Michael H. Kater, Professor of History at York University, Toronto, gives a short history of Jazz in Weimar Germany. He writes, “American jazz was imported into Germany in the early 1920s” (145). However, “[T]he great majority of German musicians still found jazz very difficult to master”, which is why “Americans and a few Englishmen… came to dominate the jazz scene of those Roaring Twenties” (145). Though as the decade came to a close “some younger German musicians were proficient enough to be accepted as sidemen into American and British touring bands” (146).He continues, “By 1930, moreover, radio broadcasts of jazz or jazz-inspired dance music were becoming more regular” which was popular among “urban upper-middle-class boys in their late teens” (146).
Though rising right-wing nationalism in Germany came to be disgusted by jazz,“racist argumentation was employed, as it was then fashionable in politically rightist circles, against ‘Niggers’, who were thought to have invented jazz, and Jews, depicted as multiplying and marketing the music” (154). Anti-Black Racism was fierce in Europe, as well as Germany, “Anti-Negro racism was supported by the alleged results of science, by a positivistic strain of cultural anthropology in vogue since the Second Empire” (154). Beliefs “proven” by science included, “no woolly-haired Negroes were capable of ‘a true inner culture and of a higher mental development”(154), the Negro was “docile” and could even play a musical instrument, but “lacked the facility for true creativity and abstract thought” (155). This along with the myth of black men as rapists would be pushed by the Nazi party.
This article, I will use to provide further context, on the works of Langston Hughes, the mostly Jewish German translators and publishers of his work. No text is written in a vacuum, and it is important to understand the political and cultural background of a text lest we put our preconceptions or values in a text that might not have had them.
Works Cited
Michael H. Kater, The Jazz Experience in Weimar Germany, German History, Volume 6, Issue 2, April 1988, Pages 145–158, https://doi.org/10.1093/gh/6.2.145
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