We are interested not in cultivating artistes, but in training German artists who consider their profession as a holy and volkhaft task grounded both spiritually and in terms of a world view.Ĭelebrating his success at purifying and centralising the musical world of Nazi Germany, and paying tribute to the successes of Adolf Hitler, Havemann declared that As one director stated in his appointment speech: There was also an official change in the purpose of the school. However, he did retain considerable influence in appointing others to positions, especially those positions vacated by Jews and foreigners. Although successfully forcing composer Franz Schreker and Georg Schunemann from their positions as director and vice-director of the academy, he never achieved his ultimate goal of himself becoming director. He was one of the foremost members of the KfdK and the official Reichsmusikkammer, and also worked with the Party and the Kampfbund to restructure and reorganise the Berlin Academy of Music. The 1933 Nazi seizure of power strengthened Havemann’s commitment to removing Jews from German musical life. A contemporary of Havemann's commented that 'he is performing in absolutely empty halls it is a laughable event artificially propped up by yawning Brownshirts '. It is important to remember that this ideological shifting was taking place before the Nazis had actually seized power that racial cleansing was still unofficial and that the violinist and conductor was not acting in accordance with official policy. When a 1932 Hamburg celebration of the birthday of Brahms included some Jewish performers, Havemann agreed to participate only if they were removed from the programme. Joining Alfred Rosenberg’s Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (Combat League for German Culture, KfdK), Havemann became the leading musician in its central Berlin branch, founding its orchestra in 1932 and serving as conductor. Havemann’s conversion to Nazism is perhaps not as surprising as it must have seemed at the time. The ensemble, which quickly earned a reputation as one of the most important promoters of modern and avant-garde music, helped to popularise the works of composers like Paul Hindemith and Arnold Schoenberg. During the liberal inter-war years, Havemann was also the founder and leader of one of the most important string quartets in the musically blossoming Weimar Germany, the Havemann String Quartet. He was appointed to the position of concert master in Lübeck while still a teenager, then moved on to positions in Hamburg, Leipzig, and Dresden before accepting a teaching post at the Berlin Academy of Music (a position he held until the end of the war). Born in Güstrow, Germany, on 15 March 1882 to a musical family, he studied violin from an early age. Perhaps most remarkably, after the war he built a successful career in socialist East Germany with a reputation for being a ‘committed anti-fascist’.īefore his conversion to Nazism, Havemann was well-known as a leftist. A man plagued by self-doubt and eager to curry favour with whoever was in power at the time, this talented violinist and conductor followed the remarkable shifts in German political and cultural life, moving smoothly from modernist musician and friend of radical Jewish composers in the Weimar era, to being a committed Nazi music ideologue. The story of Gustav Havemann is one of the more remarkable, if little-known, narratives of 20 th century German music history.
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