Anti-Music

Mark Christian Thompson is Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Black Fascisms: African American Literature and Culture between the Wars and Kafka's Blues: Figurations of Racial Blackness in the Construction of an Aesthetic.

"Anti-Music offers original, even challenging, new insights on jazz in German literary and critical texts in the first half of the twentieth century." — Brecht Yearbook"…offers a challenging new take on racial and musical imagery in German literature and philosophy of the early twentieth century." — Monatshefte"…Thompson brings to light important details that in numerous instances would be easy to overlook, subjecting them to scrutiny that yields vital clues about the understanding and experience of jazz in the Weimar and Nazi eras." — Notes"Anti-Music is an interesting and highly theoretical title that examines not just the definition and reception of jazz in Germany of the interwar years, but also the loosely connected topics and definitions of blackness, racial imagination, primitivism, white superiority, and cultural imperialism." — Jive-Talk"This book synthesizes the ideological reception of jazz amongst a series of key German thinkers and cultural producers from the interwar era. It offers bold, sophisticated readings of their texts and of how they conceived of racial blackness. It is a major contribution to the field." — Andrew Wright Hurley, author of The Return of Jazz: Joachim-Ernst Berendt and West German Cultural Change

• List of FiguresAcknowledgments Introduction: German Jazz and the Metronome of Race 1. The Jazz Paradox: Race and Totalitarian Politics in German Jazz Reception 2. The Jazz Machine: Brecht and the Politics of Jazz 3. The Monkey’s Trick: Herman Hesse and the Music of Decline 4. The Music of Fascism: Adorno on Jazz 5. Jazz-Heinis: Klaus Mann and Jazz Ontology ConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex