–1933 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 152–53.
171. On jazz in Dresden, see the discussion below regarding Otto Dix’s work, An die
Schönheit. In Danzig, “Marcel’s Jazz Band” appeared in November 1920 at the Winter-
garten (Gazete Gdanska, November 24, 1920), though it is unclear whether this group
is identical to the one that had appeared earlier in Wiesbaden. The group depicted here
likely performed in the period between 1920 and 1923. In Prague, the early jazz forma-
tion, the “Ross Brothers,” performed there with a Black dancer named “Mr. Bob”
(Prager Tagblatt, October 8, 1921). For the developments in Vienna, as well as the con-
nection with Berlin, see Nowakowski “Jazz in Wien.”
172. Otto Dix, Otto Dix: das Werkverzeichnis der Zeichnungen und Pastelle, ed. Ul-
rike Lorenz, vol. II (Weimar: VDG, 2003), 590–92.
173. It is important that my argument here not be taken to indicate directionality in
German jazz reception, e.g., from a consideration of jazz as white to one of jazz as
Black music. Instead, throughout the period, both points of view are present and can,
only with difficulty, be mapped chronologically and/or politically. The African Ameri-
can jazz musician Sam Wooding and the white jazz musician Paul Whiteman, examined
in chapters 2 and 3, are examples of this difficulty.
174. On Berlin jazz bands in Vienna, see Nowakowski, “Jazz in Wien,” 84–97.
Chapter 2
The quotation cited in the epigraph is from Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, “Lob der Re-
vue,” Musikblätter des Anbruch 8 (March/April 1926), 55.
1. Oscar Bie, “Chocolate Kiddies,” Berliner Börsen-Courier, May 26, 1925.
2. As O. M. Seibt wrote from Berlin in the Billboard: “Ever since the French oc-
cupied large slices of German territory with thousands of black soldiers, who at the
moment of writing are still stationed there, the majority of the German people do not
exactly crave to see colored performers, and repeated experiences with such acts turned
out indifferent successes, no matter how clever the individual artiste may have been”
(Seibt, quoted in Mark Miller, Some Hustling This: Taking Jazz to the World 1914–1929
[Toronto: Mercury Press, 2005], 123). In addition, Garvin Bushell, a member of Wood-
ing’s band, later reported the following story: “After opening night at the Admiral’s
Palace there were people out front crowding around the performers and musicians. Ev-
erybody was commenting on how well we’d performed, how much they loved our work,
and what a great show it was. But one German evidently had had too many drinks. He
came right up into the crowd and tore open his shirt, saying in German (which I spoke),
‘I’m a German to my heart. I don’t understand why the government allows these black
people to come to our country. During the war they cut off our noses and our ears.’ He
was speaking about the Senegalese, you know. The Senegalese didn’t take prisoners:
when a German went down they just cut off the end of his nose or an ear and put it on a
string. That way when they went back home they could show how many men they’d
killed. So this guy went on, saying, ‘I have not forgotten what they did to us, and I won’t
stand for it. They should run them out of Germany’” (Garvin Bushell, as told to Mark
Tucker, Jazz From the Beginning [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988, 57]).
3. One indication of the increasing importance of Wooding’s jazz band to the
show’s success is that while original advertisements mentioned neither jazz nor Wood-
ing, by the end of the show’s run in July, the Berliner Tageblatt ran ads that referenced
both jazz and Sam Wooding’s name specifically (Berliner Tageblatt, July 2–5, 1925).
4. On Garland, see “William ‘Will’ Garland,” Black Europe, eds. Jeffrey Green,
Rainer Lotz, Howard Rye, vol. 1 (Hambergen: Bear Family Records, 2013), 227–32.
See further: “Scala,” Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, November 27, 1924; Ejk., “Scala Wih-
nachtsprogramm,” 8 Uhr Abendblatt, December 6, 1924; “Aus den Varietéprogram-
men,” Berliner Tageblatt, December 14, 1924; “Die Scala,” Berliner Volkszeitung, De-
cember 14, 1924.
5. On the Fisk Jubilee Singers generally, see Andrew Ward, Dark Midnight When
I Rise: The Story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,
2000). On the group in Europe, see “Spirituals,” Black Europe, eds. Jeffrey Green,
Rainer Lotz, Howard Rye, vol. 1 (Hambergen: Bear Family Records, 2013), 32–37.
Responses to their May 1925 Berlin performance include: Dr. Un., “Neger-Musik,”
Berliner Morgenpost, May 15, 1925; Li Zielesch, “Bei den schwarzen Sängern,” Ber-
liner Tageblatt, May 15, 1925; Z. “Plantage-Melodien,” Neue Berliner Zeitung. Das 12
Uhr Blatt May 16, 1925; Klaus Pringsheim, “Die singenden Neger,” MM der Montag
Morgen, May 18, 1925.
6. The following examples were to my knowledge first traced in the BZ am Mittag
by Konrad Nowakowski. See his “Jazz in Wien: Die Anfänge” Anklaenge 2011/2012,
Special Issue: Jazz Unlimited: Beiträge zur Jazz-Rezeption in Österreich (Vienna: Mille
Tre Verlag, 2012), 134–36.
7. “Pete Zabriskie,” Black Europe, eds. Jeffrey Green, Rainer Lotz, Howard Rye,
vol. 1 (Hambergen: Bear Family Records, 2013), 292–94. Advertisements for Za-
briskie’s jazz band appear in the BZ am Mittag from September 29, 1922, onward. They
can also be found in the 8 Uhr Abendblatt from at least October 3, 1922, onward. Ad-
vertisements for Hines and the “Bobo Jazzband” appear in the same newspapers from
January 2 through January 13.
8. On Hayes in Europe, see “Roland Hayes,” Green, Lotz, and Rye, Black Europe,
vol. 1, 138–43. Hayes’ appearance was widely advertised in Berlin newspapers and
received a substantial amount of discussion as, for example, in: a. “Der schwarze
Tenor,” Vossische Zeitung, May 12, 1924; G. St., “Konzertwege,” Welt am Montag, May
12, 1924; schr., “Der schwarze Tenor,” Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, May 13, 1924.
9. Advertisements for Clapham’s band appear, for example, in the Berliner Mor-
genpost, Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, and BZ am Mittag between May 6 and May 12, 1924.
10. On Clapham and these recordings, of which no known copy exists, see “George
Clapham,” Black Europe, vol. 2, 232–34.
11. On the biographies of these jazz musicians in relation to the Southern Synco-
pated Orchestra, see Howard Rye, “Southern Syncopated Orchestra: The Roster,” Black
Music Research Journal 30:1 (Spring 2010), 22 (Boucher), 26 (Clapham), 34–35
(Buddy Gilmore), 36 (Mattie Gilmore). Rye indicates that Hines may also have been a
member of the SSO at one point, but this remains unconfirmed (39).
12. Julian Fuhs (also Fuss) was born in Berlin but emigrated to the United States in
1910. In 1924, he returned to Germany and made a name for himself as a popular
bandleader, in particular by performing jazz-like music in revues such as An Alle at the
Grosses Schauspielhaus or Wild West Mädel at the Neues Theater am Zoo in late 1924
and early 1925. See Ulrich Biller’s collection of facts and articles related to Fuhs’ career
at http://grammophon-platten.de/page.php?478.0. Significant here is that James Horton
Boucher, a Black British violinist, also performed with the Julian Fuhs band in Berlin
Wild West Mädel. Boucher had been a member of the SSO as well (Rye, “Southern
Syncopated Orchestra: The Roster,” 22).
13. Alex Hyde was born in Hamburg in 1898 but emigrated in the same year with
his parents to the United States. In 1924, he returned to Germany via London, perform-
ing in Hannover, Berlin, and Munich in 1924 and 1925 as well as recording for German
labels like Vox. See Horst Bergmeier and Rainer Lotz, Alex Hyde. Bio-Discography
(Menden: Jazzfreund, 1985) as well as additions by Ulrich Biller at http://grammo-
phon-platten.de/page.php?334
14. The London Sonora Band was a formation under drummer and saxophonist
Bobby Hind. Like previous groups, it premiered at the Scala in September 1924 and
then, in December, moved to the Barberina, where it would remain until May 1925,
when Alex Hyde’s formation replaced it. See “Aus den Varieteprogrammen,” Berliner
Tageblatt, September 12, 1924; advertisement for Barberina, “London Sonora Band.
Das beste Jazz-Orchester der Welt,” Berliner Tageblatt, December 14, 1924. On this
band, see the collection of materials by Ulrich Biller at http://grammophon-platten.de/
page.php?503
15. On this American group’s very early appearance in Munich, see Nowakowski,
“Jazz in Wien,” 95n241. The group appeared in the Lessing Theater’s production in
Berlin (Programm for “Wien gib acht!,” ca. 1924, Theater, Berlin Collection; AR 3048/
MF 450; box 1; folder 3; Leo Baeck Institute).
16. Other than the evidence the group left in the discographical record, little is
known about this group’s impact in Berlin or its exact arrival. Period references to the
band’s presence in Berlin include: “Berlin Now Dancing Nightly; Ban Lifted,” Variety
(May 1925): 50; Rez., “Amateurjazzkapellen,” Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, March 4,
1926.
17. Fritz Zielesch did, however, connect the Fisk Jubilee Singers with the Chocolate
Kiddies revue in a discussion of race relations in America that appeared before the pre-
miere of the revue (“Der Lebenskampf der schwarzen Rasse,” Berliner Tageblatt, May
23, 1925). In addition, critic Leopold Schmidt, in a later piece from July 1925, con-
trasted the authenticity of the Fisk Jubilee Singers with the “ghastly [gräßliche] jazz
band” in the Admiralspalast (“Rückblick,” Berliner Tageblatt, July 22, 1925.).
18. For example, while the 1928 article “Jazz-Band” contains photographs of other
African American jazz bands, Wooding’s individual portrait and name are featured
alongside white American, German, and European jazz musicians like Vincent Lopez,
Paul Whiteman, Jack Hylton, Eric Borchard, and Fred Ross (Eduard Duisberg, “Jazz-
Band,” Das Magazin 4 [May 1928], 2265).
19. Mark Miller, Some Hustling This: Taking Jazz to the World, 1914–1929 (To-
ronto: Mercury Press, 2005), 53–54.
20. Sam Wooding, “An American Dream for Harlem, New York (n.d. ca. 1980s),”
Sam and Rae (Harrison) Wooding Papers, box 1, folders 1–2, Schomburg Center for
Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, NY.
21. Chip Deffaa, Voices from the Jazz Age: Profiles of Eight Vintage Jazzmen (Ur-
bana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 19.
22. Though the complete history of the group remains to be written, Wooding and
the Chocolate Kiddies toured Europe from May 1925 through June 1926. The show
then fell apart, and Wooding continued on individually with some of the show’s per-
formers, e.g., Greenlee and Drayton. Wooding toured like this for the remainder of 1926
and into 1927 when he next departed for South America, touring there until around July
when Dave Peyton wrote of Wooding’s performance in Argentina (Dave Peyton, “The
Musical Bunch,” Chicago Defender, July 2, 1927; Miller, Some Hustling This, 155–59).
After returning to the United States, Wooding performed in New York and then left
again for Europe and Berlin in June 1928 to premiere Die schwarze Revue (The Black
Revue), discussed in chapter 4. After Berlin, he played in Brussels, Paris, Copenhagen,
and elsewhere. He left Europe in December 1931 and was back performing at Harlem’s
Lafayette Theatre (Advertisement for Sam Wooding and His International Chocolate
Kiddies’ Orchestra, New York Amsterdam News, January 27, 1932, 10). Though it dif-
fers in some details than what is presented here, see “Sam Wooding,” Green, Lotz, and
Rye, Black Europe, vol. 2, 280–90. Further details on the path of the Chocolate Kiddies
revue across Germany and Europe between 1925 and 1926 are presented in Bo Lind-
ström and Dan Vernhettes, Travelling Blues: The Life and Music of Tommy Ladnier
(Paris: Jazz’Edit, 2009), 87–110.
23. The December 1925 return of the Chocolate Kiddies did not garner much notice
in the Berlin press. Though advertisements can be found in major newspapers such as
Die Berliner Tageblatt, Vossische Zeitung, Neue Berliner Zeitung. Das 12 Uhr Blatt
beginning on December 20, 1925.
24. Sam Wooding, “Die Verklärung des Jazz,” Berliner Tageblatt, July 31, 1926.
Advertisement for the Faun des Westens for “Sam Wooding’s Famous Symphonie-
Orchestra of the Chocolat [sic] Kiddies,” 8 Uhr Abendblatt, June 22, 1926; Advertise-
ment for the Faun des Westens for the “Greenlee-Drayton-Plantation-Revue. Musik des
berühmten Sam Woodings Symphonie-Jazz-Orchesters,” 8 Uhr Abendblatt, July 21,
1926. See also Frank Warschauer, “Tanz bei Sam Wooding,” BZ am Mittag, July 9,
1926.
25. Advertisement for “Sam Wooding’s World Famous Jazz Orchestra,” Berliner
Tageblatt, October 10, 1926.
26. This second revue, which starred Johnny Hudgins, Edith Wilson, Greenlee and
Drayton, Hilda Rogers, U. S. Thompson, Louise Warner, and Benise Dant, was widely
reviewed, though less positively than the Chocolate Kiddies. See: G. “Schwarze Revue.
Im Ufa-Palast am Zoo,” Neue Berliner Zeitung. Das 12 Uhr Blatt, June 16, 1928; gol.,
“Die schwarze Revue,” Vossische Zeitung, June 16, 1926; Georg Herzberg, “Die
schwarze Revue,” Film-Kurier, June 16, 1928; m., “Die ‘Schwarze Revue.’ Ufa-Palast
am Zoo,” 8 Uhr Abendblatt, June 16, 1928; Oly, “Die schwarze Revue,” Berliner
Börsen-Zeitung, June 16, 1928; FB, “Die schwarze Revue,” Deutsche Allgemeine Zei-
tung, June 17, 1928; lo., “Schwarze Revue,” Berliner Tageblatt, June 17, 1928; s., “Die
schwarze Revue,” Berliner Volkszeitung, June 17, 1928; Hans W. Fischer, “Die schwarze
Revue,” Welt am Montag, June 18, 1928; “Sam Woodings Schokoladejungens und an-
dere Berliner Ufa-Programme,” Der Artist 2222 (July 20, 1928).
27. Discussions of this last documented appearance by Wooding in Berlin include:
MK, “Sam Wooding spielt auf,” Tempo, April 7, 1930; ü., “Sam Wooding und die Choc-
olate Kiddies,” 8 Uhr Abendblatt, April 9, 1930; ML, “Sam Wooding auf dem Dachgar-
ten,” Neue Berliner Zeitung. Das 12 Uhr Blatt, April 10, 1930.
28. Bernhard H. Behncke, “Sam Wooding and the Chocolate Kiddies at the Thalia-
Theater in Hamburg, 28 July 1925 to 24 August 1925,” Storyville 60 (1975), 217. On
Wooding’s opinion of Whiteman, see additionally Deffaa, Voices of the Jazz Age, 10–
13.
29. “Sam Wooding and Orchestra Lead European Musicians: Makes Hit,” Chicago
Defender, July 12, 1930, 5.
30. Wooding, “Die Verklärung des Jazz.”
31. Ibid.
32. John Howland, “Ellingtonian Extended Composition and the Symphonic Jazz
Model,” Annual Review of Jazz Studies 14, eds. Edward Berger, Henry Martin, Dan
Morgenstern (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009) 4.
33. James A. “Billboard” Jackson, “Billboard Likes Johnny Hudgins,” Baltimore
Afro-American, January 10, 1925.
34. The information in this initial release was available by April 24 in Germany. Der
Artist has a short note about a performance by forty African American artists that will
premiere on May 25. Under the rubric “Was uns gerade noch fehlt” (The Last Thing We
Need), an anonymous author bemoans the plan as yet another example of the “invasion”
of Black artists in Berlin’s entertainment district (Der Artist 2053 [April 24, 1925]). On
the wider response to the Chocolate Kiddies, see below.
35. “To Offer Colored Revue in Europe,” the Billboard, April 18, 1925, 5, 112.
36. The transliteration of Leonidoff’s name varies. It is given both as “Leonidow”
and as “Leonidov.” The following discussion of Leonidoff’s role is based on the au-
thor’s joint research with Konrad Nowakowski.
37. On Leonidoff’s activities with the MAT, see the retrospective account offered in
his memoirs, published as Leonid Leonidov, Rampa i zhizn (Paris: Russkoe teatral’noe
izdatel’stvo za-Granitsei, 1955). This account focuses almost exclusively on the person-
alities he encountered in the Russian theater, with no mention of his involvement with
the Chocolate Kiddies. My thanks to Vlad Bilenkin for help in assessing this work.
38. Karl Schlögel, “Berlin: ‘Stiefmutter unter den russischen Städten,” Der große
Exodus. Die russische Emigration und ihre Zentren 1917–1941, ed. Karl Schlögel (Mu-
nich: C. H. Beck, 1994), 237.
39. On Gest’s biography, style, and position in the historiography of the MAT, see
Valleri J. Hohman, Russian Culture and the Theatrical Performance in America, 1891–
1933 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 75–100.
40. “Negerexotik im Raimund-Theater,” Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, November 17,
1925. Leonidoff relates, however, that this initial project stalled when the salary de-
mands became too high.
41. Advertisement for “Alabam Fantasies” at the Lafayette Theatre, New York
Times, January 21, 1925, 5. For details on the contract as well as its London partners,
see J. A. Jackson, “Around Harlem with Jackson,” Baltimore Afro-American, February
7, 1925.
42. Abbie Mitchell, “Autobiographical Notes: Club Alabam,” Will Mercer Cook Pa-
pers, Series G, 157–7, folder 20, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard Univer-
sity.
43. “‘Alabam Fantasies’ a Hit at the Lafayette Theatre,” New York Amsterdam News,
January 21, 1925, 6.
44. Howard Rye, “Three Eddies,” The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd edition,
Grove Music Online (Oxford University Press). http://oxfordindex.oup.com/
view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.J708100
45. On issues facing Black performers in the period immediately preceding the
1920s, see, for example, Karen Sotiropoulos, Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn
of the Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
46. “Lyons Suing Club Alabam,” Variety, February 18, 1925, 37; “Lyons vs Alabam
on Thursday,” the Billboard, March 21, 1925, 22.
47. Sam Wooding, interviewed by Chris Albertson, New York, April 26, 1975. Orig-
inally conducted for the Smithsonian, these interviews with Wooding have been posted
by Albertson on his website. The relevant section is at minute 44.00 and can be found
at: http://stomp-off.blogspot.com/2012/03/sam-wooding-iii.html
48. It seems to have reached the Black community in Harlem as well. Abbie Mitch-
ell remarks that when she returned from Europe in 1923, acting in New York had
changed dramatically and everyone was speaking of Stanislavski (Abbie Mitchell, “Au-
tobiographical Notes re: 1920s,” Will Mercer Cook Papers, Series G, 157–7, folder 19,
Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University).
49. My discussion of Greenlee and Drayton and the associated idea of the “class
act” is based on Jean and Marshall Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Ver-
nacular Dance (New York: Da Capo, 1968), 291–97.
50. On this period of Ellington’s career, see Mark Tucker, Ellington: The Early
Years (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).
51. Duke Ellington, Music is My Mistress (New York: Da Capo, 1973), 71.
52. Tucker, Ellington: The Early Years, 126.
53. “Jig Walk” alone was recorded on twelve separate occasions after its Berlin
premiere (Tucker, Ellington: The Early Years, 135). See also the discography of Euro-
pean recordings of Ellington’s tunes in the 1920s in Björn Englund, “Chocolate Kid-
dies: The Show That Brought Jazz to Europe,” Storyville 62 (December 1975–January
1976), 50.
54. “Artists to Make Tour of Many European Capitals,” Baltimore Afro-American,
April 25, 1925, 14.
55. “Bamville Club Hosts Entertain Artists on Eve of European Trip,” New York
Age, May 9, 1925, 6.
56. Floyd G. Snelson, “‘Chocolate Kiddies’ Company Sails for Germany,” the Pitts-
burgh Courier, May 16, 1925, 10. Though it is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is
important to note that the revue received treatment in the African American press as
well as in Variety throughout the summer, especially due to contract disputes that arose
while the group played in Berlin. For example: “Two Artists Abroad May Quit Show,”
Baltimore Afro-American, July 4, 1925, A4.
57. O. M. Seibt, “Berlin News Letter,” The Billboard (March 28, 1925), 86.
58. Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1993), 165, 176.
59. Jacobsohn’s role is acknowledged and praised in E. B–r, “Neger-Revue in Ber-
lin. Gastspiel der ‘Chocolate Kiddies im Admiralspalast,’” Neue Berliner Zeitung. Das
12 Uhr Blatt, May 26, 1925.
60. Advertisement for Chocolate Kiddies, Berliner Tageblatt, May 27, 1925.
61. Advertisement for Chocolate Kiddies, Berliner Tageblatt, June 6, 1925.
62. “Die Neger proben. Das schwarze Gastspiel im Theater im Admiralspalast,”
Neue Berliner Zeitung. Das 12 Uhr Blatt, May 22, 1925; M. P–t., “Chocolate Kiddies
im Admiralspalast,” Berliner Morgenpost, May 24, 1925; Li Zielesch, “Die ‘Schoko-
ladenkinder’ in Zivil. Bei der ersten Probe der Negerkünstler,” Berliner Volkszeitung,
May 24, 1925; ls., “Die Neger proben,” Berliner Montagspost, May 25, 1925.
63. A number of scenes of the group’s appearance in Moscow can be seen in Dziga
Vertov’s film A Sixth Part of the World (1926).
64. “Program of Chocolate Kiddies Revue,” Institut für Theaterwissenschaft der
Freien Universität Berlin.Theaterhistorische Sammlung Walter Unruh, ca. May 1925.
65. On the role of Ellington and his music in the revue, see below.
66. According to the program, the performers were Thadeaus Greenlee and Rufus
Drayton, the Three Eddies (Shakey Beasley, Tiny Ray, and Chick Horsey), Lottie Gee,
Margaret Sims, Arthur Bryson, Bobby and Babe Goins, Arthur Strut Payne, Adelaide
Hall, Charles Davis, George Statson, and Sam Wooding’s Orchestra. The chorus was
made up of Jessie Crawford, Viola Branch, Rita Walker, Thelma Green, Bobby Vincent,
Thelma Watkins, Marie Bushell, Bernice Miles, Mamie Savoy, Allegritta Anderson,
Lydia Jones, Helen Miles, and Ruth Williams.
67. This is a reference to the popular series of language instruction books promising
to teach Germans 1000 words of a foreign language, e.g., 1000 Worte English (Berlin:
Ullstein Verlag 1925).
68. “Program of Chocolate Kiddies Revue.”
69. Bushell, Jazz From the Beginning, 55.

