Not, List und Lust

Blinded by nationalism and racism, the 20th century plunged the peoples of Europe into a devastating world war. Only in Russia did the workers and soldiers succeed in overthrowing the government and ending the war. In most other countries, industry, the military, the nobility, and the church allied themselves with fascism to oppose the organized working class. This made a second world war inevitable, plunging humanity into even greater misery. While artists at the beginning of the century had sensed the winds of freedom and opened the door to modernism, their voice in the political struggle grew weaker and weaker. Fascists and communists alike saw the arts as nothing more than a means of propaganda. Free art was suppressed with the harshest of measures. The Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich was part of the avant-garde movement and suffered a blow during the Gleichschaltung (enforced conformity) of artists that left a wound that never healed. Since he did not want to be a communist, he became an involuntary witness to his time, recording the truth about life in Russia in his music. His true music stood in contrast to his official statements as head of the Soviet school of composers, which contributed to his music not being understood west of the Iron Curtain. Bernd Feuchtner sheds new light on Shostakovich from various angles, with his relationship to musicians such as Britten, Mahler, Hindemith, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Eisler, and Theodor W. Adorno proving particularly illuminating. New in the second edition are texts on the bitter "Shostakovich Wars" in Anglo-Saxon literature, on the ambiguity of Shostakovich's Ninth, on the significance of the young Shostakovich's letters to Sollertinsky, and—in response to Russian chauvinism—the classification of Shostakovich as a European.

second, greatly expanded edition

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