Chapter 6

“A Negro Who Sings German Lieder Jeopardizes German Culture”

Black Musicians under the Shadow of Nazism

In the summer of 1935, Salzburg was a battleground. Over three hundred people had gathered inside the ballroom of the Hotel de l’Europe one heady August afternoon in defiance of the Salzburg Festival’s administration. Rumor had spread of a dynamic young Black singer with a gift for singing Bach, Handel, and Schubert who had been denied the right to perform at the festival. Backed by a small but supportive set of patrons, this Black woman by the name of Marian Anderson had shown up to the alpine city anyway. The audience at her first concert did not even fill the main concert hall of the Mozarteum building, but enough of them were so impressed by what they heard that they told others of the evening’s success. Determined to see the singer’s successes come to fruition, a wealthy white American woman named Gertrude Moulton set about organizing an afternoon teatime for hundreds of listeners with the fortitude of a military general.

“Seldom have I seen an audience like the one that came to hear Miss Anderson,” Anderson’s accompanist Kosti Vehanen later shared in his memoir.¹ The Archbishop of Salzburg sat in the front row in priestly dress, announcing his support for her and his rebuke of the Festival’s wrongdoings in the most visual manner possible. If the archbishop was concerned that Anderson would be left wanting of an appreciative audience, he was mistaken: before the end of the afternoon, Anderson had earned so many accolades from prominent musicians that she became an international superstar virtually overnight.

Although many Americans today know Anderson as the woman who sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 in defiance of the Daughters of the American Revolution, her performative politics began earlier than that, in Nazi Germany and fascist Austria. By the end of her stay in 1937, Anderson, like other Black musicians, had become a lightning rod in the world of classical music. Those who opposed her decried the presence of Black musicians in German musical life. Her supporters presented her as a champion of musical brotherhood and unity in the face of oppression. Against the backdrop of two right-wing, nationalist, racist, and fascist states, listeners became embroiled in a war about Black musicians and whether or not they belonged in Austro-German musical life.

Throughout the 1930s, this chapter argues, two competing notions of German music were at war with one another. One interpretation, in effect since at least the early 1920s, praised Black classical musicians as evidence of art music’s transformative powers. As I demonstrated in the last chapter, critics frequently lauded Black musicians for supposedly overcoming their race to present near-faultless interpretations of the German music. Through the powers invested in German music, Black classical musicians were able to shed their racial identities to become proper musicians, which listeners implicitly raced as white.

Figure 21. Marian Anderson and her accompanist Kosti Vehanen at the Mozarteum building in Salzburg in August 1935. Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania, Ms Coll 200, UPenn Ms. Coll. 198: vol. 3, p. 9, item 2.

The other interpretation, however, was less welcoming, more hostile, and growing in popularity: German music needed defending against outsiders. Speaking before parliament in Berlin in 1923, Hermann Schuster of the far-right German People’s Party (DVP) offered up the paradox that has been at the heart of German musical discourse for decades:

What drew outsiders to German music was the very reason it needed protection from them: its universal greatness.

By 1932, protecting Austro-German music required violence. In fact, the 1930s can be distinguished from the 1920s (and before) by the increasingly extreme position those on the far right took against Black classical musicians. For many, what had once been considered “universal” now only belonged to some. It had been bad enough for Black jazz musicians to perform, they believed, but now the public was willing to consume their own music performed by members of a primitive race. Black musicians performing classical music specifically became a source of racial shame that demanded a violent response. The voices of mobs in protest, the sounds of booing and hissing, and the cries of “niggering!” (Vernegerung) became over time the most piercing sounds in concert halls and opera houses. Their cacophony drowned out the increasingly desperate calls of fellow audience members for unity in diversity.

Far-right condemnations of Black classical musicians reveal a growing challenge to the wide-ranging attitudes and experiences that the 1920s had ushered in. If before numerous possibilities and opportunities were open for social or cultural pursuit, by the 1930s a diversity of modernities—the plurality of experiences, affectations, sentimentalities, and perspectives—could no longer be tolerated by leaders of the far right. German solutions to the supposed crises of the interwar era called for unity, clarity, and decisive action—even across different ideological positions.³ Unsurprisingly, the majority of solutions offered in response to the “problems” posed by diversity were in actuality what the historian Moritz Föllmer calls “homogenizing visions of change.”⁴ Nationalists in particular offered to purge society of difference and the messy complications that came with it “for the benefit of those deemed ‘Germans’ and at the expense of those deemed outsiders.”⁵

Attaining a single, unified modernity—a “better” modernity, in the words of the historian Jochen Hung—required cleansing German culture of diversity of any kind, including in classical music.⁶ It became increasingly difficult for orchestras to justify performing the music of Jewish composers such as Mendelssohn and Schoenberg; Jewish musicians went to rehearsals only to discover they had been barred from performing. The only way to purify the body again was to purge it of its supposedly alien elements. By the late 1930s, a majority of Black musicians had fled Central Europe. Those who stayed behind—Black Germans and African colonial migrants—faced persecution, violence, and even death.

Ironically, however, the demand for Black musicians never died, even if the far right had hoped it would. Their ongoing popularity is a reminder that while the years 1933 and 1934 may have represented a political shift, the 1920s still had lingering cultural and aesthetic effects.⁷ The Nazis, Pamela Potter argues, neither desired to eradicate entire cultural trends wholesale, nor were they capable of it. “The exclusion of certain people (Jews, Communists, and others) may have been carried out with shocking thoroughness,” she writes, “but it did not necessarily lead to the eradication of their artistic influences.”⁸ Even during WWII, German radio programs broadcast the music of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman and simply concealed their names.⁹ Throughout Nazi Germany, Susann Lewerenz argues, the state paradoxically employed Black musicians and entertainers from the former colonies and from within Germany to further Nazi colonial propaganda and to appeal to ongoing demands for “exotic” entertainment.¹⁰