70. Further details on song names and writers for all of the acts can be found in
Englund, “Chocolate Kiddies: The Show that Brought Jazz to Europe,” 45–46.
71. Ian Cameron Williams, Underneath a Harlem Moon: The Harlem to Paris Years
of Adelaide Hall (New York: Continuum, 2002), 75.
72. Bushell, Jazz From the Beginning, 55.
73. Behncke, “Sam Wooding and the Chocolate Kiddies at the Thalia-Theater,” 217.
74. Sam Wooding quoted in Egino Biagioni, Herb Flemming: A Jazz Pioneer
Around the World (Alphen aan de Rijn: Micrography, 1977), 19. The band recorded at
the Vox studio in July 1925 in Berlin and released the following sides: “Alabamy
Bound,” “By the Waters of Minnetonka,” “O Katharina,” and “Shanghai Shuffle.” Each
song was recorded and issued in 10-and 12-inch versions (“Sam Wooding,” Green,
Lotz, and Rye, Black Europe, vol. 2, 283–84).
75. On Whiteman’s “Experiment in Modern Music,” see chapter 3. Paul Whiteman
and His Orchestra, “By the Waters of Minnetonka” (Victor 19391). On this song in the
context of symphonic jazz, see John Howland, Between the Muses and the Masses:
Symphonic Jazz, “Glorified” Entertainment, and the Rise of the American Musical
Middlebrow, 1920–1944 (PhD diss., Stanford 2001), 142–54.
76. Nora M. Alter and Lutz Koepnick, Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of
Modern German Culture (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 7.
77. Fritz Giese, Girlkultur: Vergleiche zwischen europäischem und amerikanischem
Lebens-und Rhythmusgefühl (Munich: Delphin Verlag, 1925), 33. See chapter 4 for
further discussion of Giese’s work.
78. Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the
Land of Technology,’” New German Critique, 40 (Winter 1987): 179–224; Margaret
Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution
(Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
79. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992),
158.
80. Ibid., 159, trans. altered.
81. Here I am not as concerned about rehashing the Adorno-Benjamin debate of the
1930s in relation to experience as to read out of Adorno’s own texts on music a set of
questions and problematics. For a comparative view of their respective employments of
the concept of experience, however, see Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern
American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Los Angeles and Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005), 312–60.
82. Theodor W. Adorno, “Music in the Background,” Essays on Music, ed. Richard
Leppert, trans. Susan Gillespie (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002):
506–9. Originally published as “Musik im Hintergrund,” Vossische Zeitung, January 31,
1934.
83. Adorno, “Music in the Background,” 507.
84. Ibid., 508.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid., 509.
87. Richard Leppert, “Music ‘Pushed to the Edge of Existence’ (Adorno, Listening,
and the Question of Hope),” Cultural Critique 60 (Spring 2005), 95.
89. Ibid.
90. Albrecht Riethmüller, “Hermetik, Schock, Faßlichkeit. Zum Verhältnis von
Musikwerk und Publikum in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts,” Archiv für Musik-
wissenschaft 37 (1980), 48.
92. Ibid.
93. Theodor Adorno, “On the Social Situation of Music,” Essays on Music, 409,
trans. altered.
94. Ibid.
95. Ibid.
96. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben,
Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1997), 270.
97. Theodor Adorno, “On the Social Situation of Music,” 409.
98. Riethmüller, “Hermetik, Schock, Faßlichkeit,” 47.
99. The author consulted the following reviews in Berlin newspapers: Oscar Bie,
“Negertheater,” Berliner Börsen-Courier May 26, 1925; E. B–r, “Neger-Revue in Berlin.
Gastspiel der ‘Chocolate Kiddies im Admiralspalast,” Neue Berliner Zeitung. Das 12 Uhr
Blatt, May 26, 1925; Michael Charol, “Negritisierung. Die Chocolate Kiddies im Admi-
ralspalast,” Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, May 26, 1925; Fred Hildebrandt, “Negertheater,”
Berliner Tageblatt, May 26, 1925; P., “‘Chocolate Kiddies.’ Die Negertruppe,” Berliner
Lokal-Anzeiger, May 26, 1925; Kurt Pinthus, “Die schwarze Schau im Admiralspalast,” 8
Uhr Abendblatt, May 26, 1925; St., “Theater im Admiralspalast,” Neue Preußische Zei-
tung (Kreuz-Zeitung), May 26, 1925; Erich Urban, “Die schwarze Revue. ‘Chocolate
Kiddies’ im Admiralspalast,” BZ am Mittag, May 26, 1925; Fritz Zielesch, “Chocolate
Kiddies,” Berliner Volkszeitung, May 26, 1925; a., “Neger-Operette. Die ‘Chocolate Kid-
dies,’” Vossische Zeitung, May 27, 1925; gre, “Chocolate Kiddies,” Deutsche Allgemeine
Zeitung, May 27, 1925; RK, “Neger-Theater. ‘Chocolate Kiddies’ im Admiralspalast,”
Berliner Allgemeine Zeitung, May 27, 1925; “Schwarz-Weißes,” Vorwärts, May 27, 1925;
Yuri Ofrosimov, “негритянская оперетта (Admirals-Palast),” Rul, May 28, 1925; Klaus
Pringsheim, “Neger Revue. Chocolate Kiddies im Admiralspalast,” MM Der Montag
Morgen, June 2, 1925; “Negertheater. Chocolate Kiddies,” Welt am Montag, June 2, 1925;
Jef., “Amerikanisierung mit Musik,” Berliner Montagspost, June 8, 1925; Artur Michel,
“Chocolate Kiddies. Ein Abschiedsgruß,” Vossische Zeitung, June 13, 1925. Note should
also be made of other reviews that appeared in newspapers and journals outside of Berlin,
e.g.: “Berlin hat seine Negeroperette,” Der Artist 2058 (May 29, 1925); George Stein,
“Chocolate Kiddies,” Hamburger Anzeiger, May 29, 1925; Arthur Berkun- Wulffen,
“Neger-Revue im Berliner Admiralspalst,” Das Organ 862 (May 30, 1925): 11; Herwarth
Walden, “Schwarzkünstler,” Die Weltbühne 21 (June 2, 1925): 818–19; Walther Hanse-
mann, “Chocolate Kiddies,” Altonaer Neueste Nachrichten; Hermann Wedderkop,
“Chocolate Kiddies im Admiralspalast,” Der Querschnitt 5 (1925): 653.
100. One article recounts a confrontation in a Berlin bar between two African Amer-
ican performers from the group and German nationalists. In this account, the national-
ists are thrown out of the bar after the patrons stand up against this injustice (A. A.,
“Weiße Kulturträger,” Welt am Montag, June 2, 1925). Regardless of whether the event
took place in this manner, as noted earlier in footnote 2, troupe members later recalled
similar incidents with German nationalists.
101. Sam Wooding quoted in Biagioni, Herb Flemming, 19–20. Various versions of
this story have been given by Wooding and others from the band (Bushell, Jazz from the
Beginning, 55; Deffaa, Voices of the Jazz Age, 17). “Bis” here refers not to the German
preposition meaning “until,” but to the French-language term for “encore.”
102. Paul Bekker, Die Sinfonie von Beethoven bis Mahler (Berlin: Schuster, 1918),
17.
103. Bie, “Chocolate Kiddies.”
104. Fritz Zielesch, “Chocolate Kiddies.”
105. Michel, “Chocolate Kiddies.”
106. Pinthus, “Die schwarze Schau im Admiralspalast.”
107. Alfred Lion, interview in documentary film Blue Note: A Story of Modern Jazz
(dir. Julian Benedikt, 1997).
108. Klaus Pringsheim, “Chocolate Kiddies,” Das Tage-Buch 6 (May 1925), 805.
See further his review from June 2 “Neger-Revue. Chocolate Kiddies im Admiral-
spalast.”
109. E. B-r, “Neger-Revue in Berlin.”
110. Nonetheless and demonstrating the wide range of views present at the time, the
reviewer for the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger suggested in a generally negative article that
the “squawking and squeaking (Gequäke und Gequieke) was not as annoying” as usual,
and that German jazz bands would do well to learn from them (P., “Chocolate Kiddies,”
Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger).
111. Rumpelstilzchen [Adolf Stein], Haste Worte? (Berlin: Winkler, 1925), 321.
112. Fred Hildebrandt, “Negertheater.”
113. Urban, “Die schwarze Revue.”
114. Walden, “Schwarzkünstler,” 818.
115. Ibid.
116. Ibid., 818–19.
117. Bie, “Chocolate Kiddies.”
118. St., “Theater im Admiralspalast.”
119. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 26.
120. Ibid., 26–27.
121. RK, “Negertheater.”
122. Fritz Zielesch, “Chocolate Kiddies.”
123. Li., “Black people. Neger-Revue im Metropoltheater,” Neue Berliner Zeitung,
July 14, 1926.
124. Born in Hungary, Ernö Rapée was an American composer of popular, jazz-
inflected music of the 1920s, but who remained active in Europe and Berlin through his
activities with music for silent film.
125. The Funkstunde was the first radio station in Berlin and all of Germany, opening
in 1923.
126. Kurt Weill, “Tanzmusik [1926],” Musik und musikalisches Theater: Gesam-
melte Schriften, eds. Stephen Hinton and Jürgen Schebera. Mainz: Schott, 2000), 298.
127. On Rathaus’ as well as other composers’ use of jazz and America, see the dis-
cussion in chapter 7.
128. Karol Rathaus, “Jazzdämmerung?” Die Musik 19 (February 1927): 333–36.
129. Ibid., 333, 335.
130. Ibid. Italics in original.
131. Ibid., 336.
132. Ibid.
134. Ibid.
135. Hans David, “Abschied vom Jazz,” Melos 9 (1930): 413–17. See chapter 7 for
further examples.
136. See note 27 for further reviews of Wooding’s last performances in Berlin.
137. David, “Abschied vom Jazz,” 413.
138. Ibid., 415.
139. Excluding reviews of return appearances in Berlin, some of the most important
post-1925 references to Wooding include: Alfred Baresel, Das neue Jazzbuch (Leipzig:
Zimmermann, 1929), 13; Max Butting, “Jazz,” Sozialistische Monatshefte (December
13, 1926): 879–80; Albert K. Henschel, “Paul Whiteman,” Die Weltbühne 22 (July 13,
1926): 74–75; Karol Rathaus, “Jazzdämmerung?” Die Musik 19 (February 1927): 333–
36; Heinrich Strobel and Frank Warschauer, “Interessante Jazzplatten,” Melos 9 (1930):
482; Frank Warschauer, “Negerrevuen und Neger-Jazz,” Das blaue Heft 8 (February 15,
1926): 108–12.
Chapter 3
The quotation cited in the epigraph is from Jaap Kool, “Vom Negerdorf zur Philhar-
monie,” Uhu 1:2 (November 1924), 31.
1. On the debates over the jazzing of the classics, as well as other existing musical
composition more generally, which was known as Verjazzung (jazzification/jazzing),
see: Bernd Hoffmann, Aspekte zur Jazz-Rezeption in Deutschland: Afro-amerikanische
Musik im Spiegel der Musikpresse 1900–1945 (Graz: Akademische Druck-und Verlag-
sanstalt, 2003), 75–76; Eckhard John, Musikbolschewismus: Die Politisierung der
Musik in Deutschland 1918–1938 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994), 293; Cornelius Partsch,
“That Weimar Jazz,” New England Review 22 (Fall 2002), 186–90; Heribert Schröder,
Tanz-und Unterhaltungsmusik in Deutschland 1918–1933 (Bonn: Verlag für system-
atische Musikwissenschaft, 1990), 366–71; Jed Rasula, “Jazzbandism,” The Georgia
Review 60:1 (2006), 104–5.
2. It should be noted that while all three were born outside of Germany’s borders
at the time, each of their works were published by a German press, Berlin in the cases
of Janowitz and Schickele and Leipzig in the case of Renker.
3. The recent collection edited by Kristen Krick-Aigner and Marc-Oliver Schuster,

Jazz in German-Language Literature (Würzbug: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013),
does address Schickele and Janowitz in articles by Eileen Simonow, Jürgen Grandt, and
Pascale Cohen-Avenel, along with other examples of jazz in German-language litera-
ture. There is no mention of either Renker or the symphony in these works, however.
4. On Whiteman, see Don Rayno, Paul Whiteman: Pioneer in American Music,
vol. 1 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003); Thomas DeLong, Pops: Paul Whiteman,
King of Jazz (Piscataway, NJ: New Century Publishers, 1983).
5. Paul Whiteman and Margaret McBride, Jazz [1926] (New York: Arno Press,
1974), 33.
6. Ibid., 27–28.
7. Max Brod, “Shimmy und Foxtrott” Der Auftakt 2 (1922), 256–59. This piece
was also published under the same title in Prager Tagblatt, October 8, 1922.
8. Whiteman and McBride, Jazz, 26.
9. See, for example, Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and
the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998),
59–94.
10. Paul Allen Anderson, Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance
Thought (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 235.
11. Paul Whiteman, quoted in Arthur von Gizycki-Arkadjew, “Zwei Stimmen zum
Jazz,” Der Artist 2239 (1928). Quoted in Schröder, Tanz-und Unterhaltungsmusik, 298.
12. On this space, see, for example, Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual
Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2001), 176–77.
13. DeLong, Pops, 95.
14. Lustige Blätter, Paul Whiteman Collection, Berlin Folder, Williams College, ca.
June 1926. My thanks to librarian Linda Hall, Whiteman author Don Rayno, and Mer-
edith Soeder for helping make these materials available to me. Any document contained
within the Whiteman Collection will be designated in the footnotes.
15. “Ein Paulus als Saulus,” Neue Berliner Zeitung. Das 12 Uhr Blatt, June 15,
1926. Paul Whiteman Collection, Berlin Folder, Williams College.
16. Fred Hildebrandt, “Audienz beim Jazzbandkönig,” Der Tag (Berlin) June 13,
1926. Paul Whiteman Collection, Berlin Folder, Williams College; Richard Dyck, “Der
Mann, der den Jazz durchsetzte. Gespräch mit Paul Whiteman,” 8 Uhr Abendblatt, June
8, 1926. Paul Whiteman Collection, Berlin Folder, Williams College. Paul Whiteman,
“Paul Whiteman,” Berliner Tageblatt, June 22, 1926.
17. Albert K. Henschel, “Paul Whiteman,” Die Weltbühne 22 (July 13, 1926), 74.
18. Paul Goldmann, “Paul Whiteman und sein Jazzorchester,” Neue Freie Presse,
July 5, 1926.
19. On this and band members’ reactions to Berlin, see Rayno, Paul Whiteman, 135.
20. “Whiteman sucht den besten Foxtrott,” Vossische Zeitung, June 12, 1926; an
identical article is published in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung on June 14, 1926, as
well.
21. M. M., “Whiteman auf der Probe: Jazzband im Großen Schauspielhaus,” Vos-
sische Zeitung, June 15, 1926.
22. DeLong, Pops, 95.

23. Karen Painter, Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 185.
25. Cover of Simplicissimus 31:14 (July 2, 1926): 185. Paul Whiteman Collection,
Berlin Folder, Williams College.
26. Hans Siemsen, “Der Jazz-König kommt nach Berlin! Paul Whiteman,” 8 Uhr
Abendblatt, May 28, 1926.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Whiteman, “Paul Whiteman.”
30. Ibid.
31. Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, “Lob der Revue,” Musikblätter des Anbruch 8
(March 1926): 153–55; “Mechanische Musik,” Auftakt 6 (1926): 170–73; “Lob des
Grammophons,” Das Kunstblatt 10 (1926): 39–41.
32. Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, “Paul Whiteman,” Berliner Tageblatt, May 29,
1926. See also the similar article Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, “Paul Whiteman, der
Jazz-König,” Das Stachelschwein 3:2 (1926): 9–10.
33. Stuckenschmidt, “Paul Whiteman.”
34. Aside from Stuckenschmidt’s and Siemsen’s early pre-readings of the concert,
Hungarian pianist and critic Arpad Sándor published “Jazz” in the Berliner Tageblatt on
June 9, 1926, in which he, too, discusses Whiteman, though more generally. In addition,
an excerpt from Henry Osgood’s So This Is Jazz was reprinted as “Jazz-Anatomie. Zu
dem Berliner Gastspiel des Whiteman Jazz-Symphonie-Orchesters,” Deutsche Allge-
meine Zeitung, June 24, 1926. Finally, Arthur Rundt, discussed in chapter 6, published
an article about jazz, largely based upon his travelogue, Amerika ist anders (Arthur
Rundt, “Jazz,” Berliner Börsen-Courier, June 25, 1926. Paul Whiteman Collection,
Berlin Folder, Williams College).
35. Hugo Leichtentritt, “Zur Einführung,” program for Paul Whiteman’s concerts at
the Grosses Schauspielhaus, ca. June 1926. Author’s personal copy.
36. On the second program, see Oscar Bie, “Das zweite Programm der Whitemanka-
pelle,” Berliner Börsen-Courier, June 29, 1926. Paul Whiteman Collection, Berlin Folder,
Williams College; “Whitemans Sonntag,” Berliner Montagspost, June 28, 1926.
37. Further details regarding Whiteman’s itinerary and reception abroad are given in
Rayno, Paul Whiteman, 127–38.
38. Rayno, Paul Whiteman, 135.
39. Goldmann wrote back home to Vienna: “Just like everywhere else, Paul White-
man was an enormous success with the audience in Berlin. During the concerts there
was tremendous applause after each number. The Berlin critics, however, rejected the
‘symphonic jazz orchestra’ for the most part, despite all recognition of the technical
achievement” (“Paul Whiteman und sein Jazzorchester”).
40. “Der Jazzkönig: Paul Whiteman im Großen Schauspielhaus,” Vossische Zei-
tung, June 27, 1926.
41. Haf. [Hans Feld], “Paul Whiteman der Jazzkönig,” Film Kurier, June 29, 1926.
Paul Whiteman Collection, Berlin Folder, Williams College.
42. Leopold Schmidt, “Jazz-Konzerte im Großen Schauspielhaus,” Berliner Tageb-

latt, June 26, 1926.
43. “Der Jazzkönig: Paul Whiteman im Großen Schauspielhaus.”
44. “Whitemans Sonntag,” Berliner Montagspost, June 26, 1926.
45. Wilhelm Klatte, “Whitemans Jazzmusik,” Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, June 26,
1926.
46. Klaus Pringsheim, “Jazz-Dämmerung,” Die Schallkiste 1 (August 1926), 8. Ital-
ics in original.
47. Ibid.
48. Schmidt, “Jazz-Konzerte im Großen Schauspielhaus.”
49. Oscar Bie, “Whiteman. Großes Schauspielhaus,” Berliner Börsen-Courier, June
26, 1926. Paul Whiteman Collection, Berlin Folder, Williams College.
50. Walter Schrenk, “Whitemans erstes Konzert,” Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung,
June 26, 1926. Paul Whiteman Collection, Berlin Folder, Williams College.
51. Frank Warschauer, “Jazz: On Whiteman’s Berlin Concerts,” Weimar Republic
Sourcebook, eds. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 571. Translation modified. Originally
published as “Jazz. Zu Whitemans Berliner Konzerten,” Vossische Zeitung, June 19,
1926. Paul Whiteman Collection, Berlin Folder, Williams College.
52. XYZ, “Der Jazzkönig Paul Whiteman. Eine Auseinandersetzung aneinander
vorbei,” Der Deutsche (Berlin) June 27, 1926. Paul Whiteman Collection, Berlin Folder,
Williams College.
53. Marc Weiner “Urwaldmusik and the Borders of German Identity: Jazz in Litera-
ture of the Weimar Republic,” The German Quarterly 64:4 (1991): 475–87; Cornelius
Partsch, Schräge Töne. Jazz und Unterhaltungsmusik in der Kultur der Weimarer Re-
publik (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2000), 151–73. See further the recent collection by
Krick-Aigner and Schuster, Jazz in German-Language Literature.
54. Felix Dörmann, Jazz. Wiener Roman (Vienna: Strache Verlag, 1925); on Dör-
mann, see Siegfried Mattl, “Dunkles Wien. Felix Dörmanns Jazz und die Wiener Unter-
haltungskultur nach dem ‘Grossen Krieg,” Pop in Prosa. Erzählte Populärkultur in der
deutsch-und ungarischsprachigen Moderne, eds. Amália Kerekes, Magdolna Orosz,
Gabriella Rácz, and Katalin Teller (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007), 99–114.
55. Other than those discussed below, another possible exception to this rule is Er-
win Sedding’s Jazzyn (Berlin: Weltbücher Verlag, 1927). Sedding was a critic for Der
Artist and wrote at least three articles on jazz: “Jazz,” Der Artist 2072 (September 4,
1925); “Klavier und Jazzband,” Der Artist 2076 (October 2, 1925); “Ia. Jazzschläger,”
Der Artist 2086 (December 11, 1925). On Sedding’s novel, see Pascale Cohen-Avenel,
“An Epidemic of Jazz in German-Language Literature: 1920–1931,” Jazz in German
Language Literature, 137–46.
56. Weiner, “Urwaldmusik and the Borders of German Identity: Jazz in Literature of
the Weimar Republic,” 475.
57. Friedrich Hirth, “Der literarisierte Jazz,” Die Literatur 29 (1927): 507–8.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid.
62. Hans Janowitz, Jazz. Roman [1927] (Bonn: Weidle, 1999). Hereafter, references
to the novel will be made in the body text with the abbreviation “JR.” A portion of this
novel has appeared previously in translation: Hans Janowitz, Jazz, trans. Cornelius
Partsch and Damon O. Rarick, New England Review 25:1–2 (2004): 92–111. The im-
plicit connection between Hirth’s text and Janowitz’s novel was first suggested in Philip
Brady, “‘Saxophon—guter Ton!’ On Hans Janowitz’s Jazz-Novel of 1927,” Expedition
nach der Wahrheit: Poems, Essays, and Papers in Honour of Thea Stemmler, eds. Stefan
Horlacher and Marion Islinger (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1996), 465.
63. See Anton Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 46–86.
64. On the phenomenon of the Eintänzer, see Mihaela Petrescu, “Social Dancing
and Rugged Masculinity—The Figure of the Eintänzer in Hans Janowitz’s novel Jazz
(1927),” Monatshefte 105:4 (Winter 2013): 593–608.
65. Jürgen Grandt, “The Colors of Jazz in the Weimar Republic: Hans Janowitz’s
Jazz Takes the Coltrane,” Jazz in German-Language Literature, 78
66. Janowitz, Jazz, 24.
67. Oskar Maurus Fontana, “Jazz. Roman,” Das Tage-Buch 8 (1927), 402. Further
reviews of the novel include: Paul Leppin, “Jazz. Roman” [Review], Die Literatur 29
(1926/27): 483; Theodor Lücke, “Jazz. Roman” [Review], Die literarische Welt 3:9
(1927): 6–7.
68. These include modernist parody, as seen in the opening’s homage to Dickens’ A
Tale of Two Cities and the modernist melding of music and text in Tolstoy’s Kreutzer
Sonata, as well as more vernacular variants like the detective novel implicated through
the introduction of a serial killer and painter, Mr. Astragalus, to the novel. See further
Cornelius Partsch, “That Weimar Jazz,” New England Review 23:4 (Fall 2002), 189–91.
69. Eric Robertson, Writing between the Lines: René Schickele, ‘Citoyen Français,
Deutscher’ (1883–1940) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), 126. On the specific meaning of
the word “jazz” in the title, see below.
70. On the biographical elements within Schickele’s novel, see Jean- Jacques
Schumacher “‘. . . mein persönlichstes Buch:’ A propos du roman Symphonie für Jazz
de Rene Schickele,” Recherches germaniques 23 (1993): 155–64.
71. On this aspect in Janowitz, see Brady, 467–68.
72. Josephine Baker and figures resembling her were relatively common during the
period. On these, see Tobias Nagl, Die unheimliche Maschine: Rasse und Repräsenta-
tion im Weimarer Kino (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2009), 660–69; Cornelius Partsch,
Schräge Töne: Jazz und Unterhaltungsmusik in der Kultur der Weimarer Republik
(Stuttart: J. B. Metzler, 2000), 141–60.
73. Rene Schickele, Symphonie für Jazz (Berlin: Fischer, 1929), 9. Hereafter ab-
breviated as SFJ and cited parenthetically in the main body text.
74. Kurt Martens, “Symphonie für Jazz” [Review]. Die schöne Literatur 30:9 (Sep-
tember 1929), 418.
75. Schröder, Tanz-und Unterhaltungsmusik, 157–59.
76. On production statistics for the saxophone, see ibid., 132. On the saxophone’s
cultural uses in the context of jazz and otherwise, see Daniel M. Bell, “The Saxophone
in Germany 1924–1935, A Cultural History,” The Saxophone Symposium 29 (2004),

