66 Comments
User's avatar
⭠ Return to thread
Patrick Hinely's avatar

I will never forget my conversation with the late Emil Mangelsdorff (Albert's older brother) about the nazis' treatment of jazz and especially of its practitioners - as a teenager, Emil was sent to the Russian front, after three weeks of being beaten and starved in his local jail. More than 60 years after the fact, Emil still expressed incredulity that a government would actually persecute people for the kind of music they played. Nazi condemnation of jazz, which they considered the degenerate music of rootless cosmopolitans and inferior races, sounds much like, minus the ethnic slurs, Martha Lee's Baltimoronic rantings. While Lee may have existed only in the mind of the Sun's editors and/or publishers, her bloviations were, dangerously, presented alongside real news, in a context most people took seriously in those days. Fortunately, 'her' efforts were totally futile.

Expand full comment