Anderson’s own experience fending off offers from German agencies after 1933 bears this out. One agency in particular seemed keen to track her down: knowing she would be performing in nearby Poland, the agency asked if she couldn’t stop by Berlin for a day. Although, she writes, “I was not eager to appear in the Germany of those days,” her manager posed an outrageous sum of money to the agency and “offered Berlin a single date.” If they wanted Anderson, in other words, they were going to have to take the date or leave it. The Berlin agency eagerly accepted it, including the high fee to have her perform. “There was only one other question—was Marian Anderson an Aryan? My manager replied that Miss Anderson was not 100 percent Aryan. That ended the correspondence.”¹¹

In the case of Anderson, the agent’s comments tell us that the desire for international superstars still existed in Nazi Germany, even if the agent in question claimed to be unaware of Anderson’s race. The desire to employ international artists (and artists of color), was still strong enough to compel the manager to inquire into the status of Anderson’s tour in Central Europe, even knowing that there might be a negative outcome to the inquiry. But everyone involved eventually came up against a legal barrier to her performance that they could not work around. Unlike recordings by foreign artists, which still circulated in spite of Joseph Goebbels’s ban on them, the visuality of Anderson on a German stage could not be managed.

Like other Black musicians, Anderson hoped that if Nazi Germany couldn’t hire her to perform, Austria would. Indeed, the majority of Black performances of classical music in the 1930s took place in Austria, not in Nazi Germany. The pianist Josephine Harreld spent the summer of 1935 in Salzburg, and the contralto Marguerite Wood attended the same institute a year later. Wood lived in Salzburg, Vienna, and Milan until WWII forced her to return to the United States.¹² In Vienna, the pianist Roy Tibbs visited the famous Beethoven memorial with other Black classical musicians in the city. Even the advent of the Nazi state did not prevent some African Americans from popping over into Germany to attend the Bayreuth Festival or catch an opera in Munich. But by the late 1930s, performing while Black in German-speaking Europe became an increasingly dangerous experience.

In this chapter, I examine the fight for the soul of Austro-German music in Central Europe, using the performances of Black classical musicians and their experiences in Central Europe to access German and Austrian attitudes toward race, gender, and nationality in the tumultuous decade of the 1930s. There were both violent protestors against and ardent defenders of Black classical musicians in the 1930s, all the way up until the annexation of Austria in 1938. At the heart of each reaction—for or against Black musicians—was the unshakeable belief in the supremacy of the Austro-German musical canon. Even Austrian conservatives who were against annexation nonetheless expressed their position as one of “German—Austro-German—cultural superiority,” the historian Michael Steinberg argues.¹³ In Germany and Austria, audiences for and against Black musicians turned to the universality of German music to explain why someone should or should not be permitted to perform the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. But regardless of their position, the universalizing promises of German music died when Black classical musicians could no longer be protected from white violence.

From Protest to Riot: Aubrey Pankey’s Liederabend in Salzburg, May 1932

Whenever Black musicians performed German music on German-speaking soil they were playing with fire. Even when Roland Hayes faced adversity for performing in Berlin in 1924, one strain of criticism fixated on the outrageous audacity he had to sing German lieder in particular. “While he may understand modern music,” the critic writes, “it would be impossible for him to interpret the cultured works of German poets, since he speaks out of the soul of his aboriginal people. We decline to have this section of works by Mozart, Bach, Handel, and Schubert presented by this Negro.”¹⁴ The root cause of German anger, according to this perspective, concerned the performance of German music itself. The notion that Black performances of German music were themselves an affront in their own right became the bedrock of anti-Black critiques in the 1930s.

Hayes’s now-legendary debut in Berlin in 1924 began with boos and hisses and ended with applause and even adoration. But Aubrey Pankey’s 1932 premiere in Salzburg ended with a riot. There to perform the music of Schubert, Richard Strauss, and other German composers, the African American baritone instead found himself fleeing under police protection from Nazi rioters who demanded the Mozarteum cast out the performer. Pankey would later describe that evening as one of the most terrifying ordeals he had ever experienced as a concert artist.¹⁵ Pankey’s Salzburg Liederabend became a moment when anti-Black thinking led to violent action, marking the first time that Black classical musicians faced a violent mob that could not be assuaged by tone of voice or the quality of one’s musicianship. Organized protests against Pankey demonstrate that there was no longer any circumstance acceptable under which a Black singer could prove himself worthy of performing German music.

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Pankey studied music at the Hampton Institute in Virginia with the noted composer, pianist, and choral conductor Nathaniel Dett.¹⁶ He continued his training at Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio and at Boston University before leaving in 1931 to study in Europe. Between 1931 and 1940, he lived in Germany, Austria (where he studied with Theodor Lierhammer in Vienna), and France. His first recital took place on November 17, 1931, in Vienna: a promotional advertisement listed him as a “Negerbariton” hosting a Liederabend in the small music hall.¹⁷

Pankey’s Liederabend in Salzburg the following May did not go well. Discovering where he was to perform, Nazis in Salzburg placed flyers throughout the city on the day of his premiere, “asking the people not to enable a Negro to take the daily bread of German artists.”¹⁸ In this way, the reaction to Pankey’s performance echoed that of Hayes in Berlin in that both performances symbolized foreign artistry in German culture and non-Aryan artists taking money from the deserving German workforce of musicians. Much like antisemitic Viennese posters against the Black popular entertainer Josephine Baker and the opera Jonny spielt auf that linked jazz to Jewish degeneracy, the flyer also decried both Jews and the “Negro spirit” for inculcating German culture with their racial poison.¹⁹ The preservation of German culture was at stake. It was time, the Nazis announced, to defend the city against this racial threat.

