Well, it was a little more than a week but here we are again. This rather lengthy entry is a review of the late Mike Zwerin's Swing Under the Nazis: Jazz as a Metaphor for Freedom, first published as La Tristesse de Saint Louis in 1985. It's an interesting book with an unorthodox approach, and since I had to write this for Uni anyway I thought I'd share my review (26 years after publication, but I never was the quickest off the mark) in case the subject matter is of interest to anyone.The image above is the Frankfurt Hot Club's drummer Horst Lippmann listening to records at the Lippmann restaurant in 1940 (copyright of the Jazzinstitut Darmstadt).
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Zwerin’s book begins with a warning:
There are no footnotes. No attempt has been made to be encyclopedic. Writing a good read came first. (...) Names, dates, and places are factual, although it became increasingly difficult to separate imagination from fact. (...) The most evocative versions were used.
From an academic standpoint, this places us already on less than solid ground. Indeed, the book is certainly a work of poetical journalism and has no historiographical aspirations. Is it, therefore, possible to view this work as a valid and legitimate addition to the existing scholarship on the subject, or does it have no value beyond the artistic?
Writing in the early 1980s, Zwerin had the advantage of access to some of the leading protagonists in wartime German jazz. Otto Jung, Hans Blüthner, Dietrich Schulz-Köhn, Carlo Bohländer, Emil and Albert Mangelsdorff, as well as international figures such as Charles Delaunay and Stéphane Grappelli, all gave of their time for this project. The transcriptions from the dinner table talk with members of the Frankfurt and Berlin Hot Clubs make for an interesting, informal multi-participant style of interview as the speakers thrive on each other’s company and memories (as well as a bottle of the Jung family’s own 1944 brandy), although Zwerin admits that:
Otto, Hans, Emil and Carlo often spoke at the same time. It was difficult to separate their voices when I was transcribing the tape (...)
The rather fractured, unfocussed nature of Zwerin’s approach is clearly deliberate but it has some major drawbacks. The book begins to lose focus somewhat around Chapter 11 as it plunges into an unnecessarily detailed biography of Django Reinhardt. While Django’s own wartime experiences certainly belong among Zwerin’s subject matter, it is doubtful whether yet another re-telling of the legendary guitarist’s origins adds anything to our understanding of swing under the Nazis, or indeed of Mike Zwerin himself.
The thematic digressions continue with a meditation on South African apartheid, and the ethical considerations Zwerin faced when agreeing to tour the country in spite of the international cultural boycott. The reasoning behind the inclusion of this section is clear; South Africa is ‘the closest system we have to Nazi Germany’, but it bears only an abstract moral relation to the book's topic. Certainly Zwerin's reflections on whether or not it was right for him to take a band to ‘a republic that does not give the vote to eighty-five percent of its population’ are reminiscent of the difficult choices facing musicians in Nazi-dominated Europe, and he quotes a friend asking him bitterly: ‘Would you have gone to play in Nazi Germany?’. Perhaps there was also a contemporaneous political motivation of opposing apartheid which now, happily, has been rendered obsolete; Zwerin opens the chapter by admitting that he hesitated before including it, and then quotes Connecticut's Senator Lowell Weicker as saying:
Apartheid exists because a whole world tolerates it by silence. The silence that envelops today's black South African is no different than that which wasted yesterday's European Jew.
But any analogy between two very different times and places, however abhorrent each may be, is dangerous territory and Zwerin traverses it rather clumsily. The central Germans in his book are not those jazz musicians who collaborated with the regime on propaganda projects and official ventures such as Charlie & His Orchestra. The likes of Jung, Blüthner and Bohländer avoided military service as best they could and did not co-operate with the Nazi state; indeed, Zwerin notes that the members of the Frankfurt Hot Club participated in (presumably rather risky) gang fights against the Hitler Youth. It is difficult to condemn somebody for simply existing in Nazi Germany, but in his more Germanophobic moments Zwerin manages to come awfully close to it. In the midst of an otherwise sympathetic portrait of Hans Blüthner, a member of the Berlin Hot Club during the Nazi years, he announces:
Like any anti-apartheid Afrikaner, he benefited from an exploitative system he disapproved of.
Zwerin's definition of ‘benefitting’ in this case is the fact that Blüthner himself escaped going to war on medical grounds and did not end up in a concentration camp. It seems a strange accusation that Blüthner was benefitting from an exploitative system just by surviving it; luck and profit are two very different things. Perhaps Zwerin has in mind the question posed in Brecht's 1939 poem To Those Who Follow in our Wake:
What kind of times are these when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors!
In Nazi Germany, a conversation about jazz (at least the type carried out in the Berlin Hot Club) was tantamount to a crime. A passion for jazz and swing music was, at least on some level, a rejection of the Nazi racial and cultural Weltanschauung, although Zwerin is right to question the repeated assertions that ‘anybody who liked jazz could not have been a Nazi’ (a BBC analysis of German tastes during World War Two suggests that even fanatical Nazis tuned in enthusiastically to their jazz broadcasts). But it is rather too easy for a writer living in a comfortable democracy to pass judgement on the actions (or inactions) of those living in more difficult times. The young jazz fans’ ‘passive good deeds, the absence of bad deeds’ certainly do not make them resistance heroes, but nor do they implicate them as benefactors of the regime’s crimes.
