{"title":"Michael H Kater","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"twisted-muse-book-michael-h-kater-9780195132427","title":"The Twisted Muse","description":"Is music removed from politics? To what ends, beneficent or malevolent, can music and musicians be put? In short, when human rights are grossly abused and politics turned to fascist demagoguery, can art and artists be innocent?  These questions and their implications are explored in Michael Kater's broad survey of musicians and the music they composed and performed during the Third Reich. Great and small--from Valentin Grimm, a struggling clarinetist, to Richard Strauss, renowned composer--are examined by Kater, sometimes in intimate detail, and the lives and decisions of Nazi Germany's professional musicians are laid out before the reader.  Kater tackles the issue of whether the Nazi regime, because it held music in crassly utilitarian regard, acted on musicians in such a way as to consolidate or atomize the profession. Kater's examination of the value of music for the regime and the degree to which the regime attained a positive propaganda and palliative effect through the manner in which it manipulated its musicians, and by extension, German music, is of importance for understanding culture in totalitarian systems.  This work, with its emphasis on the social and political nature of music and the political attitude of musicians during the Nazi regime, will be the first of its kind. It will be of interest to scholars and general readers eager to understand Nazi Germany, to music lovers, and to anyone interested in the interchange of music and politics, culture and ideology.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49559222747409,"sku":"GOR003005972","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49683968393489,"sku":"GOR011889757","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50761586409745,"sku":"CIN0195132424G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52135269761297,"sku":"NLS9780195132427","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52490863018257,"sku":"GOR013145969","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0195132424.jpg?v=1751258756"},{"product_id":"culture-in-nazi-germany-book-michael-h-kater-9780300253375","title":"Culture in Nazi Germany","description":"A fresh and insightful history of how the German arts-and-letters scene was transformed under the Nazis   Culture was integral to the smooth running of the Third Reich. In the years preceding WWII, a wide variety of artistic forms were used to instill a Nazi ideology in the German people and to manipulate the public perception of Hitler’s enemies. During the war, the arts were closely tied to the propaganda machine that promoted the cause of Germany’s military campaigns.     Michael H. Kater’s engaging and deeply researched account of artistic culture within Nazi Germany considers how the German arts-and-letters scene was transformed when the Nazis came to power. With a broad purview that ranges widely across music, literature, film, theater, the press, and visual arts, Kater details the struggle between creative autonomy and political control as he looks at what became of German artists and their work both during and subsequent to Nazi rule.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49736021410065,"sku":"NGR9780300253375","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0300253370.jpg?v=1751356470"},{"product_id":"after-the-nazis-book-michael-h-kater-9780300259247","title":"After the Nazis","description":"A wide-ranging, insightful history of culture in West Germanyfrom literature, film, and music to theater and the visual arts","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49744857596177,"sku":"NGR9780300259247","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51243725029649,"sku":"NIN9780300259247","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ LIKE_NEW \/ SBYB","offer_id":52879781429521,"sku":"CIN0300259247LN","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0300259247.jpg?v=1751070929"},{"product_id":"weimar-book-michael-h-kater-9780300170566","title":"Weimar","description":"Historian Michael H. Kater chronicles the rise and fall of one of Germany’s most iconic cities in this fascinating and surprisingly provocative history of Weimar. Weimar was a center of the arts during the Enlightenment and hence the cradle of German culture in modern times. Goethe and Schiller made their reputations here, as did Franz Liszt and the young Richard Strauss. In the early twentieth century, the Bauhaus school was founded in Weimar. But from the 1880s on, the city also nurtured a powerful right-wing reactionary movement, and fifty years later, a repressive National Socialist regime dimmed Weimar’s creative lights, transforming the onetime artists’ utopia into the capital of its first Nazified province and constructing the Buchenwald death camp on its doorstep. \t  \tKater’s richly detailed volume offers the first complete history of Weimar in any language, from its meteoric eighteenth-century rise up from obscurity through its glory days of unbridled creative expression to its dark descent back into artistic insignificance under Nazi rule and, later, Soviet occupation and beyond.