In anticipation of the protestors, the police closed down the Mozarteum building’s ticket booth well before the concert to prevent lines from forming. They also stood on the steps and in the halls of the house and ensured that it was only possible to enter the building with an admission ticket. Plain-clothes detectives lurked in the hallways, looking for suspicious activity. Pankey was able to sing without protestors entering the building. But they waited outside for him, shouting and singing nationalist songs. They tried repeatedly to storm the building but were blocked by the police.²⁰

Two detailed records exist documenting Pankey’s performance, both in the right-leaning Salzburger Volksblatt. The first is a concert review written by an unnamed critic. The second is an opinion piece that appeared the following day. Both are damning in their analysis of Pankey’s performance, and both utilize nearly all of the discursive tropes available to Austrian and German audiences in the 1930s to make Pankey an inferior musician because of his race. The writer of the first essay published in the Salzburger Volksblatt begins:

What made the “Negro” out of place was his reliance entirely on his monotonous physicality to entertain his audience. In contrast, “The white [man], especially the German, is moved more by his emotions; his music is more melodious and spiritually deeper.” Black people, on the other hand, “love uniformity, in which only forced rhythms bring an expression of joy.”²² Nothing about this critic’s opening statements are original; rather, his criticisms rely on the same worn-out descriptions that portray Black musicality as primitive, simplistic, and almost ritualistic.

The critic had little to say about Pankey’s performance of classical music. He noted that Pankey had “supposedly come by his education in Vienna,” a phrase that cast doubt on Pankey’s training. But Pankey’s voice, due to his “negroid mouth formation,” was unable to produce sounds pleasing to European ears. “For our taste,” the author writes, “the voice lacks in color especially in piano, the ability to modulate, and shading … When this voice dampens, it sinks into a tender but monotonous gray.” Reproducing the stereotype of Black performers as melancholic but not intellectual, the critic concludes, “[Pankey’s] Schubert was the most successful where the music was tragic.”²³

Although he doubted that Black performers ultimately possessed the sophistication and inherent qualities found in German music to conquer German lieder—“There is hardly any need to fear that the Black race will also annex the German lied after conquering the dance hall”—he nonetheless applauded those who had protested against Pankey’s Liederabend that evening and encouraged others in the future to “act out against this pollution through Nigger music.” Their reactionary efforts, he promised, would ensure “the regeneration of German culture.”²⁴ In order for Germany to undergo a full cultural renewal, racial transgressions like those that Pankey had committed must be stopped.

The anonymous opinion piece that appeared the day after the aforementioned review was even more aggressive. The writer of it warns that the demonstration against Pankey’s recital that Monday was simply a taste of what was yet to come. Only a fraction of the followers of the Nazi party and other right-leaning parties that had participated in the demonstration were in attendance, he argued, and many more were equally committed to safeguarding Salzburg’s “cultural goods” and “national dignity” in the wake of foreign invasion.²⁵ He commended the rioters for disrupting what was an utterly disgraceful act: a Black musician performing German music.

The opinion piece offers a rigorous rejection of German musical universalism. On the one hand, the author applauds the German-speaking lands for music so beautiful that it appealed to a broad audience: “When the German lied has so much appeal that everyone around the world sings it, and when thus also baptized Negroes sing it (such as ‘Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht’), then the German spirit should rejoice in this rather than negate it.”²⁶ He also praises the city of Salzburg itself as an example of German music’s intrinsic greatness: it hosted the greatest festival in the world that attracted visitors dedicated to pursuing art.

But, the writer argues, it is precisely because of German music’s greatness that Black people should not be allowed to perform it. Black performances of German music represented a form of racial miscegenation. Salzburg, the greatest musical city of the world, “should not allow a Negro to sing, let alone [to sing] German lieder, and Schubert lieder at that.” The critic stated that he understood and sympathized with African Americans’ history of suffering, and that their progress in American society was to be commended. Referencing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he writes, “There was a time when every German soul had human compassion for the poor, tormented slaves who were abused and exploited by whites.” But what Pankey and other Black musicians wished to do was akin to racial mixing. Their eagerness to devour German music endangered whiteness itself. Blackness and Germanness were simply inhospitable to one another, and attempts to bring them together through musical performance were themselves racial transgressions. The conclusion of the author’s piece is quite clear: “A Negro who sings German lieder jeopardizes German culture.” The path that Germans must choose, however unpleasant it might appear, demanded that they use political and even violent methods to protect German art and culture.²⁷

Looking back on his ordeal in Salzburg, Pankey told the Chicago Daily Tribune, “I thought I was in some of the southern sections of the United States when I heard the mob. I never expected this in Europe.”²⁸ The irony of finding Jim Crow practices of public behavior in Central Europe did not escape other Black musicians caught in the growing crossfire of a cultural battle for the German soul.²⁹

Unfortunately for Pankey and others, threats of violence against Black musicians never dissipated in the 1930s. Black performances of German music became, to far-right ears, a sonic form of racial miscegenation, which could only be understood as a threat to the German nation and a danger to the future of the white race. More white Germans called for the removal of Black lives, cultures, and experiences from German spaces.

Those Who Fled and Those Who Stayed: The Black Exodus from Central Europe

Pankey’s harrowing ordeal was not enough to deter other African American musicians from performing in Central Europe in the 1930s. Nor was it enough to change the minds of some African Americans who continued to insist that life in Central Europe was more glamorous, less harmful, and more racially harmonious than that in the United States. Both before and after the establishment of the Nazi racial state in 1933, some African Americans continually upheld their belief in a Germany without racial prejudice. In so doing, Robbie Aitken writes, they “consciously presented idealized and romanticized visions of a Germany in which there was a lack of color prejudice.”³⁰ Their comparative frameworks reflected their own desires to indict the United States’ long history of white supremacy, which outweighed their willingness to acknowledge the realities of anti-Blackness on the ground in Central Europe.

Frank Smith—an African American doctor like Wilberforce Williams and Ossian Sweet, both of whom lived in Vienna in the 1920s—found the Viennese to be unfailingly polite and steeped in a culture of decorum and aristocracy, and he similarly placed Central Europe in comparison to the United States in his writings. “Since leaving the States,” Smith shared, “I have never heard a rough or profane word used by a policeman.”³¹ Many interpreted the absence of white American anti-Black violence abroad to mean that Central Europeans were more affirming and racially progressive than white Americans.

