Chapter 7

“And I Thought They Were a Decadent Race”

Denazification, the Cold War, and (African) American Involvement in Postwar West German Musical Life

In the summer of 1953, at the age of sixty-eight, William Kemper Harreld, a violin professor at Morehouse College, recorded in his diary his various travels through Germany and Austria. His journey was both a musical pilgrimage and a homecoming of sorts, for he had been a violin student in Berlin in the 1910s. Later, he had lived vicariously through his daughter, Josephine Harreld, while she spent the summer of 1935 taking piano lessons at the Mozarteum University Salzburg; he received her reports of listening to Marian Anderson sing in Salzburg and trekking across the border to visit the National Theatre Munich. One can hear the enthusiasm and feel the almost dizzying excitement bordering on panic humming in diary entries written during his return trip to Central Europe as he visited violin shop after violin shop in Vienna, loving each one more than the next, walking down Mahlerstrasse (which he underlined as if in disbelief: “Mahlerstrasse”) near the Vienna State Opera House, attending rehearsals of a Mozart horn concerto at the Mozarteum building, and purchasing tickets to attend the Bayreuth Festival.

As much as Harreld’s trip was a musical return to Germany and Austria, it was also an introduction, for much had changed in the decades since he had last lived and performed in the land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. The geopolitical landscape of Germany and Austria, for example, had altered considerably. A few snippets in his diary—“Russian Zone!”—highlight the Iron Curtain’s growing shadow over Germany and Austria, which had been cast early after the war but had only become starker after the Berlin Airlift in 1948. In Vienna he watched Russian steamships sail down the Danube and in Heidelberg, enjoying the good weather, he encountered “refugees from behind Iron Curtain. And Americans.”¹

In fact, everywhere Harreld went, he marveled at the sheer number of Americans crowding Germany and Austria. Most likely repeating a fact he had heard from someone in Heidelberg, he noted that the number of Americans in the city had “grown from 8,000 to 120,000 since [the] war.”² What impressed him strongly was not only the presence of white American soldiers everywhere but also the sheer number of African American soldiers living freely and traveling through the German countryside when off duty. Indeed, there may have been no stronger or more noticeable difference of this new, postwar Germany to Harreld than the presence of Black Americans everywhere he went. He counted three Black troops in a station restaurant in Bayreuth, followed around a “Negro painter” in Cologne, and spent a pleasant boat ride with another Black soldier along the Rhine who eventually disembarked in Koblenz.

Much had changed since Harreld had last had the pleasure of riding on trains roaring across the German landscape. The United States had become a superpower and an occupying force whose political, cultural, and social interventions shaped much of postwar West German society. African American troops stationed in Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, Berlin, and Hesse spent the early decades in postwar West Germany and Austria living like conquerors and victors. In the fictional story The Last of the Conquerors (1948), the African American author and veteran William Gardner Smith writes, “Many Black Americans came alive for the first time in the ruins of Berlin … Members of a victorious army, they found respect and consideration for the first time—but from their former enemies.”³ Gratified to be away from Jim Crow in the United States and on their military bases, African American soldiers escaped into German daily life. “In fact,” Maria Höhn and Martin Klimke write, “soldiers were able to develop deeper relationships with the civilian population in Germany than they had during the war in Great Britain, France, or Italy, because once hostilities were over military units tended to remain in a particular locale for extended periods. They thus established day-to-day routines that fostered their connections to the local community: for example, attending local church services, dances in village pubs, as well as performances in the theaters and opera houses of Germany’s bombed-out cities.”⁴ Harreld’s short notes of experiences such as his aforementioned Rhine river cruise record this new reality for African Americans and the Germans they encountered.

Figure 23. An entry from the travel journal of the Morehouse College violin professor William Kemper Harreld, June 1953. He played two Schubert melodies on Schubert’s own piano in Vienna: “Ave Maria” and the “Rosamunde” theme, which appeared in many of Schubert’s works. The version Harreld documented in his travel journal entry is most likely from Schubert’s Entr’acte no. 3 in B-flat Major, a piece of incidental music for orchestra. Josephine Harreld Love Collection, box 27, folder 31. Courtesy of the Spelman College Archives.

Yet the fact that the man recording these short bursts of prose had lived in Germany before—trailed two decades later by his daughter’s own stay in Salzburg and Munich—reminds us of the degree to which intergenerational cultural exchange linked people’s experiences across time. Another example, stranger still, is the unusual life and career of the African American baritone J. Elmer Spyglass, who was among the local villagers in Schwalbach who came out to greet American soldiers liberating Germany during the early hours of postwar Germany. Once a young student who had traveled abroad to Germany in the 1910s upon graduation from Toledo’s Conservatory of Music in Ohio, he had simply never returned to the United States, living comfortably instead with his wife in the German countryside even throughout the Third Reich.⁵

Both men’s experiences might appear odd to us because they fail to adhere to the zero hour (Stunde null) mythology, which constructs a neat and tidy chronological division between pre- and postwar Germany. In contrast, these experiences connect Black bodies and Black experiences across twentieth-century Germany. The notion that Germany started over after 1945 with a clean slate has endured its fair share of challenges from historians like Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, Atina Grossmann, and Geoff Eley, who have forcefully argued that “1945 did not and could not represent an absolute rupture from all that came before.” Nonetheless, within the discourse of race and race thinking, they have observed, “assumptions of the Stunde null remain largely unchallenged.”⁶ Incorporating William Kemper Harreld and Elmer Spyglass into our historical narratives of twentieth-century Germany punctures myths of Black-white encounters on German soil and blurs our clean teleological divisions even more.

At the same time, however, the new political context of West Germany created new political meanings for Black performances of classical music. In the wake of Nazi German defeat, the American military relied greatly on Black classical musicians to perform important cultural labor on West German soil. In this chapter I present two case studies of this phenomenon—the Berlin debut of the Guyanese conductor Rudolph Dunbar in 1945 and the US State Department–sponsored tour of George Gershwin’s opera, Porgy and Bess, in 1952—while acknowledging that there were many others. In both of these examples of Black classical musicians on West German stages, moments of rupture and continuity shaped German musical and cultural life.

The first performance of note took place only a few short months after Hitler committed suicide and the Nazi state fell apart, when the American authorities invited Dunbar to lead the Berlin Philharmonic in one of their first concerts under occupation powers. Both American and German audience members perceived an irony in the US authorities engaging a Black musician to teach the Germans how to supposedly become more civilized. It was as if the world had turned upside down, according to some reports, if those who were supposedly uncivilized (that is, Black diasporic peoples) could instruct the Germans on how to finally be civil.

The second case study finds the American military again relying on Black musicians to instruct Germans, albeit this time for self-congratulatory and hypocritical reasons. Responding to Soviet propaganda that depicted American institutions as deeply racist, the US State Department sponsored a tour of George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess to Europe in 1952 to celebrate their racial progress and to demonstrate to the world the importance of democracy. Here, too, currents of anti-Black racism run through the production and reception of a cast that included internationally renowned singers such as Leontyne Price and William Warfield.

In the case of both performances, the American military acknowledged that they were dependent on Black classical musicians to contribute to historical, political, and racial discourses in a manner that neither white American classical musicians nor Black jazz musicians could satisfy. Only Black classical musicians offered the technique and musical rigor that the American military believed would impress German audiences and the right racial background to morally shame them for their failures. From the American perspective it also was an added advantage that in the process Black classical musicians provided much-needed evidence to support the fragile myth that the United States was a place that embraced racial difference.

