Musicians and cultural institutions in Nazi Germany saw opera as a means of eliminating the division between bourgeois art and everyday life in service of fostering a national Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community). In pursuit of this political project, they turned to aesthetic strategies pioneered by the avant-garde movements of the Weimar Republic. Drawing from aesthetic theory, source studies, unpublished correspondence, and new archival sources, this book traces the development of avant-garde music theatre in the Third Reich through local and national developments in patronage and musical craft, rethinking both cultural policy in historical fascism and its implications for the contemporary avant-garde.

Max Erwin is Senior Lecturer in Music Studies at the University of Malta. His publications include Herbert Eimert and the Darmstadt School: The Consolidation of the Avant-Garde.