The Jazz Republic

Front matter

ONLINE SURVEY

In collaboration with Unglue.it, we have set up a survey (only ten questions!) to learn more about how open access ebooks are discovered and used.

We really value your participation—please take part!

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Jazz Occupies Germany 2 The Aural Shock of Modernity 3 Writing Symphonies in Jazz 4 Syncopating the Mass Ornament 5 Bridging the Great Divides 6 Singing the Harlem Renaissance 7 Jazz’s Silence Conclusion Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

This project has accompanied me now for more than ten years and across four institutions. Over this period, I have had more opportunities than I can recount to converse with scholars and colleagues about the subject of jazz music and popular culture in Germany during the 1920s. Their cumulative effect has helped shape The Jazz Republic. Even more so, without the collective support, guidance, and knowledge of friends and colleagues, The Jazz Republic simply would not have been completed. Throughout, I’ve also been financially supported through a number of grants and stipends from the University of Michigan, North Carolina State University, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

At both my current and previous institutions, senior colleagues in German have supported me to a degree that went far beyond the call of duty. Fittingly, they each share the first name “Ruth.” At North Carolina State, Ruth Gross was my department chair, a scholarly mentor, and simply a wonderful colleague. At Milwaukee, I have had the luck to be helped along and quite often lifted up by Ruth Schwertfeger: our conservations always left me with a smile on my face. I cannot thank each of them enough.

The following is an attempt to list, in no particular order other than alphabetical, some of those who have contributed to the current work over the years. My apologies in advance to anyone I’ve forgotten: Vanessa Agnew, Kevin Amidon, Don Anderson, Paul Anderson, Naomi André, Kerstin Barndt, Vlad Bilenkin, Viktorija Bilic, Ulrich Biller, Stephen Bourne, Helga Braunbeck, Sylvia Schmitz-Burgard, Peter Cahn, David Choberka, Michael Cowan, Chip Deffaa, Bill Donahue, Andrew Donson, Michelle Eley, Carla Garner, Michael Garval, Karl Gert zur Heide, Daniel Golani, David Gramling, Jiirgen Grandt, Jane Hawkins, Gabriele Hayden, Jiirgen Heinrichs, Leroy Hopkins, Jochen Hung, Andrew Hurley, Catherine Kirchman, Lutz Kube, Alan Lareau, Priscilla Layne, Rainer Lotz, Jason Miller, Tobias Nagl, Nancy Nenno, Marc Pierce, Arnold x Acknowledgments

Special mention, though, is due to two independent researchers of jazz music and African American musicians in Germany and Austria: Hans Pehl and Konrad Nowakowski. Each of them has contributed greatly to the following project through collaboration, joint research, and sharing of their years of knowledge and expertise. They have each greatly enriched the project and their generosity has known no bounds; each read drafts of the manuscript and, in the process, contributed new information and eliminated any number of errors. Needless to say, any mistakes that remain are my own.

My research was also furthered through a number of archives and libraries in the United States and Germany. Generally, I’d like to begin by thanking the interlibrary loan staff at both the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and at North Carolina State University for procuring almost every obscure request I’ve made. In addition, I’d also like to thank specifically: Akademie der Künste (Michael Schwarz), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, Center for Research Libraries in Chicago, Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek Weimar (Dr. Hans Zimmermann), Hochschule fiir Musik und darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt am Main (Dr. Andreas Odenkirchen), Institut fiir Theaterwissenschaft of the Free University Berlin (Dr. Peter Jammerthal), Library of Congress, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, New York Public Library, Paul Whiteman Collection at Williams College, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg of the Landesarchiv Baden-Wiirttemberg, Staatsbibliothek Berlin, and the Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung of the University of Cologne.

To the University of Michigan Press and its entire staff, in particular LeAnn Fields, who has supported the project from the start, I am deeply grateful. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript as well for their extremely useful comments.

Outside of academia, I have also been supported through my family, my mother and father as well as mother- and father-in-law and my entire extended family.