Yet within this new political context, historical continuities in German racial listening practices nonetheless persisted. However much Harreld was right to document the changing geopolitical situation surrounding him in 1945, we will see that cultural notions of race, music, and talent in Germany remained stubbornly entrenched in historical notions of Black authenticity. Perhaps the problem was that the American bodies performing cultural ambassadorship abroad were never just read as American bodies, even if American authorities frequently presented them as such. Rather, German expectations of Blackness—Black sounds, musicianship, and talent—anchored in decades of racial and musical discourses informed their own listening practices, even while they sometimes strove to listen differently.

The ultimate irony here is that American efforts to engage with Germans in the world of Western art music often reinforced to Germans their own musical superiority. “In trying to determine just what kind of break the Stunde null amounts to in German musical identity,” Celia Applegate writes, “we inevitably encounter in both institutional and individual memories the continual reappearance, like some hardy perennial, of the image of music in the ruins.”⁷ German musicians and German music emerged out of the early decades of the postwar era relatively unscathed and untouched by either the politics of denazification or the politics of the Cold War in part because of American admiration for the Austro-German musical canon. And Blackness and Black people remained stubbornly outside of German musical culture, even while new occupation powers sought to integrate them into Germans’ musical experiences.

Rudolph Dunbar and the Paradox of Performing Denazification in West Germany

Less than three months after the fall of the Third Reich, on July 20, 1945, the writer and anti-Nazi activist Ruth Andreas-Friedrich recorded a most remarkable encounter with Dunbar in her diary:

Her account captures all of the tensions and complexities surrounding German engagement with Dunbar while also illuminating Dunbar’s own agency in facilitating conversation. What dominates Andreas-Fischer’s passage is her own racial fascination with the conductor, whom she twice calls “beautiful as a panther.” His eyes gleam, he appears elegant in his uniform, but nonetheless her animalistic description implies that there is something not only exotic but potentially powerful and dangerous about him.

His power might stem from the word she uses to describe him—“victor.” Like many other Germans who met him, Andreas-Fischer mistook Dunbar for an “American” in her diary when he was from British Guyana. Associating Dunbar with the US Allied forces was not entirely inaccurate, however, as his own “elegantly tailored American uniform” suggests. Nonetheless, Andreas-Fischer calling Dunbar a “victor” represents a significant shift in international relations that occurred after the collapse of the Third Reich. Perhaps for the first time in German history, the appearance of Black soldiers garnered respect (albeit some of it hostile) instead of outrage. Unlike after WWI, when French African colonial troops stationed on the Rhine inspired a racist, far-right propaganda campaign of protest against interracial relations, the African American soldiers who landed on German soil, passing candy to children, cigarettes to men, and stockings to women, became conquering heroes. Part of their newfound power came from the fact that they were Americans. “Like the British and French,” Höhn and Klimke write, “Germans also viewed Black soldiers first and foremost as Americans or Yankees—as conquerors who wore the uniform of the victor nation—and not as ‘Negroes.’ ”⁹ In the words of William Gardner Smith, “[The Germans] were racists, but we were conquerors and the look in their eyes was respect.”¹⁰ Wearing American uniforms, Black men, including Dunbar, tapped into a new power previously unavailable to them, which Andreas-Fischer’s diary entry documents.

Yet Dunbar excites Andreas-Fischer not only because of his ties to a rising global superpower. Andreas-Fischer was apparently so struck by Dunbar’s interest in German composers that she recorded it twice in the same paragraph. Here, Andreas-Fischer reconfirmed the long-standing myth that Black people were far removed from German music. She harbored the same assumption that would later inform how music critics and audiences interpreted Dunbar’s performance that September. Yet her account also reveals to us a musician operating in the full knowledge of what white European audiences expected of him. By stating that audiences attend his concerts “not because they want to hear [his] music, but because they want to hear how a Negro makes music,” he illustrated an astute awareness of European demands for Black bodies on stage.

Lastly, Andreas-Fischer’s diary entry also suggests how quickly Black people became involved in a complex triangulation between Germans and the growing silence about the Holocaust, a theme I explore at length in the next chapter. In Dunbar’s encounter with Andreas-Fischer and her colleagues, his quip about victimization and the Holocaust ran so deep that her colleagues’ primary response to it was silence. In a room full of white Germans, Dunbar stated that Black people “are the most disregarded people in the world. Even more disregarded than the Jews, right? Or the Germans.” While the first reference points to the Holocaust, the second appears to mock Germans’ own narratives of victimization, which presented them as the primary victims of Nazi aggression as opposed to its beneficiaries. Dunbar’s comment, which questioned Germans’ sense of victimization, made his German acquaintances so uncomfortable and “embarrassed in front of one another” that eventually Andreas-Fischer’s colleague, Borchard, changed the subject by handing over a Bach cantata “to his beautiful guest.”

Dunbar was quite the figure to break the racial barrier at the Berlin Philharmonic that fall. Although his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic has appeared in a few historical accounts, his own biography and perspective on his debut has tended to disappear from our narratives documenting the performance, even though he was the primary agent of it. A classically trained clarinetist from British Guiana (his manual, Treatise on Clarinet Playing, published in 1939, still sits on the shelves of many music libraries), Dunbar left the Caribbean to attend the Juilliard School in New York City in the 1920s. Following his career in New York, he studied music under Felix Weingartner in Vienna, eventually leaving for France, where he became highly involved in the 1930s Paris musical scene.¹¹ As WWII raged, he offered concerts with the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1942 and L’Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire in Paris in 1945.¹²

Yet Dunbar’s musical pedigree, while impressive, only presents one side of his multifaceted life. He spent a majority of his adulthood challenging anti-Black racism and promoting a Black diasporic worldview. As a war correspondent and journalist for the Associated Negro Press, he reported frequently to newspapers in the United States about atrocities the Nazis had committed against Black people. In an article for Tempo titled “News from Paris,” for example, Dunbar shared personal stories of his encounters with musicians who had experienced Nazi crimes firsthand. He wrote an article for the African American newspaper and civil rights outlet the Chicago Defender in September of 1944, titled “Trumpet Player Briggs Freed after Four Years in Nazi Camp near Paris,” which documented Arthur Briggs’s account of the horrors of the Nazi regime.¹³

It was precisely his commitment to Black internationalist politics that had driven much of his musical activities during WWII and inspired him to include William Grant Still’s Afro-American Symphony in his Berlin concert. Dunbar was an outspoken critic of the British empire and praised by the Black Marxist George Padmore, among others. His concerts in England and France during WWII debuted works by different Black composers such as Coleridge-Taylor and Still.¹⁴ He also used his performances with the London Philharmonic Orchestra in April of 1942 to “raise funds for Britain’s colored allies,” an act that reveals Dunbar’s support for pan-Africanism. His own feelings of ambivalence toward European imperialism may have stemmed from his experience in the United States. In an article for Time a year after his Berlin Philharmonic debut, Dunbar told the reporter, “[The British] want to say, ‘Look what we have done for Dunbar’—but it is not the British who have done it for me, it is the Americans.”¹⁵ For these reasons, Dunbar may have readily identified with the American mission to denazify Germany and to extend greater cultural influence over Europe more broadly.

As proof of his own Americanism and commitment to denazification, when Dunbar walked onto the stage to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic at the sold-out Titania Palast in Berlin, he proudly wore his war correspondent’s uniform.¹⁶ Indeed, the act of wearing his military uniform for a musical performance also suggested the strong tie between musical performance and politics, making him appear very much like the “victor” Andreas-Fischer claimed that she had seen before her. Before the concert began, Dunbar first led the audience in a performance of “The Star Spangled Banner”; some Germans stood, others remained seated. That evening, he conducted Weber’s Oberon Overture, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony no. 6, “Pathetique” in B Minor, and the German premiere of Still’s Afro-American Symphony.

