Michael H. Kater Livres

Lotte Lehmann ranks among the most celebrated singers of the twentieth century. She was a favorite of Richard Strauss, and over her lifetime became the friend of other famous Bruno Walter, Arturo Toscanini and Thomas Mann. She had a famous encounter with Hermann Göring, in which he claimed to want to make her the foremost singer in Nazi Germany. By the time of her final performance in 1951, she was considered one of the finest singing actresses of all time. Rather than a traditional biography, this book aims to be both a descriptive narrative of Lehmann’s life and a critical analysis of the interconnections of the artist and society. Kater describes the varying phases of Lehmann’s life, as well as the sociocultural settings in which she finds herself – whether in the Wilhemine Empire, First Austrian Republic, Nazi Germany, or the United States. Kater’s use of Lehmann’s personal and other papers reshapes much of what is known about her life and career.

Michael Kater's work probes the relationship of music to society and politics in the Nazi regime, 1933-1945. It addresses the question of whether or not the Nazi regime, which utilized music and musicians for the regime's own political purposes, controlled the musicians and the music, or whether these remained in some measure autonomous.

Historian Michael H. Kater chronicles the rise and fall of one of Germany’s most iconic cities in this fascinating and surprisingly provocative history of Weimar. Weimar was a center of the arts during the Enlightenment and hence the cradle of German culture in modern times. Goethe and Schiller made their reputations here, as did Franz Liszt and the young Richard Strauss. In the early twentieth century, the Bauhaus school was founded in Weimar. But from the 1880s on, the city also nurtured a powerful right-wing reactionary movement, and fifty years later, a repressive National Socialist regime dimmed Weimar’s creative lights, transforming the onetime artists’ utopia into the capital of its first Nazified province and constructing the Buchenwald death camp on its doorstep.   Kater’s richly detailed volume offers the first complete history of Weimar in any language, from its meteoric eighteenth-century rise up from obscurity through its glory days of unbridled creative expression to its dark descent back into artistic insignificance under Nazi rule and, later, Soviet occupation and beyond.

In this history of medicine and the medical profession in the Third Reich, Michael Kater examines the career patterns, educational training, professional organization, and political socialization of German physicians under Hitler. His discussion ranges wi

In modern times, the recruitment of children into political organizations peaked with the Hitler Youth, established in 1933 after the Nazi Party gained power in Germany. The regime believed that children's minds could be molded for politics by age ten, leading to the induction of nearly all German youths aged ten to eighteen into this state-run organization. This initiative became a powerful means of aligning young minds with Adolf Hitler's ideology. Under Baldur von Schirach's leadership, the focus shifted adolescents' obedience from family and school to the racially defined Volk and the Third Reich. The Nazis attracted boys and girls with promises of status, uniforms, and outdoor activities, transforming campgrounds into premilitary training sites and indoctrination into education. While a few resisted, the vast majority joined willingly. Kater utilizes original reports, letters, diaries, and memoirs to explore the history of the Hitler Youth, detailing the methods, extent, and impact of this indoctrination, as well as the fates of the young recruits. Millions later served in the armed forces, with many participating in the oppression of foreign peoples and committing crimes against humanity. Their experiences underscore the moral failures of regimes that involve children in state crimes.

A fresh and insightful history of how the German arts-and-letters scene was transformed under the Nazis

Exploring the intersection of personal experience and societal influence, this work delves into Lehmann's life while offering a critical examination of the artist's role within their cultural context. It weaves together biographical elements with broader themes, highlighting how individual artistry is shaped by and responds to the surrounding environment.

A wide-ranging, insightful history of culture in West Germany-from literature, film, and music to theater and the visual arts

How does creativity thrive in the face of fascism? How can a highly artistic individual function professionally in so threatening a climate? The final book in a critically acclaimed trilogy that includes Different Drummers (OUP 1992) and The Twisted Muse (OUP 1997), this is a detailed study of the often interrelated careers of eight outstanding German composers who lived and worked amid the dictatorship of the Third Reich: Werner Egk, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Carl Orff, Hans Pfitzner, Arnold Schoenberg, and Richard Strauss. Noted historian Michael H. Kater weighs issues of accommodation and resistance to ask whether these artists corrupted themselves in the service of a criminal regime -- and if so, whether this is evident in their music. He also considers the degrees to which the Nazis poetically, socially, economically, and aesthetically succeeded in their treatment of these individuals, whose lives and compositions represent diverse responses to totalitarianism.