On This Day in History, 1925, Hitler Published MEIN KAMPF

[Sopio]

Let us take some time out of our day for prayerful reading.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-h...s-imein-kampfi

[Sir Cornwell]

Well it is a lovely time of year to take the family out kampfing.

[Bradley]

http://www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/

Sieg heil.

[Sopio]

If you read in English as I do, you ought to use the Michael Ford translation. I read through it cover to cover every year on April 20.

[Bradley]

Originally Posted by Sopio

If you read in English as I do, you ought to use the Michael Ford translation. I read through it cover to cover every year on April 20.

What is the specific difference?

[Sopio]

Consult http://www.amazon.com/Mein-Kampf-The.../dp/0977476073.

***

For the first time in 65 years, a modern, easy to understand, truly complete and uncensored edition of Mein Kampf has been released which reveals more than any past translation. This hardcover book is also the first translation available in an English language audio format.

Older translations altered passages, omitted passages, mistranslated Hitler's words, made some parts more sensational while concealing the true meaning in other parts of the book. If you have read one of these older translations of Mein Kampf, then you have not read the REAL Mein Kampf which is found only in the Ford Translation.

Mein Kampf is often portrayed as nothing more than an Anti-Semitic work, however only 6% of it even talks about the Jews. The rest contains Hitler's ideas and beliefs for a greater nation plus his plan on how to accomplish that goal. He outlines his plans for not only world conquest, but the conquest of the universe. The majority of the work involves Hitler's discussion of the German people's difficult times after the First World War, his political theories and his organization of the Nazi Party, as well as many attacks against his enemies which makes it a very interesting and moving story.

Mein Kampf offers an interesting interpretation of politics, people, and foreign policy matters. To characterize it as simply a racist work is to oversimplify its message. Germany did not follow Hitler because he was a racist, they followed him because he promised a great future, and Mein Kampf is where he promised that great future.
This edition is the only accurate and complete English translation of Mein Kampf ever made.

This Ford Translation offers:

* The most accurate translation ever produced.
* Phrases that are translated with precision and with no translator's bias.
* Uncommon words are replaced with more common and more meaningful terms.
* Any references to unfamiliar people, or places are explained in the text.
* This version is complete with all original passages and references restored, including passages omitted from other popular versions.


This translation has corrected over 1000 errors which were present in past translations.

No English reader has been able to appreciate these subtleties in any previous English translation, not until the Ford Translation.

Includes Photos and Illustrations of events and people in Mein Kampf Volume I and II
Click the order button to receive the book so many people wish to disparage and see why they will do anything to have the printing of this book outlawed. They have already tried...

This is the only edition that was so thoroughly researched and verified that it required a separate book(Mein Kampf: A Translation Controversy) to document the changes and corrections made which prove the dynamic style of the Ford translation is superior to all past mechanical translations.

Read the hardback version, then decide for yourself if he was a mad-man or a genius.

[Pee Vee Proots, M.D.]

Originally Posted by Sopio

Read the hardback version, then decide for yourself if he was a mad-man or a genius.

"Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence."

The man was clearly both.

[Bradley]

Sopio you convinced me, I'll buy it.

[Sir Cornwell]

Not just another vegan tweaker?

[LSA King]

It's an incredible book that everyone who goes into politics should read. If you understand the things that were going on at the time, then you can actually understand what he was talking about and making references to.

Absolutely brilliant and far better than his closest competition. You have to read the version that isn't edited, can't remember the author but he states in the beginning he did this for historical purposes and that nothing was in his own words/views blah blah blah.

[TheRascalKing]

Mein Kampf Burning Day. Fuck Hitler and his modern day dick suckers.

[King of the world]

Originally Posted by Sopio

Michael Ford translation.

Guy knows what he's talking about.

[LSA King]

Originally Posted by TheRascalKing

Mein Kampf Burning Day. Fuck Hitler and his modern day dick suckers.

You know, Hitler actually had a lot of respect for black people, especially those in France and in America. He didn't get pissed Germany lost to the black American in the Olympics, he praised him. He was against France destroying there culture and heritage incorporating all other peoples in the third-world in what is called the "melting pot" and he was right about it being a failed experiment.