While Dunbar had his own reasons for conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, the American military had theirs. In the immediate aftermath of WWII, the United States and the Allied forces writ large sought to restructure German society and culture in the hopes of eradicating Nazi ideology from civilians’ everyday lives. The denazification process also extended into German musical life. The Allied forces in Germany recognized that restructuring German cultural life would contribute to the broader goals of reeducating Germans. John Bitter, a US Army official and a central figure behind the reorganization of the Berlin Philharmonic, recalls, “I said to myself, now the war is over, now I would like to help rebuild the good Germany: that of Beethoven, Schiller, Goethe, and Brahms. One cannot always continue to conduct war.”¹⁷ Rebuilding the “good” Germany meant offering both punishments and rewards. To that end, the Allies rigorously blacklisted composers, conductors, and musicians, and their decisions often caused controversy, such as the 1946 trial of the famed conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. They prohibited Germans from singing “German military music, or … German or Nazi anthems, in public or before any group or gathering”; they promoted performances of previously banned German composers such as Mendelssohn; and they prosecuted and blacklisted German musicians who had actively participated in the Nazi regime.¹⁸

Figure 24. Wearing his US military uniform, the Afro-Caribbean conductor Rudolph Dunbar conducts the Berlin Philharmonic at the Titania Palast in Berlin in September 1945 in one of the orchestra’s first concerts after WWII. Courtesy of Getty Images.

However, American efforts to denazify German musical culture were always stymied by their dualistic nature. Constantly walking a precariously thin line between punishment and rehabilitation, between authoritative governance and the promotion of cultural democracy, between shaming Germans for departing from their supposedly exceptional past and desperately desiring to project themselves as the Germans’ cultural equals, the American military undertook an uneven, arbitrary, and sometimes contradictory process of cultural renewal. In Settling Scores, David Monod writes that postwar West German musical life endured “the complex, confused, and often contradictory efforts of the American authorities to punish musicians for the things they had done in the Third Reich while establishing the foundations of a democratic cultural life.” The American military was always trapped between two conflicting goals, he writes: “punishment and freedom, or, put another way, control and democracy.”¹⁹ Ultimately, the United States oscillated between policies of modest restraint and harsh adjudication, all the while hoping they might convince Germans to see them as their cultural peers.²⁰

Perhaps wishing to see themselves as Germans’ musical and cultural equals, the American occupiers fixated on musical institutions that they could control, the Berlin Philharmonic being one of them. The placement of Leo Borchard at the helm illustrates how quickly Allied forces sought to break with the past. An anti-Nazi activist who had participated in underground resistance movements in Berlin, Borchard was banned by Nazi officials from performing music after 1935 because they deemed him “politically unreliable.” After the war, he became the poster child for the “good German musician,” and he led the Berlin Philharmonic and the Prussian State Opera from May 1945 until his untimely death at the hands of an American officer that September, just a few days before Dunbar’s debut.²¹

Although it remains unclear how he had come to know Dunbar or why he had chosen to invite him, it was Borchard’s invitation that brought Dunbar on stage to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic at the Titania Palast—with the approval of the American authorities.²² It appears they eagerly welcomed this musical event because it so readily aligned with their own goals. Prior to and after Borchard’s death, the American military sought to place a non-German musician at the podium of the Berlin Philharmonic for political reasons. “By installing a foreigner as principal conductor of the Philharmonic,” Abby Anderton argues, “American authorities hoped to dispel any lingering Nazi claims of German cultural superiority once and for all.”²³ It became important to showcase to the German public that “outsiders” were also capable of producing musical greatness.

Although Dunbar only performed as a guest conductor, his debut not only fulfilled the American mission of installing a foreigner but it also functioned to remind Germans of their racial crimes. It mattered greatly to American officials that a Black man was conducting. As in other areas of the postwar occupation, what American authorities sought was to both punish and encourage, and in matters of race their strategy was no different. Although Heide Fehrenbach is right that official denazification rarely stressed the problems of racism, nonetheless in matters of music they occasionally made symbolic gestures in such directions. The American military wished to project to ordinary Germans an idealized image of the United States as a nation more racially inclusive than Germany, and to that end, they sponsored musical performances by musicians whom the Nazis would have denounced.²⁴

Above all, American authorities believed that the prestige of Black classical musicians demonstrated that Americans had succeeded in race relations where Germany had so clearly failed. Recalling how Nazi Germany had banned Marian Anderson from concertizing “because of the color of her skin as a Negress,” American authorities insisted on using Black musicians to symbolically denounce Nazism, announce the arrival of a new global order, and present themselves in a better light.²⁵ To that end, Eric Clarke, the head of the music branch in the Western zone in the mid-1940s, declared that Black classical musicians such as Anderson and Dorothy Maynor were among “the best assets in the reorientation of Germans.”²⁶ US Brigadier General Robert McClure also welcomed the arrival of African American musicians to Germany on these grounds.²⁷

At the behest of American authorities, Marian Anderson did indeed return to Germany in 1950, giving two sold-out shows—one in Berlin and one in Munich—to adoring crowds. Like Dunbar, Anderson performed to a 2,000-person crowd of Allied soldiers and Germans at the Titania Palast in Berlin, and her audience cheered for her so much that she had to devote “half an hour after her formal program to bows and encores,” including several spirituals and German lieder.²⁸ Following Anderson’s recital, US Army General Maxwell D. Taylor hosted a reception in celebration of Anderson, with invited guests from the other Allied powers, including the British general G. K. Bourne.²⁹ While much of the repertoire that she performed that night consisted of standards dating back to her stay in Germany in the 1930s—Schubert’s “Der Tod und das Mädchen” and “Ave Maria,” for example—the pomp and circumstance surrounding her Berlin reunion were wildly different this time. Attended by Berlin patrons (many of whom still fondly recalled her stay in Germany decades prior) and military generals, Anderson’s Liederabend had greatly changed its meaning in Germany’s postwar context.

African American classical musicians held a unique position that made it possible for them to become important cultural symbols to American authorities and Germans who heard them. Here, their identities as both Black and classical musicians came into play. Take, for example, the US Information Control Division’s insistence on having “top-rank American Negro vocalists give concerts in Germany.”³⁰ African American vocalists like Anderson, singing on German stages in full-length gowns, were subtle weapons of denazification. According to Timothy Schroer, the Allies believed that “if Germans could hear talented African Americans performing artistic works capably, they could be convinced that Blacks were not racially inferior.”³¹ Black classical musicians could shame Germans into seeing the error of their ways. As classical musicians, they embodied all of the privilege, prestige, and respectability that American authorities needed to try to impress Germany while also providing racial symbolism. Both parts of their identities—being African Americans and being well-trained practitioners in Western art music—were necessary for this unique kind of cultural labor.

Jazz music and rock and roll only went so far in positively changing German impressions of the United States, in part because of their associations with the vernacular and popular culture. Similarly, white American classical musicians did little to strike a blow at German racial attitudes. Moreover, to many white German listeners, white American classical musicians offered watered-down variations of their own white European singers, thus reinforcing their belief in the superiority of German music. Black classical musicians, however, represented a vibrant, effective geopolitical tool—if wielded properly. They could remind Germans that Americans, too, excelled in the world of classical music and that the United States was not a cultural backwater after all. But their Blackness could also be wielded to instill in German society a new vocabulary of racial acceptance. They represented all the promises and possibilities of universalism following an era that had so vocally rejected those principles. Black classical musicians, then, promised to be a vital part of the American military’s agenda to rehabilitate German musical culture.

