A Pragmatist in the Hot Seat

The years in which the Berliner Festwochen began can be studied from a specific viewpoint which will be presented in this publication. On the basis of the festival programmes from the first three years, relevant professional journals, files from the Archiv der Künste, the Federal Archives, the State Archive in Hanover and other sources, the professional background, ideological views and artistic work of the Berliner Festwochen’s first Director, Gerhart von Westerman, will be examined and reviewed in connection with his involvement with Nazism. Continuities of personnel, organisation and content also lingered in the first programme of the Berliner Festwochen. In addition to the prominent director, this text will also focus on the festival’s programming and casting policy: how German or international was the programme intended to show the world that Germany had left behind the terrors of Nazism and the cultural impoverishment associated with them? To what extent did the programme fulfil the interests of the Western allies? Who was now invited after the destructive years of the Nazi regime and the exclusion of countless cultural creatives? And finally, who accepted this invitation and came to Berlin – and who rejected it?

Gerhart von Westerman (born in Riga in 1894, died in Berlin in 1963) was a qualified composer, manager and writer on music. The first director of the Berliner Festwochen (1951-1962) had already held leading positions in the cultural sector in the Weimar Republic and during the Nazi period. Westerman had been early to recognise the importance of radio to music. From 1925 he had held a leading position at Munich Radio, becoming deputy director from 1930 to 1933 and Head of Department from 1933 to 1935. From 1935 to 1939 he moved to the Berlin short wave radio station as Head of Transmission. He spent a few months working as director of the Reich Broadcaster in Saarbrücken but was brought back to Berlin that same year a successor to the fired Hans von Benda, who had been forced to give up his post as general music director following differences over an invitation to Herbert von Karajan. From 1939 to 1945, and again from 1952 to 1959, he ran the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra as artistic director and principal managing director. Conscious of power, he coveted the title of Director, though without success during the Nazi period, when Joseph Goebbels denied him this title in order to retain ultimate authority over the orchestra. Alongside his work managing the orchestra, from 1942 to 1945 von Westerman was also Group Leader for the programme category “Serious Music” on the radio. Von Westerman also sat on various committees that implemented state sanctioned Nazi cultural policy. He was a member of the preparatory panel at the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda that distributed money to composers. As an author, von Westerman published short texts in his early years and proved himself as an editor, while in the post-war years he briefly taught Music Theory at the Conservatoire for Music in Oldenburg and compiled the widely circulated reference works Knaur’s Concert Guide (1951) and Knaur’s Opera Guide (1952).

Gerhart von Westerman joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) as early as May 1933 (membership number 1726871).[ 1] A series of portraits from German Radio shows him wearing a party badge on his lapel in 1942, as does an identity card photo from the Federal Archives that is presumed to be earlier. The date of entry to the NSDAP is viewed by scholars as an indication of how committed members were at the time they joined. As a rule, historians distinguish between committed Nazis, who entered the party from 1920 onwards, the opportunists who joined up in 1933 and those who joined the party in 1937 to benefit their careers. Whether von Westerman was an “inactive member”, who only paid the membership fee to benefit professionally, is essentially irrelevant as his party membership was certainly of considerable professional use to him: it proved his political allegiance and allowed him to negotiate at the highest level. However, his party membership did not make him completely untouchable: in May 1940 he had to defend himself before the party against allegations that he had “same-sex relations with his party comrade Jacob Meyer.”[ 2]

Gerhart von Westerman was born a Baltic German and did not acquire German citizenship until 1928. Patriotic and following the party line, when requested he presented numerous items of evidence in support of his underlying Nationalist views. According to these, after the German 8th army captured the city of Riga in 1917, he joined the German police service at the age of 23. In addition, he was also an established expert on German culture.  However, this was not sufficient for the Nazi authorities: to become a member of the Reich Chamber of Culture (RKK) he was obliged to produce an “Aryan certificate” in accordance with the rules. On a form for the Reich Radio Company (RRG) he mentions “a picture of the Führer,” which he received as a gift in 1935 to mark his 10 years of service. He was exempted from military service due to his work for the orchestra. Nevertheless in 1944 he was awarded the War Merit Cross 2nd Class for his work as a Group Leader with the Radio service.[ 3] There is one astonishing piece of information in his application file to work with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra from 31 May 1939. Here, in addition to his party membership, he is also named as a “contributing member of the SS.” As such he would have supported the SS financially without taking part in active service. The “party statistical survey” from 1939 also provides details of Gerhart von Westerman’s membership of four political organisations: the German Labour Front, National Socialist People’s Welfare, the Colonial League and the Reich Chamber of Culture.[ 4] This shows that von Westerman was not a blank page or “inactive member.”  

The importance of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra as a propaganda instrument for the Nazi regime should not be underestimated. The financially independent limited company received state subsidy from 1933 in return for serving as the “Reich orchestra” and using German music to strengthen the soul of the people. The Berliner Philharmoniker became a symbol of national culture. And they benefitted from many privileges: henceforth the musicians would be paid according to a special tariff, some of them received loans of valuable musical instruments from the Ministry of Propaganda, many concert tours took place in trains belonging to the Wehrmacht and the musicians, along with  Gerhart von Westerman, received “indispensable” status (“U.K.”) which exempted them from any form of military service. 

Von Westerman’s work included not only artistic but above all organisational responsibilities at the heart of Nazi cultural policy. He was tasked with planning the Philharmonic’s concerts, fulfilling their obligatory performances and other command concerts, for example as part of an NSDAP celebration of Hitler’s birthday on 19 April 1942, which took place following the congratulatory speech by Joseph Goebbels. They played Beethoven’s 9th Symphony complete with its final chorus, the “Ode to Joy”.  Von Westerman also managed the orchestra’s relationship with the Reich leadership, the Reich Chamber of Music, the Berlin Concert Association, the Nazi “Strength Through Joy” organisation, the Reich Propaganda Ministry and other bodies within the state and party apparatus.  

