Talk:Karl Marx (composer)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Germany Portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Germany, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to articles related to Germany on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please join the project and help with our open tasks.
Stub	This article has been rated as stub-Class on the Project's quality scale. (If you rated the article please give a short summary at comments to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses.)

[edit] Nazi work and later

Given his Hitler Youth connections, it would be surprising if he was given emeritus status post-war without some form of denazification. Is there any information on this? JackofOz 05:35, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Composers and performers were not really denazified, at least not effectively...As Goebbels had needed them, musicians, like other artists, were again needed in all the occupation zones (which vied with each other for their services); the musicians took advantage of this situation...assisted by conservative music journalists and publicists, some of whom were tied to (formerly Nazi) music-publishing firms...Composers who had worked for the Nazis in one role or another and now became prominent again, not least as teachers, included Wolfgang Fortner, Karl Marx, Cesar Bresgen, and Armin Knab.(Kater, 2000, pp. 276-7)

—eric 07:05, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

That's an interesting point of view. What about Richard Strauss, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Hans Pfitzner, and many others who had to go through the hoops to become accepted once more? JackofOz 12:12, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Our author makes mention of all three being denazified in courts of law, but seems mostly dismissive of the process:

Why did these academics find their survival beyond the cutoff point of 1945 so easy? It was a function of the sham denazification that most incriminated professors in any academic discipline who had initially been suspended from German universities because of their Nazi past found their way back to the halls of learning relatively quickly.(Ibid., p. 279)

Furtwängler "made the best of his resistance legend" before the court; Pfitzner was no longer popular anyway and had been "artificially propped up with Nazi Party help"; and Strauss' "historic greatness had been established long before the Nazi reign". At least, that's my reading of this one particular source.

Back to Marx, i've found nothing which explicitly states he went before a court or not. I did run across the brief anecdote of a Royal Navy officer (and then music student) assigned as assistant prizemaster in Kiel. Marx had been drafted into the Kriegsmarine in the final months of the war, and following the surrender worked as a clerk for this officer. In return for music lessons, Marx was excused most of his clerking duties! Maybe working for the allies postwar provided some kind of exemption or made it easier to return to teaching?—eric 01:26, 9 March 2007 (UTC)