ABSTRACT

Broadly speaking, the Swiss musical world confronted Nazism in much the same way as the country as a whole. In practice, Switzerland’s official ‘neutrality’ was far from balanced, and perhaps little more could have been demanded of a country effectively surrounded by Axis territory, indeed one whose longstanding cultural ties to its neighbours, viewed benevolently, may well have run deeper than political tensions. What the case of Switzerland also offers, however, is an international perspective on the cultural dimension of Nazism, a phenomenon long made problematic by its isolation in cultural historiography. Precisely because Switzerland was not occupied and indeed remained nominally neutral, its close relations with Nazi Germany in the field of contemporary music complicate morally clear-cut categories such as ‘complicity’ and ‘resistance’.

This chapter explores the ambivalences presented by the work of major Swiss composers active during the wartime period, notably Othmar Schoeck and Arthur Honegger (of Swiss-German parentage), but also Frank Martin and Conrad Beck, all of whom navigated between burgeoning Swiss nationalism and long-held notions of music – especially Swiss music and its various institutions – as international and apolitical.