In “The Reich’s Orchestra”, Canadian author Misha Aster describes the orchestra’s relationship with the Third Reich as “symbiotic,” a “relationship of mutual dependence and support.” As a professional manager and effectively its director, von Westerman mediated between the orchestra and the Nazi bureaucracy. In common with the other members of the orchestra he had become a servant of the state, albeit with one elementary difference: through his party membership von Westerman demonstrated that he conformed with the system, which may have been appropriate for his position, but within the orchestra this placed him in a minority. Of the 101 members of the orchestra, only twenty per cent joined the NSDAP.
Only four Jewish musicians belonged to the ensemble: the concert master Szymon Goldberg, the first violin Gilbert Back and the two cello soloists Nicolai Graudan and Joseph Schuster, all of whom emigrated from Germany between 1934 and 1935. Two more musicians who were married to Jews were tolerated despite the “Aryan paragraph”: the clarinettist Ernst Fischer and the violinist Bruno Stenzel. This is notable above all because in the musical world, which was treated as an expression of the so-called German soul, the race laws were adhered to with particular care and special permission had to be approved for musicians to be retained.  

The Philharmonic’s music programme was determined by the party: the Reich Chamber of Music (RMK), one of the departments of the RKK, was the central institution for supervising the music programme. Membership of the RMK was compulsory and a requirement to be able to practise a profession in the field of music.  One of the RMK’s principal tasks was to issue professional bans to Jewish musicians.  From 1935 onwards, “quarter Jews” and their spouses were excluded from the Reich Chamber of Culture and from 1938 onwards they were forbidden from attending German cultural events of any kind. The Reich Office of Music in the Ministry of Propaganda decided which music was permitted and which had to disappear. The basis for this was provided by the “Directive on Undesirable and Harmful Music” issued in December 1937, followed by a first list of forbidden music in the “Official Communiqués of the Reich Chamber of Music” in September 1938. Commissioned by the party and complied with the help of numerous informers, the Encyclopaedia of Jews in Music was published in 1940.[ 5] The music programme of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra observed these developments and the requirements they imposed by removing Jewish composers and music that did not conform to the system from the repertoire. The works of Mendelssohn, Mahler, Schönberg and many others were forbidden, so that more than half the pieces performed in 1938/39 were by just six composers: Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Haydn, Mozart and Richard Strauss.

During the post-war period, however, von Westerman campaigned strongly against the political exploitation of the orchestra. In advance of the Berliner Philharmoniker’s upcoming concert tour of the USA he advocated strongly for the supposedly apolitical nature of music. The concert programmes for the total of 26 performances comprised a repertoire of 20 composers. The programme included works by Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Haydn, Mozart and Richard Strauss, along with those of Handel, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Berlioz, Boris Blacher and Samuel Barber. He was entirely aware that the US concert tour was politically controversial. In an interview with the New York Times in 1955, he tried to smooth the waters in advance: “It is possible there will be no objections to us. If there are, we hope we can win over the objectors through our music. We must prove that music has nothing to do with politics.”[ 6]

Herbert von Karajan conducted the Berliner Philharmoniker as the successor to Wilhelm Furtwängler, who had died shortly beforehand. Both careers had taken a sharp upward trajectory in the Nazi period, and they were definitely perceived as representatives of Nazi cultural policy. The concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall was accompanied by dramatic demonstrations, directed against von Karajan and von Westerman in particular, who personified the hated Germany of the Nazi period. The Citizen’s Committee of 100 called for a boycott, and the event was picketed by Brit Trumpeldor, an anti-fascist, anti-communist Zionist movement who chanted “Nazis go home.” One leaflet called out von Westerman and von Karajan as “musical dictators of the Hitler regime.”[ 7] Placards read: “More good music without good Nazis”, “No harmony with Nazis”, “Protest Hitler’s pet conductor”, “A new tune while gas chambers fume”, “Put Nazis in jail not in concert halls” and “Remember six million Jews”. Some sixty policemen held the two hundred demonstrators in check.  

Von Karajan did not attend the press conference that followed, but von Westerman provided some details about his own and von Karajan’s membership of the NSDAP. He himself had never attended any political meeting of the NSDAP and used his membership purely to be able to keep his job as manager of the orchestra. He denied that von Karajan had been an early member of the NSDAP in 1933 – he had not joined the party until 1935 when he was general music director in Aachen.[ 8]

That same day two musicians from the orchestra endorsed von Westerman’s integrity: Bruno Stenzel and Ernst Fischer highlighted his support for them and their Jewish families during the Nazi period. According to Stenzel, von Westerman not only shielded them from persecution, he also tacitly left him on the payroll, even though Stenzel was no longer allowed to work as a musician. 

The purges by the Nazis did not exclude radio stations. Ten out of the eleven directors of broadcasters were forced to leave their posts against their will, at some stations up to 15 per cent of the staff were dismissed or banned from further employment. Their places were taken by party members loyal to the system.[ 9] In the course of the 1933 realignment, the organisation and ideology of all cultural activities was united and standardised. Goebbels controlled radio through the radio department of his ministry and took a personal influence on the content and form of broadcasts. He consistently emphasised the key importance of radio in quickly and directly manipulating the population. In 1934 the “Radio Hour” became the “Reich Broadcaster Berlin”, while the last editorial freedoms disappeared in June 1940 with the introduction of a united National Socialist programme that continued to be broadcast until the end of the war in May 1945.[ 10]

Though he did not hold a prominent position, Gerhart von Westerman did participate in the propaganda machine of the Nazi culture industry in his role as deputy radio director. At Bayerische Rundfunk he was promoted following the “purge” of 1933 to be given sole charge of the Music Department.[ 11] The timing corresponds with his entry to the party in May 1933. This is worth noting because Gerhart von Westerman was not considered as the successor to the then Director Kurt von Boeckmann and his Deputy in Charge of Programming, because according to a memo to Goebbels from the National Socialist Factory Cell Organisation (NSBO), he was considered “ripe for demotion.”[ 12] This was followed by an (involuntary) career change and employment with the Berlin Short Wave Station and as director of the out-of-the-way Reich broadcaster in Saarbrücken.

A series of photos from the German Radio Archives, dated 1942, shows “Group Leader Gerhart von Westermann” with a party badge in his buttonhole at work, in an armchair, at a desk, in the directing suite – his pose appears focussed, with a touch of genius, aware of his power. Within the Programme Directorate of Greater German Radio, he was now entrusted with running the music department for the “German Hour” and the category of “more difficult, lesser-known classical music.” And although the so-called subsidiary broadcasters had little scope for creating independent programming, the music broadcasts for which von Westerman was responsible contributed to entertaining and distracting the German public. He did after all receive the War Merit Cross 2nd Class for his important work as Group Leader together with a handsome annual salary of 15,000 RM, which according to the information on his denazification application was almost as high as his pay as orchestra manager of 18.000 RM.

