Schadenfreude

So ist der Jazz-Nigger auch in das Haus des Figaro, des Fidelio, des Hans Sachs, des Tristan, der Ariadne eingezogen.   .....   Der Nigger, der Bringer der Jazzkultur ... über das Europa Beethovens triumphiert? Man glaube nur ja nicht an eine satirische Pointe.
(So the Jazz-Nigger moved in the house of Figaro, Fidelio, Hans Sachs, Tristan, Ariadne.  ..... The nigger, the bringer of jazz culture ... triumphs over Beethoven's Europe?  Doesn't seem like a funny punch line.)
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The above image is a poster for the Nazi exhibition Entartete Musik (Degenerate Music) which took place in Düsseldorf in 1938.  The saxophone-playing "Der Nigger"[1] is a reference to the cover page for the score of Ernst Krenek's 1927 opera Jonny spielt auf.  (One of the opera's principal characters is an amoral and libidinous black jazz musician named 'Jonny'.)  The quote below the poster also refers to Krenek's opera, but did not come from the program booklet for the Nazi exhibition.  It came from a review of Krenek's opera published several years before the Nazis came to power.[2]  The author of the review, Julius Korngold, was a powerful and influential Viennese music critic and the father of the composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

In retrospect Korngold's review borders on the surreal.  An eminent Jewish music critic - no doubt familiar with Wagner's venomous anti-Semitic attack on the music of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer[3] - derides a new opera because it alludes to musical and dance styles created by what the critic sees as a culturally and artistically inferior race.  The word Nigger appears ten times in Korngold's review and serves to underline his contempt for jazz (Niggermusik, Niggersongs) and dance styles like foxtrot (Niggertänze).
     
How can one resist Schadenfreude knowing that a few years after writing that review Papa Korngold himself had become a racial degenerate in "Beethoven's Europe", complaining bitterly about "anti-Semitic hounding in the papers"[4] and eventually fleeing to America, the very land of Niggermusik, Niggersongs, and Niggertänze.

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1.  The German translation of the anthropological English term Negro is Der Neger.  The German term  Der Nigger, however, is a pejorative akin to the racial slur nigger in American English.

2.  Korngold, J. "Jonny spielt auf", Neue Freie Presse, 1.1.1928.

3.  In the infamous essay Das Judenthum in der Musik.

4.  In the letter to his Hollywood-based son Erich dated 15 March 1938 (English translation published in Korngold And His World).