esp. 14–25.
77. Schröder, Tanz-und Unterhaltungsmusik, 132. Though Schröder refers here to
Baresel’s 1929 Das neue Jazzbuch, the practice of doubling obviously starts much ear-
lier, in Germany as well as in the United States.
78. For van Maray, the perfect jazz is that performed by the seagulls over the lake
by the hotel, where he and Johanna first hear the jazz drummer and he decides to write
his jazz symphony. They excite him because of their ability to travel between airy
heights and watery depths: “They dove so deep that the tips of their wings became wet.
Then they darted back above and the next cycle was a bit higher than the one from
which they’d fallen. They gave me courage, the seagulls! They fit my music” (SFJ 56).
79. Nagl, Die unheimliche Maschine, 664.
80. Gustav Renker, Symphonie und Jazz (Leizpig: L. Stackermann, 1931). Hereafter
cited as “SUJ” through parenthetical citations in the text.
81. Hirsch’s Jewishness is referenced, for example, in his “sickly yellow (fahl-
gelbes) face marked by metropolis and civilization” (SUJ 89).
82. Scott Spector, “Modernism without Jews: A Counter-Historical Argument,”
Modernism/Modernity 13:4 (November 2006): 615–33.
83. Ibid., 623.
84. For Renker, the saxophone enables Makua-Taka to accommodate his African
sound to the European ear, thus the statement: “The mediator to the world of culture
was the saxophone that floated above it [the music], that gave the ears of whites the
lyrical melody they demanded” (SUJ 35).
85. Advertisement for Chocolate Kiddies Hamburger Anzeiger, August 7, 1925, as
well as Altonaer Neueste Nachrichten, August 12, 1925. This was also used in adver-
tisements of the return of the Chocolate Kiddies to Berlin (advertisement in Berliner
Tageblatt, December 20, 1925).
86. On the role of the Alps and mountains within German culture, see the recent
collection Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Mid-
dle Ages to the Present, eds. Sean Moore Ireton and Caroline Schumann (Rochester,
Camden House, 2012).
87. Janowitz writes that jazz band boys are all “sailors who always get seasick” (JR
18), it is a lake that marks the beginning of John van Maray’s symphony and the end of
his saxophone, while in Renker, Ricki Wehrberg is initially introduced as having a “pas-
sion for sailing” (SUJ 26).
Chapter 4
The quotation cited in the epigraph is from Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil,
trans. Michael Tannen (New York: Penguin, 1990), 31. Translation slightly modified.
1. While obviously the gender of a noun in German must not necessarily corre-
spond to biological sex, there remains something uncanny to the neuter gendering of
Weib. The entry for Weib in Grimm’s Wörterbuch from the late nineteenth century, for
example, states that any description of Weib must begin with a satisfactory explanation
of “the so conspicuous neuter gender of the word” (Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm,
Deutsches Wörterbuch [Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1878], s.v. Weib).
2. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 31.
3. The literature on Germany’s “New Woman” is vast, other than those works listed
below, see for example: Atina Grossmann, “The New Woman and the Rationalization of
Sexuality in Weimar Germany,” Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, eds. Christine
Stansell, Ann Snitow, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review, 1983), 153–
71; Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and
Abortion Reform, 1920–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Richard Mc-
Cormick, Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature, and ‘New Objec-
tivity’ (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodra-
matic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
4. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1995).
5. Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other,” After the
Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, and Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1986), 52.
6. Grossmann, “Girlkultur or Thoroughly Rationalized Female: A New Woman in
Weimar Germany?” J. Friedlander et al., eds., Women in Culture and Politics (Bloom-
ington: University of Indiana Press, 1986), 62–80.
7. Lynne Frame, “Gretchen, Girl, Garçonne? Weimar Science and Popular Culture
in Search of the Ideal New Woman,” Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity
in Weimar Culture, ed. Katharina von Ankum (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997), 12–40.
8. German discourse often employed the English term Girl instead of the German
word for girl, Mädchen. I have therefore capitalized the word Girl throughout this chap-
ter as a means of signifying the term’s use as a conceptual device.
9. Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1993), 177.
10. Other examples of writings on the Girl include: Erich Kästner, “Chor der Girls,”
Lärm im Spiegel (Leipzig: C. Weller & Co., 1930), 84–86; Siegfried Kracauer, “Girls
und Krise [1931],” Schriften, ed. Inka Mülder-Bach, vol. 5.2 (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1990), 320–22; Paul Landau, “Girlkultur. Von der Amerikanisierung Euro-
pas,” Westermanns Monatshefte 71 (January 1927), 565–68; Richard Huelsenbeck,
“Girlkultur,” Die literarische Welt 2:16 (April 16, 1926), 3; Alfred Polgar, “Girls
[1926],” Kleine Schriften, ed. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, vol. 2 (Reinbek bei Hamburg:
Rowohlt, 1983), 247–50; Joseph Roth, “Die Girls [1925],” Das journalistische Werk,
1924–1928, ed. Klaus Westermann, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1982), 393–94.
11. See Kerstin Barndt, Sentiment und Sachlichkeit: Der Roman der Neuen Frau in
der Weimarer Republik (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), 99–106 as well as Patrice Petro, “The
Hottentot and the Blonde Venus,” Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 136–56.
12. Fritz Giese, Girlkultur: Vergleiche zwischen amerikanischem und europäischem
Rhythmus-und Lebensgefühl (Munich: Delphin Verlag, 1925). All further references
will be made parenthetically and indicated by “GK.”
13. The images derive from Gustav Kafka, ed., Handbuch der vergleichenden Psy-
chologie, vol. 1 (Munich: E. Reinhardt, 1922), plate III, fig. b and plate X, fig. b follow-
ing 304. Giese himself contributed a lengthy section to this volume on child psychology
(Kafka, Handbuch der vergleichenden Psychologie, 323–518).
14. This image from 1924 is from a scene at cabaret Die Gondel (The Gondola). It
originally appeared as “Karikatur einer Neger-Jazzband-Kapelle aus dem Kabarett ‘Die
Gondel,’ Uhu 1:2 (November 1924), 31 as an illustration to Jaap Kool’s article “Vom
Negerdorf zur Philharmonie,” which is also referenced in chapter 3.
15. Giese’s title also plays off the more standard terminology of Frauenkultur, pres-
ent at least since Georg Simmel’s writings on the subject. See, for example, Georg
Simmel, “Female Culture,” Simmel on Culture, ed. David Frisby (Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage Publications, 1997), 46–54. On the development of the term in the Weimar Repub-
lic, see Kerstin Barndt, “‘Engel oder Megäre.’ Figurationen einer ‘Neuen Frau’ bei
Marieluise Fleißer und Irmgard Keun,” Reflexive Naivität. Zum Werk Marieluise
Fleißers, eds. Maria E. Müller and Ulrike Vedder (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2000),
16–34.
16. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investi-
gations, trans. Edmund Jephcott, eds. Stephen Mennell, Eric Dunning, and Johan
Goudsblom (Malden, MA.: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), 5–30.
17. Huelsenbeck, “Girlkultur,” 3.
18. Adolf Halfeld, Amerika und der Amerikanismus. Kritische Betrachtungen eines
Deutschen und Europäers (Jena: Eugen Diedrichs, 1927).
19. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New
York: Routledge, 1993) 176–92.
20. Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 (Durham: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2001), 9.
21. There may also be a further reason for this connection, namely that Charles
Davis, choreographer of the Chocolate Kiddies, had previously incorporated a variation
of the Tiller Girls’ routine for the show Chocolate Dandies, replacing the Tiller’s kicks
with taps. See Marshall Stearns and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American
Vernacular Dance (New York: Da Capo, 1968), 147. See further Nowakowski, “Jazz in
Wien,” Anklaenge 2011/2012, Special Issue: Jazz unlimited. Beiträge zur Jazz-Rezeption
in Österreich (Wien: Mille Tre Verlag, 2012), 138n406.
22. Attesting to her fame, Baker’s memoirs, as dictated to the journalist Marcel
Sauvage, were immediately published in German translation as: Josephine Baker, Mem-
oiren, ed. Marcel Sauvage, trans. Lilly Ackermann (Munich: Meyer & Jessen, 1928).
On Baker in Germany, see Nancy Nenno, “Femininity, The Primitive, and Modern Ur-
ban Space: Josephine Baker in Berlin,” Women in the Metropolis, ed. Katharina von
Ankum (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 145–61; To-
bias Nagl, Die unheimliche Maschine. Rasse und Repräsentation im Weimarer Kino
(Munich: Edition text + kritik, 2009), 656–60.
23. The best source for details on Douglas’ life remains Rainer Lotz, Black People:
Entertainers of African Descent in Europe, and Germany (Bonn: Birgit Lotz, 1997),
297–389. Further discussion can be found in Leroy Hopkins, “Louis Douglas and the
Weimar Reception of Harlemania,” Germans and African Americans, eds. Larry A.
Greene and Anke Ortlepp (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011): 50–69;
Andy Fry, Paris Blues: African American Music and French Popular Culture, 1920–
1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 70–78.
24. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New
York: Routledge, 1992), 4.
25. In addition to Jelavich Berlin Cabaret, see Wolfgang Jansen, Glanzrevuen der
zwanziger Jahre (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1987) and Franz-Peter Kothes, Die theat-
ralische Revue in Berlin und Wien, 1900–1938. Typen, Inhalte, Funktionen (Wilhelm-
shaven: Heinrichshofen, 1977).
26. On the concept of surface culture in Weimar, see Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces:
Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001), 9–10.
27. Theodor Lücke, “Gedanken der Revue,” Scene 16 (1926), 114. See also Jelav-
ich’s discussion in Berlin Cabaret, 169.
28. Alfred Polgar, “Synkope [1924],” Alfred Polgar, Kleine Schriften, ed. Marcel
Reich-Ranicki, vol. 2 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1983), 173.
29. On rationalization discourse and the experience of it by women during the Wei-
mar Republic, see Grossmann, “Girlkultur or Thoroughly Rationalized Female: A New
Woman in Weimar Germany?”
30. Here it should be pointed out that in addition to Berlin, individual performers as
well as entire shows travelled across Germany to large-and medium-sized towns, as
well as touring internationally. Though my focus in this chapter remains on Berlin, in-
dividual histories of Black performers in other large cities are necessary as well. One
important example of such work for Frankfurt am Main is Hans Pehl, Afroameri-
kanische Unterhaltungskünstler in Frankfurt am Main. Eine Chronik von 1844 bis 1945
(Frankfurt am Main: n.p., 2010).
31. Contemporary reviews of La Revue nègre include: Alfred Polgar, “Abende in
Berlin: Neger-Revue,” Die literarische Welt 2:7 (1926): 3; m.l., “Negerrevue im Nelson
Theater,” Vossische Zeitung, January 4, 1926; Kurt Pinthus, “Neger-Revue. Nelson The-
ater,” 8 Uhr Abendblatt, January 4, 1926; Erich Urban, “Neger-Revue bei Nelson,” BZ
am Mittag, January 4, 1926; “Neger-Revue im Nelson-Theater,” Neue Berliner Zeitung.
Das 12 Uhr Blatt., January 4, 1926; N., “Neger-Revue,” Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, Janu-
ary 7, 1926.
32. Contemporary reviews of Black People include: AM, “Bei den ‘Black People.’
Revueprobe im Metropol-Theater,” Vossische Zeitung, July 11, 1926; bur., “Schwarze
Revue. ‘Black People’ im Metropol-Theater,” Berliner Tageblatt, July 14, 1926; Georg,
“‘Schwarzes Volk.’ Negerrevue im Metropoltheater,” Berliner Volkszeitung, July 14,
1926; Li, “Black People. Neger-Revue im Metropoltheater,” Neue Berliner Zeitung.
Das 12 Uhr Blatt., July 14, 1926; Hans Siemsen, “Negerrevue im Metropol,” 8 Uhr
Abendblatt, July 14, 1926; Erich Urban, “‘Black People.’ Neger-Revue im Metropol-
Theater,” BZ am Mittag July 14, 1926; AM, “‘Black People,’ Neger-Revue im Metropol-
Theater,” Vossische Zeitung July 15, 1926; schr., “Black People,” Deutsche Allgemeine
Zeitung, July 15, 1926; Kurt Groetschel, “Neger-Revue im Metropol-Theater. ‘Black
People,’” Das kleine Journal, July 17, 1926; g., “Metropol-Theater: ‘Black People,’”
Welt am Montag, July 19, 1926.
276 Notes to Page 125
33. Program for “Die schwarze Revue” at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo (ca. June 1928),
n.p. My thanks to Hans Pehl for providing me with a copy of the program.
34. In addition to the Berlin sources listed in footnote 26 of chapter 2, see the fol-
lowing notes on Wooding’s 1928 revue from the African American press: “Going to
Germany,” the Pittsburgh Courier, June 9, 1928; “Race Entertainers Swoop in on
Germany,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 28, 1928; “Louise Warner Over There,”
Chicago Defender, July 21, 1928; Joel A. Rogers, “Johnny Hudgins Starts Home on
the First Boat,” Baltimore Afro-American, July 28, 1928; Ivan H. Browning, “News of
London,” New York Amsterdam News, August 1, 1928; “So Johnny Came Sailing
Home Again,” New York Amsterdam News, August 8, 1928. Further information is
also available in Bernhard Behnke with Mark Berresford, “Sam Wooding and the
Chocolate Kiddies at the Ufa-Palast in Berlin in June 1928,” VJM’s Jazz and Blues
Mart (Spring 2005): 2–4.
35. For the 1931 show, see ML., “‘Louisiana.’ Douglas’ Revue- Operette im
Deutschen Künstlertheater,” Berliner Morgenpost July 15, 1931. On Louisiana and
Douglas’ work during the late 1920s and early 1930s more generally, see Lotz, Black
People, 341–377.
36. Eric Prieto, “Alexandre Striello and the Beginnings of the Biguine,” Nottingham
French Studies 43:1 (Spring 2004), 30.
37. “Filmmann eröffnet Neger-Bar,” Film-Kurier, February 27, 1932, cited in Nagl,
Die unheimliche Maschine, 733. Though much remains unknown about the Biguine, it
seems certain that it opened in February 1932, rather than in 1926 as is implied by the
dating of an advertisement reprinted elsewhere (see Alonzo and Martin, Zwischen
Charleston und Stechschritt, 366; Bärbel Schrader and Jürgen Schebera, Kunst-
Metropole Berlin 1918–1933 [Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, 1987], 115). An iden-
tical advertisement to the one reprinted in these sources appears in the Berlin newspaper
Tempo on March 3, 1932.
38. Joachim Zeller, Weisse Blicke—Schwarze Körper: Afrikaner im Spiegel westli-
cher Alltagskultur: Bilder aus der Sammlung Peter Weiss (Erfurt: Sutton Verlag, 2010),
201; Klaus Völker and Max Hermann-Neisse, Max Hermann-Neisse: Künstler, Kneipen,
Kabaretts—Schlesien, Berlin, im Exil (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1991), 151; “Verschie-
denes,” Zeitschrift für Musik 99 (1932), 456; R. W. Canem, “Umschau,” Fliegende Blät-
ter 88 (June 9, 1932): 365.
39. Reviews of Welch’s performances can be found in: Das kleine Journal (June 24,
1932); Das 12-Uhr Blatt (June 22, 1932); Berliner Wochenschau (June 24, 1932), and
Berliner Tribüne (June 28, 1932). My thanks to Stephen Bourne for providing me with
copies of these texts.
40. A photograph of Douglas at the Biguine alongside the identical Black staff
members from Tempo is reproduced in Martin and Alonzo, Zwischen Charleston und
Stechschritt, 366. It is mistakenly dated to 1929 by the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbe-
sitz. While it is clear from this photograph that Douglas was at the Biguine sometime in
1932, there is as of yet no further documentation.
41. “Dinah ist da!” Tempo, September 2, 1932.
42. Adolf Stein [Rumpelstilzchen], Nu wenn schon (Berlin: Brunnen Verlag, 1932),
231.
43. The situation of African migrant workers during Weimar is treated in Robbie
Aitken, “Surviving in the Metropole: The Struggle for Work and Belonging amongst
African Colonial Migrants in Weimar Germany,” Immigrants & Minorities 28:2–3
(2010), 213–15.
44. In the 1927 edition of the yearbook, which details performers for the previous
year, individual members of the dance company at the Theater am Admiralspalast are
listed, including African American and Afro-German performers, Ralph Grayson and
Louis Brody (Deutsches Bühnen-Jahrbuch, vol. 38 [Berlin: Genossenschaft Deutscher
Bühnen-Angehöriger, 1927], 245). The very next year, this section of this publication
disappears (Deutsches Bühnen-Jahrbuch, vol. 39 [Berlin: Verlag Deutscher Bühnen-
Angehöriger, 1928], 265) and with it references to African American, Afro-German,
and Afro-European performers.
45. Further context to these performers, as well as other examples, can be found in:
Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft, Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a
Diaspora Community, 1884–1960 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2013), 194–230. Individual biographies of some performers also exist, for ex-
ample, Monika Firla, Der kameruner Artist Hermann Kessern: ein schwarzer
Crailsheimer (Crailsheim: Baier, 2010); Rea Brändle, Nayo Bruce: Geschichte einer
afrikanischen Familie in Europa (Zurich: Chronos, 2007).
46. Advertisement for “Die blaue Maus” at the Atrium-Beba-Palast, Berliner Tage-
blatt December 2, 1928; AP, “Saxophon-Susi. Alhambra,” Vossische Zeitung, Novem-
ber 4, 1928. Further discussion of Benga’s significance for modernists during the period
is given in James Smalls, “Féral Benga’s Body,” Africa in Europe: Studies in Transna-
tional Practice in the Long Twentieth Century, eds. Robbie Aitken, John Macvicar, Eve
Rosenhaft (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 99–120.
47. It was reported in the African American press that Bayton earned a total of
$200,000 during her almost two years in Germany (Floyd J. Calvin, “Earns $200,000
on German Stage in 19 Months,” the Pittsburgh Courier, February 11, 1928). Additional
examples of such performers as reported in the African American press can be found in
the writings of Ivan H. Browning, himself a performer with the Four Harmony Kings.
See Ivan H. Browning, “Across the Pond,” Chicago Defender, May 28, 1927, 6; “Euro-
pean Notes,” New York Amsterdam News, February 9, 1927, 10; “News of Our Enter-
tainers in Europe,” New York Amsterdam News, April 18, 1928, 7; “News of London,”
New York Amsterdam News, August 1, 1928, 6.
48. On this development, see Daniel M. Bell, “The Saxophone in Germany, 1924–
1935: A Cultural History,” The Saxophone Symposium 29 (2004): 1–38. More gener-
ally, see Stephen Cottrell, The Saxophone (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).
49. Ernst Krenek, Jonny spielt auf. Oper in 2 Teilen. Klavierauszug mit Text vom
Komponisten (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1954[1926]), 29, m680.
50. See, for example, Yva’s photographs of Louis Brody as saxophone player over-
laid alongside images of dancing women (Marion Beckers and Elisabeth Moortgat,
eds., Yva : Photographien 1925–1938 [Tübingen: Wasmuth, 2001]) that originally ap-
peared in Die Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung or Frans Masereel’s visual work Jazz from
1931, which depicts three Black saxophone players standing over a white female dancer
(reprinted in Sell Tower, Envisioning America, 105).
51. Michael Cowan, Technology’s Pulse: Essays on Rhythm in German Modernism

