Culture in Flight: Refugees and the Politics of Music in Latin America, 1933–60

This paper will detail and query the difficulties of crafting European cultural communities in Latin American exile.  A little-told historical narrative, European conductors, musicians, and composers fleeing Nazi Europe found refuge and work throughout Latin America, involving themselves deeply in culture, society, and politics. Most musicians gravitated to cities, where they transformed Latin American musical and urban culture. They joined or created orchestras, taught in national conservatories, and altered musical repertoires. They joined Latin American composers in bringing folk motifs and melodies into the classical canon and integrating European high culture into the Latin American musical sphere. In less developed cities, émigrés organized to duplicate the schools, religious and cultural institutions they had left behind. This seeming hubbub of activity belies the difficulty of sustaining European high culture in Latin America. The émigrés had hoped to recreate at least some aspects of the bourgeois cosmopolitan cultural atmosphere in which they had been raised, including a dedication to classical music, a cosmopolitan adherence to German culture divorced from territoriality and political power, and the idea that German-speakers should convey these universal values to the world through their cultural endeavors. Sadly, postwar Europe was generally unwelcoming. The Europeans remaining in Latin America concentrated on their everyday lives and adjusted to the steady decline of public support for classical music, relying increasingly on private lessons. Some sought a cultural home in the Judaism Hitler had forced on them and their families in the 1930s, animating new “Yekke” German-Jewish religious communities alongside older Ashkenazic and Sephardic ones.