Writing from Vienna in 1929, the journalist J. A. Rogers scoffed at the notion that African Americans faced discrimination in Europe. He writes:

Even as fascism in both Germany and Austria became an increasingly present reality, African Americans continued to uphold these beliefs. In 1936, the Wagnerian W.E.B. Du Bois made a pilgrimage to the town of Bayreuth in Nazi Germany—shortly after the Olympic games in which the African American sprinter Jesse Owens had famously competed—because he had “an interest in the development of the human soul and for the spirit of beauty, which this shrine commemorates and makes eternal.”³³ Like a pilgrim in the Holy Land, Du Bois reported to the Pittsburgh Courier that he had taken his seat in the Bayreuth opera house, waiting to partake in a once-in-a-lifetime ritual: listening to Wagner’s operas in Bayreuth. The event would last from approximately 5:00 until 10:30 p.m., and “nothing,” he assured readers in his newspaper column, “not even meals, interrupts this sacrament.”³⁴

But something did disrupt his religious rite as he prepared to transcend into a realm of unknown human expression and thought. Sitting in the seat in front of him, also waiting for the thick, velvet curtain to rise, was a wealthy white American. Oblivious to Du Bois’s presence, he boasted about his wealth and social status to his friend, bragging about booking a table at a restaurant right next to the Wagner family. Such behavior, Du Bois thought, was appalling and arrogant, embodying the worst aspects of class and race on both sides of the Atlantic. Even more than that, Du Bois fumed, it went against “what Richard Wagner lived to teach.”³⁵ This white American was incapable of grasping Wagner’s message to the world: that we should reject superficiality in all forms and instead strive to depict and understand the earnest struggles of all mankind.

It is striking that Du Bois’s complaint focused not on Nazism or on German anti-Black racism but on a white American man. Du Bois, like other African American writers, frequently ignored or dismissed anti-Black racism in Germany or the experiences of other Black diasporic populations abroad in order to highlight the benefits African Americans received in traveling through Central Europe. “Subsumed under the hegemonizing and generalizing designation ‘Negroes in Germany,’ ” Maria Diedrich writes, “Black Germans in these African American narratives of the German ’30s and ’40s are relegated to a diasporic periphery at best.” Rather, mentions of anti-Black racism, Diedrich argues, were “balanced, if not silenced, by individual public voices like those of Locke, Du Bois, and [the African American journalist John] Welch, who continued to compare their personal experiences as African Americans in Germany to their everyday lives in the United States—and found life in the United States deficient, relentlessly dangerous, and humiliating.”³⁶

Josephine Harreld, studying piano performance and conducting at the Mozarteum University Salzburg in the summer of 1935, also shared little about her experience interacting with white Austrians and Germans. The only experience of racism she shared came from white Americans. International students at the Mozarteum were Harreld’s closest friends because white Americans refused to talk to her. She confided to her parents, “The root of the trouble is three girls … They have become very thick and are the sophisticates of the group. They feel that I have overstepped my bounds by entering into conversations at the table and by acting like a reasonable human being.”³⁷ Although Harreld normally sat at another table at lunch, one day her seat was occupied by a guest and she was forced to sit at their table. The three white American girls removed themselves from it. “Jane [a young white woman from Smith] says that her family has Negro servants. So for that reason she cannot overcome her prejudices.”³⁸ Harreld’s retort was mired in the class and respectability politics that her family espoused. “So have I!” Harreld told a student who had witnessed the racist act of discrimination, “And furthermore, I have had white servants as well.”³⁹

Not once in Harreld’s letters home to her parents that summer in Salzburg does she mention Nazism or fascism in Germany or in Austria. In fact, Harreld seemed to have no qualms about popping over to Munich, a few hours’ train ride away from Salzburg, to visit the National Theatre Munich in 1935.

The downplaying or dismissal of anti-Black racism by African Americans in Central Europe was rampant. Worse, a kind of victim blaming and colorism seeped through the pages of the few reports on the diversity of Black experiences in Central Europe, when they appeared at all. Rogers insisted that any signs of anti-Black prejudice in Germany that existed had been caused by the presence of Black Africans from either France’s present or Germany’s former colonies. Rogers had listened to “the Negroes in Berlin” complain about experiencing white violence or hatred and ultimately rejected it. “[Their complaint] may be true, but I find it hard to believe it, because all with whom I came in contact were so spontaneously friendly.”⁴⁰ Worse, Rogers blamed Black Africans for their maltreatment. “I also saw Negroes, very dark ones, in places and generally doing things they would not be permitted to do in America.”⁴¹ Rogers’s comment reflects his own colorism and biases against African migrants.

Carter G. Woodson’s remarks on Black jazz musicians in Nazi Germany were even more vicious and downright violent. The historian and founder and editor of the Journal of Negro History applauded Hitler for casting jazz out of Nazi Germany. “There was nothing racial in this effort,” Woodson insisted. “Self-respecting Negroes are welcome in Germany.” Rather, Woodson writes, “Hitler set a noble example in trying to preserve the good in civilization. Would to God that he had the power not to drive them for [sic] one country into another but to round up all jazz promoters and performers of both races in Europe and America and execute them as criminals. Negroes must join in such a crusade.”⁴²

Woodson’s caustic comments completely ignored the increasingly difficult situations in which Black musicians found themselves. Following Hitler’s placement as dictator, some African American entertainers struggled to gain employment from familiar haunts or acceptance in musical circles in Germany particularly. Some, like Lillian Evanti, hosted Liederabende in Germany shortly after Hitler had assumed power. But others often paid a terrible price for staying and performing in cities such as Salzburg or Berlin. Jules Bledsoe, a Viennese favorite, had difficulty finding work in post-1933 Germany: his concert manager had attempted to arrange a concert in Berlin for him after the ban against foreign artists was in place but to no effect. Paul Robeson spent about twenty-four hours in Berlin on December 21, 1934, which was ample time to convince Robeson and his family to leave as quickly as possible. Essie Robeson, Robeson’s wife, later recalled their arrival at the Berlin Friedrichstrasse train station and how Robeson’s dark skin drew attention. A white woman, outraged and affronted to see a Black man in Berlin, marched over to uniformed policemen on the platform to complain. Essie wrote in her diary that they felt as if a lynch mob were about to attack him. It was, Essie wrote, “a terrible feeling of wolves waiting to spring” the following day as they boarded the train to Moscow. “For a long time after the train moved out of Berlin, Paul sat hunched in the corner of the compartment staring out into the darkness.”⁴³ Like Hayes and Pankey, Essie Robeson drew a comparison between the Jim Crow South and Nazi Germany, finding them to be less dissimilar than she had expected.