The American military certainly interpreted Dunbar’s performance in September 1945 in these terms. The Allied Control Council, the organization responsible for overseeing cultural events in Germany, approved his request to perform at Borchard’s behest because they saw it as “a valuable step in wiping out racial prejudices.”³² American newspapers covering the event promulgated this view of German musical and racial rehabilitation repeatedly in their growing mountain of publications on Dunbar in Berlin. Time, for example, wrote, “US occupation authorities were all for [Dunbar’s performance], though their interest was more in teaching the Germans a lesson in racial tolerance than in Dunbar’s musicianship.”³³ The American occupation forces laid the foundations for this lesson as early as possible. In an article titled “Berlin Gets Hep to Classics via Negro Conductor,” a journalist for the Chicago Defender writes, “The hall which once rocked with the race-hate strains of Nazi ‘Horst Wessel [Song]’ was rocked with the rhythms of Composer William Grant Still’s Afro-American Symphony.”³⁴

Yet the American solution to use Black musicians to denazify West Germany was always overshadowed by the fact that the American military was itself a deeply racist institution. Höhn and Klimke write, “It was ironic that this rigidly segregated and deeply racist army took on what commanders called ‘the most important job ever undertaken by the United States,’ namely, the reeducation and democratization of the defeated German foe.”³⁵ There was, perhaps, no greater irony in hiring Dunbar to teach the Germans a “racial lesson” than the fact that the American military was also enforcing racial segregation among their own troops stationed in West Germany and attending Dunbar’s Berlin debut. Black musicians were also not free from Jim Crow harassment overseas. For example, when Anderson performed in Munich, white Americans protested because she stayed at the Hotel Excelsior, a hotel run by the US Army.³⁶ Although she had arrived in Munich as a cultural ambassador of the United States, her own stay at a military-run, predominantly white hotel became mired in the very same racist politics that the authorities were hoping her performances in Germany would publicly disavow.

If the practice of racial and musical denazification was complicated (to say the least) on the American military’s side, the end results were even murkier on the German one. The American military’s open admiration for German music coupled with its severe punishment of musicians who had complied or collaborated with the Nazi regime meant that the responses of Germans to American interrogations of their musical pasts was one of flat denial.³⁷ If German musicians were supposed to have learned something from their Nazi past, it is unclear just what, exactly, that was.

Worse, throughout the course of denazification, the majority of musicians simply returned to their positions, having escaped any meaningful conversation on their relationship to Nazism. Virtually all of the members representing Germany at UNESCO in 1953 had been prominent musicologists and composers under the Nazis.³⁸ The failure of denazification meant that the process of rehabilitating and internationalizing German music happened far too quickly. Joy Calico argues against the “persistent image of the FRG [West Germany] as the postwar utopia for modernist music.” Instead, she writes, we see in the case of the music critic Hans Schnoor “a former Nazi music critic, rehabilitated in name only, resisting the Allied-led, modernist musical remigration with the familiar rhetoric of National Socialist journalism.”³⁹ Instead of disrupting German musical life, the American occupation and denazification effort ensured that much of it continued in its previous guises and forms.⁴⁰

The fact that these representatives of German music slipped past denazification efforts and back into postwar musical life suggests a greater thread of continuity between Nazi and postwar Germany than historical narratives had earlier granted.⁴¹ Rather than breaking from the past, many musical figures simply learned how to hide from it. Thus, German music’s central and sacred function to German culture remained unsullied. The belief—promoted by German exiles and adopted by Allied forces—that Nazi intolerance had nearly destroyed Germany’s great musical tradition covered a whole host of sins.⁴² German musical exceptionalism remained as firmly in place after the war as it did under Hitler.

German musicians’ narratives of their own Nazi pasts manifested in their relationship to Dunbar in ways that are strikingly similar to what scholars such as Priscilla Layne, Katrin Sieg, and Angelica Fenner have observed in their research on race and denazification. In short: Germans used Dunbar’s visit to avoid culpability and to flee responsibility for their actions through the experience of emotional catharsis. German listeners stated that they had experienced emotional and intellectual epiphanies in Dunbar’s presence and finally learned to embrace African American music. After a lesson in syncopation from Dunbar during a rehearsal of Still’s Afro-American Symphony, the first flutist of the Berlin Philharmonic purportedly said to Dunbar, “Now at last I understand your American jazz.”⁴³ There are two things that are striking about this observation. First, Still’s 1931 Afro-American Symphony actually had little to do with jazz. In fact, Carol Oja argues that the composition showcases many features of musical modernism from the 1930s, fitting into the sonic world of composers such as Edgard Varèse, Ruth Crawford, and Aaron Copland while using African American folk melodies and blues idioms.⁴⁴ Moreover, Still’s Afro-American Symphony is just that—a symphony, not a piece of jazz music. Yet the flutist’s remarks illustrate a greater assumption or misrecognition of different African American musical styles and traditions.

Second, it also reveals a new postwar mental logic at work. The flutist implies that because of Dunbar, he’d had a revelation that upended his previous ways of thinking under the Nazis. Musicians such as this flutist discovered that they had been “duped,” in other words, and thus saw themselves as victims of Nazi cultural politics. Similarly, several American newspapers reported that after hearing the Berlin Philharmonic’s musical performance, “an old German in the audience, looking at Dunbar, remarked to his wife: ‘And I had thought they were a decadent race.’ ”⁴⁵ In these moments of cultural exchange, Germans claimed to have discovered that they were mistaken and were the victims of conspiracy.

Music criticism, slowly rearing up again in the summer of 1945, offers us perhaps the most potent way in which we see postwar logic developing so quickly after the fall of the Nazi racial state. It is no wonder that Dunbar’s 1945 performance created German headlines that practically screamed in capitalized letters that “A NEGRO CONDUCTS BERLIN PHILHARMONIC.” Although presented in the guise of a break from the past, German rhetoric nonetheless smacked of historical continuity instead of cultural rupture. Dunbar, like many other classical musicians, was a German Romantic musician at heart. He routinely expressed what German journalists called a “strong empathy for German Romantic music” and enjoyed exhibiting his deep knowledge of it.⁴⁶ In an interview Dunbar gave to the Allgemeine Zeitung, he emphasized his love for the German masters: “I love Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, and the counterpoint of Sebastian Bach. When I come back from Paris, I hope above all to be able to conduct a Brahms symphony.”⁴⁷

Yet his love for German music was at odds with music critics’ views of him as a Black man.⁴⁸ The Berliner Zeitung’s comments on this “musical sensation” reveal precisely the same combination of admiration and surprise that one encountered in earlier generations of reviewers. “He knows the scores, their forms, their commands,” one reviewer was willing to admit. “Naturally, he doesn’t execute European music well enough in our views. But it is shocking enough what he is still [able to] radiate.”⁴⁹ In the critic’s estimation, Dunbar, a British subject and student of Felix Weingartner, “naturally” lacked the ability to conduct European art music. These comments could have very well appeared in the 1920s and 1930s to describe Roland Hayes or Anderson, or even in the nineteenth century to describe the Jiménez Trio. Over and over again, the notion that a person of African descent could exhibit mastery of European art music ran afoul of German music critics’ deep skepticism.