During the war German Radio broadcast many concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and with the almost macabre-sounding series “Undying Music” created a weekly programme until 1945, which von Westerman was responsible for planning. In collaboration with the Ministry of Propaganda, the Reich Radio Company and the Reich Chamber of Music, with this series he launched an “ideological connection between the trials of the war and the triumph of German culture.”[ 13] Von Westerman tailored the programming to the rules of Nazi policy by keeping it free from Jewish and “culturally bolshevist elements.” In place of the “degenerate” or “Jewish-dominated” music business there now stood one that was “Aryan”, German through and through. Everything that was “un-German” was eliminated, even though there was no general consensus on what could be understood as “German” music beyond its geographical origin. 

Misha Aster describes von Westerman’s attitude in fulfilling the requirements of his position as his “blind spot.” While maintaining the restrictive rules, von Westerman saw his job primarily to be to create a programme of artistic quality and preferred to ignore other aspects – as his correspondence shows. He considered neither the activities of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra during the Nazi period nor the political, ideological, educational and entertainment objectives of the series “Undying Music” to be propaganda or in support of the state or fundamentally misguided. Along with Furtwängler, he merely complained about opportunities for quality programming being restricted in 1944; “Meanwhile, I very much appreciate your dilemma regarding ‘Undying Music’. It really is no small matter to put together a programme of the highest quality every week. I fear, however, that it will not be possible to maintain this permanently without repeats and other concessions. The repertoire – not to mention the artists – is limited.”[ 14]

The political usefulness of von Westerman’s radio series Undying Music (1942-1945) is obvious. Furthermore, as a musicologist he contributed to the idolisation of German music and its creators – by asking what could be specified as German and excluding everything non-German, he aligned himself with Nazi race theory in the field of music.[ 15] His belief in German music was in harmony with Goebbels’ propaganda. As this notion of the superiority of German music essentially coincided with his views, he used the relevant nationalist and chauvinist phrases from the language of the Third Reich to legitimise his professional activities, such as the orchestra’s foreign tours made possible by generous state subsidies: “That German music is renowned the world over is beyond dispute. This widely acknowledged superiority in such a significant cultural field is due primarily to the importance of classical German music. It is an established phenomenon that the decisive development of art music as we recognise it in classical music was almost exclusively the preserve of the German mind.”[ 16]

Like most Germans, Gerhart von Westerman removed himself from the list of NSDAP party members immediately after the war ended. Westerman mentions this in a letter to the district superintendent of police, Herr Schaul, asking him to rehabilitate himself and his brother, Herbert von Westerman, as quickly as possible.[ 17] In the first years after the war, he remained in Oldenburg before returning to Berlin. In the centre of this idyllic small town, he compiled the popular reference works Knaur’s Concert Guide and Knaur’s Opera Guide, which became bestsellers. Revised several times and with forewords by prominent musicians, these compendia are not exhaustive, but they can be viewed as an attempt to present a more unprejudiced view of music after the history of censorship and denunciations in music under the Nazis. However, a great deal more time would pass before the music proscribed by the Nazis and the musicians who were ostracised and persecuted found their way back into the musical world. 

Von Westerman was issued with a certificate of denazification by the British allied forces in Hanover in April 1949. The British denazification process was less extensive than that conducted by the US forces. The denazification form demanded compulsory details under point C regarding membership of ten Nazi organisations. As well as the NSDAP, these included the SS, the SA and the Gestapo. Gerhart von Westerman duly provided information about his party membership. Details of the membership of more than forty more Nazi-supporting societies, associations and organisations, in five of which he held memberships (contributing member of the SS, Reich Chamber of Culture, German Labour Front, National Socialist People’s Welfare and the Colonial League) only had to be provided by those who had held official posts in them. The exculpatory witness statements and declarations on oath were provided by Otto Freundorfer, a former employee at German radio, the fellow composers Hans Knappertsbusch and Rudolf Siegel and by the qualified engineer and “half caste” Erwin Kretzer, who attested that von Westerman held “antifascist convictions” as early as 8 June 1945. His support for the two Jewish musicians from the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra is not mentioned.  

Little notice was taken in the denazification process that Gerhart von Westerman had served the Nazi cause as a musical specialist on numerous occasions: “His work for the radio was confined to music and unpolitical in nature.”[ 18] He was ultimately classified in category V as “exonerated”, in other words, as a person who had been able to prove before a hearing that they were not guilty. Any NSDAP member who had joined the party before 1 May 1937 required convincing arguments and witness statements to obtain the highly desired “Persil certificate” and not to be classified as an offender, minor offender or follower. The Special Branch recommended those classified in category V for continued employment or even recruitment on the basis of evidence of opposition activities. 

From what we know now, it can be said that Gerhart von Wes¬terman was probably not a fanatical Nazi. He was primarily concerned with furthering his own artistic ambitions. The “skilfully balanced” concert programme of a colleague five years after the end of the war succeeded in his view primarily because “even the most narrow-minded traditionalists will probably swallow it without noticing what has been put in front of them.”[ 19] However, he was not entirely confident about the denazification process and its ruling on his activities after all, as one year after he had received his denazification certificate he was of the belief that insufficient time had passed since his employment during the Nazi period. Despite Furtwängler’s insistence he was unable to agree to take over his old post in Berlin: “Berlin is too much of a hot seat for me.”[ 20]

It is no secret that in West German society coming to terms with the past of the Nazi era did not happen after the war, but only essentially began in the 1960s. Political cleansing in the form of the denazification process, run by the Western allies, was only partially successful – very many offenders and followers were rehabilitated all too quickly. The Nazi activities of citizens who were presumed blameless continue to come to light to this day: in 2019 for example, “Die Zeit” raised serious accusations against Alfred Bauer, the first Director of the Berlinale, whose activities as a high-ranking functionary of the Nazi cultural bureaucracy had until then remained unknown.[ 21] As a member of the NSDAP and the SA, Bauer worked in the film industry for UFA. From 1942 to 1945, he was adviser to the Reich Film Directorate and acted in that field as the extended arm of Joseph Goebbels. After the war Bauer described himself as “internally resistant” and cast a veil over his role in the Nazi film industry. Instead, he skilfully represented the interests of the Senate and the allies, and his expertise and contacts were helpful in putting the new film festival on its feet. The great success of the first Berlinale then helped him to retain his position for many years.  