(London: IGRS Books, 2011), 196–98, here 197.
52. The image of Helm is reprinted in Cowan, Technology’s Pulse, 205. A photo-
graph of Rosa Valetti with a saxophone can be found in Uhu 2: 2 (November 1925), 38;
Schroeter can be seen in Beckers and Moortgat, eds., Yva : Photographien 1925–1938,
28; Trude Hesterberg’s performance was reprinted in the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung 35
(September 5, 1926), 1151; For Knight’s painting, see Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung 35
(July 11, 1926), 871.
53. My thanks to Konrad Nowakowski and Hans Pehl for their invaluable help in
identifying Jones.
54. Lotz, Black People, 65–87.
55. Mark Miller, Some Hustling This! Taking Jazz to the World, 1914–1929 (To-
ronto: Mercury Press, 2005), 34.
56. For a discussion of examples of female blackface, see Martin and Alonzo, eds.,
Zwischen Charleston und Stechschritt, 352–71.
57. The first documented example of Steiner’s parody is in the revue “Wieder
Metropol” in September 1926, where she, alongside stars Hans Albers and Max Han-
sen, performed (potentially in blackface) in a scene dubbed “Negro Revue” (Program
“Wieder Metropol,” Institut für Theaterwissenschaft der Freien Universität Berlin. The-
aterhistorische Sammlungen, ca. 1926). Steiner continued to perform her Baker parody
in a 1927 performance at the Pavillon Mascotte (Advertisement in Berliner Tageblatt,
January 16, 1927). In 1929, she again appeared as Baker in Nelsons Künstlerspiele, an
illustration of which can be found in “Die Tänzerin Jenny Steiner in einer witzigen Jo-
sephine Baker-Parodie (Nelsons Künstlerspiele in Berlin),” Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung
38 (January 24, 1929): 159. Steiner’s parodies of Baker are discussed in Nenno “Femi-
ninity, The Primitive, and Modern Urban Space” (150) as well as in Alan Lareau, “Bitte
einsteigen! Josephine Baker’s 1928 Return to Berlin,” Topography and Literature: Ber-
lin and Modernism, eds. Rolf Goebel and Sabine Hake (Göttingen: V&R, 2009), 81;
Nagl, Die unheimliche Maschine, 694–95.
58. Petro, “The Hottentot and the Blonde Venus,” 139.
59. Grossmann, Reforming Sex, 3.
60. Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret, 185–86.
61. Lareau, “Bitte einsteigen!” 81.
62. Program for Madame Pompadour, Institut für Theaterwissenschaft der Freien
Universität Berlin. Theaterhistorische Sammlungen, ca. 1927. On Harris and his stage
persona “Snowball,” see Don Rayno, Paul Whiteman: Pioneer in American Music, vol.
1 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003), 160–61.
63. The Great Attraction premiered three months later than Kortner’s The Good Sin-
ner and it is unclear whether the two productions had any influence on each other. On
The Good Sinner, see Nagl, Die unheimliche Maschine, 696–99.
64. The document has been reprinted as “Erlaß wider die Negerkultur für deutsches
Volkstum,” Quellen zur Geschichte Thüringens, ed. Jürgen John, vol. 3 (Erfurt: LZT,
1996), 140–41. Numerous, mostly negative reactions to the decree were published, e.g.:
“Frick blamiert sich nach Jazz-Noten,” 8 Uhr Abendblatt, April 15, 1930; “Frick zieht
gegen den Drachen Jazz,” Vossische Zeitung, April 15, 1930; “Ehrenrettung des Jazz,”
Berliner Volkszeitung, April 24, 1930; Josef Freudenthal, “Jazzmusik verboten!” Der
Artist 2315 (May 2, 1930); Eberhard Preußner, “Kultur-Reaktion,” Musik und Gesell-
schaft 1 (July 1930): 96–98. On the 1930 ban, see chapter 7 for further discussion.
65. A. Sacher-Woenckhaus, “. . . unsere modernen Tänze sind keine Niggertänze
mehr . . .” Uhu, 8:7 (April 1932): 83–89. Italics in original. See the related discussion of
this text in Theodore Rippey, “Rationalization, Race, and the Weimar Response to
Jazz,” German Life and Letters 60:1 (January 2007), 86–88.
66. “Frick blamiert sich nach Jazz-Noten.” That this may be Kurt Weill, rather than
“Bruno Weil,” is hinted at in the text through references to this composer producing
“songs” and that he found it unsurprising that this came from Weimar, supposedly the
only German city which has yet to produce the Threepenny Opera. The article also in-
cludes the anonymous opinion of a Black musician. This was possibly Sam Wooding,
who was performing in Berlin in April 1930 when the decree was issued (see chapter 2).
67. Ibid., 86.
68. Kitty is shadowed throughout the film by a portly white American named
Tommy, who is infatuated with her and eventually orchestrates her release from the
contract with Jackson. By the end of the film, however, Tommy gives up his claim on
Kitty, thus removing one further impediment to Kitty’s own recuperation as white, Ger-
man woman and wife.
69. “Du warst mir ein Roman” features music by Bronislaw Kaper and lyrics by
Fritz Rotter. It was released by the Odeon record company as O-4984a in 1931 as per-
formed by Richard Tauber and the Odeon Künstler-Orchester.
70. James Donald, “Kracauer and the Dancing Girls,” New Formations 61 (Spring
2007), 61.
71. Hans Pehl, Afroamerikanische Unterhaltungskünstler in Frankfurt am Main, 92.
Kracauer’s original text is “Exzentriktänzer in den Ufa-Lichtspielen,” Frankfurter Zei-
tung (Stadt-Blatt), October 16, 1928. Further examples of Kracauer’s writing about
Black performers and jazz are discussed below.
72. Siegried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” The Mass Ornament: Weimar Es-
says, ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 79.
73. Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin,
and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2012), 51
74. Ibid., 50.
75. Kracauer, “Mass Ornament,” 81.
76. On Kracauer’s position on jazz and Blackness, see Rippey, “Rationalization,
Race, and the Weimar Response to Jazz,” 89–92.
77. Kracauer, “Mass Ornament,” 77.
78. Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Ger-
many, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Verso, 1998), 29
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid., 32.
81. Siegfried Kracauer, “Negerball in Paris,” Frankfurter Zeitung, October 17,
1928. Also available as Siegfried Kracauer, “Negerball in Paris,” Schriften, ed. Inka
Mülder-Bach, vol. 5.2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), 127–29.
82. Kracauer, “Negerball in Paris,” 127.

83. Ibid.
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid., 128.
86. Making the connection between Blackness qua performance even more strongly,
Kracauer suggests “that these common Negroes would first have to be translated into
American in order to be Negroes” (Ibid.). On this idea, see further, Rippey, “Rational-
ization, Race, and the Weimar Response to Jazz,” 93–94.
87. Ibid., 129.
88. Ibid.
89. Rippey, “Rationalization, Race, and the Weimar Response to Jazz,” 95.
90. Siegfried Kracauer, “Haupt-und Staatsaktion im Schumann-Theater,” Frank-
furter Turmhäuser: Ausgewählte Feuilletons, 1906–1930, ed. Andreas Volk (Zurich:
Edition epoca, 1997), 120. Originally published August 5, 1928, in the Stadt-Blatt of
the Frankfurter Zeitung.
91. Ibid.
Chapter 5
The quotation cited in the epigraph is from Alfred Baresel, quoted in Karl Holl, “Jazz
im Konservatorium,” Melos 7 (1928), 31.
1. “Jazz Bitterly Opposed in Germany,” the New York Times, March 11, 1928,
Amusements section, 8. See also: Alfred Einstein, “Some Berlin Novelties,” the New
York Times, February 19, 1928, X8.
2. Susan C. Cook, Opera for a New Republic: The Zeitopern of Krenek, Weill, and
Hindemith (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), 84–110.
3. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 63.
4. Quoted in Peter Cahn, Das Hoch’sche Konservatorium in Frankfurt am Main
(1878–1978) (Frankfurt am Main: Dr. Waldemar Kramer, 1979), 21.
5. Cahn, Das Hoch’sche Konservatorium, Anhang I, 377.
6. Leo Kestenberg, Musikerziehung und Musikpflege (Leipzig, 1921), quoted in
Ulrich Günther, Die Schulmusikerziehung von der Kestenberg-Reform bis zum Ende des
Dritten Reiches (Neuwied am Rhein: Luchterhand, 1967), 13.
7. Leo Kestenberg, Bewegte Zeiten: Musisch-musikantische Lebenserinnerungen
(Wolfenbüttel: Möseler Verlag, 1961), 72.
8. Cahn, Das Hoch’sche Konservatorium, 247. See further Peter Cahn, “Zum Frank-
furter Musikleben in den zwanziger Jahren,” Ein halbes Jahrhundert: was da ist in Frank-
furt, eds. Gerhard König and Adam Seide (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 1983), 211–17.
9. On Sekles’ life as an educator and musician, see Joachim Tschiedel, Bernhard
Sekles, 1872–1934: Leben und Werk des Frankfurter Komponisten und Pädagogen
(Schneverdingen: Verlag für Musikbücher Karl Dieter Wagner, 2005); Karl Holl, “Ber-
nhard Sekles,” Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 12 (Kassel: Bärenreiter,
1965), 480–81.
10. Cahn, Das Hoch’sche Konservatorium, 295.
11. Quoted in Peter Cahn, “Eine handschriftlich hinterlassene Formenlehre von

Bernhard Sekles,” Neue Musik und Tradition: Festschrift Rudolf Stephan, eds. C.M.
Schmidt and W. Seidel (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1990), 420. The quote is from page 136
of a handwritten manuscript held at the library of the Hochschule für Musik und darstel-
lende Kunst in Frankfurt am Main.
12. Bernhard Sekles, “Kleiner Shimmy,” Das neue Klavierbuch (Mainz: B. Schotts
Söhne, 1927), 8.
13. Bernhard Sekles, Grundzüge der Formenlehre, unpublished and undated manu-
script held at the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt am Main,
131. Italics in original.
14. Ibid., 133. Italics in original.
15. Sekles also wrote a text on improvisation for children. See Bernhard Sekles,
Elementarschule der Improvisation, unpublished and undated manuscript held at the
Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, n.d. (likely after
1925).
16. Bernhard Sekles, “Fünfzig Jahre Dr. Hochs Konservatorium,” Frankfurter Zei-
tung, Stadtblatt (January 22, 1928).
17. “Kreuz und Quer. Jazz-Klasse an Dr. Hoch’s Konservatorium,” Zeitschrift für
Musik 94 (1927), 706. Italics in original.
18. Theodor W. Adorno, “Bernhard Sekles ‘Die zehn Küsse’ [Review],” Gesam-
melte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 19 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 73.
19. Seiber’s vision of jazz and activities as head of the Jazzklasse are discussed in
the concluding section of this chapter.
20. “Kreuz und Quer. Jazzklasse an Dr. Hoch’s Konservatorium,” 706. Italics in
original.
21. The Jazzklasse debate is treated in the following secondary sources: Cahn, Das
Hoch’sche Konservatorium, 216–64; Pascale Cohen-Avenal, Si on a du jazz, pas besoin de
schnaps: Jazz, négritude et démocratie sous la République de Weimar (New York: Peter Lang,
2011), 68–71; Kathryn Smith Bowers, “East Meets West: Contributions of Mátyás Seiber to
Jazz in Germany,” in Jazz and the Germans: Essays on the Influence of “Hot” American Idi-
oms on 20th-Century German Music, ed. Michael J. Budds (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press,
2002), 119–40; Schröder, Tanz-und Unterhaltungsmusik, 387–89; and Susan Cook, “Jazz as
Deliverance: The Reception and Institution of American Jazz during the Weimar Republic,”
American Music 7 (Spring 1989), 40–42; Theodore Rippey, “Rationalization, Race, and the
Weimar Response to Jazz,” German Life and Letters 60:1 (January 2007), 78–81.
22. The national scope of the announcement was already on display through the two
articles published in Berlin’s Vossische Zeitung (“Du lernst Jazz nach Noten,” Vossische
Zeitung, November 12, 1927; Ernst Klein, “Der Frankfurter Jazzskandal,” Vossische
Zeitung, December 10, 1927) as well as the caricature “Lehrstuhl für Jazz” from Sim-
plicissimus 32.38 (December 19, 1927): 527. The announcement was also reprinted in
Hamburg in “Ein Konservatoriumsklasse für Jazz,” Hamburgischer Correspondent,
November 11, 1927.
23. Paul Schwers, “Jazz als akademisches Lehrfach!” Allgemeine Musikzeitung 54
(1927), 1194–95. Major resistance to the Jazzklasse came from the city of Munich and
the Münchner Tonkünstlerverein. See for example “Jazz im Konservatorium,” Münch-
ner Neueste Nachrichten, November 29, 1927.
24. Schwers, “Jazz als akademisches Lehrfach!” 1195. Italics in original.

25. Further examples of the conservative critique are: Karl Schaezler, “Jazz,” Hoch-
land 25 (January 1928): 439–41; “Niggermusik und Frankfurter Konservatorium,” Das
Echo 2322 (January 12, 1928): 82.
26. On the linkage of “Jewishness” and modernism and modernity in German-
speaking Central Europe, see also the discussions of this idea in chapters 3 and 6.
27. Schwers, “Jazz als akademisches Lehrfach!” 1195.
28. Ibid.
29. As Schwers writes a bit later, jazz’s “white slaves suffer under it” (ibid.).
30. Leon Lencov, “Kreuzzug gegen den Jazz,” Der Artist 2189 (December 2, 1927).
31. Karl Holl, “Jazz am Konservatorium,” Frankfurter Zeitung, November 25,
1927. A reading similar to Holl’s can be found in Walter Bertens, “Jazz-Konservatorium,”
Musik im Leben 4:1 (1928): 15–16.
32. Ibid.
33. Karl Holl, “Jazz im Konservatorium,” Melos 7 (1928), 32. Although printed a
few months later, this article, appearing in the progressive music journal Melos, draws
heavily on the original publication from the Frankfurter Zeitung. There are only slight
modifications, such as the above quote.
34. Holl, “Jazz am Konservatorium.”
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Bernhard Sekles, quoted in “Kreuz und Quer. Weiteres vom Jazz-
Konservatorium,” 32–33. It is also partially reprinted in “Zum letzten Mal: ‘Jazz im
Konservatorium,’” Frankfurter Zeitung, December 13, 1927. The later article would
make reference to the Jazzklasse as a “fresh wind” in the halls of music. This phrase was
picked up by Nazi ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, in his discussion of the Jazzklasse in
Der Sumpf: Querschnitte durch das ‘Geistes-’Leben der November-Demokratie (Mu-
nich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1939 [1930], 34–35).
38. Sekles, quoted in “Kreuz und Quer. Weiteres vom Jazz-Konservatorium,” 32. It
is important to make clear that Sekles was not only replying to Schwers and the voices
assembled in this article, but also to the Münchner Tonkünstler Verein and the protest of
Hermann W. v. Waltershausen.
39. Sekles, quoted in “Kreuz und Quer. Weiteres vom Jazz-Konservatorium,” 32.
40. It is interesting to note the anonymous poem published just underneath Sekles’
second announcement. Replete with anti-Black and anti-Semitic racism, it suggests, for
example, that the “Hottentots” will build a memorial to Sekles (“Kreuz und Quer. Weit-
eres vom Jazz-Konservatorium,” 33).
41. Heinrich Strobel, “Unzeitgemäße Proteste,” Musikblätter des Anbruch 10
(1928), 25.
42. Alfred Baresel, Das Jazzbuch (Leipzig: Zimmerman, 1925). Published in late
1925, by the end of 1926, Baresel’s work had already gone through four printings.
43. Alfred Baresel, “Kampf um das Frankfurter Jazz- Konservatorium,” Neue
Musik-Zeitung 49 (1927/28), 267. Italics in original.
44. Ibid.
45. Alfred Baresel, “Kunst-Jazz,” Melos 7 (1928), 354–55.

46. Ibid., 355. Here, he cites Paul Whiteman’s 1926 book Jazz as proof, remarking
that even Whiteman, “King of Jazz,” whom Baresel labels one of the greatest “corrup-
tors” (Verderber) of a new musical idea, admitted that it was left to the European to
discover the artistic possibilities of jazz.
47. Ibid., 356.
48. Seiber’s writings on jazz include: “Jazz-Instrumente, Jazz-Klang und neue
Musik,” Melos 9 (1930): 122–26; “Jazz als Erziehungsmittel,” Melos 7 (1928):
281–86; “Jazz und die musikstudierende Jugend,” Der Artist 2305 (February 21,
1930); “Jazz-Unterricht,” Frankfurter Zeitung, September 8, 1928; “Rhythmic
Flexibility in Jazz? A Study of Jazz Rhythm,” Music Review 6 (1945): 30–41, 89–
94, 160–71; Schule für Jazz-Schlagzeug (Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1929); “Welche
Rolle spielt die Synkope in der modernen Jazzmusik?,” Musik-Echo 1:3 (May/June
1930); “Jugend und Jazz,” Zeitschrift für Schulmusik 3 (1930): 29–32; “Einiges
über meine ‘Leichten Tänze,’” Melos 12 (1933): 11–12. On Seiber, see Smith
Bowers, “East Meets West: Contributions of Mátyás Seiber to Jazz in Germany,”
119–40.
49. Seiber arrives in New York on October 3, November 14, and December 26, 1927
(Ancestry.com. New York, Passenger Lists, 1820–1957 [database online]. Provo, UT,
USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010). Seiber was therefore likely hired as direc-
tor of the Jazzklasse in early 1928.
50. On the complex structure of radio, public, jazz, classical, and popular music at
SWR, see Michael Stapper Unterhaltungsmusik im Rundfunk der Weimarer Republik
(Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 2001), 30–34, 56–66.
51. Stapper, Unterhaltungsmusik im Rundfunk der Weimarer Republik, 60.
52. Joachim-Felix Leonard, ed., Programmgeschichte des Hörfunks in der Wei-
marer Republik, vol. 2 (Munich: dtv, 1997), 960.
53. On the Jazzklasse in relation to the question of jazz in Weimar radio, see Bernd
Hoffmann, “Jazz im Radio der frühen Jahre,” That’s Jazz: Der Sound des Jahrhunderts,
ed. Klaus Wolbert (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1997), 577–84.
54. Seiber, “Jazz als Erziehungsmittel,” Melos 7 (1928), 281–86.
55. Ibid., 281.
56. J. Bradford Robinson, “The Jazz Essays of Theodor Adorno: Some Thoughts on
Jazz Reception in Weimar Germany,” Popular Music 13:1 (1994), 12.
57. Seiber, Schule für Jazz-Schlagzeug, 29.
58. Seiber, “Jazz als Erziehungsmittel,” 284.
59. Ibid., 285.
60. Cook makes the argument that in a 1945 essay, “Rhythmic Freedom in Jazz?”
Seiber gave up on jazz and its potential (“Jazz as Deliverance,” 42). Smith Bowers, on
the other hand, counters that Seiber is more likely referring in this passage to popular
tunes with jazz-like effects (“East Meets West,” 139).
61. Alban Berg, Handschriftliche Briefe, Briefentwürfe und Notizen aus den Bestän-
den der Musiksammlung der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, vol. 1, ed. Herwig
Knaus (Wilhelmshaven: F. Noetzel, 2004), 98. This was one of a set of comments Berg
made regarding jazz. On these, see Konrad Nowakowski, “Jazz in Wien: Die Anfänge”
Anklaenge 2011/2012, Special Issue: Jazz Unlimited: Beiträge zur Jazz-Rezeption in
Österreich (Vienna: Mille Tre Verlag, 2012), 129–31.
62. Seiber, “Jazz-Instrumente, Jazz-Klang und Neue Musik,” 126.
63. Kurt Weill, “Notiz zum Jazz,” Musikblätter des Anbruch 10 (1928), 138.
64. Ibid.
65. Seiber, “Jazz und die musikstudierende Jugend.”
66. Ibid. In his 1936 essay, Theodor W. Adorno similarly speaks of the “Negerfabel”
(fable of the Negro) regarding the origins of jazz (Thedor W. Adorno, “Über Jazz,”
Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 17 [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1997], 87). See chapter 7 for further discussion of Adorno’s jazz theory.
67. Ibid. Behind the Singing Sophomores were the very same Revelers, who only
used this alternate name when working for Columbia Records.
69. Ibid.
70. “Erstes Konzert der Jazz- Klasse,” Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung 5:9
(March 3, 1929), 9. A reproduction of the program can be found in Leonhard, Program-
mgeschichte des Hörfunks in der Weimarer Republik, 960.
71. Ibid. On Henkel, see Michael Kater, Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of
Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 44.
72. Arthur Hollde, “Jazz im Konservatorium. Eine Matinee im Hochschen Konser-
vatorium,” Frankfurt General-Anzeiger (Stadtbeilage), March 6, 1929.
73. “Sinfonisches Jazzkonzert der Jazzklasse von Dr. Hoch’s Konservatorium,”
Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung (March 9, 1930): 9; “Sinfonisches Jazz-Konzert
der Jazz-Klasse von Dr. Hochs Konservatorium,” Funkstunde 10 (March 11, 1930):
295. The concert program was also reprinted in the US press as well: “Mahler’s ‘Eighth’
in London,” New York Times, May 4, 1930. A further radio appearance by Seiber and his
jazz students took place on November 5, 1929. On Seiber’s compositions, from this
period and later, see Smith Bowers, “East Meets West,” 130–36.
74. “Bunter Abend,” Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung 7:47 (November 22,
1931), 10.
75. Hans Pehl, “Vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik,” Der Frankfurt Sound:
Eine Stadt und ihre Jazzgeschichte(n), ed. Heinrich Schwab (Frankfurt am Main: Soci-
etätsverlag, 2004), 25.
76. Recordings of his two Jazzolettes further reveal that he drew specific inspiration
from Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, e.g., in instrumentation and tonality (Ebony Band,
Dancing the Jazz Fever of Milhaud, Martinu, Seiber, Burian & Wolpe, Compact Disc
[Channel Classics CCS 30611, 2011]).
77. Theodor W. Adorno, “Frankfurter Opern-und Konzertkritiken [May 1929],”
Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 19 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1997), 156.
78. The number of students annually enrolled in the jazz program at Hoch’s Conser-
vatory between 1928 and 1932 varied between 10 and 19 (Cahn, Das Hoch’sche Kon-
servatorium, 378).
79. W. St., “Die Syncopators beim Training. Die Jazzklasse im Hoch’schen Konser-
vatorium,” Stadt-Blatt der Frankfurter Zeitung, November 18, 1932.
80. In 1938, the conservatory was made public and renamed the Hochschule für
Musik und darstellende Kunst.
81. On the history of jazz in Frankfurt, see Jürgen Schwab, ed., Der Frankfurt
Sound.
82. Schulz-Köhn did receive a doctorate in 1940 with the publication of his impor-
tant study of the recording industry, Die Schallplatte auf dem Weltmarkt (Berlin: Reher,
1940).
83. Dietrich Schulz-Köhn to Langston Hughes, January 31, 1958, Langston Hughes
Papers, James Weldon Johnson Collection. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Li-
brary. Yale University.
Chapter 6
The quotation cited in the epigraph is from Langston Hughes, Fine Clothes to the Jew
(New York: Knopf, 1927), xiii.
1. Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1962), 69. On Hughes’ life and works, see the biography by Ar-
nold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1986–88). On Hughes’ role within African American diasporic culture in Europe
during the interwar period, see Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Lit-
erature, Culture, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2003), 59–68.
2. Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, 71.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 72. Lenox Avenue was a famous street in 1920s Harlem. Today it is also
known as Malcolm X Boulevard.
5. The exchange has primarily been considered from the perspective of the his-
tory of the Harlem Renaissance and the individual biographies of figures like Langs-
ton Hughes. Recently, however, scholars have begun to explore the connections be-
tween the Harlem Renaissance and Weimar modernism. See A. B. Christa Schwarz,
“New Negro Renaissance—‘Neger-Renaissance’: Crossovers between African Amer-
ica and Germany during the Era of the Harlem Renaissance,” From Black to Schwarz:
Cultural Crossovers between African America and Germany, eds. Maria I. Diedrich
and Jürgen Heinrichs (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2010), 49–74; Leroy Hopkins, “Louis
Douglas and the Weimar Reception of Harlemania,” Germans and African Ameri-
cans, eds. Larry A. Greene and Anke Ortlepp (Jackson: University Press of Missis-
sippi, 2011): 50–69.
6. Langston Hughes, “To a Negro Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret,” Collected Po-
ems of Langston Hughes, eds. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (New York: Knopf,
1994), 60. Hereafter abbreviated as CPLH.
7. Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, 66.
8. Charles Harald Nichols, ed., Arna Bontemps–Langston Hughes Letters, 1925–