Typically, music critics determined that Dunbar was the most “in his element” conducting Still’s Afro-American Symphony, even though Dunbar was not African American. Der Morgen praised Dunbar for familiarizing German audiences with a well-known American composer whose symphony embodied the “typical sound and style of the New World.”⁵⁰ Die Neue Zeit wrote that Dunbar had “built a bridge between two continents” with the Afro-American Symphony and gave audiences a piece of music full of life.⁵¹ The Afro-American Symphony conducted by Dunbar embodied “the folk songs and other tunes that interpret the lives of [Dunbar’s] people—Still is a Negro like Dunbar.”⁵² Such a statement flattens Blackness to a problematic degree. Furthermore, it illuminates how white Germans in postwar West Germany “often failed to see the individuality of Black people and the differences between them … [I]n many cases [white Germans] contributed to solidifying the nexus of skin color and culture and—mostly as unintended consequences—contributed to the process of racialization,” Moritz Ege writes.⁵³ Here in September 1945, at a performance celebrating a new racial and musical era, the same racial logics were already being played out. Dunbar was not a US citizen at the time of his performance, proving that his perceived Blackness mattered just as much if not more to both the producers and audiences of his debut than his nationality. His authority over African American music, like his assumed knowledge of jazz, was never questioned.

The ways critics described the music echoes prewar assessments of African American music. The Allgemeine Zeitung, for example, described the Afro-American Symphony as sonorous, soulful, and rhythmic.⁵⁴ Some of the movements had a certain “homesickness,” the critic for the Allgemeine Zeitung explained, then informing his readers that this was characteristic of the blues and African American music in general. The lively scherzo created the “excited mood of a Negro meeting [i.e., church revival],” and the finale captured the sentiments of the traditional African American spiritual, a genre with which many German audiences were already familiar. The critic noted, “Especially when this piece was played one naturally felt how deeply connected Dunbar is to it [the work], and here we ought to admire the Philharmonic Orchestra above all, who had immersed themselves into this foreign world.”⁵⁵ Moreover, the press consistently referred to Dunbar as the first American conductor to perform with the Berlin Philharmonic since the war had ended, even though he was British Guyanese and had lived in London since 1931.

One measure of Dunbar’s success, however, might be in the large number of Black conductors who followed him, for his debut established a working blueprint for how these later performances would go. In fact, West Germany in particular became something of a “promised land” for African American conductors, who benefitted from the American military’s insistence on using them to denazify Germany, thus suspending American racial norms in order to do so. Take, for example, the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra, the first and only symphonic orchestral ensemble ever formed under the supervision of the US Army. In 1955, Henry Lewis, an African American bassist who had been on the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s roster until he joined the military, began his tenure with the ensemble as their assistant conductor.⁵⁶ However, after receiving recommendations from Hans Hörner, conductor of the Stuttgart Philharmonic, and Fritz Mareczek, conductor of the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra, Lewis became the orchestra’s principal conductor in March of 1956.⁵⁷ The interracial ensemble, with a Black conductor in tow, fit with the American authorities’ vision of itself to a tee. The orchestra functioned as a well-respected ensemble in Germany while also adhering to the American authorities’ message of racial acceptance, and the US Information Service (USIS) promoted it heavily in Germany.⁵⁸ In a report from Bonn to Washington DC, one official wrote, “The virtuosity and musical ability of the orchestra, coupled with a soldierly and yet free and easy bearing, made a great impression and changed not a few preconceived German opinions regarding cultural efforts and achievements in the United States.”⁵⁹ From the US Army’s perspective, the ensemble successfully proved that the United States could carry the same heavy cultural weight as the citizens they were trying to reeducate.

Frustrated with American musical institutions, other Black conductors went to Europe because they were afforded more opportunities to perform and study than they were in the United States.⁶⁰ Conductors such as George Byrd, Dean Dixon, James Frazier, Everett Lee, and James Anderson DePriest recognized in interviews that these unique opportunities to use their training and mastery as serious conductors in West Germany also allowed them to fulfill the role of cultural ambassador.⁶¹ Dixon became a fan favorite in Germany and Austria, touring in both countries in the 1950s and 1960s.⁶² Later, Paul Freeman, an Eastman School of Music alumnus, studied at the Berlin State School of Music (now UdK) through a Fulbright fellowship program before launching his career as a successful conductor as well.⁶³ Another student of Berlin’s State School of Music, Isaiah Jackson, made his debut conducting the Vienna Symphony in 1970, for example, instead of with an orchestra in the United States.

Black conductors could be roped into claims of fairness and equality in German orchestras. K. H. Ruppell, the music critic for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, defended German orchestras against the claim that they favored German music by mentioning Black American conductors such as Dixon instead. “It is my duty to voice a protest against [the critic] Martin Bernheimer’s accusation that the Munich press is indulgent toward German composers and performers and that it snobbishly misunderstands certain non-German works,” he wrote to the New York Times. “We would rejoice,” he counters, “if Dean Dixon, an American conductor who is very popular in Munich, would introduce us to important works of American composers at the Musica Viva concerts in Munich.”⁶⁴ His sentiments that Germans had accepted Dixon as a convincing interpreter of classical music in the 1950s had some merit. Conductors such as Lee and Dixon were able to acquire lengthy contracts with regional orchestras in Europe, something unavailable to Black conductors in the United States for decades.

Yet the racial listening politics of Dunbar’s debut cast a shadow over Black conductors in Germany and lasted for decades. Roughly fifteen years after Dunbar’s performance, another Black conductor was unable to escape it. In August 1959, the African American conductor George Byrd debuted with the Berlin Philharmonic conducting an all-European program: Brahms’s Symphony no. 2 in D Major, Boris Blacher’s Paganini Variations, and César Franck’s Symphonic Variations. Newspapers in both the United States and in Europe incorrectly reported that Byrd’s debut with the Berlin Philharmonic was the first time a Black conductor had performed with the ensemble, forgetting Dunbar’s appearance fourteen years earlier.⁶⁵ The Austrian newspaper Neues Österreich, for example, reported in their story, titled “Black Director for the Berlin Philharmonic,” “George Byrd from Brooklyn is the first Negro to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra.”⁶⁶ How quickly Dunbar’s own debut had been erased from public memory.

Moreover, critics spun the same racial logic that they had produced for Dunbar into the way they understood Byrd’s performance with the Berlin Philharmonic. Most concert reviews found a way to highlight Byrd’s Blackness. A critic for Der Kurier, for example, stated that “As a conductor George Byrd presented himself as a congenial, erudite, and imaginative Negro who takes music very seriously.”⁶⁷ The critic’s praise perhaps implied that Byrd was the exception rather than the rule for Black musicians. Another music critic’s praise relied on the same kind of cultural and biological racism that had informed music criticism for decades: “Byrd, the colored [conductor], brings the instinctive, enchanting musicality of his race. His musicality proves itself even with the Brahms symphony.”⁶⁸ Because he was Black, Byrd was supposedly more naturally “musical,” a term the critic never fully defined.

I bring up Byrd’s own debut with the Berlin Philharmonic so that we may reconsider Dunbar’s. The latter’s performance was potently symbolic for it represented an extreme racial and cultural change in just a short amount of time. Audiences and critics were aware that Dunbar’s debut was a test case for German democracy and for race relations in light of recent events. Indeed, Heide Fehrenbach argues that when it came to Black-white relations in the wake of the Holocaust and Nazism, postwar German officials were obliged “to confront and counter persisting racial assumptions underlying notions of national belonging, and to do so under the bright light of international scrutiny.”⁶⁹ Both German and American audiences heralded Dunbar’s debut as a triumph. But historical distance provides us with another perspective. Dunbar’s performance offered a moment when myths about Black musicianship were confronted only to be renewed, and German music—and those who played it—retained its innocence. Even at one of the most powerful moments in German history—the immediate aftermath of WWII—a Black musician’s performance was unable to overturn decades of lingering notions of Black musicality in German culture.