After the Second World War, Gerhart von Westerman profited from his seemingly aristocratic manner, his evident skills as a manager and the ability to speak several languages (German, Russian, English, French and Italian). Directly after the end of the war, Berlin was under Soviet occupation. Von Westerman handled negotiations on behalf of the orchestra and mediated – as he had previously done with the Nazis – with the Soviet occupying forces in Russian. Nurturing equally effortless interactions with the Western allies, he became Director of the Berliner Philharmoniker from 1952 onwards and from 1951 and in the years that followed he produced the programme for the Berliner Festwochen. Gerhart von Westerman was one of the Directors of the SFB Radio Board, was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit in 1960 and remained highly decorated to his death in 1963. The grave of honour awarded to him by the city of Berlin can be found in Dahlem Forest Cemetery.

Gerhart von Westerman never linked his professional career and contacts with his party membership. Open attacks such as that of the conductor Leo Borchard, whose biographer writes that he angrily called von Westerman a “fascist” in 1945, were rare.[ 22] By contrast, his ability to accommodate the Nazi’s instructions with some elegance was praised by the distinguished musicologist Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt in 1959: “The nobility with which he ran the Short Wave Station during the Thirties, often in conflict with official rules that were hostile to the arts, is unforgotten.”[ 23] Stuckenschmidt was himself banned from writing in 1934 due to his support for New Music and Jewish musicians and emigrated to Prague in 1937. The journalist Walter Lennig also emphasised Westerman’s stubbornness and diplomatic skill in 1962: “His life has seen many tensions, feuds and arguments. But that this man consistently had a clear idea in mind and was always prepared to pave the way for modern art, even when this led in directions far from his own artistic sympathies, is something even his enemies would not dare deny today – assuming that he, who certainly had no shortage of them in the past, still has any enemies now. In any event in the last eleven years, he has made the Berliner Festwochen a completely un-Bayreuthian Bayreuth for art and artists the world over.”[ 24]

So, did von Westerman stand up for New Music or against the Nazi system? As a prominent functionary of Nazi cultural policy who implemented its restrictive rules, he belonged to the millions of Germans who supported the Nazi regime and by doing so enabled it for a long time. 

Established Traditions

Gerhart von Westerman’s programming could be described as moderately modern, he focussed on established artistic traditions that left little room for experimental formats. His models for the Berliner Festwochen were the classical festival destinations of Bayreuth, Salzburg and Munich. In order to come close to matching them, for the “big city festival” in Berlin he proposed “the highest quality in the selection and performance of the works.”[ 25] In view of the fact, that artists had been persecuted and ostracised just a few years earlier and the dramatic fates they had suffered, from a contemporary perspective, simply wishing to achieve representative performances appears vacuous and banal.

The first two editions of the Berliner Festwochen in 1951 and 1952 were funded by the Western allies, who had a great influence on the artistic programme during this time. In this way, the USA, Great Britain and France overtly demonstrated Berlin’s connections with Western culture. It was not until 1953, that funding was provided solely by the Berlin’s state government. 

Did the programming change with independent funding? Which criteria were applied in selecting the programme? The following analysis of the first three festival programmes might contribute to a critical re-evaluation. Regarding the events that are viewed more closely here, the following questions remain central: which German, international or Jewish artists did von Westerman bring to Berlin? Did the German artists include former party members? Which composers and performers who were persecuted by the Nazis or forced into exile were allowed to appear at the festival? Was the attempt made to rehabilitate composers who were on the list of “degenerate music”? Who accepted their invitation and who rejected it?

Only a few musicians were able to continue their careers at an equivalent level after emigrating. Many well-known singers from the Weimar Republic were unsuccessful in relaunching themselves abroad. As a result, during the post-war period requests for long-forgotten artists tended to be few and far between. At the same time there was a great demand to see familiar stars from the Nazi period on stage while the others were exposed at times to mistrust or open antagonism for leaving Germany or being openly critical in public.

As a manager with excellent connections, Gerhart von Westerman regularly had dealings with former colleagues from the music scene. When the Berliner Festwochen took place for the first time in 1951 at the Deutsche Oper, he was able to count on the support of its Artistic Director Heinz Tietjen, who had taken up this post once again. Tietjen’s career enjoyed a rapid rise after the Nazis seized power: he was appointed by Hermann Göring to the Prussian State Council and was a holder of the “Golden Party badge.” As general artistic director of the Prussian State Theatres, a close confidante of Winifred Wagner and director of the Bayreuth Festival from 1931 until 1944 he became famous for his “opportunistic approach.”[ 26] After the war ended, Tietjen was ordered by Colonel General Berzarin to rebuild Berlin’s theatres in June 1945. Nevertheless, the conductor Leo Borchard, who had spent the previous years in internal exile and active resistance, demanded that he be relieved of his post, thereby initiating a denazification process that lasted several years which Tietjen survived unscathed. After he was exonerated, the Berlin Magistrat reappointed him Director of the Deutsche Oper in 1948.

 

The Programme of the 1st Berliner Festwochen: 5 September to 30 September 1951

Together with Heinz Tietjen, Gerhart von Westerman directed the first Berliner Festwochen. The official programme consisted of orchestral and chamber concerts, theatre and dance performances, mimes, guest productions as well as art exhibitions, firework displays, sailing regattas and boxing matches. The 250 events were attended by a total audience of 153,000, of which 100,000 visited the Day of Sensations, a “monster variety performance” at the Olympic Stadium, with the remaining cultural events accounting for a third of the total.[ 27]

To mark the inauguration of the Schiller Theater, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra played Ludwig van Beethoven’s 9th Symphony and The Consecreation of the House conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler with the soloists Elisabeth Grümmer, Margarete Klose, Peter Anders and Josef Greindl – all previously leading singers of the Nazi period. Concert soloists included Erna Berger, Siegfried Borries, Erik Then-Bergh and the conductors Joseph Keilberth, Hans Rosbaud and Carl Schuricht, who had been able to continue their careers in Germany in part because they were included on the “Gottbegnadeten” List of 1944 – the list of those “god-gifted” artists whose exceptional status spared them from service at the front or in the armaments industry. There was also acclaim for Rudolf Schock and the young baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. The violinist Tibor Varga was one of the few international guests; Sergiu Celibidache and Enrico Mainardi were already in Berlin. Ferenc Fricsay, who was championed by Otto Klemperer, had come to Berlin from Budapest via Salzburg to lead the RIAS-Sinfonieorchester for several years. The only artist who had emigrated back to Berlin was the Jewish conductor Leo Blech who, at the age of eighty, conducted a concert at the distant Jagdschloss Grunewald. Alongside Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart and Smetana the programme contained more modern works by Leoš Janáček, Albert Roussel, Anton Webern as well as works by composers who a few years earlier would have been classified as “degenerate” – Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith and Ernst Krenek, whose jazz opera Jonny spielt auf had been banned for being “degenerate.” As a prototype of the Zeitoper genre, this exuded the vitality of the Golden Twenties and was seen as epitomising artistic freedom (the world premiere was on 10 February 1927 in Leipzig). The jazz musician on the title page of the piano score was caricatured by the Nazis for the poster of the exhibition Entartete Musik (1938). There was also a performance of one work by the Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn, together with world premieres by Boris Blacher, Wolfgang Fortner, Ernst Pepping and Günther Neumann.