Someday you and your kin will wake up and realize everything you do and say has been manipulated by the Jews since before slavery even ended.

[Pee Vee Proots, M.D.]

Originally Posted by TheRascalKing

Mein Kampf Burning Day. Fuck Hitler and his modern day dick suckers.

Only retards and people afraid of learning the truth about things burn books.

[TheRascalKing]

Originally Posted by LSA King

You know, Hitler actually had a lot of respect for black people, especially those in France and in America. He didn't get pissed Germany lost to the black American in the Olympics, he praised him. He was against France destroying there culture and heritage incorporating all other peoples in the third-world in what is called the "melting pot" and he was right about it being a failed experiment.

Someday you and your kin will wake up and realize everything you do and say has been manipulated by the Jews since before slavery even ended.

Lol, no, he didn't. He believed that African people and those who had African ancestry were inferior. He called Italians and French "nigger souls" and ordered black POWs shot on sight or locked up and worked to death. He also ordered kids that were the product of relationships between Germans and Africans in the Rhineland sterilized. He destroyed literature written by black authors. He banned black music, such as jazz and ragtime, from Germany.

[Sir Cornwell]

A day for the family to join hands and sing around a nice kampfire?

[LSA King]

Originally Posted by TheRascalKing

Lol, no, he didn't. He believed that African people and those who had African ancestry were inferior. He called Italians and French "nigger souls" and ordered black POWs shot on sight or locked up and worked to death. He also ordered kids that were the product of relationships between Germans and Africans in the Rhineland sterilized. He destroyed literature written by black authors. He banned black music, such as jazz and ragtime, from Germany.

You'd be surprised. Just because he thought the African (black) peoples were inferior, doesn't mean he didn't have respect for them.

His opinions were the product of preserving what he believed to be German culture. Mixing of the races diluted that, so it's only natural he felt negative towards those mixing the races under that logic. Nigger was a term used long before it was given to black people and it had little to do with mixing of actual black bloodlines, but rather mixing two clearly distinct and separate bloodline cultures into one.

Sterilization is nothing new, it's going on in America as we speak. Lets not forget Hitler got the majority of his Eugenics program from the U.S. not by some magical sick way of thinking.

The banning of books and music had little to do with the color of skin, but more to do with the influence in which they were a spawn of. Not to forget both of those mediums were the two largest methods for propaganda back in the day, in which there was plenty.

Just read the fucking book Tacho, quit making excuses.

[TheRascalKing]

Lol, ok. Go get in front of the NAACP and NoI and tell them that Hitler was their friend.

I'm not reading Mein Kampf.

[Pee Vee Proots, M.D.]

Originally Posted by TheRascalKing

I'm not reading Mein Kampf.

That's the kind of petty bullshit that leads to racism and discrimination. "I'm not going to read it because I don't like what those people have to say." What do you stand to lose by reading his book? It's not like the money goes to Hitler or Naziism. The only risk is discovering that you were wrong about the book in some way.

[Sir Cornwell]

Hitler wasn't all bad, that doesn't mean I wouldn't like to hook him up to a 100Kv 3-phase line and let him enlighten me. I bet he'd really glow!

Very illuminating.

[TheRascalKing]

If not reading a book by a failed artist and mass murderer makes me a bad guy, I'm a bad guy.

[King of the world]

Originally Posted by Pee Vee Proots, M.D.

The only risk is discovering that you were wrong about the book in some way.

You hit the nail on the head. Liberals are shit fucking scared of the book and its opposition to liberal degeneration.

[DiStOrTiOn]

Hitler was the best thing to ever happen to Germany

[Sopio]

Originally Posted by King of the world

You hit the nail on the head. Liberals are shit fucking scared of the book and its opposition to liberal degeneration.

In all honesty, Mein Kampf is probably less racist (and less delusional) than The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which I read and enjoyed.