1962 (New York: Dodd, 1980), 372.
9. Tobias Nagl, Die unheimliche Maschine: Rasse und Repräsentation im Wei-
marer Kino (Munich: edition text+kritik, 2009), 667.
10. On the translation of Hughes in the Spanish-speaking world, see Vera M. Kut-
zinski, The Worlds of Langston Hughes: Modernism and Translation in the Americas
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012).
11. Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, 110. Italics in original.
12. Else Feldmann, “Neger, die Dichter sind,” Arbeiter-Zeitung (Vienna), Decem-
ber 18, 1928.
13. Hughes, “To a Negro Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret,” CLPH, 60.
14. On the role of the blues in Hughes’ work, see Steven C. Tracy, Langston Hughes
and the Blues (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
15. Langston Hughes, “Negro,” CPLH, 24. Section headings that appear in quota-
tions all refer to the titles of poems written by Hughes.
16. Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, 57.
17. Hans Goslar, Amerika 1922 (Berlin-Wilmersdorf: Hermann-Paetel, 1922).
18. On travel literature in Weimar, in particular on the role played by African Amer-
icans, see Sara Markham, Workers, Women, and Afro-Americans: Images of the United
States in German Travel Literature from 1923–1933 (New York: Peter Lang, 1986).
19. Alfred Kerr, New York und London: Stätten des Geschicks, Zwanzig Kapitel
nach dem Weltkrieg (Berlin: Fischer, 1923), 85. Ellipses in original.
20. PB, “Farbige Millionäre in New York,” Vossische Zeitung, March 4, 1922; Ko-
ber, “Der schwarze Mann. Aufstieg einer Rasse,” Vossische Zeitung, August 21, 1922.
21. Harlem is, for example, the focus of Joseph Chapiro, “Die amerikanische Neger-
Hauptstadt,” Berliner Tageblatt, March 31, 1929. For a discussion of further examples
of German travelers to Harlem during the 1920s, see Dorothea Löbbermann, “Tourist-
ische Begierde. Harlem als New Yorker Attraktion,” Fremdes Begehren: transkulturelle
Beziehungen in Literatur, Kunst und Medien, eds. Eva Lezzi, Monika Ehlers, and San-
dra Schramm (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), 121–31. Additionally, in 1931, a German re-
porter named Hellmut H. Hellmut visited the Cotton Club in Harlem and captured a
rare, live performance of Cab Calloway. See Cab Calloway, Lethia Hill, Eddie Rector,
et al., Live from the Cotton Club (Hambergen: Bear Family Records, 2003).
22. Hans Goslar, “Der amerikanische Neger,” Vossische Zeitung, April 1, 1922;
Hans Goslar, Amerika 1922 (Berlin-Wilmersdorf: Hermann-Paetel, 1922), 71.
23. Goslar, Amerika 1922, 64.
24. Ibid., 76.
25. Ibid., 68.
26. Nils Roemer, “Jewish Traveling Cultures and the Competing Visions of Moder-
nity,” Central European History 43:3 (September 2009), 429.
27. Ibid., 430.
28. Goslar, Amerika 1922, 71.
29. Langston Hughes, “Negro,” CPLH, 26. In CPLH, lines 2 and 3 are rendered as
separate lines. However, like Goslar’s translation, the original publication in Crisis ren-
dered them as one line, which has been maintained here (see Langston Hughes, “Ne-
gro,” the Crisis 23.3 [January 1922]: 113).
30. Goslar, Amerika 1922, 71. Again, this layout is identical to that which one finds
in Goslar’s text, i.e., with the last two words of the second line pushed to the right mar-
gin.
31. Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (New
York: Routledge, 2004), 20.
32. Ibid., 71.
33. Georg Widenbauer, “Die schwarze Weltgefahr” Deutschlands Erneuerung 7:12
(1923), 735.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 736.
36. Ibid., 735.
37. English-language reprintings of Hughes’ work can be found in Franz Friedrich
Oberhauser, “Black City Haarlem [sic],” Kölnische Zeitung, September 4, 1929; also
published in Neue Freie Presse, September 22, 1929; Marie Leitner, Langston Hughes,
and Countee Cullen, “The Weary Blues / She of the Dancing Feet Sings,” Der Quer-
schnitt 6:7 (1926): 518–19.
38. Alain Locke—Arthur Rundt Correspondence, 1926–28, Alain Locke Papers,
164–82, Folder 7, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
39. In a letter to Alain Locke from 1926 (the exact date is obscured by an ink stain),
Rundt sends his regards to Hughes and mentions that he was pleased by the card he
received from Hughes. Hughes also appears to have mentioned Rundt in a later letter to
Anna Nussbaum. See her response to Hughes on January 28, 1928 (Langston Hughes
Papers, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Li-
brary, Yale University. Further references to the Langston Hughes Papers will be ab-
breviated hereafter as LHP).
40. “Communism Practised in Palestine Colonies,” New York Times, March 8, 1925,
X15. See further: Arthur Rundt and Richard A. Bermann, Palästina: Ein Reisebuch
(Leipzig, Vienna, Zurich: P.E.L., 1923).
41. Arthur Rundt, Der Mensch wird umgebaut. Ein Russlandbuch (Berlin: Rowohlt,
1932).
42. Paul Huldermann translated two articles by Alain Locke into German and pub-
lished them in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (Alain Locke, “Der Neger in der ameri-
kanischen Kultur,” February 3, 1929; “Negerdichtung der U.S.A.,” February 10, 1929).
He also attempted to publish a translation of a new work by Locke that would have been
similar to New Negro as is discussed in his correspondence with Locke (Alain Locke—
Paul Huldermann, Correspondence, Alain Locke Papers, Box 164– 38, Folder 10,
Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University). See further Schwarz “New
Negro Renaissance—‘Neger-Renaissance,’” 61.
43. Arthur Rundt, Amerika ist anders (Berlin: Wegweiser, 1926), 75.
44. Ibid., 76.
45. Löbbermann, “Touristische Begierde. Harlem als New Yorker Attraktion,” 123.
46. Rundt translates Angelina Grimke’s “The Black Finger”; Joseph Cotters’, “And
What Shall You Say?”; Hughes’ “Our Land,” “Poem (Youth),” and “I, Too.” Rundt’s
translations of the above pieces in the Frankfurter General-Anzeiger were published in
that paper on March 18 (“New Yorker Brief,” translation of Cotter), April 4 (“Harlem,
das Negerghetto”), May 2 (“Der schwarze Finger,” translation of Grimke), and May 20,
1925 (“Neger-Lyrik. Drei Gedichte von Langston Hughes,” translation of the three po-
ems by Langston Hughes). The May 20 publication of “I, Too” was the very first of
Rundt’s translations of Hughes, followed shortly thereafter by its publication as,
“Neger-Lyrik. Zwei Gedichte von Langston Hughes,” Prager Tagblatt, June 14, 1925.
47. Rundt, Amerika ist anders, 71; “Der amerikanische Neger,” 211; “Neger-Lyrik.
Zwei Gedichte von Langston Hughes,” Prager Tagblatt, June 14, 1925.
48. Arthur Rundt, “Die schwarze Welle,” Uhu 1:11 (August 1925), 32. English in
original italicized.
49. Rundt, Amerika ist anders, 75. English in original italicized.
50. Alfred Rundt, “Der amerikanische Neger,” Velhagen & Klasing Monatshefte
41:2 (1927), 212. English in original italicized.
51. Langston Hughes, “I, Too,” CPLH, 46.
52. Rundt, Amerika ist anders, 71. Again, it must be borne in mind that slight varia-
tions exist between all four published examples of Rundt’s translation, in particular
between the opening line and treatment of the last three lines of the poem.
53. That this was no mere misreading is indicated by the fact that Rundt correctly
reads the future tense in the more difficulty parsed “Nobody’ll” of Hughes’ poem and
translates it as “Keiner wird.” Moreover, Rundt is the only translator out of the seven
who translate “I, too” to use “wollen” (to want) rather than “werden” (to become).
54. For example, Henri Barbusse, Die Kette: Visionärer Roman, trans. Anna Nuss-
baum, 2 vols. (Berlin: Neuer Deutscher Verlag, 1926).
55. Nussbaum corresponded with Dreiser from 1926–29, the result of which being
the publication of Theodor Dreiser, Schwester Carrie, trans. Anna Nussbaum (Berlin:
Zsolnay, 1929).
56. Lisa Silverman, “Zwischenzeit and Zwischenort: Veza Canetti, Else Feld-
mann, and Jewish Writing in Interwar Vienna,” Prooftexts 26:1–2 (Winter/Spring
2006), 45.
57. Anna Nussbaum, “Negerromane,” Sozialistische Monatshefte 28:16/17 (1922),
661.
58. On the Southern Syncopated Orchestra in Vienna, see Konrad Nowakowski,
“‘30 Negroes (Ladies and Gentlemen)’: The Syncopated Orchestra in Vienna,” Black
Music Research Journal 29:2 (Fall 2009): 229–82. Though this essay does not contain
a discussion of Nussbaum’s comments, Nowakowski’s later work does. See his “Jazz in
Wien: Die Anfänge,” Anklaenge 2011/2012, Special Issue: Jazz unlimited. Beiträge zur
Jazz-Rezeption in Österreich (Wien: Mille Tre Verlag, 2012), 71.
59. I cannot here do justice to the broader cultural, historical determinants at work
in 1920s Vienna, a context that in many ways led to the unique creation that was Nuss-
baum’s Africa Sings. Rather, and standing in parallel to the absent consideration of the
equally rich background of Langston Hughes, a thoroughgoing discussion of Nuss-
baum’s development during the mid-1920s must be bracketed out here. On jazz and the
African diasporic presence in Vienna more generally during these years, see Nowa-
kowski, “Jazz in Wien: Die Anfänge.”
60. Anna Nussbaum, “Neger-Musik,” Der Tag, September 25, 1927. See further
discussion of this piece in Nowakowski, “Jazz in Wien,” 71.
61. Anna Nussbaum to Langston Hughes, December 7, 1927, LHP.
62. Anna Nussbaum, “Afrika singt,” Der Tag, December 25, 1927. The translations
are by Josef Luitpold and Nussbaum. She mentions sending a clipping of the article to
Hughes in her second letter to him from January 20, 1928, LHP.
63. Anna Nussbaum to Langston Hughes, December 7, 1927, LHP.
64. For example, in April 1928, she wrote to Claude McKay to request a copy of his
1922 collection Harlem Shadows. Published just over six months later, Afrika singt
contains 19 poems from this collection (Anna Nussbaum to Claude McKay, March 30,
1928. Claude McKay Collection. James Weldon Johnson Collection. Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library. Yale University).
65. George S. Schuyler, “Views and Reviews,” the Pittsburgh Courier, March 3,
1928, A8.
66. Anna Nussbaum, “Die afro-amerikanische Frau,” Der Tag, February 12, 1928.
67. Schuyler, “Views and Reviews.”
68. Anna Nussbaum, “The Afro-American Woman” (Du Bois, The Papers of W. E.
B. Du Bois); Anna Nussbaum, “The Afro-American Woman,” Norfolk Journal and
Guide, March 31, 1928.
69. Nussbaum, “Die afro-amerikanische Frau”; Nussbaum, “The Afro-American
Woman” (The Papers of W. E. B. Du Bois); and Nussbaum, “The Afro-American
Woman,” Norfolk Journal and Guide.
70. Examples of awkward renderings in Afrika singt are detailed in Alan Lareau,
“Harlem in Vienna: The Anthology Afrika singt (1929),” unpublished conference paper,
MLA Convention, New York, December 29, 2002.
71. Hughes, “Negro,” CPLH, 24.
72. Nussbaum, Afrika singt, 15.
73. Hanna Meuter and Paul Therstappen, eds. and trans. Amerika singe auch ich.
Dichtungen amerikanischer Neger (Dresden: Jess, 1932), 89. On Meuter and this col-
lection, see footnote 126. At the same time, this is not to suggest that Nussbaum was the
only translator who retained these proper names. For example, Austrian translator and
poet Josef Kainer did so as well in his 1926 translation of “Negro” (Josef Kainer, “Neg-
erdichtungen,” Arbeiter-Zeitung [Vienna], August 6, 1926).
74. Nussbaum, Afrika singt, 8.
75. Ibid., 9.
76. Ibid., 10.
77. In English: W. E. B. Du Bois, “Afrika singt,” the Crisis 36 (March 1929): 87, 98;
H. L. Mencken, “Afrika singt,” American Mercury 17 (1929): x, xii. Besides Hesse’s
review referred to below, see in German: Rudolf Holzer, “Afrika singt . . .” [Review],
Wiener Zeitung, May 30, 1929, 1–3; Rudolf Kayser, “Afrika singt” [Review], Neue
Rundschau 40 (1929): 429; Edlef Köppen, “Afrika singt,” Die literarische Welt 5 (May
31, 1929): 6; Ernst Lissauer, “Gesang des schwarzen Volkes,” Die Literatur 31
(1928/29): 389–91; Ernst Lothar, “Erschütternde Melodie,” Neue Freie Presse, Decem-
ber 12, 1928, 1–3; Fritz Rostosky, “Afrika singt” [Review], Die schöne Literatur 31
(February 1930), 90; John Sieg, “Americana,” Die Tat 21 (1929), 67; Kurt Tucholsky,
“Afrika singt” [1929], Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7, eds. Mary Gerold-Tucholsky and
Fritz J. Raddatz (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1975): 235–36; Martha
Weltsch. “Afrika singt . . . ,” Jüdische Rundschau 26 (February 1929): 101.
78. Percy Julian, “The New Interest of Austrian Youth in Negro Prose and Poetry.”
the Crisis 40 (November 1933), 253.
79. Ibid.
80. Hermann Hesse, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Volker Michels, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 119.
81. Langston Hughes, “Auch ich bin Amerika. Negerlieder von Langston Hughes,”
trans. Anna Nussbaum Atlantis 1:9 (1929): 549. This was a selection of three of his
poems from Africa Sings, including “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (Der Neger spricht
von Strömen), “Cross” (Zwischen schwarz und weiß), and “I, Too” (Auch ich singe
Amerika). Other examples include: Langston Hughes, “Ruby Brown,” Die Frau (Vi-
enna) 38:6 (June 1, 1929): 1; Langston Hughes and Frank Horne, “Afrikanischer Tanz /
Der Neger spricht von Strömen / Arabeske,” Die Literatur 31 (1929): 378, 380; Her-
mann Kesser and Langston Hughes, “Übler Bursche,” Die Weltbühne 24 (1929): 614;
Langston Hughes, “Ich bin ein Neger,” Arbeiter-Zeitung (Vienna), December 29, 1929.
82. Alfons Goldschmidt, Acht Menschen in der Todeszelle (Berlin: Tribunal, 1932),
16.
83. Anna Siemsen, Langston Hughes, and Paula Kurgass, “Amerikanische Neg-
erlieder,” Urania IX:8–9 (1929): 218, 252, 281.
84. [Thomas] Otto Brandt, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen, “Drei Gedichte
junger Neger,” Literarische Monatshefte 1:6 (May/June 1930): 11.
85. Slovene translations from Africa Sings were done by Mile Klopcic and Cvetko
Kristan. See Igor Maver, “The Question of Literary Transmission and Mediation: Aes-
thetic, Linguistic and Social Aspects of Slovene Translations from American Verse until
1945,” Slovene Studies 13:1 (1992), 96.
86. On the compositions other than those by Bornefeld, Reinitz, and Heymann, see
Malcom Cole, “‘Afrika singt:’ Austro-German Echoes of Harlem Renaissance,” Jour-
nal of the American Musicological Society 30:1 (Spring, 1977): 72–95. See further
Helmut Bornefeld, Afrika singt. Ein Zyklus für tiefere Stimme und Klavier nach Worten
schwarzer Dichter [1931] (Stuttgart: Carus), 2010. Werner Richard Heymann produced
“Er oder ich” from Hermann Kesser’s translation of Hughes’ poem “Suicide,” trans-
lated as “Selbstmord” for Africa Sings. Though the song was never published, I thank
Elisabeth Trautwein-Heymann for providing me with a copy.
87. Three songs from Schatten über Harlem were published by Universal Edition.
These were Béla Reinitz, “Lied aus Dixieland,” U.E. 7117 (Vienna: Universal Edition,
1930); “Schatten über Harlem,” U.E. 7118 (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1930); “Weißer
Bruder, was wirst du sagen?” U.E. 7119 (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1930).
88. Cole, “Austro-German Echoes,” 82.
89. Ibid.
90. Joachim-Felix Leonard, ed., Programmgeschichte des Hörfunks in der Wei-
marer Republik, vol. 2 (Munich: dtv, 1997), 957. Radio played a role in disseminating
the poems in non-musical form as well. In early 1929, Ernst Glaeser produced a presen-
tation using readings of poetry from Africa Sings (Ibid., 954). Around the same time,
the radio program “Song” included a recitation of Hughes’ “Negro” as translated by
Nussbaum (Ibid., 955–56).
91. Cora Gary Illidge, “Abbie Mitchell Captivates Hearers,” the New York Amster-
dam News, November 25, 1931, 7; Edward G. Perry, “Abbie Mitchell in N.Y. Concert,”
Afro-American, May 2, 1931, 15; Maude Roberts George, “Abbie Mitchell Wins High
Praise in Song Recital,” the Chicago Defender, November 7, 1931, 10.
92. It is unclear how Abbie Mitchell came to know these works, though one strong
possibility is through her daughter, Marion Cook, or her son-in-law, Louis Douglas,
who is discussed in chapter 4.
93. M.G., “Skandal im Landestheater,” Deutsches Volksblatt, October 20, 1930.
Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg E 18 VII Bü 456. Hereaf-
ter abbreviated as LBW.
94. Ibid.
95. “Kundgebungen am Theater,” Stuttgarter Neues Tagblatt, October 20, 1930,
LBW.
96. Karl Konrad Düssel, “Uraufführung und Theaterskandal. ‘Schatten über Har-
lem’ im Landestheater,” Stuttgarter Neues Tagblatt, October 20, 1930, LBW.
97. “Vom Landestheater. Unerhörter Theaterskandal bei einer Uraufführung,” Der
Beobachter, October 25, 1930, LBW.
98. “Der Kulturbolschewismus auf der Bühne,” Völkischer Beobachter, October 24,
1930, LBW.
99. “Um die Freiheit der Kunst,” Berliner Tageblatt, October 28, 1930, LBW.
100. See for example: Molodet, “Kulturfaschismus gegen Landestheater. Theater-
skandal um ‘Schatten über Haarlem [sic],” Beilage zur Süddeutschen Arbeiter-Zeitung,
October 20, 1930, LBW; “Uraufführung: ‘Schatten über Harlem,’” Arbeiter-Tribüne,
October 25, 1930, LBW; “Theaterskandal im Reich,” Die Rote Fahne, October 22,
1930, LBW.
101. To be sure, the Nazis did not forget, and as Kim Kowalke notes, in 1940, after
an initial raid of Universal Edition, the Viennese publisher of modern music, to confis-
cate music by Weill and Eisler, they returned to collect, amongst other things, 160 cop-
ies of music from Schatten über Harlem (Kim Kowalke, “Dancing with the Devil: Pub-
lishing Modern Music in the Third Reich,” Modernism/Modernity 8:1 [2001], 27).
102. Martin Ulmer, Antisemitismus in Stuttgart 1871–1933. Studien zum öffentlichen
Alltag (Berlin: Metropol, 2011), 379.
103. Ossip Dymow (Ossip Dymov) was born Yosef Perelman in Bialystok in 1878.
Further biographical information is available in Maxim D. Shrayer, eds., An Anthology
of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry, vol.
1 (Amonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2007), 168–69.
104. “Harlem: 5 Neighborhoods,“ Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, eds.
Cary D. Wintz and Paul Finkelman (New York: Routledge, 2004), 477.
105. Ossip Dymow, Schatten über Harlem. Komödie in Vier Akten (Berlin: C. Som-
mer, 1930), 19. Held at the New York Public Library’s Theater Division, this is the only
known copy of the script. After the scandal, however, a brief excerpt was published in
Die Weltbühne (Ossip Dymow, “Schatten über Harlem.” Weltbühne 26 [1930]: 788–92).
106. Ibid., 26.
107. News of the lynching reached Germany on May 10, with articles on the case
appearing, for example, in Die Vossische Zeitung (“Furchtbare Lynchjustiz in Texas”)
and Berliner Volkszeitung (“Lynchmord in Texas”). More pointedly, the pro-democratic
weekly Welt am Montag published three articles about this single case within one
month. First, it highlighted the case in a front-page headline, “Neue Neger-Progrome in
Amerika,” on May 12, 1930, which was followed later with an article discussing Walter
White’s work on lynching, highlighting the cases where African Americans were burned
and lynched (“Der geröstete Neger,” Die Welt am Montag, June 2, 1930).
108. For example “Theaterskandale im Reich,” Danziger Neueste Nachrichten, Oc-
tober 20, 1930, LBW.
109. “Staatliche Verseuchung,” Der Angriff, October 26, 1930, LBW.
110. F. Sch., “Württ. Landestheater. Uraufführung: ‘Schatten über Harlem,’” Südde-
utsche Zeitung, October 20, 1930, LBW. First italics in original, English “colored peo-
ple” in original italicized.
111. Gabriele Hayden develops this argument for Dymow and Shadows over Harlem
in her “Performing Blackness in Weimar Germany,” unpublished conference paper,
ACLA Convention, Providence, RI, March 29, 2012.
112. Scott Spector, “On Modernism without Jews: A Counter-Historical Argument,”
Modernism/Modernity 13:4 (November 2006), 628.
113. Ibid., 620–21.
114. Dymow, Schatten über Harlem, 66.
115. Part of the confusion on the part of the audience can be put at the feet of the
director, Friedrich Brandenburg, who, as some critics noted, emphasized the tragic ele-
ments of the play at the expense of its comedy (M. G., “Skandal im Landestheater,”
Deutsches Volksblatt, October 20, 1930, LBW; Hermann Wissenharter, “Schatten über
Harlem,” Württemberger Zeitung, October 26, 1930, LBW).
116. Düssel, “Uraufführung und Theaterskandal. ‘Schatten über Harlem’ im Landes-
theater.”
117. Langston Hughes, “Laughers,” CPLH, 27.
118. Langston Hughes, Fine Clothes to the Jew (New York: Knopf, 1927), xiii.
119. Langston Hughes, Review of W. C. Handy, The Blues, Opportunity (August
1926), 258.
120. Ossip Dymow, “Neger-Getto [sic] Harlem. Die schwarze Stadt im Völkerbabel
von Neuyork,” Das kleine Blatt (Vienna), April 27, 1931.
121. Another leading African American newspaper, the Chicago Defender, referred
similarly to the fascist objection to “Harlem culture” (“Harlem Play Results in German
Uprising,” the Chicago Defender, October 25, 1930, 8).
122. “Germans Start Riot at Negro Play,” Baltimore Afro-American, October 25,
1930, 9.
123. “German Fascists in Riot over Negro Play,” New York Times, October 20, 1930,
9.
124. Nussbaum to Du Bois, Letters from November 7, 1930, and December 29, 1930
(Du Bois, W. E. B. et al. The Papers of W.E.B. Du Bois. University of Massachusetts at
Amherst).
125. Josef Luitpold “Zwischen Zeiten, Klassen, Kontinenten,” Arbeiter-Zeitung,
June 28, 1931; Anna Siemsen, “Anna Nußbaum. Ein Leben für die Internationale,”
Kulturwille 9:1 (January 1932): 3–4.
126. One more anthology of African American poetry would be published before
Weimar’s end: Meuter and Therstappen’s Amerika singe auch ich (I, too, sing America).
The impetus behind this project was Hannah Meuter, a young sociologist with an inter-
est in African American culture (Hannah Meuter, “Der neue Neger in der ameri-
kanischen Literatur,” Kölner Vierteljahreshefte für Soziologie 6:3 [1927]: 269–73). The
collection was the only volume published of a planned series on “Der neue Neger” (the
New Negro) and includes translations side-by-side with the English source text. Still,
despite its later date of publication, the collection was much less current than Africa
Sings as it is based on Robert T. Kerlin’s anthology American Negro Poetry from 1923.
Finally, for a variety of reasons, the work simply did not enjoy the same resonance with
the literary public or with composers of the period.
127. On the translation of Hughes after World War II, see Daniel Brown, “‘Black
Orpheus’: Langston Hughes Reception in German Translation (An Overview),” Langs-
ton Hughes Review IV:2 (Fall 1985): 30–37.
128. Hayes, The Practice of Diaspora, 119.
129. Theodor W. Adorno, “Oxforder Nachträge [1937],” Gesammelte Schriften, ed.
Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 17 (Frankfurt am Main: SuhrKamp, 1997), 101.
Chapter 7
The quotation cited in the epigraph is from Theodor Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of
a European Scholar in America,” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans.
Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 241.
1. Bernd Hoffmann shows through quantitative analysis of references to jazz in the
music journals Die Musik and Deutsche Tonkünstlerzeitung that “there is a turn away
from the positive reception [of jazz] already before the influence of the cultural-political
coordination by the National Socialists” (Aspekte zur Jazz-Rezeption in Deutschland:
Afro-amerikanische Musik im Spiegel der Musikpresse 1900–1945 [Graz: Akademische
Druck & Verlagsanstalt, 2003], 46). At the same time, it must be borne in mind that
Hoffmann’s analysis also shows that modernist journals like Der Querschnitt and Melos
continued to contain positive references to jazz into the early 1930s. See figures B4 and
B5 in his Aspekte zur Jazz-Rezeption in Deutschland, 218–19.
2. Wilhelm Frick, “Erlaß wider die Negerkultur für deutsches Volkstum,” Quellen
zur Geschichte Thüringens, ed. Jürgen John, vol. 3 (Erfurt: LZT, 1996), 140–41. Fur-
ther, Alan E. Steinweis, “Weimar Culture and the Rise of National Socialism: The
Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur,” Central European History 24 (January 1991), esp.
414. In connection with later Nazi actions against jazz, see Heribert Schröder, “Zur
Kontinuität nationalsozialistischer Maßnahmen gegen Jazz und Swing in der Weimarer