This book, though, is dedicated to my wife, Katie, and children, Charlotte, Grace, Josephine, and Isabelle. Any words here will not suffice to express what you mean to me, so I'll only say that without you, I would be lost.

Acknowledgments xi Note Regarding Language

Throughout this work, the word “Black” is capitalized when used in reference to people of African descent and the Black African diaspora in all cases except when occurring in direct citation. This usage is common though by no means universal in a variety of fields such as African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies. It is adopted here as a means of signaling these groups’ status as communities on par with other nationalities, peoples, etc., yet in a way that also attends to the diversity of Black peoples and cultures in the United States and globally, something especially important given the derogatory and dehumanizing language contained within some of my primary sources. The manuscript also uses “African American” in non-hyphenated form throughout for similar reasons and employs “Black” and “African American” synonymously where appropriate.

Introduction

Sometime in the spring of 1925, a sixteen-year-old Berlin native, Alfred Lion, decided to spend a day at the Theater im Admiralspalast. One of the most important entertainment establishments of the German capital, it was well known to Lion from his youth for its renowned skating rink. In 1922, however, the building had been renovated and the rink replaced with a theater hall that could fit an audience of over 2000.! In addition to its café and casino, this institution featured performances by musical revues and operettas throughout the 1920s. On that spring day, there was a performance of the African American revue Chocolate Kiddies. As Lion recalled much later, in part mixing the establishment’s past and present:

Well, you know I was a young boy and I used to go skating, roller-skating, in a place called the Admiralspalast, I think it was. And one day I went there with my skates and they told me there was no skating today, they had a band there and I saw a poster on the wall and it said “Sam Wooding and his Chocolate Dandies” [sic]. And I didn’t know anything about it, but it looked strange to me, different, you know. And I went in, checked out my skates, and sat down and there was Sam Wooding. It was the first time

I saw colored musicians and heard the music. I was flabbergasted . . —It was something brand new, but it registered with me right away... . I couldn’t really put my fingers[sic] on it, but it was the beat, you know. It was the beat. That beat . . .—it got into my bones.?

Like so many others who heard jazz during Germany’s Weimar Republic, Lion was completely taken by this music from America. Not content with the live experience alone, Lion purchased recordings by Sam Wooding made in Berlin, holding on to them for much of his life.” A little more than a year later, in September 1926, Lion undertook a trip to New York City, where, amongst other things, he acquired recordings he could not find in Berlin.*

Even in New York, Lion at first found it difficult to find the sort of jazz records he desired, until he discovered so-called “race records.” According to Lion, it was only then that he was able to find the work of Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, and others.° Still, New York did not prove to be as enthralled about Lion as he was about jazz. A fight with a dockworker landed him in the hospital, and after convalescing, he returned home to Germany. Back in Berlin, he apparently worked for an import-export company until 1933, when the German-Jewish Lion was forced into exile, first to Chile and then back to New York, this time permanently, in 1936.

While Lion’s experience might have remained but an interesting, private aside in interwar history, in 1939, along with Max Margulis, he cofounded Blue Note Records, today considered one of the most important record labels in jazz history.® Lion was joined in New York later in the year by his friend Francis Wolff, fellow German-Jewish exile and jazz enthusiast from Berlin.’ The Blue Note label became a major driving force behind the recording and dissemination of jazz music and grew from early successes with Sidney Bechet and Albert Ammons and Meade “Lux” Lewis to later working with Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Bud Powell, Art Blakey, and Miles Davis. Leaving Harlem for Berlin in 1925, Sam Wooding, the African American performer named in Lion’s account, could hardly have imagined the impact his sojourn would have on Lion, jazz history, or, as the present work suggests, on the culture of Weimar Germany itself.