With funding from the Western allies, international guests arrived, including the Orchestre National de Paris conducted by Ernest Bour. This distinguished conductor would go on to find acclaim in the Sixties for his world premieres of New Music works at the Donaueschinger Musiktage and other venues. Years before, however, after the annexation of Alsace, he had produced populist radio broadcasts in keeping with Nazi propaganda. Other contributions the Western allies made to the Festwochen included the Comédie Française from Paris with Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme and the Juilliard Quartet from the USA, which played at the British Centre, as well as the Old Vic Theatre from London with Shakespeare’s Othello and the Hall Johnson Choir, whose African American spirituals represented the USA’s official contribution to the Berliner Festwochen. There were also performances of the musical Oklahoma! and the leading actress Judith Ander¬son and her company in Robinson Jeffers’s adaptation of the Greek tragedy Medea. Additional highlights were Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell at the Schiller Theater and guest performances by the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus with Gustaf Gründgens and Marianne Hoppe in T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party. Among the guest artists was also the Jewish French mime and former Resistance fighter Marcel Marceau in the role of “Monsieur Bip”, who was hailed as “one of the greatest living stage artists, as an ambassador of international understanding and of peace.”[ 28] However, while mime and the expressive dance of the American dancer Angna Enters and her German equivalent Dore Hoyer were acclaimed in the West as innovations, the Central Committee of the SED branded these and many other Western art forms as incomprehensible formalism and declared war on them in accordance with the basic principles of Stalinist cultural policy.

 

The Programme of the 2nd Berliner Festwochen: 31 August to 30 September 1952

For the 2nd Berliner Festwochen, Gerhart von Westerman was now sole Director. The programme presents six to thirteen events per day in all the western districts of Berlin, most of them in large theatres, but also at open-air theatres and other smaller venues. Von Westerman argued for his broad-based programme with the idea of a “social conscience”, the point of the Festwochen was to “bring joy, consolation and encouragement to the people of this city, to the brothers and sisters from this city from whom we are separated, and from the closed countryside surrounding us – to shine a light against the darkness for all of them.”[ 29] In addition to the classical music repertoire, the programme for the Berliner Festwochen 1952 contained a small number of contemporary works, including premieres by Wolfgang Fortner and Werner Egk, composers who had previously been loyal to the Nazi line. The latter was on the “Gottbegnadeten” List and was a former Director of STAGMA, the forerunner of GEMA, which was charged with implementing the law concerning rights for music performances controlled by the Nazi state machine. The programme also featured the world premiere of Tatjana Gsovsky’s ballet mime “The Idiot”, with Klaus Kinski in the lead role and music by Hans Werner Henze. Gsovsky assembled the text out of lines from Dostoyevsky and Biblical quotations. Having fled from Russia in 1924, Gsovsky set up a ballet school in Berlin. After being banned from working by the Nazis as a result of a dance performance based on motifs from Goya, she emigrated to Paris. She succeeded in making a fresh start after the end of the war as head of the ballet of the East Berlin State Opera. In 1951, irreconcilable tensions with SED cultural functionaries led to Gsovsky and the majority of her dancers moving to the Western part of the city, where her dance school was located and where she would work from 1953 to 1966 as Ballet Mistress and Chief Choreographer at the Deutsche Oper. 

Karl Amadeus Hartmann, whose critical, haunting works were not performed under the Nazis, was now conducted by the then “god-gifted” State Conductor Eugen Jochum, who was one of the most famous interpreters of the works of Anton Bruckner. There was a world premiere of Boris Blacher’s Prussian Fairy Tale, his Second Piano Concerto, played by his wife, the pianist Gerty Herzog, with Hans Rosbaud and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Blacher was one of the few modern composers who had been played and performed frequently during the Nazi period. Rosbaud was one of radio’s pioneers for new music. He saw no contradiction between his early radio collaborations with Arnold Schönberg and his ability to adapt to new circumstances during the Nazi period. Among the other conductors were Hans Knappertsbusch and Karl Böhm. Both had pursued careers successfully during the Nazi period without being party members and were among the 15 names on the list of conductors who were exempt from war service. Igor Markewitsch, a member of the Italian resistance movement and Eugene Ormandy, who had emigrated to the USA in the 1920s, conducted the RIAS-Symphonie-Orches¬ter. The General Music Director of the Hamburg State Opera Leopold Ludwig conducted its guest performance of Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress”. Ludwig had been appointed State Conductor by Hitler in 1942 and had conducted at the Berlin City Opera from 1943 onwards. He had kept secret his membership of the NSDAP from 1937 onwards, which had resulted in a prison sentence of eighteen months on parole and a fine. Similar misrepresentations had led to a conviction for Elisabeth Flickenschildt, who gave a dazzling performance at the Festwochen in Jürgen Fehling’s production of Maria Stuart. Ludwig and Flickenschildt were both on the “Gottbegnadeten” List. 

Highlights among the guest productions included the performances of choreographers George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins with the New York City Ballet, whose neoclassical ballet was marked by a modern, purist-abstract aesthetic. The distinguished Sadler’s Wells Ballet from London presented Giselle in the production by Frederick Ashton with the legendary ballerina Margot Fonteyn. Other guests included the Théâtre National Populaire of Jean Vilar with Heinrich von Kleist’s Prince Friedrich of Homburg, a performance that caused a furore, not only on account of its stars, Gérard Philipe and the then still unknown Jeanne Moreau, but also because of its subject matter, which revolves around the refusal to obey orders in a German army.

