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Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany. By Michael H. Kater. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. xiv + 291 pp.

As this representative passage shows, Michael Kater's monograph, with its fifty pages of notes, is exhaustive to the extent that at times the reader has difficulty seeing the orchestra for the instruments, as it were. Schumann became one of the Ghetto Swingers at Terezin concentration camp, was moved to Auschwitz, but survived and still plays in minor Berlin clubs. Kater's account of the fate of musicians and fans after the war constitutes a document and indictment as moving as those which precede it: 'jazz victims' received no compensation from the West German government. The author refuses to indulge his subjects, coolly observing that musicians who played for Nazi bands (Charlie's Orchestra and the DTU) were more interested in women and other perks than in ethics or politics. Unfortunately for their reputation, this aligns them with such Nazis as Wilhelm Fauderl, a yellow press editor, and Hans Hinkel, Goebbels' sidekick who appear to have operated the equivalent of a director's couch for starry-eyed Frauleins, thus echoing the activities of earlier night-club habitues on another continent. 'Everybody's Doing It' dates from 1911 and its reference is not limited to rhythmic dance. Jazz fans, Kater affirms, remained abstracted from political reality, though he also insists that the Swing Jugend (in Hamburg and other urban centres), by dint of their style, clothes, language and interest in jazz represented a challenge to Nazism by proclaiming despite the uniformity they shared with the Hitler Youth they loathed their status and independence. Gradually the 'swings' were conscripted or sent to camps, but their places were filled by younger members with 'an acutely sharpened sense of justice and democracy'. Kater ends his book with a tribute to Thorsten Miiller the journalist and ex-swing, one of the few cases where jazz led to genuine political belief and action. This suggests the author hoped for more evidence among the swings of that commitment and militancy demonstrated by the Edelweiss Pirates, whose origins were working class rather than middle class and whose musical tastes were for folk music.