Originally Posted by DiStOrTiOn

Hitler was the best thing to ever happen to Germany

I don't know about that, you filthy antisemite.

[Psych]

Originally Posted by TheRascalKing

Mein Kampf Burning Day. Fuck Hitler and his modern day dick suckers.

God you're fucking dumb.

[DiStOrTiOn]

Originally Posted by Sopio

I don't know about that, you filthy antisemite.

Name anything or anyone that did greater things for Germany than Hitler and nazism

[Psych]

Originally Posted by DiStOrTiOn

Name anything or anyone that did greater things for Germany than Hitler and nazism

King William I.

[TheRascalKing]

Originally Posted by Sopio

In all honesty, Mein Kampf is probably less racist (and less delusional) than The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which I read and enjoyed.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X is a pretty decent critique of social relations in mid 20th century America, self hate among people of color, along with the criminal underworld of that time. I don't like Malcolm X's antisemitism and alienation of progressive white allies though. He did well by leaving the Nation of Islam cult, it was brave considering he knew full well it would get him killed.

[Pee Vee Proots, M.D.]

Originally Posted by DiStOrTiOn

Name anything or anyone that did greater things for Germany than Hitler and nazism

Name anyone who did worse things for Germany than Hitler and Naziism.

He forever tarnished Germany's name in the eyes of the world, got millions of his countrymen killed, and in the end achieved nothing but demoralizing the entire nation by losing the war and more or less giving half of Germany to the commies.

[DiStOrTiOn]

Originally Posted by Psych

King William I.

Did the king turn Germany into the world's first superpower?


I don't think so bitch. Hitler Germany was best Germany

[DiStOrTiOn]

Originally Posted by Pee Vee Proots, M.D.

Name anyone who did worse things for Germany than Hitler and Naziism.

Zionist jews

[TheRascalKing]

Originally Posted by DiStOrTiOn

Did the king turn Germany into the world's first superpower?


I don't think so bitch. Hitler Germany was best Germany

Nazi Germany wasn't the world's first superpower, I think that award goes to the Romans.

[Psych]

Originally Posted by DiStOrTiOn

Did the king turn Germany into the world's first superpower?


I don't think so bitch. Hitler Germany was best Germany

Well he created the german empire so he did create a german superpower. Not the first one in the world, but neither was hitler's.

[Psych]

Originally Posted by TheRascalKing

Nazi Germany wasn't the world's first superpower, I think that award goes to the Romans.

What about the Egyptian dynasties?

[TheRascalKing]

Oh, yeah, those guys. All the old paintings on the wall, they do the same dance, don't you know?

[Pee Vee Proots, M.D.]

Originally Posted by DiStOrTiOn

Zionist jews

Anyone. You could just as easily say the allied forces were worse for Germany than Hitler. No one person has fucked up Germany as much as Hitler. If he'd won the war (or not lost so spectacularly) the good he did for Germany might have had some lasting effect. Hitler was great for a few years, but he was too ambitious and ended up driving his little reich into the dirt.

[Sopio]

Originally Posted by TheRascalKing

The Autobiography of Malcolm X is a pretty decent critique of social relations in mid 20th century America, self hate among people of color, along with the criminal underworld of that time. I don't like Malcolm X's antisemitism and alienation of progressive white allies though. He did well by leaving the Nation of Islam cult, it was brave considering he knew full well it would get him killed.

I didn't say that it was without merit or that he was anything less than genuine in his convictions, but I stand by what I said about the quantity of racist content of the book. What you said is not a valid excuse for that, for it could just as easily be said that Mein Kampf is a decent critique of social relations in early 20th century Europe and so on. Race in Mein Kampf plays an exceedingly small role in the work compared to the other which is almost exclusively about race. I would even say that in addition to mere quantity, Malcolm X expresses a much more virulent strain of racism. If he had written the same sort of work exclusively about Jews, he would be universally reviled and associated with such notorious antisemites as Norman Finkelstein, and I'm sure that if he had escaped his NOI assassin, he would have been later assassinated by ADL agents.

