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Jazz as a Catalyst in West German Arts and Culture

By: Andrew Wright Hurley

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eText | 31 July 2025 | Edition Number 1

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Advancing the New Jazz Studies by focusing on questions of intermediality and cultural catalysis, this book demonstrates the role jazz played in the re-making of West German culture in the post-war era.

The shadow of National Socialism, a history of German polarisation by jazz, and the influences of occupation and division, meant that jazz catalysed influential young creative artists. These included writers such as Nobel Laureate Gunter Grass, Young German Cinema filmmakers like Hansjurgen Pohland, and abstract visual artists like KRH Sonderborg. Jazz provided an impulse to take into extra-musical artforms, and an impetus to reflect on what art and culture were. Through considering poetry, the novel, photography, film and television, graphic design and the fine arts, this volume reveals how German creatives were influenced not only by American jazz culture, but also by cultural innovations from elsewhere, and by German traditions they considered less compromised by the Nazi era. The book also explores the limits of this catalysis, examining for example how African-Americans received the German representation of jazz culture.

Written in an accessible style, this important contribution to New Jazz Studies and German Studies scholarship will appeal to both graduate and undergraduate students or researchers in the fields of jazz history, twentieth-century musicology, and European or German cultural studies.