By the late 1930s, all African Americans were advised to leave the European continent as quickly as possible. William R. Tatten, an orchestral leader who had been a member of Will Marion Cook’s orchestra, publicly urged African Americans to get out of Europe in 1938. Interviewed by the African American paper New York Amsterdam News, Tatten said, “I advise Negroes to stay out of Europe altogether unless it is absolutely necessary to go over there.”⁴⁴ Although Tatten, who had returned to the United States from Vienna in October 1936, claimed that he offered his advice not because he was concerned about the treatment of Black people in Europe, but because of oncoming war, his message does not sound entirely truthful, especially when one considers his own trip back to the United States. Tatten had originally traveled to Germany to perform with Cook’s Southern Syncopated Orchestra, then onward to Switzerland and Czechoslovakia, where he led several all-white jazz-influenced orchestras. Tatten settled in Berlin in 1930, where he organized his own ensemble to perform at the Haus Vaterland, the Hotel Esplanade, and the Princess Restaurant in Berlin; he later recalled being in Germany when Paul von Hindenburg was elected president. Tatten was still in Berlin when the Nazis came to power, and he was forced to flee to Budapest. There he formed a Hungarian orchestra that went on tour with him to Vienna, and from Vienna he returned to the United States.⁴⁵

There remains no discernible pattern of how and why Black musicians left or sometimes fled Europe to return to the United States. In some ways, their departures remain as invisible or unrecognizable as their entrances into Germany and Austria. Some musicians’ exits were relatively uneventful. Other musicians, such as the Fisk piano professor William Allen, fled under duress: Allen had been in Poland to study with Egon Petri (Hazel Harrison’s former teacher) during the summer of 1939, and fifteen days before the invasion of Poland, he received notice from the Dutch Embassy that he should pack his bags and return to the United States immediately.⁴⁶

The opera singer Caterina Jarboro reported her terrifying 1939 journey back to the United States from Europe in true dramatic fashion. When Germany invaded Poland in September, Jarboro, who had been performing in opera houses in Europe since 1934, had been engaged to perform in Poland near the Soviet border. She apparently had to leave all of her luggage behind, fleeing to France before returning to the States. “Because of the war situation,” a reporter for the New York Amsterdam News writes, “Mme. Jarboro had to cancel engagements previously scheduled directly in the war zone and along the frontier.” “ ‘No more,’ explained the diva, ‘shall I be able to sing in Germany, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Poland, Austria—all countries to which I have returned year after year for engagements.”⁴⁷ Jarboro’s remarks that she could no longer find work in Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and other countries explains why so many African American musicians continued to reside in German-speaking Europe until the late 1930s. In the United States, they had few opportunities to perform with major opera houses or symphony orchestras. As long as European opera houses and orchestras—no matter how big or small—were willing to take them, African American classical musicians could earn money in their profession.

Jules Bledsoe also returned to the United States from Germany on a German cruise liner in 1938, arriving in April on the SS Bremen of the North German Lloyd line. He was somewhat apprehensive about booking a ship out of Bremen, but he explained that it was the only boat that would get him to the United States in time for his other engagements. Bledsoe told a New York Amsterdam News reporter in 1938:

The African American journalist Roi Ottley, however, was less forgiving of German mistreatment of African Americans. He counters Bledsoe’s more positive impressions of life in Nazi Germany. According to Ottley, a young Black German teacher named Mary Ann was accepted to study at Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelm University (today’s Humboldt University) and live in the student residence halls. She left the United States, Ottley writes, with warnings ringing in her ears:

Mary Ann went anyway, stubbornly believing that things weren’t as they seemed, but within a few months of living in Germany she asked her parents to bring her back to the United States. She spent her last few days in Berlin living in fear.⁵⁰

Although it is unclear how many African American musicians and entertainers fled German-speaking Europe right before war broke out in 1939, what remains remarkable is how many musicians continued to eke out a living in Central Europe prior to the outbreak of war. They lived and performed in these hostile spaces long after the Nazi racial state had enforced rules to encourage their departure and long after German nationalists in Austria expressed their desire to cast them out. Only war could convince some African American musicians to leave, and by then it was often too late for them to escape. For Black Germans and African colonial migrants, the situation was even worse since they had little choice but to stay.⁵¹ Like other racial minorities in Europe, many were captured and sent to concentration camps in Central and Eastern Europe.⁵²

The Last Woman Standing: Marian Anderson in Austria, 1935–37

By November 1937, a few months before the Third Reich annexed Austria, Anderson had become a polarizing figure. She was most likely the last remaining prominent Black musician in the city, and her Liederabend that month symbolized either the universalist ideals of classical music at a time when popular support to repress these ideals was at its apex or the downfall of German music at the height of a cultural crisis, depending on the listener. What Viennese reception of Anderson teaches us is how much the city had become divided over its musical, national, and racial future in the months leading up to the annexation. As we will see, critics’ praise of Anderson carried overtones of desperation and fear: they held her up as a beacon of light in a time of darkness and insisted that she represented the beauties of universalism in an era of extreme nationalism and racism.