[King of the world]

You are right, there's actually very little GAS THE KIKES! RACE WAR NOW! stuff in Mein Kampf, it's pretty tame compared to Corneliu Codreanu's For my Legionaires. The truth is a lot of people don't appreciate Mein Kampf because it was not written for them. A lot of opposition to Mein Kampf comes from its mistranslations and propaganda that was pushed heavily in the propaganda film Why We Fight made by Frank Capra (more like Frank Crapra) who was working for the United States Army (so yeah, it's not going to be biased, took out of context or mistranslated at all ).

A lot of people parrot the idea that Hitler was a crap writer because that is what Konrad Heiden wrote in the foreword to Ralph Mannheim's translation and also what Kike Abe Foxman had parroted. That is the most widely distributed English translation of Mein Kampf. Most people who say this have never actually read Mein Kampf or understood it. Eine Abrechnung is a double entendre.

MK is basically a commentary on his experiences, views, and how they developed, you can feel the anger and bitterness and it is entertaining, you can connect to it well. It is more of a metaphysical worldview than political guidelines like FML. They're both very good books.

[King of the world]

I've been ignoring tacho for a while now because he's just a flat out fucking moron, but I caught one of his bullshit claims about jazz music in a post of his that was quoted.


"One of the strangest photographs of the war was taken by Schulz-Koehn outside La Cigale, a jazz club in Paris. It shows a gypsy (Django), four Africans and a Jew posed smiling beside a fellow officer. The Germans were there not to arrest these men but to listen to them play." (Brian X. Morton)

Swing Time for Hitler
Brian X. Morton

It is of some small comfort that totalitarian regimes are never quite as total as either their leaders or subsequent historians might imagine. As much as the Bolsheviks may have wished to "abolish" religion, faith and observance persisted all through the Soviet sphere and contributed to the disintegration of the Communist system. Similarly and more recently, the Taliban exercised less than certain--and certainly less than the publicized--influence over the people of Afghanistan.

By the same token, we have long been used to the idea that the Nazis proscribed jazz and sought to ban it from every corner of the Reich. To the ideologists of National Socialism, it was music of racial impurity, lumped in with other examples of entartete Kunst or "degenerate art," damned as "Judaeo-Negroid" and not fit for the ears of good Germans. In recent years, this rather one-dimensional picture has begun to shift significantly.

One tiny example suggests the complexity of the real situation: the strange tale of guitarist Django Reinhardt, who managed not only to survive but to thrive in Nazi-occupied France, despite the fact that he was a gypsy, and a handicapped gypsy at that, thanks to the patronage and the protection of a jazz-loving Luftwaffe officer. Those last four words represent such an oxymoron that most recent encyclopedia entries on Django, who died half a century ago in 1953, make no mention whatever of Oberleutnant Dietrich Schulz-Koehn.

One of the strangest photographs of the war was taken by Schulz-Koehn outside La Cigale, a jazz club in Paris. It shows a gypsy (Django), four Africans and a Jew posed smiling beside a fellow officer. The Germans were there not to arrest these men but to listen to them play. With its whisper of collaboration, this remains an awkward detail for jazz fans to deal with, but it is even more unsettling, given the prevailing notion of the Nazis' attitude toward jazz.

There have been a number of attempts to rewrite this odd corner of popular music history. Michael Zwerin's La Tristesse de Saint Louis: Swing under the Nazis took its title from the habit of disguising jazz tunes--in this case "St. Louis Blues"--from the authorities under safely translated titles. The story of wartime swing is also told in a chapter in Hitler's Airwaves, a study of propaganda broadcasting under the Third Reich written by business executive Horst J.P. Bergmeier and economist Rainer E. Lotz. Now, though, their exploration of the period has been taken a step further and given additional flesh in an ambitious box set of music with the arresting title Swing Tanzen Verboten: Swing Music and Nazi Propaganda during World War II, just released by the English firm Proper Records with text by Dutch jazz expert Joop Visser. Its four CDs are an eye-opening experience, not so much musically, though there are fine cuts by Reinhardt, but because they raise the possibility that far from banning jazz, the Nazi authorities were aware of and tried to harness some of its appeal.

