| This dissertation undertakes a transnational study of jazz music in Germany and the United States from 1920 to 1957. It explores jazz's impact on German and American national identities, the ambiguous divide between so-called "low" and "high" culture, and conceptions of race. It compares Germany to the United States in order to illuminate how national cultures imbibed, reformed, and integrated jazz. Focusing primarily on German music critics, composers, musicians, educators, and musical elites, the dissertation interrogates the roots of the wide range of interpretations of jazz. These commentators embraced, remained skeptical, or were quite disdainful of jazz along cultural, racial, and national lines. In particular, the project investigates how and why notions about "high" German music intertwined with notions about race and nation and impacted critics' interpretations of jazz. In focusing on the reception of jazz, the dissertation sheds light on the ambiguous space for jazz between so-called popular/entertainment music and art/serious music. The dissertation also brings to light how Germans adopted jazz into their own culture and reformed it for their own tastes. The dissertation analyzes how American and German cultural identities changed over time and, in particular, traces the slow, winding process of jazz becoming a culturally legitimate form of music in Germany by the late 1950s. I focus on jazz's ambiguous and uncertain beginning in Germany, the critical reception of Paul Whiteman in the mid-1920s, the expansion and changing interpretations of jazz across musical spaces in the late Weimar Republic, the inconsistent repression and at times even embrace of jazz during the Third Reich, the challenges of reviving German jazz under American occupation after World War II, and finally West Germany's acceptance of jazz as legitimate music in the 1950s. |