Even a complicated case such as Dietrich Schulz-Köhn, who was a first lieutentant in the Luftwaffe and by his own admission neither particularly pro- nor anti-Nazi, is described by Charles Delaunay (then Secretary-General of the Hot Club de France and an active member of the French Resistance) as having distributed ration cards and secret letters for the Resistance whenever he passed through the Hot Club's headquarters in occupied Paris. The boundaries between right and wrong, like Zwerin's boundaries between fact and imagination, are extremely difficult to define. We are examining, to quote Michael H. Kater, ‘gray people against a landscape of gray’.
One of the strengths of Zwerin's book is suggested by its subtitle: ‘Jazz as a Metaphor for Freedom’. His ideas on this theme are interesting and often perceptive, and it is here that his broad interpretation of the subject matter becomes an advantage. Drawing comparisons with the startling vibrancy of jazz music in Andropov-era communist Eastern Europe, he convincingly illustrates how jazz music flourishes in oppressive climates precisely because it becomes a tool of intellectual and spiritual resistance. As Joachim-Ernst Berendt, a jazz aficionado in the Third Reich who later became the driving force behind post-war German jazz scene, tells Zwerin:
It can be no accident that totalitarian regimes are all against jazz. It's basic to their character. You improvise, you make your own decisions. You have a special sound, you do not sound like anybody else. Spontaneity means freedom.
The comparative approach attempted in the section on South Africa is much more successfully handled here. Zwerin takes part in a late-night jam session with Otto Jung, his two sons and Emil Mangelsdorff, and then bemoans the utilitarian climate of the American and Western European jazz scenes in which:
There has to be a 'reason' to play these days. 'Play' is work. (...) Fun is, if not incidental, secondary. (...) The only place I know where professional musicians still jam just for laughs is Eastern Europe. Under authoritarian regimes. They are lucky. They have their devils.
According to Zwerin, European Jazz's Golden Age roughly coincides with the rise of the Nazis and ends around the time of Django Reinhardt's disastrous concert with Duke Ellington in New York in 1946. But the art form which thrives in oppressive political climates was doomed with the death of ‘a devil named Joeseph Goebbels (...) the most powerful angel jazz music ever had.’
What, then, of the book's contribution to the canon of scholarship on the subject? It follows from the introductory warning that this is a book that should be handled with care when it comes to the facts. But I would argue that, although it is pitched in layman's terms and has no pretensions of academic credibility, Zwerin's enviable access to many of the surviving protagonists (including the only published interview with Heinz 'Ganjo' Baldauf, the Gestapo officer who monitored the Frankfurt jazz scene) does offer new material at least, and a fresh perspective at best.
Thomas Hobbes wrote that 'imagination and memory are but one thing'. But this proto-relativist assertion will not quite do in examining books such as Zwerin's. If it is to be of any use to us, we must be able to distinguish between the two. Of course, imagination is vital in any historical writing to breathe life into the past, but it must serve the facts rather than replace them. As Timothy Garton Ash points out in his criticism of the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuściński's factually unreliable African reportages:
The frontier between the literature of fact and the literature of fiction is open, unmarked. (...) With Kapuściński, we keep crossing from the Kenya of fact to the Tanzania of fiction, and back again, but the transition is nowhere explicitly signalled.
In Zwerin's South Africa of poetic journalism, fortunately, there are signposts. The introduction states that ‘some characters are composites, and their names make that obvious’. The witnesses of the Nazi era, however, are all real. There is no blending of Otto Jung and Hans Blüthner, or Dietrich Schulz-Köhn and Joachim-Ernst Berendt, no composite Otto Blüthner or Dietrich Berendt appears to confuse us. The protagonists are allowed to speak their piece. The composites, rather, occur in the present; friends of Zwerin's such as 'Blow' Black and Claude Verses are merged personalities, their troubled lives and illegal activities are protected by false monickers. These excursions form a reflective part of Zwerin’s self-proclaimed personal chronology, but they add little to the book. The story of swing under the Nazis is fascinating enough in itself, and it would be preferable if he focussed on this rather than the drug-fuelled antics and xenophobic rants of his composite acquaintances.
Seven years after Zwerin's book first appeared under its original title La Tristesse de Saint Louis, Michael H. Kater published a scholarly work that finally gave the subject the time it deserved. Zwerin approaches the subject not as a historian, but as a musician and a writer. To ask for a book that sticks to the facts and cuts out the filler of Django biographies, personal anecdotes and lengthy philosophical digressions would essentially be to ask for a different book than the one he set out to write. What we are left with is a collection of abstract riffs and improvisations on a theme; a journey into the heart of jazz in the Third Reich that could have gone so much further.
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