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49921172144401,"sku":"GOR007225232","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51869282304273,"sku":"GOR012796204","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53263737684241,"sku":"CIN0300170564G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0300170564.jpg?v=1751038141"},{"product_id":"different-drummers-book-michael-h-kater-9780195165531","title":"Different Drummers","description":"When the African-American dancer Josephine Baker visited Berlin in 1925, she found it dazzling. \"The city had a jewel-like sparkle,\" she said, \"the vast cafés reminded me of ocean liners powered by the rhythms of their orchestras. There was music everywhere.\" Eager to look ahead after the crushing defeat of World War I, Weimar Germany embraced the modernism that swept through Europe and was crazy over jazz. But with the rise of National Socialism came censorship and proscription: an art form born on foreign soil and presided over by Negroes and Jews could have no place in the culture of a \"master race.\"  In Different Drummers, Michael Kater--a distinguished historian and himself a jazz musician--explores the underground history of jazz in Hitler's Germany. He offers a frightening and fascinating look at life and popular culture during the Third Reich, showing that for the Nazis, jazz was an especially threatening form of expression. Not only were its creators at the very bottom of the Nazi racial hierarchy, but the very essence of jazz--spontaneity, improvisation, and, above all, individuality--represented a direct challenge to the repetitive, simple, uniform pulse of German march music and indeed everyday life. The fact that many of the most talented European jazz artists were Jewish only made the music more objectionable.   In tracing the growth of what would become a bold and eloquent form of social protest, Kater mines a trove of previously untapped archival records and assembles interviews with surviving witnesses as he brings to life a little-known aspect of wartime Germany. He introduces us to groups such as the Weintraub Syncopators, Germany's best indigenous jazz band; the Harlem Club of Frankfurt, whose male members wore their hair long in defiance of Nazi conventions; and the Hamburg Swings--the most daring radicals of all--who openly challenged the Gestapo with a series of mass dance rallies. More than once these demonstrations turned violent, with the Swings and the Hitler Youth fighting it out in the streets. In the end we come to realize that jazz not only survived persecution, but became a powerful symbol of political disobedience--and even resistance--in wartime Germany. And as we witness the vacillations of the Nazi regime (while they worked toward its ultimate extinction, they used jazz for their own propaganda purposes), we see that the myth of Nazi social control was, to a large degree, just that--Hitler's dictatorship never became as pure and effective a form of totalitarianism as we are sometimes led to believe.  With its vivid portraits of all the key figures, Different Drummers provides a unique glimpse of a counter-culture virtually unexamined until now. It is a provocative account that reminds us that, even in the face of the most unspeakable oppression, the human spirit endures.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346220355857,"sku":"CIN0195165535G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52145140334865,"sku":"NLS9780195165531","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0195165535.jpg?v=1750693619"},{"product_id":"culture-in-nazi-germany-book-michael-h-kater-9780300211412","title":"Culture in Nazi Germany","description":"A fresh and insightful history of how the German arts-and-letters scene was transformed under the Nazis     Culture was integral to the smooth running of the Third Reich. In the years preceding WWII, a wide variety of artistic forms were used to instill a Nazi ideology in the German people and to manipulate the public perception of Hitler’s enemies. During the war, the arts were closely tied to the propaganda machine that promoted the cause of Germany’s military campaigns.     Michael H. Kater’s engaging and deeply researched account of artistic culture within Nazi Germany considers how the German arts-and-letters scene was transformed when the Nazis came to power. With a broad purview that ranges widely across music, literature, film, theater, the press, and visual arts, Kater details the struggle between creative autonomy and political control as he looks at what became of German artists and their work both during and subsequent to Nazi rule.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346740154641,"sku":"CIN0300211414VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0300211414.jpg?v=1751038174"},{"product_id":"hitler-youth-book-michael-h-kater-9780674019911","title":"Hitler Youth","description":"In modern times, the recruitment of children into a political organization and ideology reached its boldest embodiment in the Hitler Youth, founded in 1933 soon after the Nazi Party assumed power in Germany. Determining that by age ten children's minds could be turned from play to politics, the regime inducted nearly all German juveniles between the ages of ten and eighteen into its state-run organization. The result was a potent tool for bending young minds and hearts to the will of Adolf Hitler.  