Swing Youth: In Nazi Germany, jazz was an act of defiance
The Nazis denounced jazz music as "degenerate art," despite its widespread popularity in Germany. As the Nazis clamped down on expression, groups of jazz-loving teenagers
The Nazis denounced jazz music as "degenerate art," despite its widespread popularity in Germany. As the Nazis clamped down on expression, groups of jazz-loving teenagers formed the Swing Youth to rebel. The interwar Weimar Republic period is often referred to as a "Golden Age" of culture and creativity in Germany. It was a time when groundbreaking movements, from Bauhaus architecture and experimental cinema to avant-garde art and theater, flourished against the backdrop of economic catastrophe and extreme political polarization. In cities such as Berlin, where speakeasies, cabarets and hedonistic nightlife were the norm, a radical new genre of music became immensely popular. Jazz, which emerged from African American communities in the Deep South, was first brought to Germany by pioneering artists from the US, UK and France after World War I. Josephine Baker, the US-born dancer, actress and jazz artist who found fame in 1920s Paris, became a huge star in Germany after her sensational debut as the "Black Venus" in Berlin in 1926. By the 1930s, records by jazz icons such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington were being played all over Germany. Baker would become known for her civil rights activism in the US Image: Keystone Archives/HIP/picture-alliance But after the Nazis seized power in 1933, modern art forms like jazz came under extreme pressure. The white supremacist Nazis, who believed that Germanic peoples belonged to a superior "Aryan master race", sought to align German society through a process known as Gleichschaltung (synchronization). This was the process of Nazification through which all aspects of society from politics and law, into art, music and everyday life, were submerged into a totalitarian system of control.
The Reich Culture Chamber (Reichskulturkammer) placed music, arts, literature, theater, radio, film and the press under state supervision, allowing only artists belonging to Nazi-affiliated bodies to work. The Nazis produced touring exhibitions denouncing so-called 'degenerate' art and music, pictured here in Düsseldorf in 1938, and sought to link jazz with Jewish identity Image: TT/IMAGO In 1937 and 1938, the Nazis introduced the labels "degenerate art" ("entartete Kunst") and "degenerate music" ("entartete Musik") to persecute artists and artworks that did not conform to the Nazi ideal of art and beauty, or to the Nazis' racial worldview. By 1935, it was forbidden to broadcast jazz, which, with its Black American roots, the Nazis denounced as inferior. Many jazz promoters and musicians were also Jewish, and the Nazis spread antisemitic and racist propaganda about its origins, linking jazz with Jewish people. A racist caricature of a jazz musician wearing a Star of David appeared on a propaganda poster for the 1938 Nazi exhibition 'Entartete Musik' ('Degenerate Music') Image: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/IMAGO Individual artists were eventually banned, as was listening to foreign radio stations. However, jazz music was never completely outlawed by Nazis. Due to its widespread popularity, there were even attempts to create a more "Germanic" form of jazz music. Enter the Swing Youth (Swing-Jugend), which emerged as a counterculture movement among affluent teenagers in the northern city of Hamburg in 1939. The movement quickly spread to other cities like Berlin. Youth under Nazi rule: from repression to resistance German youth had been the target of Nazi propaganda since the 1920s.
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