Porgy and Bess and the Cold War in West Germany

At least with Dunbar’s performance in Berlin in 1945, German audiences and the American military who sponsored the event interpreted the performance in the same light. They both understood—tacitly or explicitly—that Dunbar’s debut represented a change to the national, political, racial, and musical order. The US State Department’s sponsoring of an all-Black production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in 1952, however, represented a cornucopia of competing ideologies that never quite managed to align, even while both the Allied forces and the German and Austrian audiences at the performance walked away declaring the feat a musical success. The message that the United States had hoped to send to Berlin and Vienna, one that they believed portrayed the United States in a positive light, became reread or misread once it reached European shores. While German and Austrian audiences applauded Porgy and Bess as a successful American cultural export, they erroneously believed that it accurately depicted a deeply local, Black diasporic community. Their praise for the African American characters and performances raises doubts over the efficacy of American musical interventions abroad.

As the Cold War began to heat up in the 1950s, the US State Department began to employ art music as a tool of cultural diplomacy in global politics, somehow missing the irony of using music’s supposed political neutrality as a tool of propaganda.⁷⁰ As Emily Abrams Ansari argues, “the war had convinced many Americans that military and ideological intervention in foreign affairs could benefit both American objectives and global stability. The only way to defeat the most wicked enemies, many Americans now felt, was to counter them with the power of good.”⁷¹ Implicit in this assumption, however, was that only the “right” kind of music had the cultural weight necessary to overturn negative influences.

Classical music was an especially potent geopolitical strategy for American authorities because of its long European history and its associations with art instead of entertainment.⁷² In particular, American officials believed that classical musical offerings were effective abroad because they understood them to be both simultaneously national and universal—“national,” Danielle Fosler-Lussier writes, “in that a single example of art could be understood as representing some characteristic of the United States as a whole; universal in the sense that people abroad should be able to interpret the music, like it, and evaluate it much as the senders would.”⁷³ American perceptions of themselves as good, even innocent, in their support of music has been a lasting trope, especially in a German context.⁷⁴

The potential problem with Cold War involvement in music-making was that the organizers frequently misunderstood the power of musical representation and audiences’ perceptions of it, unable to recognize that, as Fosler-Lussier writes, “the seeming simplicity of musical diplomacy was an illusion.” She continues, “Whether or not people acknowledged it, mediating music—moving it across space and time—changed its meanings.”⁷⁵ Especially in the case of Porgy and Bess, it becomes startlingly apparent just how little the opera’s organizers in 1952 were able to control the opera’s messaging once it left American soil. Its fractured and duplicitous significations were difficult enough to contend with in the United States, but the opera tour’s managers had even less control over the opera’s meanings once it left America’s shores and traveled to Europe.

The American-sponsored tour of the opera, led by the Broadway director Robert Breen and the American National Theater and Academy (ANTA), was probably doomed from the start, for the opera itself had been mired in its own longstanding controversies well before it traveled across the ocean in 1952. Originally premiering in 1935 in New York City, Porgy and Bess follows the stories of its African American title characters, who live in a small coastal fishing village in South Carolina. Porgy, a crippled beggar in the fictional African American town of Catfish Row, falls in love with Bess, a prostitute and drug addict involved with a dangerous criminal named Crown. After Crown flees Catfish Row to escape arrest charges for murder, Porgy takes Bess into his care and the two develop an intimate relationship. Shortly thereafter, however, the police question Porgy’s involvement in Crown’s criminal affairs and throw him in prison. Upon his release, he discovers that Bess has left him for the drug dealer Sportin’ Life. The final scene of the opera depicts Porgy resolving to leave Catfish Row and find Bess.

One of the primary contradictions embedded in the opera itself lies in its moniker, “an American folk opera.” Naomi André argues that none of the terms—“American,” “folk,” or “opera”—were clear even in the 1930s when Gershwin first composed Porgy and Bess.⁷⁶ Sometimes compared to Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, the opera borrows from numerous operatic traditions, thus musically representing what Gershwin hoped would be America’s “vast melting pot.”⁷⁷ Gershwin saw it as a hybrid between Romantic opera and “lowbrow” folk music, for he used some African American musical expressions as the basis for his operatic composition. “If I am successful,” he once wrote to a friend, “[Porgy] will resemble a combination of the drama and romance of Carmen and the beauty of the Meistersinger.”⁷⁸ Using Wagnerian leitmotifs (the popular theme “Summertime” occurs four times in the opera, for example), late-Romantic harmonic language, and rich orchestration, Gershwin’s musical style firmly placed the work into a Western musical tradition. Yet even in the 1930s, Gershwin’s designation of African American “folk” music within the genre of opera meant that the opera already contained multivalent meanings long before its Cold War tour.⁷⁹

When the US State Department announced their decision to sponsor a production of Porgy and Bess in Europe, many Americans reacted unfavorably to the news. One problem that many people expressed at the time (and that continues to be a problem today) concerned the music itself. Many heard the musical numbers in Gershwin’s opera—including children’s songs, call and response choruses, religious prayers, and shouts—as nothing more than highly stylized musical stereotypes of African American life. The American musicologist Richard Crawford, for example, called Gershwin’s musical compositions in the opera an example of “fakelore,” for Gershwin confessed that he had composed all of the so-called African American spirituals in the opera himself.⁸⁰ Whatever sounded like African American folk music, in other words, had been the invention of this white, Jewish American composer. Gershwin had been inspired by his short trip to South Carolina to listen to African American communal singing, but in fact he did not use any music created by African Americans themselves.

Even the presentation of the Black musical idioms in Porgy and Bess—if we choose to call them that—reinforces a musical hierarchy. Richard Middleton argues that in Porgy and Bess, “Black idioms are encased, put in their place, by the style, orchestration, and structural conventions of late-Romantic opera.” Moreover, “while ‘Black’ idioms are fine for Eden,” Middleton writes, “grown-up emotions like personal love require the manner of European late Romanticism.”⁸¹ At various points in the opera, Gershwin drops the act, so to speak, and uses the musical language of European art music to portray complex emotional processes, thus implying that African American folk singing (loosely defined) was incapable of adequately representing them.

In the 1950s, both white and Black critics also objected to the subject matter of the opera. White, mainstream presses hesitated to endorse the tour for concern that the opera put America’s handling of race—what one Washington Post critic called a “ticklish situation”—in a poor light.⁸² In numerous African American circles, the greatest criticism of the opera stemmed from Gershwin’s depiction of African Americans, which many found delusional at best. Langston Hughes openly lamented the State Department’s sponsorship of this production in an opinion piece for the Chicago Defender. Why, Hughes demanded, could not the United States have sponsored a play “depicting Negroes as clean, well-behaved citizens, some even educated, some of the women as well dressed as whites, some of the men not crapshooters?”⁸³ In his view, Gershwin’s decision to write about gambling crapshooters, drug addicts, and ignorant, pious villagers framed African Americans in the most negative of terms.

From the perspective of ANTA, who produced the opera abroad, the value of sending Porgy and Bess to Europe had everything to do with Gershwin and his music. By the 1950s, Gershwin epitomized the ideal American composer both within and outside the United States. The composer recalled an earlier decade of American travel to Europe in the “transatlantic twenties” before WWII, to which lively works such as An American in Paris (1928) testified. And it was in Berlin in 1926 that Gershwin had offered his European debut of his now-famous Rhapsody in Blue. His music quickly conjured up images in many listeners’ minds of American vibrancy, syncopation, and musical experimentation within safe musical forms.

Not only was his music quite accessible to everyday listeners but American authorities also thought that the figure of Gershwin—an American icon—was politically safe to send abroad, unlike Aaron Copland and other composers. Ansari argues most forcefully in her book “that it was a particularly American experience of the Cold War, especially the influence of anti-communism, that led American composers to stay quiet about the influence of politics upon stylistic choices.”⁸⁴ In this increasingly volatile climate, Gershwin was a safe and reliable choice to represent American cultural and musical values abroad.

