The Politics of Music in Vienna

It was famously said of post-war Austria that its genius lay in persuading the world that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian. Hitler was born in Austria and only took German citizenship in 1922. Beethoven was born in the Rhineland, the town of Bonn, the former West German capital.

The 1939 New Year’s Concert and Nazi collaboration

The New Year’s concert played by the Vienna Philharmonic, which always prominently includes Johann Strauss’s music, these days is estimated to be heard by around 50 million viewers in more than 150 countries via television and streaming.

Despite all the attention spread around the globe, what is widely overlooked is that both the orchestra and the New Year’s concert have a dark history.

The proceeds from ticket sales the first New Year’s Concert performance in 1939 were sent to the Nazi Party for winter relief. Moreover, 60 of the Vienna Philhamonic orchestra’s 123 musicians were paid-up members of the Nazi party. That is a much higher percentage than in the wider Austrian population.

Not to forget that the Austrian capital — after the formal annexation (“Anschluss”) of Austria by Germany in 1938 — turned out to be the most fanatical and anti-Jewish city of any in the Third Reich.

The orchestra management also resolutely fired any of their musicians who were Jews or married to Jews. Five died in concentration camps.

Some were lucky and got visas to Britain or North America despite a ferocious campaign by London’s Daily Mail and other English papers against letting in asylum seekers from Nazi Germany-Austria.

The Daily Mail and News Chronicle insisted that any Jews let into Britain would take the jobs of British professionals – doctors, accountants, lawyers or musicians.

Whitewashing the Vienna Philharmonic’s history

After 1945, the orchestra’s board of management covered up the Nazi past of the orchestra. One subplot is that Baldur von Schirach, the Nazi governor of Vienna during the Third Reich and the man who oversaw the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews to death camps in Poland, was given a ring of honour by the Orchestra’s directors as they crawled to the extreme right.

The ring was presented to 1942 after three years of New Year Concerts, but was lost by von Schirach. Yet in late 1966, after von Schirach’s release from Spandau prison for crimes against humanity, a replacement ring was presented to him by Helmut Wobisch, one of the orchdestra’s trumpeters who was a member of the Nazi party and later joined the Waffen SS.

Wobisch was sacked in 1945 during the so-called de-Nazification of post-war Germany and Austria. But as U.S. and British policy turned anti-communist after the occupying Russian army in east Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia imprisoned all social democratic politicians and democratic trade union organizers, London and Washington dropped most de-Nazification procedures. Wobisch was allowed to start playing for the Vienna Philharmonic in 1951 again.

Finally coming clean

As the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Concert became known worldwide as start of the classical music year the Nazi history and anti-Semitic record of the orchestra was quietly buried. In the semi-official history of the orchestra written by its Chairman Clemens Hellberg in 1992, there were no details of the Philharmonic’s Nazi and anti-Jewish past.

Finally in 2012, the Philharmonic opened its archives to independent historians and details emerged both of its anti-Jewish past and the cover-up after 1945.

Vienna’s New Year concert: Celebrating history, comprehensively

This year’s edition of Vienna’s New Year’s Concert will rightly be enjoyed around the world. But nobody should overlook the dark, collaborationist history of its early years.