Anderson’s concerts were always politicized, including her most famous 1935 Salzburg Festival concert. In fact, Anderson’s first trouble with right-leaning gatekeepers of German music began there. Anderson had settled permanently in Vienna in the fall of 1934, having spent the summer in Germany working with Sara Cahier exclusively on the music of Mahler. Little evidence exists about her stay in Nazi Germany that summer, but the little she has said echoes reports from other Black musicians: it must have been profoundly uncomfortable, even frightening. In Vienna, she set about trying to prove her merits and woo Viennese audiences with her singing. “To sing and be accepted here [in Vienna],” she later shared, “meant another milestone in the direction I had always hoped to go.”⁵³ At her first concert at the Wiener Konzerthaus in Vienna, she won over the crowd with her lieder interpretations, especially of Bach’s “Komm, süßer Tod.” She made such an impression on the audience that Dr. Waitz, Archbishop of Salzburg, approached her after the concert to ask if she could give a charity concert in the Salzburg Cathedral at the Salzburg Festival.

But then Salzburg, near the Austrian-German border, had become a contested site of Nazism by the early 1930s. Jewish intellectuals such as Stefan Zweig had stopped visiting, and a few years later Toscanini would resign from the festival in protest. The last time a Black musician had performed in the city—Pankey—he had been chased out of town. The invitation offered to Anderson to come to Salzburg and perform, and the consequent debates about that invitation, articulate the varying positions on Anderson that listeners took up in the 1930s. The questions of whether the universalizing message of German music applied to everyone and whether music could and should transcend racism and nationalism became more urgent throughout Anderson’s career in Austria. Anderson’s performance in Salzburg in 1935 was at that time the greatest musical test of these competing ideals.

The test failed. The administration soundly rejected Anderson’s petition to perform at the Salzburg Festival: “According to your wish I hereby answer your two letters of March 29 and April 24 as well as that of Dr. Hohenberg that there can be no question of Marian Anderson [singing in the festival] since earlier experiences firmly speak against it.”⁵⁴ Baron Heinrich Puthon, the president of the Salzburg Festival committee, professed ignorance of her request to perform and claimed that there was simply no room for Anderson in the festival because all of the performances had been scheduled months earlier.⁵⁵ No matter how many impresarios and prominent musicians protested on Anderson’s behalf, the Salzburg Festival would not budge.

Anderson’s concert manager Helmer Enwall wrote to the Viennese manager Wilhelm Stein in outrage over this incident, accusing the festival of flat-out racism. “When every summer singers of different nationalities appear in Salzburg, and when Marian Anderson is known throughout the world as one of the finest and most distinguished lieder singers and interpreters of Schubert, Mahler, Brahms, and others, all the more must we be given a reason why permission has not been granted,” he writes. “[I wonder] whether it is perhaps her dark complexion?”⁵⁶ The Salzburg Festival prided itself on being open to different nationalities but in reality was not welcoming to different races.

Anderson chose to sing in Salzburg anyway. Perhaps pressured by international elites, the Salzburg Festival eventually relented and let her perform at the Mozarteum building—albeit unattached from any of their own activities. Within minutes of her landing in the alpine city of Mozart, gossip swirled around Anderson. The Austrian and German media reported that the “Salzkammergut [region] was streaming with the thrilling sensation” of this “exotic nightingale” in a grey-pink dress.⁵⁷ Her friend and accompanist Vehanen reflected later that within a few days of being in Salzburg, “Enough prominent people were there for the news of Marian Anderson’s artistry to spread around; soon her name was on everybody’s lips. She had quietly gained the attention and the confidence of the influential musicians.”⁵⁸

On the day of her second recital, Anderson performed for a nearly sold-out house filled with some of the most prominent members of Austria and Germany’s musical life. In his memoir, Between the Thunder and the Sun, the American journalist Vincent Sheean provided an eyewitness account of hearing Anderson sing in Salzburg, and the list of attendees at Anderson’s recital he provides is a roll call of Europe’s classical music elites. Moulton had organized an afternoon concert for almost four hundred people at the Hotel de l’Europe, including the Archbishop of Salzburg, “Toscanini, [Lotte] Lehmann, [Bruno] Walter, and practically all the other musical powers of Salzburg.”⁵⁹ In many ways, their attendance at Anderson’s recital was a political act. By gathering to hear Anderson sing, they hosted their own demonstration against the Salzburg Festival and publicly indicated that they were willing to defy, annoy, or alienate those who saw Anderson’s presence as unsavory.

According to her private notes, Anderson sang a combination of baroque and Romantic pieces that afternoon. She began by singing the popular Henry Purcell aria, “When I Am Laid in Earth,” followed by Doménico Scarlatti’s “Se Florindo è fedele” and Handel’s “Ah! Spietato!” Her Schubert pieces were “Der Tod und das Mädchen,” “Die Forelle,” and “Die Allmacht.” She sang Brahms’s “Die Mainacht” and Mahler’s “Irrlicht” and “Rheinlegendchen” as well. Having just returned from Finland, where she worked with the composer Jean Sibelius, a mentor of hers, she sang two of his pieces, “Die Libelle” and “War es ein Traum.” She concluded with four African American spirituals: “Deep River,” “Crucifixion,” “Lord, I Can’t Stay Away,” and “Heav’n, Heav’n.”⁶⁰

Audiences found Anderson’s recital moving, thoughtful, emotional, and most pleasing to Austrian and German ears. She received numerous encores, and at the Archbishop’s insistence, Anderson had to repeat Schubert’s “Ave Maria” for the audience. At the end of one of Anderson’s spirituals, Sheean observed, “There was no applause at all—a silence instinctive, natural, and intense, so that you were afraid to breathe. What Anderson had done was something outside the limits of classical or Romantic music.”⁶¹

After the concert, Toscanini and Walter came backstage and thanked Anderson personally for her performance. Toscanini told Cahier, “What I heard today one is privileged to hear only once in a hundred years.” Vehanen clarified the significance of Toscanini’s statement further: “He did not say the voice he heard, but what he heard—not the voice alone but the whole art.”⁶² In other words, Anderson’s entire artistry and her entire mastery of German music had impressed Toscanini.

