In the early 1930s, the leadership of the Third Reich began its cultural war against entartete, or degenerate art.  In the visual arts the movement to ban modernism is well know.  Less known is the way in which it affected music. 

The Nazis aimed not only to ban atonal music or jazz, but also any work that was composed by Jews, Bolsheviks, or others already deemed undesirable to the regime.  The most famous event in this repression was the 1938 exhibit “Entartete Musik” held in Düsseldorf.  There, many new composers’ works were made known, unfortunately as examples of what music should not be.

Just how deep the insidious repression of composers and the silencing of various forms of music went becomes clear in Amaury du Closel’s thorough and unprecedented account. Of the hundreds of  works, many are only just being rediscovered, performed, and recognized. The composers’ lives, unknown for the most part, are here retraced.  Many went into exile but a large proportion were deported and killed, just as their works were lost to the world. 

Les voix étouffées du IIIème Reich is a unique and major contribution to Germanic studies and the history of music and musicians.