Although the opera remained controversial throughout much of the twentieth century, few could deny that Gershwin’s magnum opus was the first widely recognized American opera, one that successfully entered the musical canon and took its place in the operatic repertoire. By the time that it traveled to Europe in 1952, it was one of the only large-scale musical works widely acknowledged as a distinctly American cultural product.⁸⁵ In the harsh, brilliant light of Cold War American politics, Porgy and Bess gleamed brightly as a sparkling jewel worthy of representing American culture, if for no other reason than the fact that it had entered an operatic canon that had for centuries been dominated by French, Italian, and German operas. It was with this perception of the opera that the State Department readily encouraged its tour to Vienna and Berlin.

Yet there was another, more glaring reason why the State Department was eager to perform this work abroad. By the 1950s, it had become necessary to find effective means of combating the USSR’s acerbic and accurate accusations of deeply institutionalized racism in the United States. In 1951, the US State Department acknowledged that “no American problem receives more widespread attention … than our treatment of racial minorities, particularly the Negro.”⁸⁶ Although the USSR had pointed out American racial problems since the 1920s, during the Cold War, race and foreign policy became inextricably linked.⁸⁷ In 1946, for example, Secretary of State James Byrnes engaged in a skirmish with the USSR over voting rights in the Balkans. After protesting that the USSR was denying the rights of some of its citizens to vote, he received a short retort: “the Negroes of Mr. Byrnes” were denied the same rights. To numerous officials, that statement was “a checkmate of the first order.”⁸⁸ The United States’ woeful racial inadequacies were in the spotlight on the world stage and had the potential, as many saw it, to become the largest stumbling block in the nation’s world policy. In sending African American performers abroad, the United States hoped to challenge international opinion of American society.

Although the United States sent a variety of jazz musicians and popular entertainers, Black classical musicians were also an important part of the global mission. Their investment in African American musicianship abroad during the Cold War led the United States to bring numerous musicians to tour Europe. The pianist Natalie Hinderas, for example, gave a recital for Radio Free Europe (five German radio stations whose sole purpose was to fight communism and broadcast their shows across the Iron Curtain) in Munich in 1957, and she performed on a sponsored tour through Vienna, Munich, Heidelberg, and Stuttgart.⁸⁹ African American choral director Jester Hairston also received sponsorship from the US State Department, as did the singer Elwood Peterson, who, after studying in Aachen in 1957, went on several USIS-sponsored tours. The flutist Dorothy Handy toured Germany in 1955 with the USIS. The Hall Johnson Choir, known for their performances of African American spirituals, also toured West Germany, performing in West Berlin’s famous anticommunist Berliner Festwochen in 1951. Henry Blackmon, a singer, also performed in Germany on behalf of the USIS, and the opera singer Helen Phillips, sponsored by the US High Commission’s Speakers and Artists Bureau, gave a thirty-concert tour in West Germany.⁹⁰ These musicians, and many more who performed in Germany as well, offer us a glimpse into the extent to which Black musicianship permeated West German postwar musical life as a result of the American government’s initiatives to bring African American musicians to Europe.

Musicians make for unlikely and sometimes unwilling diplomats. A constant tension between politics and performance hummed in Cold War musical exchanges, especially since many musicians insisted that they simply did not care about politics and were only abroad to perform. Nonetheless, they performed the highly visible role of Americans abroad whether they recognized it or not.⁹¹ From them audiences were supposed to learn what ordinary Americans were like, for better or worse. The two lead singers for the tour, the soprano Leontyne Price and the bass-baritone William Warfield, especially endured the harsh glare of an international spotlight that followed them around and speculated on a budding romance between the two of them.⁹²

Away from the production, the cast of Porgy and Bess also assumed the roles of cultural ambassadors. In this case, however, the ensemble was fully aware of the racial politics of their performances offstage, seeking through their dress and comportment to redress Soviet depictions of African Americans as victims of racial injustice. One cast member remembered, “We always looked well when we went out… . We went in our evening gowns and our mink stoles.”⁹³ Another cast member, Joy McLean, sardonically noted, “We surely didn’t feel or look oppressed when we emerged from the theater.”⁹⁴ Dailies such as Bild, a gossipy Berlin tabloid, marveled at these “dark-skinned performers” and mentioned how well dressed the performers were offstage.

The US State Department encouraged these views and told the performers to “keep in mind what you’d like your folks at home to read in the press about what you say.”⁹⁵ The production, Ellen Noonan argues, saw “the performers as representatives of a different, but no less authentic, type of educated, accomplished, professional African American—in short, precisely the community members that [Porgy’s author] DuBose Heyward had written out of his fictional portrayal of Black Charleston.”⁹⁶ In other words, in the eyes of the State Department, the African American musicians were more important for what they symbolized to European audiences than they were for the characters they performed on stage. It mattered more how they performed than what they actually sang. And it also mattered how well they dressed offstage in comparison to the costumes they wore on it.

As a result, African American opera singers were more reliable for American self-promotion than jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong. Already reared in musical institutions usually reserved for white elites, they offered the respectability and the racial optics that the US State Department desperately needed in the wake of a growing civil rights struggle. Several performers also hosted Liederabende as part of their “goodwill” endeavors, including Irving Barnes and William Warfield, who wooed patrons in a Viennese Rathskeller with his performance of Richard Strauss.⁹⁷ Americans argued that the production of Porgy and Bess offered Germans the opportunity to encounter classically trained, highly talented African American musicians of high operatic quality.

When the opera headed for Berlin, it debuted on September 16 to sold-out crowds.⁹⁸ In Berlin, musical dignitaries such as Walter Felsenstein, the director of the Komische Oper in East Berlin, were in attendance, a sure testament to the opera’s musical importance abroad. Felsenstein had requested two tickets to the performance in a letter addressed to the production’s personnel, stating, “It [is] essential that I should familiarize myself with this production as well as the opera.”⁹⁹ He was not the only East German in attendance. Although the East German press was notably silent on the Berlin production, East Germans did attend the performances. When the State Department discovered its popularity among residents of East Berlin, they ordered that East German currency be accepted at face value instead of the usual exchange rate of five deutsche mark to one US dollar.¹⁰⁰

Figure 25. African American opera singers William Warfield and Leontyne Price, the leads of the US State Department–sponsored touring production of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, stand in front of the German Reichstag building in Berlin, Germany, September 18, 1952. Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

If the American authorities had hoped that German audiences would marvel at the professionalism of the cast and crew and ignore the content of Porgy and Bess, they were severely mistaken. In fact, the impressions that German audiences formed of the musical work stood in direct opposition to American interests. Berlin critics heralded the opera not as an American musical work—countering the US State Department’s firm vision for it—but as a “Negro” opera above all, broadly defined. In 1954, Breen tried to correct this misconception. He commented to a press agent, “I notice that phrases ‘Negro opera’ and ‘Negro troupe’ and such are being used again by the press… . All through the last European tour we strongly emphasized to the press that Porgy and Bess must be referred to only as ‘an American opera’ or ‘American troupe.’ ”¹⁰¹ Nevertheless, Breen’s wish for Germans to see Porgy and Bess as an American opera went unheeded, to which numerous articles and reviews can attest. Germans found the perceived Blackness in the performers, in the story, in the music itself, and in this staging alluring. In its opening description of the opera, Der Kurier explained to its readers, “Porgy and Bess is an excerpt from the life of a Negro fisher and Negro harbor worker,” as if the opera had presented facts instead of a fictional tale.¹⁰²

Worse, music criticism conflated the two aspects of the tour that the authorities wished to divorce—the relationship between the African American performers and the characters they played. Many attendees believed that the singers were able to perform their roles so well because they were supposedly portraying parts of themselves and their history. Their remarks confirm Mari Yoshihara’s argument that when singers of color take on roles in the operatic repertoire that supposedly look like them, audiences frequently do not divorce the identity of the singer from the role she has been cast to perform.¹⁰³ Similarly, in the German case, listeners conflated Black singers with their operatic repertoire.