Republik und im Dritten Reich,” Colloquium: Festschrift Martin Vogel zum 65. Geburt-
stag, ed. Heribert Schröder (Bad Honnef: Gudrun Schröder, 1988), 175–82.
3. All told, Adorno authored some seven pieces on jazz: “Abschied vom Jazz
[1933],” Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 18 (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1997), 795– 99; [Hektor Rottweiler], “Über Jazz [1936],” Gesammelte
Schriften, vol. 17, 74–100; “Oxforder Nachträge [1937],” Gesammelte Schriften, vol.
17, 100–8; Wilder Hobson, American Jazz Music, New York: Norton & Company 1939.
Winthrop Sargeant, Jazz Hot and Hybrid, New York: Arrow Editions 1938 [1941],
Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 19, 382–99; “Jazz,” Dictionary of Arts, eds. Dagobert D.
Runes and Harry G. Schrickel (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), 511–13; “Zeit-
lose Mode. Zum Jazz [1953],” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10, 123–37; Theodor Adorno
and Joachim Ernst-Berendt, “Für und Wider den Jazz,” Merkur 7:9 (1953): 887–93.
4. Responses to Adorno’s jazz theory are quite numerous and run the gamut from
serious engagement to offhand comment: Theodore Gracyk, “Adorno, Jazz, and the
Aesthetics of Popular Music,” The Musical Quarterly 76 (Winter 1992): 526–42; Ulrich
Schönherr, “Adorno and Jazz: Reflections on a Failed Encounter,” Telos 87 (Spring
1991): 85–96; Harry Cooper, “On Über Jazz: Replaying Adorno with the Grain,” Octo-
ber 75 (Winter 1996): 99–133; James M. Harding, “Adorno, Ellison, and the Critique of
Jazz,” Cultural Critique 31 (Autumn 1995): 129–58; James Buhler, “Frankfurt School
Blues: Rethinking Adorno’s Critique of Jazz,” Apparitions: Essays on Adorno and
Twentieth-Century Music, ed. Berthold Hoeckner (New York: Routledge, 2006): 103–
30; Cornelius Partsch, Schräge Töne: Jazz und Unterhaltungsmusik in der Kultur der
Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2000), 256–68. See also in this regard,
Richard Leppert’s comments in Essays on Music, trans. Susan Gillespie, ed. Richard
Leppert (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 330–58.
5. J. Bradford Robinson, “The Jazz Essays of Theodor Adorno: Some Thoughts on
Jazz Reception in Weimar Germany,” Popular Music 13:1 (1994), 1.
6. Recently, Konrad Nowakowski has detailed a number of problems with Robin-
son’s argument in his “Jazz in Wien: Die Anfänge,” Anklaenge 2011/2012, Special Is-
sue: Jazz unlimited. Beiträge zur Jazz-Rezeption in Österreich (Wien: Mille Tre Verlag,
2012), 127–28.
7. Adorno’s discussion of the Jazzklasse is referenced in chapter 5. Adorno refers
to Whiteman in “Ad vocem Hindemith. Eine Dokumentation,” Gesammelte Schriften,
ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 17 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 223. He mentions
The Revelers in “Musikalische Aphorismen,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 18 (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 34–35. Finally, he references Baker in his negative review
of Louis Douglas’ Black People (at which, not Baker but Maud de Forest performed) at
the Frankfurter Schauspielhaus (“August 1927,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 19 [Frank-
furt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997], 99). On the appearance of Bechet and the jazz band
Mississippi Jazzers, as well as Black People in Frankfurt am Main in 1927, see Hans
Pehl, Afroamerikanische Unterhaltungskünstler in Frankfurt am Main. Eine Chronik
von 1844 bis 1945 (Frankfurt am Main: n.p., 2010), 74–79.
8. On Adorno’s contact with jazz in Vienna, see Konrad Nowakowski, “Jazz in
Wien,” 130–31.
9. Theodor W. Adorno, Der Schatz des Indianer Joe. Singspiel nach Mark Twain
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979). Hereafter cited in the body text with the abbre-
viation S.
10. Theodor Adorno, Kompositionen, eds. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Reiner Riehn
(Munich: Musik-Konzepte, 1980).
11. Rolf Tiedemann, “Adorno’s Tom Sawyer Opera Singspiel,” The Cambridge
Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
392–93. Though slightly different, this text is largely an English translation of Tiede-
mann’s original German afterword.
12. Karla Schultz “Utopias from Hell: Brecht’s ‘Mahagonny’ and Adorno’s ‘Trea-
sure of Indian Joe,” Monatshefte 90:3 (1998): 307–16; Peter-Ulrich Philipson, “Kinder-
modell der Moderne. Adornos Schatz des Indianer Joe,” Geschichte, Kultur, Bildung:
Philosophische Denkrichtungen. Johannes Rohbeck zum 60. Geburtstag, eds. Peggy H.
Breitenstein and Johannes Rohbeck (Hannover: Siebert, 2007), 103–16; Christopher D.
Morris, “Impossible Alternatives to Tom Sawyer’s Delusions in Twain and Adorno,”
University of Toronto Quarterly 81:2 (Spring 2012): 219–45.
13. Susan C. Cook, Opera for a New Republic: The Zeitopern of Krenek, Weill, and
Hindemith (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), 4.
14. Theodor W. Adorno and Alban Berg, Briefwechsel 1925–1935 (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 276.
15. Martin Hufner, Adorno und die Zwölftontechnik (Regensburg: ConBrio Ver-
lagsgesellschaft, 1996), 93.
16. On Adorno’s activities during the first months of the Nazi regime, see Stefan
Müller-Doohm, Adorno: Eine Biographie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 262–
76.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Adorno and Berg, Briefwechsel 1925–1935, 279–80.
20. In addition to the differences discussed below, Adorno excises one of the major
figures of the plot, Becky Thatcher, who is Tom’s love interest and subject of much of
the novel. Becky’s femininity and Tom’s relationship with her is, in part, substituted
through the figure of Huck.
21. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey, The Stan-
dard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James
Strachey, vols. IV-V (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 196.
22. Edgar H. Hemminghaus, Mark Twain in Germany (New York: AMS Press, 1966
[1939]), 144n4.
23. In both German translations and the English original of Twain’s The Adventures
of Tom Sawyer, a forward by the author specifies that the story takes place some thirty
or forty years in the past, that is to say in the period between 1836 and 1846.
24. Hemminghaus, Mark Twain in Germany, 130–31.
25. Mark Twain, Tom Sawyers Abenteuer und Streiche, trans. Margarete Jacobi
(Stuttgart: Lutz, 1892). On the various editions produced of Twain’s works before and
during the 1930s, see Hemminghaus, Mark Twain in Germany, 83–96, 123–31.
26. Though not all passages display this level of similarity, the montage quality of
Adorno’s work is obviously intentional, as can be seen in the following comparison of

Jacobi’s translation and Adorno’s Treasure.
First, Jacobi’s text:
“Heut’ Nacht. Ich denk’, da werden sie den alten Williams holen kommen.”
“Der ist aber schon am Sonnabend begraben worden, warum haben sie ihn da
nicht schon in der Nacht geholt?”
“Na, du redst auch, wie du’s verstehst! Sonnabend Mitternacht ist doch schon
Sonntag und da hat kein Teufel mehr was zu suchen hier oben. Der wird sich
schwer hüten, sich am Sonntag blicken zu lassen (Twain, Tom Sawyers Abenteuer
und Streiche, 59–60)
Next, Adorno’s version of the same scene:
HUCK: Da werden sie den alten Williams holen kommen, der war schon schlecht
genug.
TOM: Der ist aber schon am Sonnabend beerdigt worden, warum haben sie ihn da
nicht in der Nacht geholt?
Huck: Können vor Lachen. Sonnabend Mitternacht ist schon Sonntag. Da hat
kein Teufel mehr was zu suchen hier oben. Der wird sich schwer hüten, sich am
Sonntag blicken zu lassen. (S 20)
27. Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence,
1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1999), 24.
28. Ibid., 26
29. Ibid., 24.
30. Ibid., 25.
31. Theodor Adorno, “The Idea of Natural History,” Telos 60 (June 1984), 111.
32. Ibid., 118.
33. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne
(London: Verso, 1993), 177–78.
34. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades
Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 170.
35. Mark Twain’s Book of Animals, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2010), 1–33.
36. Christina Gerhardt, “The Ethics of Animals in Adorno and Kafka,” New Ger-
man Critique 97 (January 2006), 162.
37. Theodor W. Adorno and Ernst Krenek, Briefwechsel (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1974), 57.
38. Gerhardt, “The Ethics of Animals in Adorno and Kafka,” 166.
39. On the significance of such unnamed animals in Schatz, see Morris, “Impossible
Alternatives to Tom Sawyer’s Delusion in Twain and Adorno,” 240–41.
40. Peter von Haselberg, quoted in Steinert, Entdeckung der Kulturindustrie oder:
Warum Professor Adorno Jazz-Musik nicht ausstehen konnte (Vienna: Verlag für Ge-
sellschaftskritik, 1992), 228n14.
41. Anthony Krupp, Reason’s Children: Childhood in Early Modern Philosophy
(Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2009), 14–15.
42. Morris, “Impossible Alternatives to Tom Sawyer’s Delusions in Twain and