There was also acclaim for the performance of Harald Kreutzberg, an outstanding exponent of expressive dance and pupil of Mary Wigman, who had been able to continue his career uninterruptedly in Germany during the Nazi period. As in the previous year, mime was once again a great success and non-European art was presented for the first time with the Indian dance company Ram Gopal. New discursive formats also took place with a series of readings, book launches and the Berlin conversations entitled “Where do we stand now?” The exhibition Contemporary French Painters was held at the Hochschule der Künste. The art historian Adolf Jannasch, Head of the Visual Arts Office for Berlin city council and subsequently Director of the Gallery of the 20th Century, conceived the exhibition together with Maurice Jardot, a former assistant to the art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.

The Jewish composers whose works were heard included the contemporary Aaron Copland and Giacomo Meyerbeer, whose admirers for a long time included Richard Wagner. Four studio operas were created in response to commissions from the Berliner Festwochen, by Heimo Erbse, Wolfgang Fortner, Theo Goldberg and Hans Werner Henze, who was advancing to become one of the leading 20th century composers and exponents of New Music. An important element of the programme was the performance of works by Paul Hindemith, whose provocatively new sounds were widely rejected as “atonality” under the Nazis. The exhibition Entartete Musik in 1938 had also expressly denounced his wife Gertrud’s Jewish ancestry. Eventually performances of his works were banned, to which he reacted by emigrating. The guest performance from New York of Porgy and Bess, George Gershwin’s work that had received its world premiere in 1935, would not have been permitted during the Nazi period. Until it was forcibly taken off, the German media had vilified the production in Copenhagen in 1943 as “a Jewish negro opera with jungle screams”.

 

The Programme of the 3rd Berliner Festwochen: 30 August to 27 September 1953 

As the Western allies no longer provided any funding for the third year of the Berliner Festwochen, the programme lacked expensive international guest productions. However, at first sight it does not appear less extensive because the Berlin institutions provided a broad spectrum of events. As in previous years, no distinction was made in listing the performances whether they were being presented in the Titania-Palast or the Sportpalast. However, Gerhart von Westerman’s contribution was now also emphasised in the programme: in 1953 he was named as director on the dust cover for the first time. 

The 3rd Berliner Festwochen were opened at the Schiller Theater with Max Reger’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Beethoven and a work by Georg Friedrich Handel, both conducted by Robert Heger. The former “god-gifted” State Conductor and later President of the University of Music and Performing Arts in Munich had left his NSDAP membership far behind and been able to continue his career after a swift denazification process. Heger himself saw his professional advancement as the completion of a “good fate.”[ 30] Other works were conducted by Leopold Ludwig, Heinz Tietjen, Richard Kraus and two conductors who had previously worked in radio, Artur Rother and Hans Rosbaud. Herbert von Karajan conducted the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, alongside Wilhelm Furtwängler. Their Nazi past appeared to be an insignificant episode: all the conductors named were consistently employed by major concert houses and a few years later also as teachers. On this list of conductors, the guest concert by the City Opera of Frankfurt am Main stands out, in which Sir Georg Solti conducted the premiere of the new version of Paul Hindemith’s Cardillac. Solti was not one of the younger stars of the conducting firmament: in 1939 he had managed to escape the pogroms against Jews in Hungary and flee to Switzerland. After the intervention of the US military government, Solti had been appointed general music director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in 1946 succeeding Clemens Krauss, who had been dismissed, and Hans Knappertsbusch, who had been installed at short notice before being banned from performing until 1947. The soloists included Gerda Lammers and Ernst Haefliger who had made their debuts in the early 1940s and been able to pick up from there in the post-war years. A complete Schubert cycle was performed by the individual arts offices of the Western districts, a new authority, which from 1947 onwards was active in support of artists’ rights and where exhibitions and concerts took place.

Tatjana Gsovsky presented another ballet production, Hamlet by Boris Blacher, and wrote ballet history with her “Berlin style”. Gert Reinholm, who played the Danish prince, had joined the State Opera as a dancer in 1942, and then founded the Berlin Ballet with Gsovsky, which would become part of the Deutsche Oper in 1962. The Théâtre National Populaire was again invited, this time with Danton’s Death by Georg Büchner, The Miser by Molière and Jean Vilar both directing and taking the leading roles. The comedy act “Günter Neumann und seine Insulaner” performed at numerous venues in Berlin. Certainly, by the time of the musical grotesque “I was Hitler’s Moustache (1949) the RIAS legend had been able to win over a large audience. Giorgio Strehler visited with his anti-authoritarian people’s theatre Piccolo Teatro di Milano and its masterful production of Carlo Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters at the Hebbel Theater. The German premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was directed by Karl-Heinz Stroux at the Schloßparktheater. There were several guest performances by the The American National Ballet Theatre directed by Lucia Chase and Oliver Smith at the Titania-Palast, and the ballet of the Royal Opera Stockholm with the choreographer Birgit Cullberg.

As in the previous year, readings were part of the programme. Here works were presented by the much-read authors Walter Jens, Edzard Schaper and Hermann Kasack. In 2003 the revelation that Walter Jens had been an NSDAP member caused a scandal, as it was difficult to reconcile with his ideal image of a widely educated scholar and distinguished author. Wilhelm Furtwängler provided an introduction to contemporary music in his lecture Chaos and Shape. Only a year before he had been reinstated in the post of chief conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker for life, after his role in the cultural affairs of the Third Reich had been clarified and his professional ban as part of the denazification process had been lifted. In order to properly represent the Berlin cultural landscape, space was also given to the visual arts and representative loans were organised. 47 U.S. collections made works available for the large-scale exhibition 100 Years of American Painting 1800-1900 at Schloss Charlottenburg. Other exhibitions presented the works of Karl Hofer and Vincent van Gogh.