Baldur von Schirach headed a strict chain of command whose goal was to shift the adolescents' sense of obedience from home and school to the racially defined Volk and the Third Reich. Luring boys and girls into Hitler Youth ranks by offering them status, uniforms, and weekend hikes, the Nazis turned campgrounds into premilitary training sites, air guns into machine guns, sing-alongs into marching drills, instruction into indoctrination, and children into Nazis. A few resisted for personal or political reasons, but the overwhelming majority enlisted.  Drawing on original reports, letters, diaries, and memoirs, Kater traces the history of the Hitler Youth, examining the means, degree, and impact of conversion, and the subsequent fate of young recruits. Millions of Hitler Youth joined the armed forces; thousands gleefully participated in the subjugation of foreign peoples and the obliteration of \"racial aliens.\" Although young, they committed crimes against humanity for which they cannot escape judgment. Their story stands as a harsh reminder of the moral bankruptcy of regimes that make children complicit in crimes of the state.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50361113575697,"sku":"CIN0674019911G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51322236829969,"sku":"CIN0674019911VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0674019911.jpg?v=1750816065"},{"product_id":"different-drummers-book-michael-h-kater-9780195050097","title":"Different Drummers","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50496136610065,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50496138182929,"sku":"CIN0195050096G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0195050096.jpg?v=1750779823"},{"product_id":"doctors-under-hitler-book-michael-h-kater-9780807848586","title":"Doctors Under Hitler","description":"In this history of medicine and the medical profession in the Third Reich, the author examines the career patterns, educational training, professional organization, and political socialization of German physicians under Hitler. His discussion ranges widely, from doctors who participated in Nazi atocities, to those who actively resisted the regime's perversion of healing, to the vast majority whose ideology and behaviour fell somewhere between the two extremes. He also takes a chilling look at the post-Hitler medical establishment's problematic relationship to the Nazi past.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51007857492241,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007860474129,"sku":"NIN9780807848586","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52407217979665,"sku":"NLS9780807848586","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0807848581.jpg?v=1763120099"},{"product_id":"ahnenerbe-der-ss-1935-1945-book-michael-h-kater-9783486579505","title":"Das Ahnenerbe der SS 1935-1945","description":"Standardwerk der NS-Forschung: Die Schutzstaffel Heinrich Himmlers entfaltete während des Dritten Reiches höchste Aktivität, und das nicht nur als Agent totalitärer Machtvollstreckung. Kater zeigt, dass die SS den ernsthaften Versuch einer Infiltration des deutschen Kultur- und Geisteslebens unternommen hat, aus Motiven, die nicht zuletzt in der bizarren Persönlichkeit Himmlers selbst beschlossen liegen. Himmlers SS-Forschungsamt \"Ahnenerbe\" entwickelte sich, über den Umweg anfangs noch harmlos anmutender geisteswissenschaftlicher Projekte, zu einem der gefährlichsten Instrumente nationalsozialistischer Kulturpolitik. Dennoch vermochte sich das \"Ahnenerbe\" nie zur obersten Kulturbehörde des Dritten Reiches, nicht einmal der SS, auszuwachsen. In einem Prozess der institutionellen Selbstvernichtung, der sich innerhalb der Schutzstaffel vollzog, wurde es sogar fast zerrieben. Der Verfasser charakterisiert die SS nicht als monolithisches Gebilde, sondern als \"Spielfeld parasitärer Kräfte, die im Neben- und Gegeneinander wirkten\". Er reiht sich damit in die Gruppe jener Historiker ein, die den Führer-Staat Hitlers als Ausdruck eines auf allen Ebenen wuchernden Machtpluralismus interpretieren und nicht als eine zielbewusst gelenkte, allzeit geschlossene Monokratie. Pressestimmen zur 1. Auflage: \"Kater hat mit seiner Untersuchung über Himmlers Kulturpolitik ein Standardwerk der NS-Forschung vorgelegt.\" FAZ vom 24.5.1974 \"Michael H. Kater hat eine vorzügliche Arbeit geleistet. Auch seine präzisen Personen- und Institutsbeschreibungen zeigen ein immenses Quellenstudium und die Übersicht bis ins kleinste Detail.\" SZ vom 12.\/13.7.1975\u003cbr\u003e Zur 3. Auflage: \"Der erneute Nachdruck vermittelt nicht nur eine bedeutsame Arbeit aus der Frühzeit der Erforschung des Nationalsozialismus als Dokument der wissenschaftlichen Entwicklung, sondern auch eine Darstellung, die unbeschadet des Fortschreitens unserer Erkenntnis ihren Wert behalten hat und durch den Einblick in eine frühe Forschungssituation zugleich die gegenwärtige kritisch zu mustern hilft.\" Heinz Hürten in: Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte 67,1 \/ 2004","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51062226223377,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51062229074193,"sku":"NIN9783486579505","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52407785390353,"sku":"NLS9783486579505","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/3486579509.jpg?v=1751284689"},{"product_id":"composers-of-the-nazi-era-book-michael-h-kater-9780195099249","title":"Composers of the Nazi Era","description":"How does creativity thrive in the face of fascism? How can a highly artistic individual function professionally in so threatening a climate?  