The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar GermanyThe Jazz Republic examines jazz music and the jazz artists who shaped Germany’s exposure to this African American art form from 1919 through 1933. Jonathan O. Wipplinger explores the history of jazz in Germany as well as the roles that music, race (especially Blackness), and America played in German culture and follows the debate over jazz through the fourteen years of Germany’s first democracy. He explores visiting jazz musicians including the African American Sam Wooding and the white American Paul Whiteman and how their performances were received by German critics and artists. The Jazz Republic also engages with the meaning of jazz in debates over changing gender norms and jazz’s status between paradigms of high and low culture. By looking at German translations of Langston Hughes’s poetry, as well as Theodor W. Adorno’s controversial rejection of jazz in light of racial persecution, Wipplinger examines how jazz came to be part of German cultural production more broadly in both the US and Germany, in the early 1930s. Using a wide array of sources from newspapers, modernist and popular journals, as well as items from the music press, this work intervenes in the debate over the German encounter with jazz by arguing that the music was no mere “symbol” of Weimar’s modernism and modernity. Rather than reflecting intra-German and/or European debates, it suggests that jazz and its practitioners, African American, white American, Afro-European, German and otherwise, shaped Weimar culture in a central way. |
Contents
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 Jazzs Silence | 197 |
Conclusion | 226 |
Notes | 241 |
Index | 303 |
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The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany Jonathan O. Wipplinger No preview available - 2017 |
Common terms and phrases
Admiralspalast Adorno Advertisement aesthetic Africa Sings African American culture American jazz Artist audience Berliner Tageblatt Bernhard Sekles Black performers cabaret chapter Chocolate Kiddies concert Conservatory critics debate diaspora discussion drum early Ernst Europe European example figure film foxtrot Frankfurt am Main further German German culture German jazz Germany’s Giese Girlkultur Goslar Harlem Renaissance Huck Ibid important Jaap Kool Janowitz jazz band jazz in Germany jazz music jazz novel Jazz Republic jazz symphony jazz's Jazzklasse Jewish Jonny Josephine Baker June Kracauer Langston Hughes modern modernist Musik Nazi Negro Neue opera Orchestra original Paul Whiteman period play popular music race racial recording Review revue rhythm Rundt Sam Wooding saxophone Schickele Schwarze Scottsboro Seiber Sekles Shimmy Siemsen song symphonic jazz Syncopated theater Tiller Girls tion Twain University Press Unterhaltungsmusik Verlag Vienna Weill Weimar culture Weimar Germany Weimar jazz culture Weimar Republic Wooding Wooding’s words writes York Zeitung