The Jazz Republic argues that encounters between Germans and jazz such as Lion’s are emblematic of a broad and unpredictable exchange and dialogue between Germany and America around jazz. From New Orleans to New York, from London to Paris to Moscow, Madrid, and of course Berlin, the 1920s witnessed a global explosion of interest in jazz that found special resonance in Germany. This period in German history was one marked by extremes: in culture, society, and politics. On the one hand, Weimar Germany’s culture bristled with the newness and innovation of modernist experimentation in Dadaism and Expressionism, as well as in the films of Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau. On the other hand, such radical departures from tradition mixed unevenly with repeated crises in politics and the economy: a runaway currency devastated the German middle-class in the early 1920s, followed later by massive unemployment, not to mention a political atmosphere in which murder, rather than debate, often ruled the day. And yet still, in the middle of all this, there stood a new form of music from America called jazz.

From the beginning of the Weimar Republic through the early years of the Nazi regime, American jazz was a constant presence. To speak of the “Golden

Twenties,” as the third decade of the twentieth century is often called in Germany, is to evoke images not only of political radicalism and avant-garde artistic experiment but also jazz. More to the point, the Weimar Republic was, in a central way, Germany’s own “jazz age.’ It was an age syncopated by experiences of revolution and betrayal, defeat and “victory” gone awry, hope and despair, progress and reaction. Indeed, because it has become de rigueur to refer to jazz’s presence within Weimar culture, the music can appear almost omnipresent in scholarly discussions of the period. Yet while there are many individual essays on jazz within German studies scholarship, there are but two monographs devoted to the subject and none in English. More to the point, neither of the existing works investigates the histories of the individual performers to which German commentators responded, nor do they make extensive use of the daily press and the innumerable discussions of jazz that took place there. So though scholars may rarely question jazz’s cultural significance, nor do they, as a rule, devote substantive, long-form analysis to showing precisely and concretely how it contributed to, rather than merely reflected, the period’s vaunted modernism and modernity. Everywhere and yet nowhere, in many ways jazz figures as a form of cultural background music to Weimar culture proper. Yet jazz and the German interest in it were more than mere passing fancies of a decadent society slipping into the abyss of totalitarianism, more than acoustical accouterment to avant-garde or reaction. Against the implication of jazz as ornament to Weimar culture, The Jazz Republic maintains on the contrary that jazz and the German encounter with it must be placed at the center of Weimar culture—of its modernism, modernity, and debates over changing cultural, gender, and racial norms.

Part of the reason for jazz’s curious position within contemporary scholarship is the fact that it is a musical, rather than a visual, literary, or otherwise textual, genre. In order to recognize jazz as central to Weimar culture, one must first understand how, as the editors of a collection of writings on music and culture put it, “sound matters”—to culture, subjectivity, and history.” While musicologists, in particular via the work of Susan McClary, have for some time convincingly argued for a socially constructed notion of music and sound, scholars within German studies have only more recently begun to ask similar questions. If scholarship in the emerging field of sound studies has begun redefining our understanding of sound in German studies, the exact role this aural realm has played remains much less defined. !°

For a number of reasons, the case of Germany during the interwar period presents a particularly rich example of crossings between music, sound, culture, and society. As scholars Pamela Potter and Celia Applegate have argued in a variety of contexts, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, German cultural identity was deeply invested in music.!! If the equation was neither uniform nor uncontested, the idea of Germans as a “people of music” acted as a powerful framing device within broader debates over German identity. During the interwar period, such debates increased in proportion and intensity. Applegate and Potter summarize: “World War I marked a crisis in German identity that deeply influenced the discourse on German music while condoning attempts to exploit music for political aims.”'? The disruption of society and politics caused by World War I and Germany’s ensuing defeat engendered a crisis in national and thus musical identity. Over the course of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, various attempts were made to rearticulate the fractured relationship between music and German cultural identity. This lent the reception of jazz special significance during the interwar period and guaranteed debate over the music’s powerful resonance in this period of upheaval. As a musical form emanating from the United States, one viewed simultaneously as both mechanical and primitive, jazz posed immediate challenges to the ideologies surrounding this musically inflected cultural identity. Yet if discussion of jazz could act, as it indeed often did, as a means of reinforcing boundaries between “German” and “non-German,” so, too, could it lead to spectacular breakdowns of such oppositions, to reforming and rearticulating categories of national and cultural belonging, of constructions of Weimar Germany as jazz republic.