Adorno,” 238.
43. Adorno and Krenek, Briefwechsel, 57.
44. Ibid., 56.
45. Tiedemann, “Adorno’s Tom Sawyer Opera Singspiel,” 386–389.
46. Morris, “Impossible Alternatives to Tom Sawyer’s Delusion in Twain and
Adorno,” 241.
47. On the history of the case and its position in twentieth-century American his-
tory, see James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994) and
Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 2007). More recently, Susan D. Pennybacker has analyzed the
case from a transnational perspective in order to shed new light on British history in the
1930s, see From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
48. Quoted in Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro, 5.
49. James A. Miller, Susan D. Pennybacker, and Eve Rosenhaft, “Mother Ada
Wright and the International Campaign to Free the Scottsboro Boys, 1931–1934,”
American Historical Review 106:2 (2001), 388.
50. On the Rote Hilfe, see Sabine Hering and Kurt Schilde, eds., Die Rote Hilfe: die
Geschichte der internationalen kommunistischen “Wohlfahrtsorganisation” und ihrer
sozialen Aktivitäten in Deutschland (1921–1941) (Opladen: Leske+Budrich, 2003). On
Münzenberg and the League Against Imperialism in this context, see Miller, Penny-
backer and Rosenhaft, “Mother Ada Wright,” 397–98.
51. Cited in Miller, Pennybacker and Rosenhaft, “Mother Ada Wright,” 403.
52. Godo Remszhardt to William Pickens, Field Secretary of NAACP, June 4, 1930,
W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, University of
Massachusetts Amherst Libraries MS 312.
53. Godo Remszhardt to Langston Hughes, July 15, 1930, Langston Hughes Pa-
pers, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
Yale University.
54. Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel and Haiti and Universal History (Pittsburgh: Univer-
sity of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 19–20.
55. Buck-Morss, Hegel and Haiti, 80.
56. Roy Wright, thirteen years old in 1931, would later state that before his testimony,
he was taken into a separate room and beaten by the deputy sheriff until he agreed to im-
plicate the other African American riders (Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro, 94).
57. Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro, 21.
58. Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro, 21–22. That this idea was present in Germany
is partially confirmed by the following statement from Alfons Goldschmidt: “At first
both girls vigorously denied having been attacked by the boys. But they are prostitutes,
entirely in the hands of the police, who can convict them for perjury or other crimes
punishable with years of imprisonment” (“Aus dem Lande der ‘Freiheit,’” Der Funke,
May 10, 1932).
59. Jim’s mangled English in Adorno is present in Jacobi’s translation as well. Com-
pare Twain, Tom Sawyers Abenteuer und Streiche, 23.
60. Theodor W. Adorno, “Abschied von Jazz,” Europäische Revue 9 (1933): 313–
16.
61. In a short paragraph written for the journal Die Musik, Adorno states that: “The
end of jazz, long prophesied, has come” (Theodor Adorno, “Musikalische Aphorismen
[1932],” Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 18 [Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1997], 22).
62. Hans Th. David, “Abschied vom Jazz,” Melos 9 (1930): 413–17. Indeed, be-
tween 1926 and 1933 no less than four separate articles bore the title “Twilight of Jazz”
(Jazz-Dämmerung) and two the title “Farewell to Jazz.”
63. A discussion of the multiple and uneven legal measures taken against jazz by the
Nazis can be found in Schröder, “Zur Kontinuität nationalsozialistischer Maßnahmen
gegen Jazz und Swing in der Weimarer Republik und im Dritten Reich.” On the history
of jazz and entertainment music in Weimar radio, see Michael Stapper, Unterhaltungs-
musik im Rundfunk der Weimarer Republik (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 2001). For jazz in
Weimar and Nazi radio, see Joachim Ernst Berendt, “Jazz als Indiz: Beiträge zu einer
Geschichte des Jazz am deutschen Rundfunk (1924–1975),” Ein Fenster aus Jazz: Es-
says, Portraits, Reflexionen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1977), 290–309.
64. Kolb had been made director of the Funkstunde in February, yet his tenure there
was short-lived. Already in April, he was replaced by the writer Friedrich Arenhövel,
who had been handpicked by Goebbels. On Kolb’s position within the Nazi hierarchy,
see Ansgar Diller, Rundfunkpolitik im Dritten Reich (Munich: dtv, 1980), 56–59, 114.
On Kolb and the Funkstunde ban, see Axel Jockwer, Unterhaltungsmusik im Dritten
Reich (University of Constance, PhD diss., 2005), 287–88.
65. Press release of the Berliner Funk-Stunde, March 8, 1933. Reprinted in Albrecht
Dümling and Peter Girth, eds., Entartete Musik. Dokumentation und Kommentar (Düs-
seldorf: Der kleine Verlag, 1993), 120. The ban is further referenced in “Keine Jazz-
musik mehr!” NS Funk 1 (March 19, 1933), 27; “Haben Sie schon gehört, dass . . . ?”
Der Artist 2466 (March 24, 1933).
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
68. Theodor Adorno, “Farewell to Jazz,” 496. Translation slightly modified.
69. Adorno, “Farewell to Jazz,” 497. Translation slightly modified.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid., 497–98. Translation slightly modified.
72. Thus in the 1953 “Perennial Fashion—Jazz,” he writes: “The fact is that what
jazz has to offer rhythmically is extremely limited. The most striking traits in jazz were
all independently produced, developed and surpassed by serious music since Brahms”
(Adorno, “Perennial Fashion—Jazz,” Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber [Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983], 123).
73. Adorno, “Farewell to Jazz,” 499.
74. Adorno and Berg, Briefwechsel 1925–1935, 280.
75. Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic
Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 400.
76. On Seiber’s role in “On Jazz,” see Nick Chadwick, “Mátyás Seiber’s Collabora-
tion in Adorno’s Jazz Project, 1936,” British Library Journal 21 (Autumn 1995): 259–88.
77. On Adorno’s experience of jazz in Britain during the mid-1930s, see Evelyn
Wilcock, “Adorno, Jazz, and Racism: ‘Über Jazz’ and the 1934–7 British Jazz Debate,”
Telos 107 (Spring 1996), 65–67; Catherine Parsonage, The Evolution of Jazz in Britain,
1880–1935 (London: Ashgate, 2005), 61–77.
78. The three songs remain unpublished and are located in the Theodor W. Adorno
Archiv at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.
Conclusion
The quotation cited in the epigraph is from “Good Bye Jonny” (1939), music by Peter
Kreuder, text by Hans-Fritz Beckmann.
1. A powerful example of the synthesis of anti-Black and anti-Semitic racism that
took place during the final years of the Weimar Republic is Alfred Rosenberg, Der
Sumpf: Querschnitte durch das ‘Geistes-’Leben der November-Demokratie (Munich:
Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1939 [1930]), 26–43.
2. Goebbels quoted in Heribert Schröder, “Zur Kontinuität nationalsozialistischer
Maßnahmen gegen Jazz und Swing in der Weimarer Republik und im Dritten Reich,”
Colloquium: Festschrift Martin Vogel zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Heribert Schröder (Bad
Honnef: Gudrun Schröder, 1988), 179.
3. On the history of jazz in the Third Reich, see Michael Kater, Different Drum-
mers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992);
Michael Kater, “Forbidden Fruit? Jazz in the Third Reich,” The American Historical
Review 94:1 (1989): 11–43; Horst J. P. Bergmeier and Rainer E. Lotz, Hitler’s Air-
waves: The Inside Story of Nazi Radio Broadcasting and Propaganda Swing (New Ha-
ven: Yale University Press, 1997); Bernd Polster, ed., Swing Heil. Jazz im Nationalsozi-
alismus (Berlin: Transit, 1989); Mike Zwerin, Swing under the Nazis: Jazz as a
Metaphor for Freedom (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000); Christian Kellersmann,
Jazz in Deutschland von 1933–1945 (Menden: Der Jazzfreund, 1990).
4. Erica Carter, Dietrich’s Ghosts: The Sublime and the Beautiful in Third Reich
Film (London: BFI Publishing, 2004), 214.
5. Ibid., 215.
6. Ibid., 175.
7. Guido Fackler, “Zwischen (musikalischem) Widerstand und Propaganda—Jazz
im ‘Dritten Reich,’” Musikalische Volkskultur und die politische Macht, ed. Günther
Noll (Essen: Verlag Die Blaue Eule, 1994), 439–41.
8. Marita Gründgens, “Ich wünsche dir Glück, Jonny” (Electrola 3161). See also the
recordings by Nina Buser (Brilliant 319, DeBeGe 2116) and Carla Carlsen (Telefunken A
1700). Further details on these recordings are included in Rainer Lotz ed., Die deutsche
National-Discographie, Series 1 “Discographie der deutschen Kleinkunst,” eds. Klaus
Krüger and Rainer Lotz, vols. 4 and 5 (Bonn: Birgit Lotz Verlag, 1996 and 1998).
9. Kurt Herbst, “Zwei Punkte im Kapitel: Rundfunk und Unterhaltungsmusik,”
Die Musik 27 (December 1934), 220. See below for further discussion of Herbst.
10. Gründgens’ career is discussed in Evelin Förster, “Die grosse Kunst der kleinen
Schwester. Marita Gründgens—Ein Multitalent,” Fox auf 78 27 (Winter 2013): 16–18.
11. Marita Gründgens, “Ich wünsch’ mir eine kleine Ursula” (Electrola EG 3771).
12. Her performances of Jolson took place as part of early appearances on West-
deutscher Rundfunk in Düsseldorf in 1929 (“Gründgens, Marita,” Tondokumente der
Kleinkunst und ihre Interpreten 1898–1945, ed. Berthold Leimbach [Göttingen: Leim-
bach, 1991], n.p.).
13. Marita Gründgens, “Filmsucht” (Telefunken A 1567).
14. See the entry for the Nina Buser recording in Lotz, ed., Die deutsche National-
Discographie, Series 1 “Discographie der deutschen Kleinkunst,” vol. 5, 1143. Though
here “blues” indicates tempo rather than genre, the association “blues” had with African
American popular music remained.
15. Kater, Different Drummers, 37.
16. Herbst, “Zwei Punkte im Kapitel: Rundfunk und Unterhaltungsmusik,” 220.
17. See the entry in Hofmeisters Musikalisch-literarischer Monatsbericht 107 (Jan-
uary 1935), 4.
18. Hans Bund mit seinem Streichorchester with vocals by Eric Helgar, “Jonny hat
Sehnsucht nach Hawaii” (Telefunken A 1716); Quartettgesang, “Johnny hat Sehnsucht
nach Hawaii” (Woolco 10706); Fritz Domina with vocals by Paul Dorn, “Johnny hat
Sehnsucht nach Hawaii” (Kristall 3103).
19. Alan Lareau, “Undermining Gender in Weimar Cabaret and Beyond,” Popular
Music and Society 28 (February 2005), 27.
20. It is present, for example, on the Austrian Schlager singer Freddy Quinn’s al-
bum Überall ist es schön (Polydor 1973) as well as the German Schlager singer Lolita
on Ihre größten Erfolge (Bear Family Records 2004).
21. Dishwashing is referenced directly within the “interview” with Jonny in Der
Deutsche Rundfunk (see below). The title Jonny spült ab, nonetheless, has an older his-
tory and possibly originated from the caricature “Daitsche Kunst” in the Nazi periodical
Die Brennessel (5:5 [January 30, 1934], 69) by an illustrator with the initials T. E. S. See
the reproduction in Eckhard John, Musikbolschewismus: Die Politisierung der Musik in
Deutschland 1918–1938 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994), 364.
22. On Eichborn’s later career as a composer for film, see the brief discussion in
Robert C. Reimer, “Turning Inward: An Analysis of Helmut Käutner’s Auf Wieder-
sehen, Franziska; Romanze in Moll; Unter den Brücken,” Cultural History through a
National Socialist Lens: Essays on the Cinema of the Third Reich, ed. Robert C. Reimer
(Rochester: Camden House, 2000), 231–32.
23. Hugo Hartung, Wir Wunderkinder: Der dennoch heitere Roman unseres Lebens
(Düsseldorf, Droste-Verlag, 1957). On Hartung, see Helga Schreckenberger, “‘Es war
vielleicht ein neues Exil und vielleicht das schmerzlichste.’ Das Thema der Rückkehr in
Oskar Maria Grafs Briefen an Hugo Hartung,” Erste Briefe/First Letters aus dem Exil
1945–1950. (Un)mögliche Gespräche. Fallbeispiele des literarischen und kün-
stlerischen Exils, eds. Primus-Heinz Kucher, Johannes F. Evelein, and Helga Schreck-
enberger (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2012), 128–42.
24. Listing for programs originating from Munich on Monday, February 25, Der
Deutsche Rundfunk 13:9 (1935), 26.
25. Patrick Merziger, “Humour in the Volksgemeinschaft: The Disappearance of
Destructive Satire in National Socialist Germany,” The Politics of Humour: Laughter,
Inclusion, and Exclusion in the Twentieth Century, eds. Martina Kessel and Patrick
Merziger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 141.
26. Ibid., 131–32.
27. “‘Jonny spült ab.’ Hörspiel von H. Hartung und B. Eichhorn,” Der Deutsche
Rundfunk 13:9 (1935), 66.
28. Hugo Hartung, “Zwiegespräch mit Jonny,” Der Deutsche Rundfunk 13:9 (1935), 6.
29. Ibid. Ellipsis in original.
30. Ibid.
31. Merziger, “Humour in the Volksgemeinschaft: The Disappearance of Destruc-
tive Satire in National Socialist Germany,” 141.
32. Ibid.
33. W. G., “‘Jonny spült ab,’ Der Schwabensender,” Der Deutsche Rundfunk 13:11
(1935): 67.
34. Ibid.
35. Wolfgang von Bartels, “Rundfunk-Kritik,” Zeitschrift für Musik 102 (April
1935), 459.
36. Kurt Herbst, “Die Grenzen zwischen Kitsch und Parodie in der Musik,” Die
Musik 27 (April 1935), 505.
37. Will Reichartz, quoted in Merziger, “Humour in the Volksgemeinschaft: The
Disappearance of Destructive Satire in National Socialist Germany,” 141.
38. Ibid.
39. This claim is based upon known discographical records as well as the listings in
the volumes of Hofmeisters Musikalisch-literarischer Monatsbericht from 1935 to 1941.
40. On this exhibition, see above all the two slightly different editions of Entartete
Musik: Dokumentation zur Düsseldorfer Ausstellung von 1938, eds. Albrecht Dümling
and Peter Girth (Düsseldorf: DKV, 1988 and 1993).
41. For example, Alan Lareau, “Jonny’s Jazz: From Kabarett to Krenek,” Jazz and
the Germans: Essays on the Influence of “Hot” American Idioms on 20th-Century Ger-
man Music, ed. Michael Budds (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2002), 23.
42. Lutz Koepnick, The Dark Mirror: German Cinema between Hitler and Holly-
wood (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 129.
43. Hans Albers, “Good Bye, Jonny!” (Odeon O-4650).
44. A more clearly jazzy example is Franz Thon’s recording featuring vocalist Rudi
Schuricke (Franz Thon mit seinen Tanzrhythmikern, “Good-Bye Jonny” [Imperial
17244]).
45. For cases of Nazi persecution and intimidation of jazz musicians as well as jazz
musicians’ often successful attempts at evasion, see Kater, Different Drummers, 38–56.
46. Carter, Dietrich’s Ghosts, 214. Carter’s reading here is based on Sabine Hake’s
discussion of the Douglas Sirk film Schlußakkord (1937) in her Popular Cinema of the
Third Reich (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 107–27.
47. The two instrumental versions are both by bandleader Will Glahé (Electrola
E.G. 6722 and Columbia DW 4823). Recordings with vocals include Peter Kreuder,
vocals by Kurt Mühlhardt (Telefunken A 2855); Egon Wolff with unnamed vocalist
(Odeon O-31 483a); Otto Stenzel, vocals by Paul Erdtmann (Gloria GO 41 293 a);
Franz Thon mit seinen Tanz-Rhythmikern, vocals by Rudi Schuricke (Imperial 17244);
Iska Geri und die Neun Casaleons (Imperial 19119); Jan Behrens featuring vocals by
the Heyn Quartett (Polydor and Grammophon 11074A).
48. Ernst Krenek, Jonny spielt auf. Oper in 2 Teilen. Klavierauszug (Vienna: Uni-
versal Edition, 1954), 2. Alfred Baresel’s jazz handbook lists the “Swanee whistle” as a
secondary percussion instrument of a typical jazz formation (Das Jazzbuch [Berlin:
Zimmermann, 1925], 34).
49. Geri, “Good bye, Jonny!”
50. Iska Geri, “Känguruh” (Deutsche Grammophon Gr 47 532).
51. Peter Kreuder cites the identical section from “Old Folks at Home” in his
“Piano-Medley aus dem Tonfilm Wasser für Canitoga” (Telefunken A 2854).
52. The singer Lottie Gee performed it as the fourth song in the program (“Program
of Chocolate Kiddies Revue,” Institut für Theaterwissenschaft der Freien Universität
Berlin, ca. May 1925).
53. On Krenek’s use of this motif in Jonny spielt auf as well as the possible connec-
tion to the Chocolate Kiddies, see Jonathan Wipplinger, “Performing Race in Ernst
Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf,” Blackness and Opera, eds. Naomi André, Karen M. Bryan,
and Eric Saylor (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 243–45; Konrad Nowa-
kowski, “Krenek, Baker—und Briggs? Der Aufstand gegen die ‘Vernegerung Wiens’
Anfang 1928,” Anklaenge 2011/2012, Special Issue: Jazz Unlimited: Beiträge zur Jazz-
Rezeption in Österreich (Vienna: Mille Tre Verlag, 2012), 196–97.
54. Marita Gründgens does parody “Good Bye, Jonny!” and Albers’ performance of
it in her “Filmrückblick 1940” (“Film Review 1940”) (Electrola 7068), in a sense clos-
ing the Nazi-era Jonny cycle that had begun with her.
55. “Good bye, Jonny!” is included as “Leb’ wohl, Peter!” in the collection Peter
Kreuder, Melodien: 20 der schönsten Tanz-und Lied-Kompositionen für Gesang und
Klavier (Leipzig: Sikorski, ca. 1940), 34–35. Though issued without a date of publica-
tion, the collection includes “Die drei Codonas” from the 1940 film of the same name.
See further Axel Jockwer, Unterhaltungsmusik im Dritten Reich (University of Con-
stance, PhD diss., 2005), 246–47; Kellersmann, Jazz in Deutschland von 1933–1945,
46–47.
Index
807th Pioneer Infantry Band, 53 Baker, Josephine, 16, 45, 51, 81, 82,
103, 114, 124, 125, 126, 128, 131,
Adorno, Theodor W., 17, 146, 226, 135, 138, 180, 199, 271n72, 273n22,
264n81, 294nn3–4, 294n8, 295n16, 278n57; Bitte einsteigen! (All
299n77; “Abschied vom Jazz” (“Fare- Aboard!), 130; Memoiren, 274n22;
well to Jazz”), 197–98, 220–25, Shuffle Along, 170
298n61; aesthetic theory, 16, 68, 70; Balieff, Nikita, 57
animals, 208–9; critique of Sekles, Balz, Bruno, 230, 235
148, 162; Der Schatz des Indianer Joe Barbusse, Henri, 177
(The Treasure of Indian Joe), 19–20, Baresel, Alfred, 18, 106, 141, 155, 156–
199, 200–203, 205, 206, 207, 208, 57, 272n77280, 282n42, 283n46,
209, 210, 212, 216, 217, 219–20, 224, 302n48
225, 295n25; The Dialectic of En- Barka, Myriam, 34
lightenment, 196, 206, 211; Jazzk- Barthelme, George, 25–26, 39, 111,
lasse debate, 162, 294n7; “Music in 246nn16–17
the Background,” 70–71, 72; “On the Bates, Ruby, 213, 216–17, 219
Social Situation of Music,” 72; rejec- Baudelaire, Charles, 70, 73
tion of jazz, 19, 196, 197–98, 284n66; Baum, Vicki, 98, 127
Scottsboro Boys, 213–17, 239; shock, Bayton, Ruth, 126, 277n47
73–74, 79; Twain as source material, Beasley, Shakey (Clarence), 59, 263n66
204–20, 239, 295n20, 295n26, Bechet, Sidney, 2, 27, 179; Black Peo-
297n59; “Über Jazz” (“On Jazz”), ple, 199, 294n7
159, 197; “Zeitlose Mode: Zum Jazz” Beckmann, Hans-Fritz, 233, 299
(“Perennial Fashion–Jazz”),” 197 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 90, 100, 142
Aeolian Hall, 87, 93, 95 Beethovensaal, 52
Alabam Fantasies, 58, 59, 60. See also Bekker, Paul, 75–76
Chocolate Kiddies Béla, Dajos, 61, 88
Albers, Hans, 233, 235–37, 278n57 Benga, François (Féral), 126, 277n46
Alhambra, 52, 126 Benjamin, Walter, 17, 68–69, 70, 71, 72,
Ammons, Albert, 2 74, 77, 79, 196, 206, 207, 264n81
Ansermet, Ernest, 27 Bennett, Gwendolyn, 189
Antheil, George, 43, 142; Transatlantic, Berg, Alban, 160, 202, 203, 224,
200 244n40, 283n61
Apollo-Theater, 34, 37, 124, 252n107 Berlin, Irving, 237
Armstrong, Louis, 11, 12, 85, 164, 165, Berliner Funkstunde, 80, 162, 198, 221–
201, 220, 244n41 22, 227, 267n125, 298n64
Attali, Jacques, 79, 143–44 Bie, Oscar, 45, 51, 52, 76, 78–79, 80, 97
303
304 Index
Black, Tom, 34, 250n71 260n22, 261n26, 261n37, 302n53; ad-

Black diaspora, 10, 11, 39, 46, 48, 167 vertisements, 272n85; 1925, 125, 170,
“Black Horror on the Rhine.” See 237, 241n7, 255n142, 260n23; Afri-
“Schwarze Schmach am Rhein” can American press reviews, 263n56;
Black music, 7, 10, 47–48, 50, 52, 88, German press reviews, 265n99;
174, 226, 255n156, 257n173, 279n66; “Swanee River,” 237. See also Wood-
theater, 170 ing, Sam
Blackness, 7, 8, 9, 10, 18, 32, 33, 34, 35, Clapham, George, 52, 247n31, 259n10
36, 105, 109, 138, 139, 151, 161, 183, Club Alabam, 57–58, 59, 60
205, 225, 226, 279, 280n86; African Coltrane, John, 2, 11
Americans, 6; drums, 106; Girl, 124– Comedian Harmonists, 61
30, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135; and the Confrey, Zez, 95, 220
machine, 43–50; primitive, 118, 137; Cook, Will Marion, 125, 179; In Da-
race, 5, 108, 200, 212, 217, 233; Wei- homey, 58, 61; Southern Syncopated
mar revue stage, 124–30, 131 Orchestra, 26–27, 58
Blake, Eubie, 59, 170 Cook, Marion, 125, 126, 291n92
Blakey, Art, 2 Cosmo Jazz Band, 37, 252n102
Bohländer, Carlo, 163 Cotton Club, 60, 190, 286n21
Borchard, Eric, 38–39, 50, 87, 92, Cullen, Countee, 169, 180, 181
251n92, 252n110, 253nn112–14, cultural bolshevism, 186, 191, 192, 226,
260n18 231, 233. See also National Socialism
Borchard, Marie, 253n112
Boucher, James, 52, 259n12 Dachgarten Café, 55
Braham, Philip: “Limehouse Blues,” 67 Dadism, 2, 32–33, 35, 36, 44, 92, 239,
Brandt, Max, 200 255n138
Brandt, Thomas Otto, 184, 185 d’Albert, Eugen: Die schwarze Orchidee
Brecht, Bertolt, 4 (The Black Orchid), 200
Briggs, Arthur, 199, 247n31, 252n100 David, Hans, 81–82, 220, 298n62
Brody, Louis (M’bebe Mpessa), 277n44, Davis, Charles, 60, 263n66, 274n21
277n50; Harem Nights, 34 Davis, Miles, 2, 11
Bryson, Arthur, 59, 263n66 DeVeaux, Scott, 10–11, 12. See also
Buck-Morss, Susan, 207, 215 jazz tradition
Bund, Hans, 230, 300n18 Dickens, Charles, 99, 102, 271n68
Bushell, Garvin, 66, 257n2, 264n69 Die Gondel (The Gondola), 274n14
Bushell, Marie, 263n66 Die große Attraktion (The Great Attrac-
Butting, Max, 53 tion), 131, 132, 133, 197, 278n63
Byjacco: “Dolores Jazz,” 27, 247n41 Dietrich, Marlene, 227, 228, 229
“By the Waters of Minnetonka,” 66, 75, Dix, Otto, 86, 239, 257nn170–71, 106;
264n74 An die Schönheit (To Beauty), 48–49,
105
Caesar, Irvin, 67 Dolores, Arthur, 27, 251n98
Café Größenwahn, 36 “Dolores Jazz,” 27, 29, 32, 247n41
Caféhaus Trio, 158 The Doors, 201
Čapek, Karel, 44 Dörmann, Felix, 98
Charell, Erik, 88–89, 124, 130, 132 Douglas, Louis, 33, 124, 125, 129, 131,
Chitta, Bella, 27, 251n98 135, 274n23, 276n40; Black People,
Chocolate Dandies, 1, 59, 60, 274n21 125, 199, 294n7; Die schwarze Revue
Chocolate Kiddies, 1, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, (The Black Revue), 125; La Revue
56–67, 68, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 89, 92, nègre, 125; Louisiana, 125, 131,
93, 118, 119, 123, 179, 259n17, 276n35
Index 305
Drayton, Arthur, 60, 63, 67, 125, Firml, Rudolf, 67

260n22, 261n26, 262n49 Fischer, Fred, 36
Dreiser, Theodore, 205, 288n55; Sister Fisk Jubilee Singers, 52, 258n5,
Carrie, 177 259n17
drums/drummers, 40–43, 50, 105–7, Fitzgerald, Ella, 201
148, 149, 253n115, 256n162, Folies Bergère, 126, 246n20
256n169, 272n78; French understand- Foster, Stephen, 63, 179, 237
ing, 252n100; trap, 37, 41, 43, 44, 46, foxtrot, 16, 23, 24, 29, 30–33, 35, 36,
48, 49, 92 89, 248n55
Du Bois, W. E. B., 121, 180, 181, 183, Franck, Harry A., 24
195; The Souls of Black Folks, 7 Frankfurt School, 196, 239
Dupont, E. A., 125 Freud, Sigmund, 69, 204
Düssel, Karl Konrad, 187, 193 Frick, Wilhelm, 134, 197
Dymow, Ossip, 196, 291n103; Schatten Fritz Domina, 230, 300n18
über Harlem (Shadows over Harlem), Fuhs, Julian, 52, 88, 92, 259n12
15, 151, 185, 189–90, 191, 192–93,
194, 195, 291n105, 292n111 Garland, Will, 52, 258n4
Gee, Lottie, 60, 63, 263n66, 302n52
Ebinger, Blandine, 36 Geri, Isaka, 236, 237
Edwards, Brent Hayes, 166–68 Gershwin, George: Rhapsody in Blue,
Einstein, Albert, 44 87, 93, 95, 96–97, 125, 162
Einstein, Alfred, 214 Gest, Morris, 56, 57, 58, 60, 262n39
Ellington, Duke, 2, 11, 12, 61, 66, 163, Giese, Fritz, 53, 68, 274n13; Girlkultur,
165, 190, 220, 244n37, 244n41, 117–24, 126, 128, 131, 135, 136
262n50, 263n53, 263n65; Chocolate Gillespie, Dizzy, 11
Kiddies, 62 Gilmore, Buddy, 52, 179, 247n31
Ellis, Vivian: Mr. Cinders (Jim und Jill), Gilmore, Mattie, 52
162 Gilroy, Paul, 12–13, 244n43
Ellison, Ralph, 6, 7 Goebbels, Joseph, 226, 229, 298n64
Engdahl, Louis, 214 Goins, Babe, 60, 66, 263n66
Entartete Musik (Degenerate Music), Goins, Bobby, 60, 66, 263n66
226 Goldmann, Paul, 89, 269n39
Eric Concerto’s Yankee Jazz Band, 39. Goldschmidt, Alfons, 184, 185, 214,
See also Borchard, Eric 297n58
Ernst, Henry (Ernst Ratkowsky), 23–24, Goslar, Hans, 167, 169–74, 175, 176,
27, 245n7; “Dolores Jazz,” 29; “Me- 178, 180, 181, 182, 183, 185, 191,
ine Jagd nach der ‘Tschetzpend’” 192, 195, 286n29, 287n30
(“My Hunt for the ‘Tschetzpend’”), Graetz, Paul, 35
23, 24, 26, 29–30, 39, 245n5 Grau, Rudolf, 228
Etté, Bernhard, 27, 61, 88, 162 Granstaff, Earl, 53
Europe, James Reese, 25, 53, 111 Greenlee, Thaddeus, 60, 63, 67, 125,
Expressionism, 2, 25, 43–4, 239, 262n49, 263n66
255n138 Grofé, Ferde, 95, 96, 97
Grosz, George, 32–33, 35, 45, 86, 237,
Fall, Richard: “O Katharina,” 67 239, 248n58, 249n64
Faun des Westens, 55 Grosz, Wilhelm, 185
Feld, Hans, 95 Groundsell, Frank, 32
Feldmann, Else, 68 Gründgens, Gustaf, 228
Felski, Rita, 115 Gründgens, Marita, 229, 230, 231,
Fields, Arabella, 33 302n54
306 Index
Halfeld, Adolf, 4 Hughes, Langston, 19, 121, 163–64,