Most German-speaking critics repeatedly remarked that it seemed so easy for the singers to slip into their roles. One critic noted, “A particular characteristic [of this opera] is the fact that everybody plays himself, but a fascinating surprise is the truthfulness with which the various figures are shown. Never before has one encountered such a style in Berlin.”¹⁰⁴ Der Kurier also praised the opera’s cast members in the same way, probably much to the horror of Langston Hughes: “The actors do not appear to be acting but just playing their own lives.”¹⁰⁵ The critic from the Süddeutsche Zeitung praised the musicians in a similar manner, while also highlighting their Blackness, writing that “the dark-skinned guests performed as if it weren’t a musical play with prescribed roles, but a piece of their being.”¹⁰⁶ Another reviewer in Vienna’s Die Presse made similar comments, mentioning that performances of Porgy and Bess by all-white casts prior to this one (in Copenhagen and Zurich) had failed because “the piece is so rooted in an American foundation, and in the milieu of the Negro, that it can only be effectively performed with Negro power.”¹⁰⁷ In their estimation, only Black people could tell this authentically Black tale, for the two were one and the same.¹⁰⁸

By describing the opera and its effects as a natural and effective form of operatic storytelling in which the actors simply played themselves, German critics reinforced pre-1945 stereotypes of African Americans. Instead of dispelling myths about Blackness, West Germans perpetuated them. Numerous reviews echoed the same primitivist sentiments toward African Americans that had thrived during the jazz era of the Weimar Republic and even during the Kaiserreich: African Americans were “hot-blooded” musicians whose music comprised “wild shrieks” that correlated to their fiery and passionate natures. One criticism from Der Kurier captures these underlying beliefs very well: “the voices are admirable. It is simply wonderful how the voices fall from a screaming high pitch into a rich normal voice again. Every tone and every movement is full of discipline.”¹⁰⁹

At the end of the tour Harvey Kellerman, an American liaison for the Berlin Cultural Festival, declared Porgy and Bess a “triumph” in Berlin. “Well-meaning friends advised against it,” Kellerman stated. “So did prominent members of the American Black community, who feared that German or even any European audiences were not ready to appreciate the message.”¹¹⁰ But, Kellerman concluded, Porgy had surpassed everyone’s expectations and transcended the international and political fray. In a letter to Breen, one American general personally thanked him for serving his country through art:

President Eisenhower called the opera one of his Cold War “secret weapons,” claiming it fulfilled his directive to go “forth and demonstrate that Americans too can lay claim to high cultural and artistic accomplishment.”¹¹² The musicians in the production also received praise for their musical intellect and sophistication, and the American press credited them with dismantling lingering European stereotypes of the oppressed Negro. Following the opera’s run in Europe, the US State Department later sent productions of Porgy and Bess to Africa, Asia, and South America.

Although the American government may have convinced Germans that Porgy and Bess deserved praise and accolades as a work of high art, the opera’s subject matter and how the German public chose to discuss it allowed Germans to perpetuate myths of “the Negro.” In 1956, for example, a journalist with the Journal and Guide argued, “Foreign audiences are seldom aware that Porgy does not deal with the present, they do not know that the music is not genuine Negro art… . While I was in Europe last summer, I had many heated discussions on the subject, but could not explain away the ‘authenticity’ of life as depicted in Porgy.”¹¹³

Yet Afro-Americanophilia continued to thrive in West German musical circles.¹¹⁴ While German audiences often expressed indifference to American modernist music, African American art songs continued to be wildly popular.¹¹⁵ Black musicians, regardless of background, were still sought to perform. At the request of the German government, for example, the highly-regarded African American pianist Sylvia Lee (who worked at the Bavarian State Opera) taught African American spirituals to German choruses for seven years.¹¹⁶ Musical works such as Porgy and Bess and Still’s Afro-American Symphony are only a few examples of West German demand for African American music.

In fact, German demand for African American art music and its practitioners became a frequent reference point in ongoing debates about the casting of African American performers thereafter. Following a contentious debate over the African American mezzo-soprano Vera Little’s debut as Carmen at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 1958, a writer for the General-Anzeiger Wuppertal commented directly on what the critic believed was a strong preference for African American singers. “The Berliners,” the critic begins, “have a bias toward Negro voices. The Porgy and Bess ensemble celebrated triumph; Dorothy Dandridge as Carmen Jones is still unforgettable. All the more reason to be curious about Vera Little, who was announced as the Black Carmen from the USA.”¹¹⁷ The music critic Gerhard Wandel also held up Berliners’ preference for African American musicians. “Particularly within the last few years,” he writes, “Berliners have taken a shine to exotic guests. Just recall Porgy and Bess, [the dancer and choreographer] Katherine Dunham, and more recently, the dance group, ‘Brasiliana.’ ”¹¹⁸

While Cold War officials applauded themselves on their successful launching of Black performances in Europe, for Black classical musicians their time abroad took its toll on them. Confessing privately to her manager Sol Hurok about the stresses of being a cultural ambassador, Anderson shared, “I was told beforehand that this tour would be strenuous, but I do not believe that anyone realized how strenuous. For, the world situation being what it is, there were things required of me as a Negro, as a representative of my people, that would not be required of someone else.”¹¹⁹ Placed in the unique situation of representing American high culture and its aspirations of entering a universal art music canon while also tasked with the greater burden of overturning well-founded Soviet criticisms of American white supremacy, Black classical musicians had the most to gain and to lose in these moments of cultural exchange. No one else could fulfill this dual function better than them. Because of their tour abroad, Price and Warfield became international superstars in high demand for years. Yet the musical performers and cultural diplomats were ultimately incapable of correcting gross misidentifications of African American life in German public discourse, even while displaying their classical training and excellent vocal technique.

The Return of Musical Blackness

American investment in German musical life after WWII was substantial and would be sustained for decades, yet the American relationship to German audiences was far more complex than government funders might have understood. German audiences never read American bodies as simply or uniquely American, a fact that the American military either sought to control in their favor or worked to deny. The politics of Black bodies in German musical spaces was no less complex, even if American organizers might have hoped otherwise. Rather, Black classical musicians frequently functioned as signs for older racial and musical logics that predated 1945.¹²⁰ In the case of German music and its legacies, the intellectual and cultural traditions that had undergirded public concertizing and listening for decades remained firmly in place, unable to be dislodged.

At the behest of the American forces, a new, postwar West German musical life quickly embraced Black performers on its stages in an unprecedented manner. Yet a closer look reminds us how drastically and quickly a new context can produce new cultural meanings while nonetheless producing or reproducing the logic of race. The question of what musical Blackness could or should look and sound like after 1945 did not dissipate after the establishment of two German states in 1949, nor after the Allied forces ended their occupation of West Germany in 1955.

Indeed, the next chapter takes up where Allied forces left off, by exploring how West German musical institutions and their listening publics—now free from Allied interference—produced, managed, and understood racial and gendered musical performances in the 1950s and 1960s. West German opera houses were especially eager to initiate public conversations on the changing meanings of music, national identity, and coming to terms with Germany’s past, and they frequently employed Black opera singers to do so. West German questioning of the relationship of Black classical musicians to German musical culture did not lessen once the American authorities withdrew a significant portion of their troops. Rather, these questions took on a new sense of urgency when a new, younger generation of Germans began to ask them instead.