13 - Strauss in the Third Reich

Summary

I … would like … to declare simply under oath that I have never been a member of the National Socialist Party, and that I never sympathized with it nor engaged in propaganda for it. My only relations to Mr. Goebbels’s Department of Propaganda are the result of the following: having been a leading German musician for forty years, and having worked, as founder and longtime president of the Genossenschaft deutscher Tonsetzer [Guild of German Composers], on a reorganization of STAGMA [ Staatlich genehmigte Gesellschaft zur Verwertung musikalischer Aufführungsrechte (Corporation for the Utilization of Musical Performance Rights)], I was in 1933 appointed by Dr. Goebbels in Berlin, without being asked for my agreement, to the post of President of the new Reichsmusikkammer; I did not reject this honorific post immediately, since I did not know the new men in power and believed that I could, perhaps, do some good for music and musicians. When I realized after a year that my position was only a front and that I had no influence whatsoever on the workings of the Reichsmusikkammer, I was relieved from my post by Dr. Goebbels on the basis of a letter to my friend and collaborator Stefan Zweig , intercepted and used against me by the Gestapo; in the letter I had spoken critically about the Reichsmusikkammer . For ten years, I have not had any dealings with the Department and the Party, except for plenty of harassments and hostilities.

Read from a historical and source-critical perspective, hardly any of the statements in this letter of January 1, 1947 by Strauss are correct. Yet the misrepresentation, although made in connection with Strauss's denazification process, was not entirely tactical but corresponded in substance to Strauss's private assessment of his own biography. Subjective “truth” and selective memory come together here to form idiosyncratic autobiography. If the result withstands historical scrutiny only here and there, that is nonetheless the very reason why posterity, when judging Strauss's activities during the Third Reich, has been more interested in a “moral verdict” than a historical inquiry.