Pamela M. Potter delves into music and its societal role, particularly within German-speaking contexts. Her work investigates how art reflects and influences social and political currents, emphasizing the connection between musicology and broader cultural and historical landscapes. Potter analyzes the ways artistic creation shapes national identity and how this linkage evolved through turbulent periods of German history. Her approach offers profound insights into the interplay of music, society, and politics.
This study examines the social, economic and intellectual factors that caused German musical scholars to support the ideological aims of the Nazis, and argues that many of the ideas that served the regime survived the Nazi period to influence the conception of music history down to the present.
This provocative study asks why we have held on to vivid images of the NazisÕ total control of the visual and performing arts, even though research has shown that many artists and their works thrived under Hitler. To answer this question, Pamela M. Potter investigates how historians since 1945 have written about music, art, architecture, theater, film, and dance in Nazi Germany and how their accounts have been colored by politics of the Cold War, the fall of communism, and the wish to preserve the idea that true art and politics cannot mix. Potter maintains that although the persecution of Jewish artists and other Òenemies of the stateÓ was a high priority for the Third Reich, removing them from German cultural life did not eradicate their artistic legacies. Art of Suppression examines the cultural histories of Nazi Germany to help us understand how the circumstances of exile, the Allied occupation, the Cold War, and the complex meanings of modernism have sustained a distorted and problematic characterization of cultural life during the Third Reich.
Potters Studie deckt die Beziehungen auf, die die Musikwissenschaft mit dem Staat und der Partei unterhielt, und beleuchtet die Mentalität des Fachs, die sich ungebrochen vom Ende des Ersten Weltkriegs bis in die Nachkriegszeit hielt: eine Mischung aus antiintellektuellem Ressentiment, Sich-Mühen um Volksnähe, einem irrational eingefärbten Anti-Elitarismus und einer ausgesprochenen Schwäche für die deutsche Volksseele, die sich, wie man meinte, vor allem in der Musik ausdrückte.