 

Between Tradition, Spectacle and the Avantgarde

The programmes of the Berliner Festwochen give the impression that all the events – whether they are music, opera, plays, dance, literature or other popular formats such as boxing matches at the Olympic Stadium – were conceived by Gerhart von Westerman alone, comprehensive credits are missing. While all the artists are mentioned, the Artistic Directors of Berlin’s cultural institutions are not named. With the loss of funding from the Western allies and funding coming solely from the State of Berlin, over the years Gerhart von Westerman personally becomes increasingly visible. From 1953 onwards he is credited as Director at the beginning of the programmes, while from 1955 he appears with a short biography and a portrait drawn by Horst Strempel. The choice of Horst Strempel was a political one – in his critical work the artist looked at the period of National Socialism and reconstruction and two years earlier he had fled the GDR with his family for West Berlin. From 1956 onwards, von Westerman appears in the programme every year with a full-page portrait photo. However, no text or foreword by him can be found in the Berliner Festwochen’s high circulation programmes until 1960. Not until it is time to mark the 10-year anniversary does his personal retrospective appear along with a correction. Here it is possible to read for the first time that the festival management “is known to have no influence on the programming of the Berlin theatres as it has no additional funding available to induce Berlin cultural institutions to create special performances as part of the festival.” In consultation with the artistic directors, it may be possible “to secure the occasional fulfilment of certain wishes, however the independence of one party and dependence of the other remain obvious.”  In order to achieve an overall programme that “appears like a deliberate plan and not like the product of coincidence, (...) a counterweight had to be established within the overall planning.”[ 31]

Alongside opera, theatre and art, above all music stood at the heart of the first editions of the Berliner Festwochen, and, looking back in the programme for 1960, the Director Gerhart von Westerman praised his own work not in representing the classical and romantic heritage, but as a champion of the progressive with “many an experimental foray (...) into the modern.”[ 32] Here he did not mean the best-attended element of the Festwochen, which in the first three years of its existence consisted of popular large-scale events. At the Waldbühne, just like at the Olympic Stadium with the Day of Sensations, spectacular events with broad public appeal took place with Japanese fireworks, such as the events with Rudi Schuricke, Bruce Low and Roman chariot races, and the European boxing championship where Hein ten Hoff defeated Jack Gardner. Von Westerman cared relatively little for these popular entertainments. Under his direction, the programme – despite the popularity of the early large-scale events – was more strictly curtailed. The Berlin public was told that the weather was responsible for this change in programming, as open-air events in September would present too great a risk of being cancelled.

His focus lay primarily on music and, as before, this was intended to edify, entertain and provide an identity. The Western allies too saw music as a means for people to understand each other and bring about peace. It was generously overlooked that von Westerman and many of the invited artists had celebrated their success with the help of the Nazis and had then continued their careers uninterrupted in the post-war years. On behalf of the Western allies von Westerman worked together with former party colleagues who had succeeded in regaining their old jobs or who were engaged in reconstruction work following their denazification. They would not have had far to go as many of the named protagonists had already known each other for years from Berlin, from the radio and through working with the former “Reich Orchestra”. 

Besides music, the programme concentrated on theatre, dance and mime. The “silent arts” seemed to suit a society that had not learned to talk about Nazism or the Holocaust. And the politicians and cultural managers had another concern: culture could be used as a means of propaganda in the battle between East and West – the visual and performing arts were tools that lent themselves to be exploited. With the ideological polarisation between West and East Berlin, between the FRG and GDR, the Western allies and the Soviet Union, these events had to make it clear to everyone that their real purpose was to act as a bulwark against the East and thus “…not only to serve the pleasure of the inhabitants, every performance takes place almost in self defence and as a clear attack on political support for totalitarianism,” as the journalist Friedrich Luft declared in the official programme to the Berliner Festwochen 1951.[ 33] 

In later years, directors of the Berliner Festspiele would focus on specific themes, establish formats that straddled different genres – in music, theatre, dance and art – and overtly seek out dialogue with controversial political positions. However, it took several attempts to rehabilitate Jewish musicians in Germany, not only because many of them refused to perform in post-war Germany at all, for example Arthur Rubinstein, Isaac Stern and Vladimir Horowitz, who only broke his vow never to perform in Germany when he appeared at the Berliner Festwochen in 1986. If Jewish musicians were well integrated into the countries that had received them, they found returning to Germany difficult. With few exceptions some of them only returned to Germany for guest performances: Jascha Heifetz played at Berlin’s Titania-Palast in 1949 and Yehudi Menuhin in 1947, as the first Jewish musician after the Holocaust, with the Berliner Philharmoniker conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. Menuhin professedly saw this as an attempt to achieve reconciliation and understanding through the medium of music. Other exceptions were the conductors Sir Georg Solti, Lorin Maazel and Leonard Bernstein, whose regular appearances at the Berliner Festwochen were greeted with great enthusiasm. However, this had nothing to do with “overcoming the past” and moral reappraisal. In the post-war period much more attention was paid to the Cold War and to a pragmatism that drove the social integration of former Nazi functional elites. The ubiquitous urge for self-justification went hand in hand with the social will to declare one’s own innocence of any guilt or responsibility. As the antisemitism that continued to be widespread could not be driven out of people’s heads, Jewish artists now lent themselves to celebrate it publicly in an act of atonement.

In a letter from 1948 Leonard Bernstein describes his impressions of Munich as follows: “One: everything is destroyed. Two: the people are starving, they fight their way through, steal, beg for bread (...). There is hardship everywhere. Three: the Jews are rotting in the (refugee) camps. Four: Nazism lurks in every corner.”34 Bernstein recognised that music was an element that brings people together and has no borders. According to him, German music no longer belonged to the Germans alone and should not only be played by Germans. It was precisely the universal character of German music that made it impossible to view it in geographically isolated terms. German music transcended ethnic and national categories. When he visited Berlin with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra to perform two concerts at the festival in 1960, he wrote: “We have come to take one more step through this kind of cultural exchange along the paths of international understanding that lead to peace.”[ 35]

It was not until 1987 that the 37th Berliner Festspiele offered an appropriate commemoration of the persecution, displacement and extermination of more than 130 musicians who had once shaped cultural life in Berlin but had been forced to emigrate to save their lives after 1933. The music programme Memory – Renewal – Conversation comprised works by Theodor W. Adorno, Paul Ben-Haim, Hans Eissler, Lukas Foss, Berthold Goldschmidt, Paul Hindemith, Paul Juon, Ernst Krenek, Artur Schnabel, Arnold Schönberg, Erich Walter Sternberg, Josef Tal, Ernst Toch, Kurt Weill, Stefan Wolpe and Alexander von Zemlinksy, among others.[ 36] Four years later this was followed by the comprehensive art historical exhibition Patterns of Jewish Life as part of the 41st Berliner Festspiele. That the occasion marked the 50th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, at which the deportation of the entire Jewish population of Europe was agreed, remains a grave legacy.  

