The Politics of Music in Vienna

It was famously said of post-war Austria that their genius lay in persuading the world that Hitler was a German and Mozart an Austrian. Hitler was born in Austria and only took German citizenship in 1922.

Mozart was born in mid 18th century Salzburg at the time an independent Catholic city-state ruled by its Archbishop and the composer always identified himself as part of German cultural life and history.

The Vienna Philharmonic: From 1939 New Year concerts to Nazi collaboration

Vienna now will be heard around the world as the Vienna Philharmonic plays its wonderful New Year concert of Strauss’s music. But both the orchestra and the New Year concert have a dark history. The first performance was on New Year’s Eve 1939.

The proceed from ticket sales were sent to the Nazi Party for winter relief. The German nationalists had already invaded Poland three months earlier and were busy carving up Poland with Russian soldiers who walked in from the east.

The Polish army held out longer against German soldiers than the French army and British expeditionary force of 13 divisions, around 390,000 men, managed in May-June 1940.

By then Austrian capital, Vienna, had become the most fanatical and anti-Jewish city of any in the new Third Reich after the formal annexation – “Anschluss” – of Austria by Germany in 1938.

The orchestra’s Nazi ties: From membership to anti-Semitic purges

60 of the Vienna Philhamonic orchestra’s 123 musicians were paid-up members of the Nazi party – a much higher percentage than in the wider Austrian population.

They stayed members of the Nazi party during the second world war. The orchestra management had 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.

The Daily Mail encouraged its readers to sign up for the British Union of Fascists, even printing the Kings Road, Chelsea address of the party headquarters to swell the card carrying members of Britain’s ethnonationalist party under its media-friendly leader, Oswald Mosley.

The cover-up: Post-war efforts to whitewash the Philharmonic’s history

The orchestra’s board of management covered up the Nazi past of the Orchestra after 1945. Baldur von Schirach, the Nazi governor of Vienna, 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 US 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 organisers London and Washington dropped most de-Nazification procedures and enthusiastic Nazi Wobisch was allowed to start playing for the Vienna Philharmonic in 1951.

A glimpse into the past: How Austria’s history is repeated in modern politics

As the Vienna New Year concert became known worldwide as start of the classical music year the Nazi history and anti-semitic record of the Vienna Philharmonic 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 Orchestra opened its archives to independent historians and details emerged both of its anti-Jewish past and the cover up after 1945.

Today Austria again has a far-right government. Its target are Austrian Muslims with a ban on wearing the headscarf for girls attending schools. It has introduced a ban of family reunions for refugees just as 1930s Austria after the Anschluss in 1938 made life impossible for opponents of the Nazi regime (captured in the Sound of Music movie) as well as for Jews.

Vienna’s New Year concert: Celebrating history, but at what cost?

Today Austrian government in Vienna is a coalition with a Conservative Chancellor from the Christian democratic ÖVP party, a Socialist Vice-Chancellor, and ministers from Austria’s Liberal Party NEOS. But the only beneficiary so far has been the far-right Freedom Party which has climbed in opinion polls since the coalition of 3 legacy parties formed a government last March.

Vienna’s New Year concert will rightly enjoyed around the world. It first happened when Austria was ruled by far-right racists in 1939. How long before another far-right racist party is again in power in Vienna?