Carnegie Hall

Musical life in Germany was never the same after jazz arrived. This Black American art form changed not just the sound, but the culture of music in Weimar Germany. Concentrated in major metropolises like Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Munich, jazz left an indelible mark on the lives of the many Germans who read about, danced to, heard, or even tried out the new musical form from across the Atlantic.

This music was of course not new for the Black American musicians who brought jazz to Germany after World War I. Pioneers like James Reese Europe were already playing jazz before it spread from the US to Germany. Though Europe never played for German audiences (he died tragically in 1919), his and many other Black musicians’ work stands behind so much of what followed in the 1920s. The music they played belonged to a long, Black American tradition of syncopated and improvised music.

In the decade following the First World War, artists like Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, Josephine Baker, and Duke Ellington further developed the music’s already impressive vocabulary. To many at the time, jazz wasn’t just a new type of music, but a new sound completely. Jazz foregrounded instruments like the drums and the saxophone that were rarely featured in German popular and concert performances. More than this, jazz used these and other instruments in ways unfamiliar to Europeans.

When jazz arrived in Germany after four years of relative isolation, young German artists and the larger public were keen to experience jazz—and they would not have to wait long.

In April 1919, Berliners first came face to face with jazz—not as music, but as a new dance. Like elsewhere on the continent, jazz first entered public consciousness as a new way to move on the dance floor. Elsewhere, however, Germans were treated to visiting jazz bands from Paris and London, where important American groups like the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, featuring Bechet, and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band had already begun spreading the gospel of jazz across the continent.

As the decade wore on, more American jazz musicians made the trip across the pond, including to Berlin. One of the most important of these was Philadelphian Sam Wooding, who had served in the First World War as part of the 807th Pioneer Infantry Band. Arriving in Germany in the spring of 1925 for a multi-city tour of Germany and Europe, Wooding—along with other notable jazz artists like Doc Cheatham, Tommy Ladnier, and Gene Sedric— provided musical accompaniment to an all-Black revue.

Still, reactions to jazz from white German audiences ran the gamut from unrestrained enthusiasm to racist caricature and stereotyping. German responses to St. Louis–born dancer, singer, and jazz artist Josephine Baker especially revealed the double-edged nature of jazz’s popularity in Germany for Black artists.

Together with fellow star performers Claude Hopkins and Louis Douglas, Baker headlined the Berlin premiere of La Revue Nègre in January 1926. While the press and audience debated the significance of her artistry, Baker used her newfound renown and wealth to bold effect. In the years following, she published an autobiography, made numerous recordings, starred in films, and opened pop-up restaurants in multiple cities, including Berlin.

Alongside Black pioneers like Wooding and Baker, white American jazz artists featured prominently in the German reception of jazz. These were led by Paul Whiteman, who—through million-selling records and a brief visit to Berlin in June 1926—popularized jazz for a wider audience. Whiteman was one of the most popular and influential performers of popular music at the time and is said to have helped make jazz a household term.

Like the general population, German musicians were fascinated by jazz, and many attempted to integrate and imitate its sounds in their music. One of the earliest to do so was Eric Borchard, who became Germany’s leading jazz artist for much of the decade and performed widely until his untimely death in 1934.

Aside from Borchard, Stefan Weintraub and his Weintraub Syncopators documented their jazz chops not only on recordings, but in the film The Blue Angel, starring Marlene Dietrich. In the realm of cabaret, composers Friedrich Hollaender and Mischa Spoliansky produced spectacular works in conversation with the new jazz idiom.

Composers of art music also entered the fray, with Kurt Weill and Ernst Krenek leading the pack. The Austrian Krenek earned both fortune and infamy for his so-called “jazz opera” Jonny spielt auf (Jonny Strikes Up). In hindsight, it’s clear that Krenek’s opera is less about jazz than the stereotypes surrounding it. His 1927 opera pits a saxophone-playing Black American jazz artist against a brooding Central European composer in the mold of Arnold Schoenberg. This stereotypical presentation was later weaponized by the Nazis in their exhibit of so-called “degenerate music” in 1938.

By contrast, the engagement of German-Jewish composer Kurt Weill with jazz was longer lived and more substantive. In works like The Threepenny Opera (1928) or Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930), Weill collaborated with playwright Bertolt Brecht to meld the jazz-inflected popular music of the period with leftist politics, producing haunting classics like “Mack the Knife.”

The Great Depression and the rise of the Nazis put jazz in Weimar Germany under extreme pressure. Not only were gigs all but impossible to come by as the economy ground to a halt, the Nazis increasingly targeted jazz as part of their war against “non-German” culture.

Sam Wooding last played Germany in 1930 and Josephine Baker in 1928, while Kurt Weill, Ernst Krenek, Stefan Weintraub, and many others were forced into exile. Nevertheless, jazz’s sound and culture would live on during the Third Reich—testament to many things, but most of all to how jazz and its artists had forever changed music in Germany.

Photography: Europe, Baker, the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, The Blue Angel, The Threepenny Opera by Wikimedia Commons; Whiteman courtesy of the Carnegie Hall Rose Archives.