"'Grey C', Acceptable": Carl Orff's Professional and Artistic Responses to the Third Reich.

Abstract

“ ‘Grey C’, Acceptable”: Carl Orff’s Professional and Artistic Responses to the Third Reich

During the Third Reich, the composer Carl Orff (1895–1982) experienced a complicated relationship with the National Socialist government as he, ultimately successfully, attempted to advance his career in a perilous landscape in which even the eminent Richard Strauss (1864–1949) experienced difficulties. Orff has been criticized for being an opportunist both during the Third Reich and in the following period of denazification. In the literature to date, the content of Orff’s compositions for the stage have been given relatively little examination in the context of totalitarianism. The works of Carl Orff evince a darkly fatalistic worldview and negative portrayal of authority. This is the case with the works he wrote before his traumatic experiences in World War I, the works he wrote while accepting financial and other benefits from the Third Reich’s cultural apparatus, and the works he wrote after the fall of National Socialism, as he struggled to come to terms with his society’s morally compromised state. In the aftermath of the Third Reich, he engaged through his art with the difficult issues facing German society, such as societal failure and collective guilt, as well as his own struggles of conscience. In the spring of 1946, Orff was rated as “‘Grey C’, acceptable” by the Office of Military Government of the United States during the American occupation of Bavaria, as his evaluators found that he had a genuinely anti-Nazi attitude but nevertheless had benefited under National Socialist rule. Orff was one of the many German citizens who inhabited this grey zone, and following the Third Reich he sought to come to terms with his past through his artistic expression. My study of these previously unexamined aspects of Carl Orff’s art contributes to our understanding of life and art in the context of totalitarian conditions.