The final book in a critically acclaimed trilogy that includes Different Drummers (OUP 1992) and The Twisted Muse (OUP 1997), this is a detailed study of the often interrelated careers of eight outstanding German composers who lived and worked amid the dictatorship of the Third Reich: Werner Egk, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Carl Orff, Hans Pfitzner, Arnold Schoenberg, and Richard Strauss. Noted historian Michael H. Kater weighs issues of accommodation and resistance to ask whether these artists corrupted themselves in the service of a criminal regime--and if so, whether this is evident in their music. He also considers the degrees to which the Nazis politically, socially, economically, and aesthetically succeeded in their treatment of these individuals, whose lives and compositions represent diverse responses to totalitarianism.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52346539311377,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52346539933969,"sku":"NLS9780195099249","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780195099249.jpg?v=1758176604"},{"product_id":"composers-of-the-nazi-era-book-michael-h-kater-9780195152869","title":"Composers of the Nazi Era","description":"How does creativity thrive in the face of fascism? How can a highly artistic individual function professionally in so threatening a climate?     Composers of the Nazi Era is the final book in a critically acclaimed trilogy that includes Different Drummers (OUP 1992) and The Twisted Muse (OUP 1997), which won the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize of the Canadian Historical Association. Here, historian Michael H. Kater provides a detailed study of the often interrelated careers of eight prominent German composers who lived and worked amid the dictatorship of the Third Reich, or were driven into exile by it: Werner Egk, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Carl Orff, Hans Pfitzner, Arnold Schoenberg, and Richard Strauss. Kater weighs issues of accommodation and resistance to ask whether these artists corrupted themselves in the service of a criminal regime - and if so, whether this may be discerned from their music. After chapters discussing the circumstances of each composer individually, Kater concludes with an analysis of the composers' different responses to the Nazi regime and an overview of the sociopolitical background against which they functioned. The final chapter also extends the discussion beyond the end of World War II to examine how the composers reacted to the new and fragile democracy in Germany.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52352892862737,"sku":"NLS9780195152869","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780195152869.jpg?v=1758182367"},{"product_id":"never-sang-for-hitler-book-michael-h-kater-9780521873925","title":"Never Sang for Hitler","description":"Lotte Lehmann ranks among the most celebrated singers of the twentieth century. She was a favorite of Richard Strauss, and over her lifetime became the friend of other famous men: Bruno Walter, Arturo Toscanini and Thomas Mann. She had a famous encounter with Hermann G ring, in which he claimed to want to make her the foremost singer in Nazi Germany. By the time of her final performance in 1951, she was considered one of the finest singing actresses of all time. Rather than a traditional biography, this book aims to be both a descriptive narrative of Lehmann's life and a critical analysis of the interconnections of the artist and society. Kater describes the varying phases of Lehmann's life, as well as the sociocultural settings in which she finds herself - whether in the Wilhemine Empire, First Austrian Republic, Nazi Germany, or the United States. Kater's use of Lehmann's personal and other papers reshapes much of what is known about her life and career.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52485437391121,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52485438439697,"sku":"NLS9780521873925","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780521873925.jpg?v=1759857709"},{"product_id":"never-sang-for-hitler-book-michael-h-kater-9781107675049","title":"Never Sang for Hitler","description":"Lotte Lehmann ranks among the most celebrated singers of the twentieth century. She was a favorite of Richard Strauss, and over her lifetime became the friend of other famous men: Bruno Walter, Arturo Toscanini and Thomas Mann. She had a famous encounter with Hermann G ring, in which he claimed to want to make her the foremost singer in Nazi Germany. By the time of her final performance in 1951, she was considered one of the finest singing actresses of all time. Rather than a traditional biography, this book aims to be both a descriptive narrative of Lehmann's life and a critical analysis of the interconnections of the artist and society. Kater describes the varying phases of Lehmann's life, as well as the sociocultural settings in which she finds herself - whether in the Wilhemine Empire, First Austrian Republic, Nazi Germany, or the United States. Kater's use of Lehmann's personal and other papers reshapes much of what is known about her life and career.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52667683406097,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52667684323601,"sku":"NLS9781107675049","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781107675049.jpg?v=1762283150"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-michael-h-kater.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}