Anderson’s decision to perform under growing opposition and hostility became one of the defining features of her long career. Although she had not been able to perform as part of the Salzburg Festival, she nonetheless won her battle to create public spaces for listeners to hear her sing. Her pattern of showing up to perform in the face of considerable protest and administrative pressure to relent only strengthened over the next few years.

For example, in June 1936, a few short months before the Berlin Olympics in Nazi Germany, Anderson performed again to adoring crowds and in the face of much opposition—this time violent. Singing with the Vienna Philharmonic at the behest of Bruno Walter, Anderson performed Johannes Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody as part of an all-Brahms evening.⁶³ Walter’s insistence on collaborating with Anderson on Brahms was not only aesthetic; it reflected his own politics as a German Jew who had been forced out of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1933 with Hitler’s rise to power. Throughout his time with the Vienna Philharmonic, he made no attempts to hide his loathing of the National Socialist movement. In his memoir, he writes in visceral prose, “Hitler was made chancellor and the Nazis set the Reichstag building afire. The gates of hell had opened.”⁶⁴

Throughout the 1930s, Bruno Walter worked with several Black classical musicians either in private lessons or in public concerts. Prior to inviting Anderson to perform with the Vienna Philharmonic, for example, Walter had already performed with Hayes in New York City on March 26, 1925. Showing his “willingness to explore repertoire that was foreign to him,” Hayes writes, Walter conducted Hayes in a performance of excerpts from Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion and orchestrated arrangements of African American spirituals.⁶⁵ When Hayes returned to Vienna in 1926, Walter sought him out again to perform with the Vienna Philharmonic for October, but Hayes had already decided to return to the United States for a few concerts.⁶⁶ In 1935, prior to Anderson’s Salzburg debut, Walter had also started teaching conducting to Josephine Harreld.⁶⁷

For his collaborative work with Anderson and others, Walter received angry promises of violence from Austro-German nationalists. Throughout the 1930s, protestors threw stink bombs into the Vienna State Opera House and other musical venues to decry the “degenerate” and “debased” music that they believed had infiltrated these spaces. In Walter’s memoirs, he recalls Vienna’s descent into terror and anxiety as the Nazis began to assume more cultural influence and political power. It became all the more necessary to resist and defy those who professed through violence to be reclaiming German culture.⁶⁸ But the news that Walter had engaged Anderson to sing with the Vienna Philharmonic brought him a death threat so severe that Vienna’s police were called in to help.⁶⁹ When Anderson stepped onto the podium with Walter to sing Brahms, plainclothes officers watched from the shadows.

The concert fostered a daring and defiant spirit of community among her Viennese supporters. And nearly all of the reviews in the Viennese media—none of which appeared in right-wing presses—were unanimous in praising the quality of musicianship that had been on display that evening. “What would Brahms have said?” read several headlines the day after the concert, as if suggesting that Vienna was living in truly modern times to be hosting a Black woman in the Musikverein. Die Stunde, marveling at Anderson’s performance, asked “What would [the poet Goethe] have said to such a beautiful song sung from the mouth of a Black woman …?”⁷⁰

What Anderson’s singing symbolized to some in late 1930s Vienna was the power of musical universalism in spite of German nationalism and racism. Much to the horror of Austrian Nazis, for example, the Neues Wiener Journal concluded their review of Anderson’s June 1936 concert by stating, “But who dares formalize what is so much larger than this: understanding, the brotherhood of two races [performing] in character of the music?”⁷¹ Anderson’s debut with the Vienna Philharmonic represented the aspects of German music that nationalists wished to see buried: its universalism, its ability to bring musicians of different races together for the purpose of performance. Music could stand for brotherhood and equality in a Beethovenian sense in a city that was becoming increasingly hostile to such ideals.

By late 1937, though, just over a year after Anderson’s Vienna Philharmonic debut, it had become increasingly difficult to maintain and uphold these optimistic beliefs in the face of a growing and unified opposition to them. In November 1937, Anderson hosted another recital in Vienna, and the Viennese knew it would be her last. Growing concern from her family, friends, and supporters back in the United States coupled with mounting social unrest and political upheaval in Vienna led Anderson to leave the city. Her swan song in the city of Vienna—one last Liederabend—sold out the large Musikverein Hall days before her appearance. The Neues Wiener Journal reported, “We have not heard Marian Anderson, the incomparable Negro singer, in Vienna for over a year. Her reappearance proved the extent to which the Viennese concert audience had taken her singing to their hearts; the large Musikverein Hall was sold out to the last row.”⁷²

At her farewell concert, with her accompanist Vehanen at her side, Anderson sang music that the Viennese loved best: the lieder of Schubert, Wolf, Handel, and other German composers. She also offered them a trio of Sibelius lieder and several African American spirituals, which the audience demanded she sing repeatedly.⁷³ Critics nearly unanimously agreed that Anderson had never sounded better; she was at the pinnacle of her artistry. One dedicated follower at the Neues Wiener Journal noticed a stark transformation from her 1934 arrival in Vienna to her last recital in 1937: “During the time of her absence, she has become visibly and audibly more mature,” he writes. No more did listeners see a “gangly creature with big burning eyes on the podium, but rather a woman, beautiful and aware in her own way, a priestess of her art.”⁷⁴

Figure 22. Marian Anderson in Vienna, 1930s (figures unidentified). Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania, Ms. Coll. 198: vol. 8, p. 19, item 5.