Imagine for a moment that you are a British or American jazz fan in wartime scanning the airwaves in hopes of finding some familiar music. Out of the ether a male voice begins to sing a familiar melody. "I'm the Sheik of Araby,/Your love belongs to me./At night, when you're asleep/into your tent I'll creep./The stars that shine above/will light a way to love./You'll rule this land with me/the Sheik of Araby." Before the war you heard umpteen versions of this song, which was inspired by RudolphValentino in The Sheik. Even if a band didn't have a singer, most fans could mouth the words. But this time, something strange happens. After that first verse, a voice cuts across the music: "Here is Mr. Churchill's latest song." The melody stays the same, but the words are unfamiliar. "I'm afraid of Germany/her planes are beating me./At night, when I should sleep,/into the Anderson I must creep./Although I'm England's leading man/I'm led to the cellar by ten./A leader in the cellar each night/that's the only damned way I can fight."

That was certainly not the way Ted Snyder, Harry B. Smith and Frances Wheeler wrote it, so jazz fans will rightly insist on some personnel details for this curious performance. The band included Riimis van den Broek, Helmuth Friedrich and Ferri Juza on horns, Franz Muck on piano and the Krupa-like Fritz "Freddy" Brocksieper on drums. The conductor of the orchestra was a man called Lutz Templin, but he'd ceded nominal control to the singer Charlie Schwedler. "The Sheik of Araby" was one side of the first record issued in late 1940 on the Klarinette & Mandoline imprint, soon to be familiar from its maroon label and K&M prefix. As those altered lyrics suggest, the artists--Charlie and His Orchestra--weren't merely German swing enthusiasts flouting their leaders' disapproval. They were government employees broadcasting to the enemy in the enemy's own language and in a musical form that their employers were nominally committed to stamping out. Though less well-known than the infamous Lord Haw-Haw (William Joyce) or Axis Sally (Mildred Gillars), who broadcast on behalf of the fascist regimes, they were an important part of the Reich's propaganda effort to smuggle a defeatist message into British and American homes.

The history of wartime jazz abounds with such ironies. That a form of music proscribed as "degenerate" should become an instrument of state policy seems more than a little perverse. Within weeks of Hitler's coming to power in March 1933, the new Nazi government's broadcasting authority announced the banishment of swing and hot music from the airwaves. Jazz had long been suspect and such a directive was inevitable, but in practice, it would be a further two years before Eugen Hadamovsky, the program director of RRG, could announce that "as of today, nigger jazz is finally switched off on the German radio." [Wasn't this just a programming decision? Jazz certainly was not banned from society; it continued to be performed in the German cinema, for example in films featuring Marika Rökk.]

There were no more consensuses in government circles about what defined jazz than there was in the jazz clubs and cellars of Berlin and Frankfurt, where such matters were debated as passionately as in New York or London. From an ideological point of view, jazz was "Judaeo-Negroid" music and thus complicit in the "shame of Versailles." From a Nazi point of view, defeat in the First World War was the result of Jewish treachery at home and led to still further racial defilement, most hurtfully symbolized by the presence of black French colonial troops in the occupied Rhineland. The distorted rhythms and "atonality" of jazz might originally have seemed an unconscious expression of "Negroid" sexuality, but they became--to Nazi ears--part of a new Jewish fifth column, a sinister conspiracy to undermine Aryan culture. [After elaborating this caricature, Morton tells us in the next paragraph that this really was not the consensus : it was the opinion of Rosenberg but not of Goebbels.]

The more extreme exponents of anti-Semitism and cultural nationalism like ideologue Alfred Rosenberg's Kampfbund fur Deutsche Kultur (Campaign for German Culture), would have happily cauterized cultural modernism and replaced it with a fey folk culture. To a degree, Hitler was of similar mind, but Hitler's views on music and art were inchoate and largely unconsidered, expressing personal knee jerks rather than a coherent aesthetic philosophy. Much more significant to this story was the more thoughtful and sophisticated approach of his propaganda minister Josef Goebbels. Whatever else he might have been, Goebbels was a man of some culture and viscerally opposed to the populist strain that ran through the lower ranks of the Nazi Party. He was also profoundly convinced that the radio loudspeaker was the key instrument in the struggle to maintain national unity and resistance to the forces of "Bolshevism" (a term almost as amorphous and cloudy as "jazz").

