Young Anxious Melodies: An Examination of Jazz and the Youth Under the Third Reich

Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels recognized jazz music as an impending threat to his office because of the way in which it entered Germany: from outside its borders. This thesis will seek to alleviate the tension between jazz's perceived potential to negatively influence German culture and Goebbels's future attempts to appropriate the music. Relying upon the available scholarly literature, as well as Goebbels's diaries from 1939 to 1941, this thesis begins by exploring how his inconsistent understandings of jazz, combined with his assessment of its introduction into Weimar Germany following World War One, influenced its official censorship. Drawing on more of Goebbels's diaries as well as on the Reich's censorship of the radio, official documents on the formation of the Hitler Youth, and a poster from the 1938 Entartete Musik (Degenerate Music) exhibition this thesis demonstrates how the efforts to stop jazz and to control those refusing to join the Hitler Youth were included into one concentrated state agenda. This jazz agenda shifted to focus on appropriation efforts after its prominence amongst the German youth could no longer be ignored by state officials. Testimonials from Walter Meyer, the leader of his direct-action youth group the Edelweiss Pirates, and Hans Otto Jung, band leader of the more musically focused Frankfurt Hot Club consider how life for those broadly targeted in the government's crackdown on jazz had experienced it. These narratives will demonstrate that Goebbels and other state officials understood that jazz was not nearly as determinant of delinquent behavior as the published proscriptions would suggest. Yet, in the regime's response to jazz, the music continued to be labeled as an ensuing problem for the well-being of the nation's youth, one that Goebbels eventually responded to through his appropriation efforts. I argue that the tension between jazz's potential corruptibility and the appropriation of its popularity is really reflective of the state's desire, yet inability, to connect to the nation's youth.