From Composers to Dictators: Composer Postcards and the Training of Authoritarian Subjects

Four portraits accompany the phrase “Deutsche Musik” (German Music), lettered in red on the front of a 1936 picture postcard. The portraits are of composers George Frideric Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach, Heinrich Schutz, and Richard Wagner; German composers whose music the Nazi regime labeled as embodying the German ‘soul.’ On the postcard’s verso is another portrait: a purple six-pfennig stamp, emblazoned with the text “Deutsches Reich” (German Reich) and a profile image of Adolf Hitler. Perhaps, the convergence of musical icons and authoritarian leader, of popular media and the apparatus of statehood, on this postcard is mere coincidence. I argue, however, that a larger phenomenon is at play: the postcard evidences the transference of secular personality cults that emerged in nineteenth-century German musical culture to the person of the authoritarian leader.

Though Baroque and Romantic era composers did not cause the rise of Nazism, the ideas of hero-worship that first developed around these figures are an important precedent for the relationship between authoritarians and their subjects. I establish and examine this relationship through an analysis of postcards from 1890-1946 featuring composers, music notation, song lyrics, and other references to musical culture, as well as official Nazi literary publications (e.g., Wille und Macht) and posters. Building on conversations by musicologist Abigail Fine (2025) and Joshua S. Walden (2018) about material culture and portraiture of composers, this project opens the possibilities of hearing history through the undertheorized medium of music postcards while also situating the medium back in the media landscape of World War II. The quotidian medium of the postcard advertised and perpetuated the consumption of personality cults of the nineteenth century into the first decades of the twentieth, performing subtle cultural work during the formation and consolidation of Hitler’s Germany.

The poster design will feature the postcard described above as its center image. The visual presentation will expand outward to show examples of other composer postcards. This poster display is mindful about balancing informing about Nazi propaganda while also not seeking to perpetuate circulation of such imagery. Therefore, where Nazi graphic symbols are present, viewers will be required to lift a flap to see. This poster feature aims to provoke an intentional moment of reflection on the interplay of the public and private dimension to music postcards, their circulation, and ideas of censorship. After establishing the project’s argument underneath the center postcard, the poster will guide the viewer through a counterclockwise journey of supporting evidence, methods, and additional references. This counterclockwise direction will start in the top left-hand corner and proceed to the bottom right.