The piano-playing, widely read Goebbels saw an urgent need to maintain a certain level of sophistication in German broadcasting. There was no such consensus within his ministry. His deputy Hans Hinkel would have sanctioned nothing but "good German music," which usually meant ersatz folk songs and oompah bands. Surprisingly, given his somewhat exaggerated enthusiasm for Wagner and Bruckner (light operetta was probably more his speed), Hitler took a generally pragmatic view and in summer 1942, according to transcriptions of his table talk, was suggesting that propaganda broadcasts directed at Britain and America should contain a proportion of musical material that would appeal to such audiences. This was the policy that would prevail and would lead to the formation of Charlie and His Orchestra.

However ironic the story of wartime swing might seem, it is also full of gaps and occlusions. Jazz fans are as addicted to gaps in information as to the known details, and there is a perverse appeal in the Proper set's fragmentary discographies and obscure personnel’s. The man chosen to lead the propaganda orchestra, saxophonist and violinist Lutz Templin, was not a card-carrying Nazi and seemed to have no strong political convictions. He had no strong musical ideology either. There is a certain mythology that Templin played hot music. Indeed, it's probably safer to talk about German swing than German jazz, since there was little hot playing to be heard until the bebop revolution swept in at the end of the war and young men like the Mangelsdorff brothers in Frankfurt, Albert and Emil, began to construct a new German jazz inspired by the most advanced American models. For the propaganda swingers of the war years Paul Whiteman's much-derided but hugely successful symphonic jazz was regarded as the acme of taste.

Five years ago, I spoke to a few surviving musicians of the period, for a BBC documentary series on wartime and propaganda swing. None remembered Lutz Templin as anything other than a competent player and leader, and this is borne out by the cuts on Swing Tanzen Verboten; they're competent, but mechanical and rather soulless, and there is certainly no sign that any of these players ached to fire off a hot solo. A few of those I spoke with remembered or had heard of Charlie Schwedler as a smooth opportunist, happy to lend his light voice and unctuous personality to whatever message was required of him. [You didn't really expect a fair assessment from a post-war writer, did you?] Only drummer Freddie Brocksieper commanded anything like admiration. One elderly man, who'd played clarinet in a wartime orchestra in Hanover, and who declined to be named on air, said that Freddy was a finer musician than any of the Americans and the only one who had any real understanding of hot jazz. Musicianship, though, was secondary to a political message, and whatever their private instincts, these players must have been relieved to be not just surviving the war but seemingly contributing to the effort in a relatively risk-free capacity.

RRG's "Political Cabaret" began broadcasting on shortwave to the United States early in 1940. Schwedler was, it seems, an occasional contributor, but it was later in the year before Charlie and His Orchestra was properly convened and began to issue those K&M discs that now represent the ambiguous legacy of wartime propaganda swing. Propaganda music had been made and broadcast since the early days of the so-called Phony War. The first listed by Bergmeier and Lotz is a sourly anti-Semitic reworking of the old Protestant hymn "Onward, Christian Soldiers," recorded on October 11, 1939, by one Erhard Bauschke and his orchestra. The sentiments are generic and predictable; the rhyming is, by comparison with what followed, fairly sophisticated: "Onward conscript army, /marching on to war, /fight and die for Jewry, /as we did before." Later on, the propaganda lyricists had to adapt to events as quickly as possible. The Gershwins' "They All Laughed" provided a useful template, especially in the dark days after Dunkirk when it was thought the British might be intimidated into defeatism. "They all laughed at Germany and its leader/when he said that Germany will rise/...They all laughed at Germany wanting colonies/said, she was reaching for the moon!/Now it's a joke to deny German victory/wise guys have to change their tunes." George was already dead by this time, but Ira, the lyricist, must have been turning uncomfortably in his sleep as lines like these went out over the airwaves.