Hall, Adelaide, 60, 66, 263n66 165–96, 205, 215, 239, 285n5,
Haller, Hermann: Admiralspalast, 53, 287n37, 288n59; Africa Sings, 177,
62, 124, 128, 130, 136 180, 181, 182, 183–85, 189, 195,
Harlem Renaissance, 19, 87, 111, 164, 286n10, 288n59, 290n81, 290n85,
165–96, 285n5, 293n126. See also 290n90, 293n126; diasporic blues,
modernism 166, 168–69, 179, 182, 183, 193, 194,
Harlington-“Jazz-Band,” 26 285n1, 286n14; 8 Menschen in der
Harris, Charles (Snowball), 132, 278 Todeszelle (8 People on Death Row),
Harry Johnson’s Orig. Amerik. Jazz- 194, 214; Fine Clothes to the Jew,
Band, 26 180, 285;“I, too” (Auch ich singe
Hartung, Hugo, 231–32 Amerika), 174–77, 287n46, 288n53,
Haus Vaterland, 165 290n81; “Laughers,” 193; “Negro,”
Hayes, Roland, 52, 179, 258n8 169, 171–74, 181–82, 286n29,
Heß, Emil, 187 290n90; “The Negro Speaks of River”
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 25, (Der Neger spricht von Strömen),
215 177–85, 290n81; post-World War II
Held, Albert, 46 translation of, 293n127; relations with
Helm, Brigitte, 127, 278n52 Nussbaum, 167, 172, 174, 177–85,
Henderson, Fletcher, 55, 56, 61, 85, 163; 195–96, 214, 287n39, 289n62; rela-
Club Alabam, 57 tions with Rundt, 287n39; “Suicide,”
Henkel, Eugen, 161–62 290n86; “To a Negro Jazz Band in a
Henschel, Albert, 89 Parisian Cabaret,” 166; Weary Blues,
Hermann-Neisse, Max, 125 180
Hesse, Hermann, 98, 183–84
Hesterberg, Trude, 127, 278n52 International Defense League, 213
High Life Jazz-Band, 37 Internationale Frauenliga für Frieden
Hines, George “Bobo,” 52, 258n7, und Freiheit, 178
259n11
Hirth, Friedrich, 98, 99, 271n62 Jackson’s Jazz Band, 26
Hoch Conservatory, 18, 140, 141, Jacobi, Margarete: Tom Sawyers Aben-
143–46,149–50, 157, 162, 163, teur und Streiche, 205, 212, 296,
284n78 297n59
Holitscher, Arthur, 171 Jacobsohn, Fritz, 62, 263n59
Holl, Gussy, 35, 251n95 Jacoby, Fritz: “Dolores Jazz,” 27
Holl, Karl, 152–53, 154, 157, 159, Jankuhn, Walter, 132
282n31 Janowitz, Hans, 86, 98, 107, 110, 239,
Hollaender, Friedrich, 35–36, 130, 228– 267n2, 268n3, 272n87; Das Cabinet
29, 235, 250n87 des Dr. Caligari, 99 Jazz. Roman
Hopkins, Claude, 125 (Jazz: A Novel), 17, 85, 99–103, 108,
Hopkins, Joe, 190 109, 113, 114, 128, 241, 271n62
Hopkins, Sadie, 126 jasbo, 255n158
Hornbostel, Erich Moritz von, 53 jazz: word origin, 255n158. See also
Horsey, Chick (Layburn), 59 drums; jazz dance; jazz tradition;
Hotclub Combo, 163 jazzing; Weimar jazz culture
Hudgins, Johnny, 58–59, 60, 125, Jazz Band Duet, 26
261n26 Jazz-Band Max de Groot, 37
Huelsenbeck, Richard, 118–19 jazz dance, 16, 25, 27, 29, 33, 35,
Hugenberg, Alfred, 191 248n55; Berlin, 30, 31–32, 251n98;
Hughes, George, 191 German, 35, 40, 238
Index 307
jazzing: classics, 84, 148, 267n1; Ger- 137, 139; jazz and Blackness,
man culture, 18, 143; German litera- 279n76, 280n86; “The Mass Orna-
ture, 109 ment,” 18, 135–40; “Negerball in
The Jazz Singer, 133 Paris” (“Negro Ball in Paris”), 137–
jazz tradition, 10–12, 13, 14, 39, 220. 38, 139
See also DeVeaux, Scott Krenek, Ernst, 12, 16, 53, 85, 112, 208,
Jedermann sein eigner Fussball (Every- 211; Jonny spielt auf (Jonny Strikes
one His Own Football), 32 Up), 127, 132, 142, 200, 227, 231,
Jewishness, 110–11, 151, 192, 205, 206, 233, 235, 236, 237, 302n53
233, 272n81, 282n26 Kreuder, Peter, 233, 235, 237, 299,
Jimmi Jazz Band, 37, 252n103 301n47, 302n51, 302n55
Jimmy’s Jazz-Band, 26
Johnson, Arthur S., 62 Lafayette Theatre, 58, 260n22
Johnson, Georgia Douglas, 180 Lang, Fritz, 2, 34
Johnson, James P., 85 Leander, Zarah, 227, 230
Johnson, J. Rosamond, 179 Leisser, Theodor, “The Jimmy,” 46
Johnson, James Weldon, 179, 189, 205 Leonard, Robert L., 40, 41
Johnson, Peter, 35 Leonidoff-Bermann, Leonid Davydov-
Jolson, Al, 228; The Jazz Singer, 133 ich, 56–60, 62, 261nn36–37
Jones, Sissieretta, 179 Lewis, Meade “Lux,” 2
Jones, Sonny “Fernandes,” 15, 126, Lewis, Ted, 253n112
129–30, 135 Lewis, Willie, 66
Joplin, Scott, 33 Lion, Alfred, 1, 15, 17, 20, 79, 139,
Julian, Percy, 184 241n3, 241n4, 241n7, 266n107; Blue
Note Records, 2, 76–77, 241n6
Kachalov, Vasily, 57 Lion, Margo, 131
Kapelle Boesing mit Original Jazz Locke, Alain, 169, 174, 177, 182, 215,
Band, 37 287n39, 287n42; The New Negro,
Kayser, Rudolf, 5 175, 180
Kentucky Serenaders, 52 Lola-Bach Ballet: Haremsnächte (Ha-
Kessler, Harry, 45 rem Nights), 35, 250n79
Kestenberg, Leo, 145, 147 London Sonora Band, 52, 123, 249n14
Kingsley, Walter, 45, 255n158 Lubitsch, Ernst, 31–32
Kisch, Egon Erwin, 171 Lücke, Theodor, 124
Klabund (Alfred Henschke), 35, Lyons, Arthur, 62
250n87
Klein, James: Apollo-Theater, 34, 124; Mangelsdorff, Albert, 163
Haremsnächte (Harem Nights), 34– Mangelsdorff, Emil, 163
35, 47, 250n79 Mann, Klaus, 98
Knaatz, Karlernst, 31 Mann, Thomas, 98, 214
Knight, Laura, 127 Marcel’s Jazz Band, 26, 38, 246n20,
Kodály, Zoltán, 157 257n170
Koebner, Franz Wolfgang: Jazz and Margulis, Max, 2
Shimmy, 40–41, 256n158 Martens, Kurt, 104
Kolb, Richard, 221, 222, 298n64 Marx, Karl, 5
Kool, Jaap, 35, 40, 43, 45, 53, 84, Massary, Fritzi, 132
250n86, 254n120, 255n156, 255n158, MAT. See Moscow Art Theatre
267, 274n14 May, Joe, 34
Kracauer, Siegfried, 53, 118, 239; Die McKay, Claude, 180, 185, 189, 194,
Angestellten (The Salaried Masses), 214, 289n64
308 Index
Mehring, Walter, 31, 35, 40, 239, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 115, 116–17
248n55, 251n96, 254n118 Nikisch, Arthur, 90
Meuter, Hanna, 289n74, 293n126 Nikisch, Mitja, 90
Meyer, Hans, 99 Norris, Clarence, 213
Mills, Florence, 61, 66 Nussbaum, Anna, 15, 19, 191, 192,
Mitchell, Abbie, 179, 185, 262n48, 288n58; Africa Sings, 181, 182, 185,
291n92; Alabam Fantasies, 59–60; 195, 214, 288n59; “The Afro-
Club Alabam, 58–59; Lafayette The- American Woman,” 181, 185; “Ne-
atre, 58 gro,” 181, 184, 289n73; death, 195;
Mitchell, Johnny, 66 relations with Dreiser, 177, 288n55;
Mitchell, Louis, 111, 129 relations with Du Bois, 195; relations
modernism, 3, 15–16, 20, 44, 46, 79, 86, with Hughes, 167, 172, 174, 177–85,
90, 102, 124, 175, 239, 248n57; Afri- 195–96, 214, 287n39, 289n62; South-
can American, 184, 194–95; Harlem ern Syncopated Orchestra perfor-
Renaissance 194, 285; Jewish 110– mance comments, 179
11, 191–92, 226, 282n26
modernity, 4, 17, 45, 63, 67–74, 78, 79, Ohio Lido Venice Band, 53, 243n34
83, 85, 98, 101, 105, 110, 118, 119, Oliven, Fritz, 128
120, 122, 123, 124, 136, 142, 155, Original American Jazz Band, 38,
173, 201, 282n26; machine-age, 97; 252n110
materialism, 108; mobility, 114; mod- Original Dixieland Jazz Band, 32, 39
els of childhood, 209–13; primitive, Original-Jazz Band, 26
131, 137; women, 115, 116 Original Piccadilly Four Jazz Band, 37,
Monk, Thelonious, 2 38, 39, 41, 50, 246n12, 251n92,
Morel, E. D., 249n67 252n108
Morgan, J. H., 34 Osgood, Charles, 66, 269n34
Morton, Jelly Roll, 2
Moscow Art Theatre (MAT), 56, 57, 60, Pahlen, Kurt, 185
62, 261n37, 262n39 Palais Heinroth, 53
Mumm, Reinhard, 35 Payne, Arthur “Strut,” 60, 63, 263n66
Münzenberg, Willi, 214 Phillips Original amerikanische Neger
Murnau, F. W., 2 Jazz Band, 39
Myer, Richard: Mr. Cinders (Jim und Poelzig, Hans, 88
Jill), 162 Poggany, Willi, 62
Pinthus, Kurt, 53, 76
National Socialism, 2, 72, 110, 134, Poindexter, Rose, 125, 132
135, 146, 160, 186–95, 202, 203, 215, Polgar, Alfred, 53, 124
220, 222–23, 226–28, 230, 231, 233, Pollack, Heinz, 44, 254n131
235–36, 237, 282n37, 291n101, Polster, Bernd, 227
293n1, 293n2, 295n16, 298nn63–64, Powell, Bud, 2
301n45, 302n54. See also cultural Powell, Ozie, 213
bolshevism Preiss, Gerhard, 35
Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir, 56, Price, Victoria, 213, 216–17, 219
57 Pringsheim, Klaus, 53, 77, 96
Neues Theater am Zoo, 55, 162, 259n12 Proust, Marcel, 70
New Negro Renaissance. See Harlem
Renaissance Radio Brünn, 185
New Woman, 16, 18, 115, 116, 128, Raemackers, Louis, 31
132, 133, 135, 273n3; and Girl, 127, Rahna, Marcelle, 129
130, 131 Rapée, Ernö, 80, 266n124
Index 309
Rathaus, Karol, 53, 81, 267n127; Schrenk, Walter, 97

Fremde Erde (Foreign Soil), 80, 200 Schroeter, Hertha, 127, 278n52
Rathenau, Walther, 171 Schulz-Köhn, Dietrich, 163–64, 180,
Ray, Tiny, 59, 263n66 285n82
Rector, Eddie, 58, 60 Schumann, Clara, 144
Reese, James, 25, 53, 111 Schumann Theater, 139, 140
Reichartz, Willy, 232 Schuyler, George, 180
Reichmann, Max, 131. See also Die “Schwarze Schmach am Rhein,” 16, 33–
große Attraktion (The Great Attrac- 34, 35, 36, 46, 47–48, 50, 51, 120,
tion) 173, 191, 249n67, 249n69
Reinfeld, Hans, 230, 235 Schwers, Paul, 151–52, 159, 282n29
Reinhardt, Max, 35, 88 Sedding, Erwin, 270n55
Reinitz, Béla, 185–86, 189, 290n87, 229 Seiber, Mátyás, 15, 18, 283n60, 284n73,
Remszhardt, Godo, 215 298n76; arrivals in New York,
Renker, Gustav, 17, 85–86, 98, 108, 109, 283n49; “Jazz als Erziehungsmittel”
110, 111, 113, 114, 151, 192, 267n2, (“Jazz as Educational Method”), 158;
268n3, 272n84, 272n87 Jazzklasse, 140, 143, 149, 157–63,
The Revelers, 161, 199, 220, 284n67, 225, 281n19, 283n49; Jazzolette, 162,
294n7 284n76; “Jazz und die musikstudier-
Rheinische Frauenliga (Rhenish League ende Jugend” (“Jazz and Youth Music
of Women), 33–34, 35 Learners”), 161; “pseudo-measure,”
Rideamus (Fritz Oliven), 128 158, 159, 160; “Rhythmic Freedom in
Roberts, Evandale, 15, 39, 46, 111, Jazz?” 283n60; Schule für Jazz-
253n115 Schlagzeug (Manual for Jazz Percus-
Roehr, Curt Max, 40 sion), 158–59, 160
Rosenberg, Alfred, 282n37, 299n1 Sekles, Bernhard, 18, 141–42, 143,
Ross, Fred (Rosenthal, Erwin), 50, 280n9, 281n15, 282n38, 282n40;
253n114, 260n18 Jazzklasse debate 145–57, 159, 160,
Ross Brothers, 253n114, 257n171 162, 163
Roth, Joseph, 45–46, 171 Sewonu, Josephy (Joe), 26, 46
Rundt, Arthur, 121, 167, 174–77, 180, shimmy, 29, 37, 40, 44, 46, 254n121
181, 183, 191, 192, 195, 269n34, Siemsen, Anna, 181, 194
287n39, 288nn52–53 Siemsen, Hans, 21, 23, 25, 40, 41, 170,
181, 245n2, 269n34; “Jazz-Band,” 92,
Scala, 52, 53, 126, 259n14 245, 245n1, 255n156
Scala-Casino, 37, 38, 39 Simmel, Georg, 69, 274n15
Schall und Rauch (Sound and Smoke), Sissle, Noble, 59, 170
35, 36–37, 250n85, 250n86 Skutezky, Viktor, 125
Schickele, René, 17, 85, 86, 98, 103–4, Sound and Smoke. See Schall und Rauch
105, 106–8, 109, 110, 112, 113, 114, Sousa, John Phillip, 43
128, 267n2, 268n3, 271n70 Southern Syncopated Orchestra, 11, 26,
Schlesische Funkstunde, 185 52, 58, 179, 247n30, 259n11, 288n58
Schmalhausen, Otto, 32, 45, 255n155 Spector, Scott, 110, 191–92
Schmidl, Leopold “Poldi,” 43, 46–48, Spoliansky, Mischa, 35, 61, 254n118
49, 245n162, 256n167 Spyglass, Elmer, 33
Schmidseder, Ludwig, 228 Stanislavski, Constantin, 56, 262n48
Schmidt, Leopold, 96, 97, 259n17 Steiner, Jenny, 130, 278n57
Schoenberg, Arnold, 44, 90, 150, 155, Stellio, Alexandre, 125
202 Stenzel, Otto, 236, 237
Schreker, Franz, 53, 89 Stern, Josef Luitpold, 181
310 Index
Stolz, Robert, 251n94 67, 83, 85, 114, 120, 128–129, 133,
Stravinsky, Igor, 154, 156, 161 157, 161, 163, 197, 199, 224, 227,
Strobel, Heinrich, 18, 154–55, 157 229, 231, 232, 236–38, 244n37; my-
Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz, 51–52, 53, thologies 10–20
90–91, 92–93, 95, 96, 97, 257, Weinert, Erich, 189
269n34 Whiteman, Paul, 15, 17, 67, 80, 81, 95,
“Swanee whistle,” 236, 302n48 103, 104, 107, 110, 132, 155, 199,
238, 244n41, 255n158, 257n173,
Tauber, Richard, 131, 279n69 260n18, 269n34, 269n37; in Berlin,
Therstappen, Paul: Amerika singe auch 86–98, 269n39; “By the Waters of
ich (I, too, sing America), 182, Minnetonka,” 66; “Experiment in
289n74, 293n126 Modern Music,” 66, 87, 102, 105,
Three Eddies, 59, 60, 263n66 113; “Japanese Sandman,” 87; “King
Tiller Girls, 18, 63, 77–78, 116–17, 118, of Jazz,” 80, 83, 93, 98, 111, 283n46;
119, 123, 124, 128, 131, 132, 136–37, symphonic jazz, 55, 62, 83, 84, 85,
138, 274n21 86–98, 102, 106, 111, 113–14, 142,
Tompa, Ernst, 23 148–49, 162; “Whispering,” 87;
Trent, Joe, 60, 62 Wooding’s opinion, 261n28
Tucholsky, Kurt, 35, 40, 44, 46, 49, 170, Widenbauer, Georg, 175, 182, 192; “Die
250n86, 254n127 schwarze Weltgefahr” (“The Black
Twain, Mark, 200, 201, 203, 204, 205– World Danger”), 173–74, 176
6, 297n59; The Adventures of Tom Wiene, Robert, 34
Sawyer, 19, 202, 204, 207–8, 209, Wien gib acht! (Vienna Watch Out!), 53,
212, 217–18, 225, 239, 295n23, 259n15
295n25 Wieninger, Wilhelm (Wilm Wilm), 23,
245n8
Ufa-Palast am Zoo, 55, 125, 276n33 Winckler, Hans Erich, 40, 254n118
Urban, Erich, 77 Winkelstern, Marianne, 131–32
Wintergarten, 53, 126, 131, 257n171
Valetti, Rosa, 127, 278n52 Wolf, Willi, 128
Vitalien, Berthe, 125 Wolff, Egon, 236, 237, 301n47
Vodery, Will H., 53 Wolff, Francis, 2, 241n3, 241n7
von Haselberg, Peter, 209 Wooding, Sam, 1, 2, 11, 16, 17, 20, 44,
von Sternberg, Josef, 130 50, 51–83, 87, 89, 92, 93, 96, 97, 106,
111, 131, 142, 238, 257n173, 258n3,
Walden, Herwarth, 41, 44, 53, 77–79, 260n18, 260n22, 266n101, 267n139;
80, 239, 251n92, 255n141, 291n105 Admiralspalast, 51, 53, 88, 257n2;
Walker, Ruth, 126, 132 Berlin, 55, 66, 220, 241n3, 241n7,
Warschauer, Frank, 53, 97, 113 261n26, 262n47, 267n136, 279n66;
Washington, Booker, T., 8, 121 “By the Waters of Minnetonka,” 66,
Wedderkop, Hermann, 44, 45, 53 75, 264n74; Club Alabam, 57–58, 60;
Welch, Elisabeth, 125, 276n39 Die schwarze Revue (The Black Re-
Weill, Kurt, 12, 16, 53, 72, 73–74, 79– vue), 125, 276n34; Europe tour 1925–
80, 134, 142, 154, 160–61, 201, 26, 260n22; Faun des Westens, 55;
291n101; Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Frankfurt, 139; German audience, 75;
Mahagonny (Rise and Fall of the City Hamburg, 61; “Indian Love Call,” 67;
of Mahagonny), 200; Dreigrosche- Neues Theater am Zoo, 55; “O Katha-
noper (Threepenny Opera), 74, 162, rina,” 67, 264n74; Rhapsody in Blue,
279n66 125; “Swanee River,” 237; symphonic
Weimar jazz culture, 22–24, 27, 30, 39, jazz pioneer, 56; “Die Verklärung des
Index 311
Jazz” (“The Transfiguration of Jazz”), Wright, Roy, 213, 214, 297n56

55; Ufa-Palast am Zoo, 55, 125. See
also Chocolate Kiddies Youmans, Vincent, 67
Woods, Eddie, 52
World War I, 4, 9, 16, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, Zabriskie, Jacob Pete, 39, 52, 258n7
38, 53, 60, 129, 144, 167, 238 Zech, Paul, 31
World War II, 195, 237, 293n127 Zeitoper, 200–203
Wright, Ada, 214 Zemlinsky, Alexander, 185
Wright, Andy, 213, 214 Zielesch, Fritz, 76, 79, 259n17

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For a complete list of titles, please see www.press.umich.edu

Music, Race, and American Culture

University of Michigan Press

Published in the United States of America by the

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Names: Wipplinger, Jonathan O., author.

1 Jazz Occupies Germany 21

2 The Aural Shock of Modernity 51

3 Writing Symphonies in Jazz 84

4 Syncopating the Mass Ornament 115

5 Bridging the Great Divides 141

6 Singing the Harlem Renaissance 165

7 Jazz’s Silence 197

Rampersad, Don Rayno, Marc Reibold, Christian Rogowski, Andreas

Note Regarding Language

Sometime in the spring of 1925, a sixteen-­year-­old Berlin native, Alfred Lion,

in a variety of contexts, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,

Reimagining America, Rethinking German Americanism

In order to do justice to the complexity, unpredictability, and contradictoriness

Ellison’s recasting of the well-­known metaphor of the American melting pot

Following Radano, my conceptualization of American culture is not one that

and in parallel to my own thoughts, Andrew Zimmerman’s Alabama in Africa

How are cultural representations affected by impulses external to the

tacts with American music and culture. Simultaneous to this expansion of

Mythologies of Weimar Jazz Culture

As I suggested earlier, the idea that jazz is important to Weimar culture is by no

sensus regarding jazz as a metacategory for the variety of African American

been changed either by the passage of time or by their displacement, relo-

jazz productions of their own. Chapter 4, “Syncopating the Mass Ornament:

Of course, the construction of Weimar Germany as jazz republic did not

Jazz Occupies Germany: Weimar Jazz

Indeed, any attempt at reconstructing jazz’s presence in this early period is

Taking Jazz Seriously in Postwar Germany

As mentioned in the introduction, jazz in Germany, and even more so German

In a retrospective account of his introduction to the music, entitled “Meine

Jazz is a worldview and therefore to be taken seriously. Jazz is the expres-

amorphous music. It is the negation of all musical syntax and stylistics,

history, various iterations of Cook’s group played in London, Paris, Vienna,

While Ernst’s account of jazz’s entry into Germany is generally substanti-

Berlin Dances to Dada’s Jazz

craze, Lubitsch’s depiction of the foxtrot features an absurdist caricature of

Significantly, all of the musical works referenced by Grosz in this period

liga (Rhenish League of Women).68 Apart from claims of “inverse colonialism,”

in police intervention;79 it did provoke critique from the Rhenish League of

Enter the Jazz Band

The Jazz Band Drums

In response to the numerous jazz bands, German writing on jazz increased

Blackness and the Machine, or Jazz Band Modernism

Figure 4: To Beauty (An die Schönheit). 1922. Dix, Otto (1891–­1969) ©

Figure 5: A Jazz band in the Winter Garden at Danzig (today Gdansk,

The Aural Shock of Modernity:

Figure 6: Jazz Musi-

“I found Harlem to be everything a young Negro would look forward to and

Against all prognostications, the future of this improvisatory music con-

So like Fletcher Henderson and other African American musicians, Wooding

The Chocolate Kiddies between

Leonidoff, born in Kharkov (Charkow) to a merchant family, became involved

Experiencing Jazz, Experiencing Modernity

While their discussion of the modernization of sound can be applied to a

Nowhere has music become so wholly appearance as in the café. But in

it sounds as if a miserly waiter is turning off a couple of electric bulbs.

abrogates the “organic” surface structure of neo-­classicism and moves

*ODPMMBCPSBUJPOXJUI6OHMVFJU XFIBWFTFUVQBTVSWFZ POMZUFORVFTUJPOT

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1 Jazz Occupies Germany 21

2 The Aural Shock of Modernity 51

3 Writing Symphonies in Jazz 84

4 Syncopating the Mass Ornament 115

5 Bridging the Great Divides 141

6 Singing the Harlem Renaissance 165

7 Jazz’s Silence 197

Sometime in the spring of 1925, a sixteen-year-old Berlin native, Alfred Lion,

Ellison’s recasting of the well-known metaphor of the American melting pot

Figure 4: To Beauty (An die Schönheit). 1922. Dix, Otto (1891–1969) ©

abrogates the “organic” surface structure of neo-classicism and moves

rator does in the above quotation, to form a “jazz-novel” (Jazz-Roman) from

like Renker but also shaped the self-understanding of modernism itself. It is

As with Makua-Taka’s use of the saxophone, Ricki’s jazz symphony mediates

Zeitschrift für Musik, Deutsche Tonkünstler-Zeitung, and Der Auftakt reprinted

In the creations of our day an increasingly abstract-speculative moment is

Like many before him, Sekles saw contemporary music as hyper-rationalized