Again in universalizing tones, critics sang the praises of Anderson’s ability to remind Vienna of its shared humanity, even while pointing out the supposed foreignness of her musicianship. “[The] triumphs of her expressive presentation are greater [than the foreign sound of her voice] since they are testimony of a moving, very emotional heart,” the critic for Das Echo writes. “And therefore Anderson in the end virtually ensures the opposite effect of the exotic, of the bizarre; she proves how the human heart speaks intelligibly to everybody.”⁷⁵ Similarly, the critic for Die Stunde spoke of Anderson in the language of universal human rights: “[Her concert] makes those people happy who have not yet given up their belief that all men are equal.”⁷⁶ Anderson’s final farewell was a musical testament to Austrian liberal ideals in the wake of ongoing right-wing nationalist assault.

Anderson’s concertizing in Central Europe then became imbued with more than just musical and aesthetic meaning in the late 1930s. A symbol to many of the aspirational goals of racial equality, universal brotherhood, and harmony among nations, her Liederabende brought out growing divisions between nationalists and defenders of a cosmopolitan Central European culture. Anderson faced continual opposition from nationalists, National Socialists, and other ideologues who prided themselves on protecting German culture from foreign invasion. But other listeners also adored Anderson for the same reasons her enemies detested her: she represented the possibilities of racial harmony through the shared and cherished action of musical performance. Leaving only a few months before the annexation of Austria by the Third Reich, Anderson became a ghost whose elegant image haunted the city of Vienna well through the postwar era, where her performance of Schubert’s “Nacht und Träume” became the swan song of the city’s past, wedged into people’s memories.

Black Departures and White Reckonings

Writing to the New York Times in 1942, a Viennese expatriate residing in the United States named George Kugel reflected on a concert he had attended in 1932 or 1933, “before Vienna had awakened to the acuteness of the Nazi menace.” Explaining that a fight broke out in, of all places, the Musikverein Hall, because of the performance of “Negermusik,” he recalled:

Anything “negroid” needed to be expunged from German musical culture, ranging from Baker to Schoenberg to Anderson. Black performers and their musicianship had come to stand for racial miscegenation, commercialism, and sexual deviance. Protesters against this rhetoric, however, attempted to move singers such as Anderson away from these racist discourses (even while they sometimes reaffirmed them through their interpretations of Anderson’s musicianship) and fought hard to create a harmonious space for Anderson and other Black classical musicians amid the overwhelming hostility toward anything deemed “negroid.”

But in the fight to determine who had the right to perform in Central Europe, Black musicians lost. African American classical musicians in particular fled or were pressured into leaving Central Europe by the late 1930s, labeled “degenerate” and poisonous by the National Socialist press. These musicians were entirely capable, the National Socialists assured German speakers, of creating only the worst kind of racial pollution. The Nazi state would work hard to ensure that Black cultures and people would be eradicated in Europe.

The Nazi state followed through with their avowal to cleanse Europe of its Black presence. In December 1943 a letter from the African American entertainer Evelyn Anderson Hayman arrived at the offices of the Chicago Defender for publication in their “Swinging the News” section. She had written to Chicago from a concentration camp in Germany. “Dear Swinging,” Hayman writes, “I was formerly with Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds (1929) and wish to be remembered to all my friends. I have been interned here for more than a year. I am in a very nice camp and have it very good here. The wife and two daughters of Freddy Johnson, the pianist, are here also.”⁷⁸ Sending Christmas greetings to friends and loved ones in the United States, she signs her letter from Post Tettnan[g], Germany. Held against her will at a concentration camp near Liebenau, Germany, occasionally able to sneak in items such as lipstick from the Red Cross, Hayman represents the terrible consequences and outcomes of being a Black musician in Nazi-occupied Europe, the very thing Anderson had come to fear. Living in Paris, like many other Black musicians, Hayman had ignored several warnings about Nazi invasions. And like other African American musicians who had chosen to stay on the outskirts of Central Europe, she soon found herself experiencing the full terror of Nazi racial policy.

Although Nazi German actions against Black musicians were inconsistent and minimal in comparison to their organized attack against Jews, they nonetheless indicate the dangerous sincerity behind their efforts to eliminate racial difference in Europe. After being interned in a concentration camp for eight months, the popular jazz trumpeter Valaida Snow arrived back to the United States in ill health, underweight and frail. She had been living in Denmark conducting an orchestra when Nazi Germans arrested her. Her experience in the camp was terrible: regularly whipped, beaten, and called a “Black pig,” she became malnourished after living on a diet of three potatoes a day for over six months.⁷⁹

Even inside Nazi concentration camps, the demand for Black musicianship continued. Arthur Briggs, a jazz trumpeter, spent four years in a concentration camp near St. Denis, France, playing “Better Days Will Come” on his trumpet. Rudolph Dunbar, a classically-trained conductor who participated in the rebuilding efforts of postwar West Germany, was shocked when he first met Briggs to see how much Nazism had ravaged him and others. Dunbar also made sure to record how concentration camps expected Black musicians to perform Black music for them. The commandant, for example, ordered Briggs to join two other Black musicians in the camp, “Gay Martins from West Africa and Owen Macauly, a colored youth who was born in England,” to sing “Negro spirituals.”⁸⁰ Dunbar left his meeting with Briggs with the growing realization that no one had been spared by the evils of German racism and nationalism, not even talented African American musicians. The supposedly harmonious and universal world of classical music could not liberate anyone from racism’s destructive power.

There was one surprising and lasting outcome of this divisive climate in the 1930s that manifested after 1945. Many of those very same Central European musicians who had attended Anderson’s concerts in Central Europe eventually fled to the United States. There, they trained a new generation of Black students in classical music, and this generation would later return to Central Europe after the demise of the Nazi racial state. The opera singers Marion Freschl and Lotte Lehmann, for example, both of whom had witnessed Anderson’s Salzburg recital in 1935, were adamant that they wished to support Black vocalists in the United States. They worked with and supported singers such as Camilla Williams, Shirley Verrett, and Grace Bumbry, all of whom broke racial barriers at major opera houses in Central Europe after 1945. The legacies and impact of Anderson, Hayes, and other Black classical musicians would live on—just not in the ways audiences in the 1930s might have expected.