Just as "St. Louis Blues" was translated as "La Tristesse de Saint Louis" in occupied France to keep the suspect title from the ears of Wehrmacht soldiers, so the W.C. Handy song was also turned into a propaganda vehicle, introduced by Charlie as the lament of a Negro working on the London docks during the blackout. "I hate to see the evenin' sun go down/'cause the German, he done bombed this town." The revisions, here and elsewhere in Charlie's repertoire hardly constitute deathless blues poetry, but they survive in a curiously subversive relation to the original. Just as jazz musicians understood the power of transforming a light and simple song into something dark and resonant--John Coltrane's reworking of "My Favorite Things" would be a good example--so the very familiarity of these songs increased their propaganda value; given that British and American audiences could hum the melody, how long would it be before they treacherously sang the new words as well? It is as unwise to underestimate as it is difficult to quantify the impact on listeners--and, as Goebbels hoped, sophisticated listeners--in the Allied countries.

The success of the German propaganda effort can only be judged in the context of ultimate defeat, but it is clear that during the war Goebbels and his more responsive officials found a way of harnessing modern technology with the most flexible and responsive form in popular music and creating a propaganda weapon of considerable power. Some "black" stations, like Radio Arnhem, were conceived with such skill that Allied troops and even some of their intelligence officers were convinced that they were listening to the real thing. The supply of English-speaking Nazi sympathizers willing to broadcast on behalf of the Axis was never large. For all the publicity given to "Lord Haw-Haw" and to Ezra Pound, for his insane ramblings [more of Morton's objectivity!] on behalf of Mussolini, they were exceptions. Music proved to be a more potent and a more insidious propaganda device.

Listening to the tunes on Swing Tanzen Verboten is a fairly dispiriting business. Nothing here merits a second listen on purely musical grounds [Morton would die rather than admit that this is good music], and yet these strange survivals offer important historical insights. To repeat, it has been casually accepted that the Nazis and the Soviets "banned" jazz. Neither is more than hypothetically true. But while it's long been understood that the Soviet authorities made a distinction between jazz as the spontaneous expression of a beleaguered proletariat and jazz as a bourgeois affectation, a similar finessing hasn't until recently been applied to the situation in Nazi Germany. The survival of jazz under the Third Reich is a curious story of oversight and tacit tolerance.

The experience of Django Reinhardt remains the best clue to the reality. The same regime that first attempted to expunge the new Germany of the taint of jazz also kept many of the country's swing musicians in employment. The idea of Goebbels as a jazz fan is fantastic nonsense, the kind of thing Mel Brooks or Woody Allen might turn into a screenplay, but Goebbels understood the semantics of jazz, its ambiguous resonance of both servitude and freedom, better than most of his colleagues. Jazz, we have been told in film after film and novel after novel is the quintessential music of resistance and rebellion. In Josef Skvorecky's fantasy The Bass Saxophone a single note from that improbable instrument is a clarion of freedom. But this is an unduly sentimental picture. Jazz is an existential form. It changes and adapts to circumstance and it takes on unexpected colorations, not just black and blue.

This article appeared in the 15 September 2003 issue of The Nation.

Marika Rökk "Ach, ich hab ja so viel Rhythmus" - YouTube

Marika Rökk "Ach, ich hab ja so viel Rhythmus" - YouTube
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Marika Rökk "Finale" - YouTube

Marika Rökk "Finale" - YouTube
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Marika Rökk "Finale" - YouTube

Marika Rökk "Finale" - YouTube
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Marika RÖKK "Schlangentanz" - YouTube

Marika RÖKK "Schlangentanz" - YouTube
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Ilse Werner-Wir machen Musik - YouTube

Ilse Werner-Wir machen Musik - YouTube
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Ich brauche keine Millionen (Musik, Musik, Musik) - YouTube

Ich brauche keine Millionen (Musik, Musik, Musik) - YouTube
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So yeah, w/e; you fucking moron.