Entartete Musik

Entartete Musik was a Nazi label for music condemned as degenerate, especially works by Jewish composers and modernists. The regime used it to justify censorship, persecution, and exclusion from German musical life.

Reich Chamber of Music: A Nazi professional organization that controlled admission to Germany’s musical professions. Membership restrictions gave the regime a direct means to exclude targeted musicians.
Ernst Krenek: An Austrian composer whose opera Jonny spielt auf became a prominent target of Nazi attacks. The regime used his jazz-influenced opera as an emblem of supposedly degenerate music.
Modernism: A broad movement that challenged inherited artistic forms and conventions from the late nineteenth century onward. Modernist experimentation was a central target of Nazi musical condemnation.
Entartete Kunst: A Nazi label for visual art the regime condemned as degenerate and removed from public institutions. It was the visual-art counterpart to the campaign against condemned music.
Degenerate Music Exhibition: A 1938 Düsseldorf exhibition that presented condemned music as evidence of cultural and racial decline. Its displays made the regime’s condemnation visible to a mass audience.
Kurt Weill: A German composer known for collaborations with Bertolt Brecht, including The Threepenny Opera. His Jewish background and modernist work brought him under Nazi condemnation.
Atonality: Music organized without a tonal center governing its pitches and harmonies. Nazi critics treated its departure from familiar tonality as evidence of cultural decay.
German art music: A tradition of composed music associated with German-speaking Europe, including works from the Baroque period onward. The Nazis selectively elevated this tradition as a racialized national ideal.
Nazi book burnings: Public burnings of books organized by the Nazi regime and its supporters, especially in 1933. They show how the campaign against modern music fit a broader attack on disfavored culture.
Arnold Schoenberg: An Austrian composer who developed atonality and the twelve-tone method. The Nazis condemned his modernist music and persecuted him as a Jew.

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