Free Action

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 Günter Grass, Young German Cinema filmmakers like Hansjürgen 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.

Andrew Wright Hurley is a Professor at the University of Technology Sydney and historian who has written widely on jazz in Germany and around the world, on popular music and contemporary German fiction, and on German-Australian colonial entanglements.

Introduction 1. Atmospheric Conditions Permitting: Germany's Second, More Enduring Jazz Age 2. In Phase: Jazz, the Spoken Word and Recited Lyrik (Poetry) 3. Drums, Trumpets and Memory: Jazz as an Ambiguous Stimulant for the Post-War West German Novel 4. Black Performers, Jewish Ghosts, and the Illustrated Travel Journal: The German Jazz Photography Album of the 1950s and 1960s 5. Hearing and Seeing Jazz in Film and TV 6. Visualising Jazz in Graphic Design: "Music Captured by the Retina" 7. From Freedom in Paint to the Jazz Action: Jazz and Fine Arts 8. Conclusion