1 NSDAP Gaukartei, BArch R 9361-IX card no. 48220262. 
2 BArch (BDC) PK T0051 transcript of NSDAP Kreisgericht I Berlin, 11.03.1940, quoted in Aster, p. 257.
3 Denazification application of Gerhart von Westerman, NLA HA Nds. 171 Hanover No. 44049.
4 BArch, R 9361-V/138148 (2 Blatt); BArch, R 9361-V/155076 (2 Blatt); BArch, R 55/24014 (2 Blatt).
5 Eva Weissweiler: Ausgemerzt!: Das “Lexikon der Juden in der Musik” und seine mörderischen Folgen, Cologne 1999. A reprint of: Lexikon der Juden in der Musik, Berlin 1940.
6 Name Unknown, Berlin Philharmonic Hopes Art Will Win Over Reaction to Nazi Past on U.S. Tour, The New York Times, 8 February 1955. See also Jonathan Rosenberg: Dangerous Melodies: Classical Music in America from the Great War through the Cold War, New York, 2019, note 195.
7 Tonight at Carnegie Hall. The Musical Dictators of the Hitler Regime, leaflet issued by Citizen’s Committee of 100, 1 March 1955, reproduced in Elliott W. Galkin: A History of Orchestral Conducting in Theory and Practice, Pendragon Press, 1988 (1986), p. 740.
8 As von Karajan drew a veil over his party activities during his own lifetime, it only became known later that he not only joined very early, but also did so a second time, in 1933 and in 1935. Retrospectively he attached little importance to his party membership. In an interview with the critical Karajan biographer Oliver Rathkolb Karajan is alleged to have said that for him being a member of the NSDAP was like joining a ski club to be able to spend the night cheaply in one of the chalets.  
9 Goebbels made the artistic directors and directors of the RRG commit to this new staffing policy: “And if I am to be responsible for the spiritual activation of the radio, then I am also responsible for the personnel employed. Because I cannot cultivate a spirit on the radio with a staff someone else has put in front of my nose – the radio house must belong to me! [...] so it would be very kind, and I would be extremely grateful if you would carry out this act of cleansing yourselves. If you do not do it or do not want to do it then it will be done by us [...].” See Goebbels-Reden. Vol 1: 1932-1939, in: Helmut Heiber (Ed.), Düsseldorf 1971, p. 82-107, quoted in Schrader, p. 60.
10 The files of the Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft in the Federal Archives give details of this (BArch, R 78). Many of the files from the Department of Music Programming were destroyed during the Second World War. The Federal Archives contain primarily reference files belonging to the RRG’s Director Kurt Magnus before 1933 with material on the political monitoring of the programme.   Personnel records for individual members of staff are kept with the personally related documents of the former Berlin Document Center.
11 Cf. here and in the following Axel Buchholz: Von Gauleiters Gnaden, https://www.sr.de/sr/home/der_sr/wir_uber_uns/geschichte/fundstucke/20200601_fundstueck_juni2020_intendant_karl_ma¬ges100.html (accessed on 1 March 2021); Hasselbring, 1999; Schrader, p. 62.
12 Transcript of a memorandum from NSBO Munich to Minister Goebbels on 26 March 1933, Bayerische Rundfunk Historical Archive (BR HA), RV/5.2, quoted in Schrader, p. 49.
13 Aster, p. 225.
14 PKS Furtwängler to von Westerman, 4 July 1944, quoted in Aster, p. 226.
15 On the question of specifically German qualities in music being connected with ideas on race, cf. John, p. 49ff.
16 Gerhart von Westerman: Über Geltung und Einsatz deutscher Musik im Ausland, DMK (Deutsche Musikkultur) VI/1, 1941/42, S. 1, http://digital.sim.spk-berlin.de/viewer/image/783919042-06/8/#1571988075347 (accessed on 1 March 2021).
17 Gerhart von Westerman’s resignation from the party was completed on 9 June 1945, see Zur Sache meines Bruders Herbert von Westerman, enclosure 5, Gerhart von Westerman to Herr Schaul, Superintendant of Police District I24, on 10 June 1945, private archive.
18 Denazification certificate from 9 April 1949, NLA HA Nds. 171 Hanover No. 44049.
19 Gerhart von Westerman to Herr Lessing, 15 July 1950, ADK Archive, GvW50.
20 Ibid.
21 Cf. Katja Nicodemus, Ein eifriger SA-Mann, Die Zeit, 30 January 2020, No. 6, p. 49 / Feuilleton.
22 Matthias Strässner, Der Dirigent, der nicht mitspielte: Leo Borchard 1899-1945, Lukas Verlag, Berlin, 2019, p. 185.
23 Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, GvW zum 65. Geburtstag, monograph 1959, p. 5.
24 Walter Lennig, Das Portrait. Festwochen mit klarem Konzept, Sonntagsblatt, Hamburg, 2 September 1962, ADK Archive, GvW 54.
25 Gerhart von Westerman: Grossstadtfestspiele, Maske und Kothurn, Band 6, Heft 2, 1960, p. 114.
26 Hannes Heer, Boris von Haken: Der Überläufer Heinz Tietjen. Der Generalintendant der Preußischen Staatstheater im Dritten Reich, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 58, 2010, H. 1, pp. 28-53.
27 Ulrich Eckhardt, Berliner Festwochen im 5. Jahrzehnt, Die Berliner Festwochen, Eine kommentierte Chronik 1951-1997, ed. Bernd Krüger, Berlin, 1998, p. 9; Gerhart von Westerman looking back in the Foreword to the Berliner Festwochen Almanach of 1960.
28 Herbert Ihering in conversation with Marcel Marceau, “Die Weltkunst der Pantomime”, Berlin 1956.
29 Auf ein Wort nur!, Gerhart von Westerman in an interview with e.m., Official Programme of the Berliner Festwochen, 1952, p. 7.
30 Name Unknown, obituary for Robert Heger, Der Spiegel, No. 4, 23 January 1978, p.164.
31 Gerhart von Westerman, 10 Jahre Berliner Festwochen. Ein Rückblick, Official Programme of the Berliner Festwochen, 1960, pp. 10-15.
32 Ibid.
33 Friedrich Luft, Theaterstadt Berlin, Official Programme of the Berliner Festwochen, 1951, p. 26.
34 Humphrey Burton, Leonard Bernstein. Translated by Harald Stadler, Munich 1994, p. 240ff, quoted in: Anat Feinberg: Nachklänge. Jüdische Musiker in Deutschland nach 1945, Vienna 2005.
35 Jonathan Rosenberg, The Best Diplomats Are Often the Great Musicians: Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic Play Berlin, New Global Studies, Band 8, Heft 1, 2014, pp. 1-22.
36 Lexikon der verfolgten Musiker*innen der NS-Zeit, https://www.lexm.uni-hamburg.de/content/index.xml (accessed on 1 March 2021).