Talk:Karl Marx (composer)

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Nazi work and later[edit]

Given his Hitler Youth connections, it would be surprising if he was given emeritus status post-war without some form of denazification. Is there any information on this? JackofOz 05:35, 6 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Composers and performers were not really denazified, at least not effectively...As Goebbels had needed them, musicians, like other artists, were again needed in all the occupation zones (which vied with each other for their services); the musicians took advantage of this situation...assisted by conservative music journalists and publicists, some of whom were tied to (formerly Nazi) music-publishing firms...Composers who had worked for the Nazis in one role or another and now became prominent again, not least as teachers, included Wolfgang Fortner, Karl Marx, Cesar Bresgen, and Armin Knab.(Kater, 2000, pp. 276-7)

—eric 07:05, 6 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That's an interesting point of view. What about Richard Strauss, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Hans Pfitzner, and many others who had to go through the hoops to become accepted once more? JackofOz 12:12, 6 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Our author makes mention of all three being denazified in courts of law, but seems mostly dismissive of the process:

Why did these academics find their survival beyond the cutoff point of 1945 so easy? It was a function of the sham denazification that most incriminated professors in any academic discipline who had initially been suspended from German universities because of their Nazi past found their way back to the halls of learning relatively quickly.(Ibid., p. 279)

Furtwängler "made the best of his resistance legend" before the court; Pfitzner was no longer popular anyway and had been "artificially propped up with Nazi Party help"; and Strauss' "historic greatness had been established long before the Nazi reign". At least, that's my reading of this one particular source.

Back to Marx, i've found nothing which explicitly states he went before a court or not. I did run across the brief anecdote of a Royal Navy officer (and then music student) assigned as assistant prizemaster in Kiel. Marx had been drafted into the Kriegsmarine in the final months of the war, and following the surrender worked as a clerk for this officer. In return for music lessons, Marx was excused most of his clerking duties! Maybe working for the allies postwar provided some kind of exemption or made it easier to return to teaching?—eric 01:26, 9 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Wildly non npov tone in one place.[edit]

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a violation of npov tone as blatant as saying the charges of Nazi involvement published in an historical work “ do not stand up to scrutiny and can only be described as a falsification of history”. The person claiming this is a prominent history professor, in print, and cited. They may not be right, but they should be disputed only by other sources, not a Wikipedia editor’s editorializing. It has been replaced with appropriately neutral tone, saying the previously citied work is disputed by this other cited work. T L Miles (talk) 18:32, 5 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

As far as I can see, that paragraph was added by User:H-stt on 14 December 2018 (in an edit that added an awful lot of uncited material). Maybe they can provide quotations from both sources they provided (Kater, Prieberg). Without them, the paragraph could possibly be removed per WP:EXTRAORDINARY. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 03:41, 6 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hi there, I got your ping. The edit was made on behalf of de:User:Cellotaurus, a distant relative of Karl Marx. Cellotaurus wrote the German language article and I helped with the translation.

As I have access to the 2009 updated database version of Prieberg 2004, I can cite the relevant part of the entry in full:

4781 Kein Eintrag in ZKNSDAP.

4786 Ungenaue Erinnerung, 1963: "(...) meine Werke - vor allem die größeren - verschwanden nach der >Machtübernahme< fast völlig aus den Konzertprogrammen, woran vermutlich weniger der Stil der Werke als mein >aggressiver< Name schuld gewesen sein dürfte. Im Frühjahr 1933 brachte H. Rosbaud mein Klavierkonzert in einer Frankfurter Sendung, deren Programm auch vom Stuttgarter Sender übernommen war; dort aber wurde mein Werk ohne Angabe eines Grundes abgesetzt" (Karl Marx an Fred K. Prieberg, 23/II/63, handschriftlich). s. Jöde.

4787 Geschichtsfälschung, 1998: "(...) (Karl Marx) lieferte regelmäßig Beiträge für die Liederbücher der HJ. (...)" (Kater II. S. 266). Verlegte Titel - zweckhaft ignoriert dies der "DRPoH" - konnten, von wem auch immer, mit Erlaubnis des Verlags, des Rechtsinhabers, nachgedruckt, brauchten also nicht "geliefert" zu werden. Einige wenige Lieder von Marx stehen 1941 in den Musik(Lieder)-Blättern der HJ, erst 1943 mehrere in einem Liederbuch; von "regelmäßig geliefert" keine Rede.

Information: DML, FA, MM2, KDMK (Marx verschwieg dem Herausgeber fast alle der oben genannten Titel), RML, SML, LdCh, MGG.

Please note that "falsification of history" is a verbatim quote of "Geschichtsfälschung". Kater's claim that Marx submitted entries to the HJ (Hitler Youth) songbooks regularly, get contradicted by explaining that according to German law only permission by the publisher was necessary, the author wasn't asked and got no say in such reprints. He further described that only in 1941 a few songs by Marx were published on loose sheets by the HJ and in 1943 several got reprinted in one songbook. He denies that this could be called submitted regularly.

All further claims in this part of the article are taken verbatim from this source. So I think even the strong words regarding Kater are sourced appropriately.

Additionally I point to the tiny "s. Jöde." in the quotation above. At the entry on Fritz Jöde in the same work (p. 3704), Prieberg scolds Kater in even stronger words for not understanding or disregarding central aspects about musical institutions in the "Third Reich". There he uses the term "Geschichtsfälschung / Falsification of history" again to describe Kater's work. --h-stt !? 13:24, 6 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]