Reimagining America, Rethinking German Americanism

In order to do justice to the complexity, unpredictability, and contradictoriness of the meaning of jazz music for Weimar Germany, it is first necessary to change how we approach the encounter between Germany and America as it took place through jazz. During the Weimar Republic an important debate over Amerikanismus (Americanism) and Amerikanisierung (Americanization) occurred across German culture and society, with jazz being one essential component of this discussion.'* From conservatives like Adolf Halfeld who railed against the “mechanical life” of America to Bertolt Brecht’s satire of an infatuated group of “700 intellectuals praying before an oil tanker,’ debate over America and American modernity occupied an important position on both ends of the political and cultural spectrum.'* With the global recognition of the United States as a world power following the First World War, Europeans and Germans in particular paid increasingly public attention to this once upstart nation, elevating its status in the minds of many to the purest instantiation of the present, of the modern; its skyscrapers, monopolistic businesses, films and film stars, and jazz signaling to Weimar commentators simultaneously hope for renewal as well as marking fear over decline.!°

At the same time, one of the fundamental questions regarding Americanism is the extent to which Germany’s image of America compares to the historical reality of 1920s America. In accounts of the period, Weimar’s America is all-too-often understood primarily as an absence, a projection of a utopian or, as is often the case, a dystopian imaginary, against which German culture could define itself. This line of thinking was by no means foreign to cultural critics at the time. Rudolf Kayser, for example, could already claim in 1925 that Americanism “[cJertainly . . . has nothing or only little to do with the American,” instead, it “is a new European method” for embracing modern life.!° While there is little question that Weimar Americanism was a cultural war waged on a German field of battle, with German interests largely driving the debate, this does not mean that the encounter and engagement with American culture was purely, or even primarily, determined by German interests alone. To paraphrase Marx’s methodological challenge from the 1Sth Brumaire, Weimar Germany may have made its image of America, but it did not make it freely, as it pleased. Instead of viewing German Americanism as a mirror image of internal concerns, the present work understands the relationship to be more akin to that of a prismatic refraction. While the prism of German culture and history did indeed shape the output, the resulting image was to no small part informed by the input of American culture itself. In a word, Weimar’s America and the debates around it were, I argue, powerfully informed by the contradictions and conflicts inherent to American culture itself, most notably of race. One conclusion to draw from this is that in order to better understand the images of jazz circulating in Weimar culture, one must investigate the African American and African diasporic presence in the United States and in Germany. As Tobias Nagl writes in his study of race and Blackness in Weimar film, “representations of the ‘Other’ cannot be conceptualized within a vacuum; they carry traces of real encounters and are symptoms of a repressed history.”!” In addressing and evaluating the impact of America and jazz on Weimar culture, the current work will argue that one must hear this history in stereo, as it were, simultaneously listening to developments on both sides of the Atlantic. Only in this way can one be attentive both to the ways American culture framed and was in turn framed by the German encounter with it.

For this synching of German and American culture to work to its fullest extent, however, each side of the encounter must be reexamined. On the American side, this process begins with acknowledgment of the fraught racial composition of American culture. Scholarship on Americanism in Weimar tends to abide by the unspoken agreement that when one is discussing Americanism in Weimar, itis of a white Germany confronting a white America, with consideration of the impact of African Americans and Blackness generally treated as a separate topic. As long as this remains the implicit framework from which German Americanism is judged, the German encounter with America will itself remain the caricature it has often become. To move away from such separation and from Weimar’s own understanding of Americanism as “European method,” one of the first steps is to view discussion of white American and African American culture as inseparable. Ralph Ellison’s thoughts on African American culture in relation to white American culture have been important to my thinking here. As Ellison writes in “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke”:

Down at the deep dark bottom of the melting pot, where the private is public and the public private, where black is white and white black, where the immoral becomes moral and the moral is anything that makes one feel good (or that one has the power to sustain), the white man’s relish is apt to be the black man’s gall.'®

Ellison’s recasting of the well-known metaphor of the American melting pot not only speaks to the foundational importance of African Americans to American culture writ large, but also to the unique structure of American cultural identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Both Manichean dualism and dialectically dirtied stew of cultures, races, and identities, Ellison’s take on American identity points towards the necessity to recognize in everything that originates from this nation a duality of inseparably connected “essences.” As Ellison argues, however, such interconnectedness has little to do with the equitable distribution of power. Speaking to the painful and often violent implications of the racial ideologies inherent to American culture, he reminds his (white) readers that white enjoyment (“relish”) usually means pain and anger (“gall”) for African Americans. In terms of conceptualizing the impact of jazz on German culture, Ellison’s thoughts suggest the need to examine how all instances of US culture are bound up with this dialectic of race and to investigate in turn how German commentators engage (or do not) with this aspect.

I will define my use of the term “jazz” shortly, but it is important to consider the implications of this idea in relation to American popular music more generally. As the work of Ronald Radano has shown, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century witnessed a fundamental shift in how African American music was constructed and consumed by critics and audiences. Out of an ideological matrix of music and racial difference, Radano argues, a focus on rhythm in Black music emerged and created a code of listening to and defining Black music that erased earlier understandings, in particular in relation to the African American voice. The trope of an ineffable “Black rhythm” pervaded and shaped American popular music, both Black and white, and in so doing created the fraught system out of which American (and German) conceptualizations of jazz emerge. For Radano, this means that:

Black music’s power [is located] not in a segregated racial preserve but in the relational position of a black sound confessing the mulatto truth of a white supremacist nation. If it unseats the authenticity of black presence so does it reveal for African-America something more: it places claim on the totality of the American social experience that has been persistently portrayed to be white.!°

Following Radano, my conceptualization of American culture is not one that would erase racial difference through a claim of power equity between Black and white as in the non-Ellisonian idea of American culture as “melting pot.” Instead, my emphasis on the relational structure of African American and white American identities gestures towards an understanding of American culture that better attends to W. E. B. Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness, which amongst many other things, is tied with striving “to make it possible,’ as Du Bois writes in The Souls of Black Folks, “for a man to be both a Negro and an American.””° On the one hand, this will mean paying attention to how German images of and interactions with African Americans overlap but are not identical to other African diasporic communities. On the other, this means that it is necessary to show how the seemingly most “white” American phenomena carry “Blackness” and how “Black” phenomena like jazz are often structured via white America’s image of African Americans.

Through this specific conceptualization of American culture, I hope to unfold an equally complex German encounter with American culture, jazz, and Blackness during the Weimar Republic. For one, it enables a reorientation of Weimar Americanism along transnational vectors that often lead directly towards Germany’s own conflicted racial and colonial past. As a modern European (after 1919 former) colonial power, German society during the first half of the last century took part in a global network of exchanges: of peoples, products, cultures, and ideas. Germany’s colonial era escalated the encounter and exchange with the rest of the world, including Black Africans. Moreover, and in parallel to my own thoughts, Andrew Zimmerman’s Alabama in Africa has shown the value of viewing these questions within a transnational context ofrace, capitalism, and labor. As Zimmerman demonstrates through his discussion of the expedition of members of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute to the German colony in Togo in 1901, German investments in Africa and Blackness were part of a network linking African, African American, white American, German, and other European actors.”! In revealing this interweaving of Africa, African America, and Germany, Zimmerman’s work hints at what might be gained through the application of a similar model to the study of Americanism and jazz in the Weimar Republic.

The colonial and transnational context discussed by historians like Zimmerman has obvious implications for scholars working in the interdisciplinary field of German studies. As Sara Lennox argues in “From Postcolonial to Transnational Approaches in German Studies,’ while many German historians since the work of Sebastian Conrad and Jiirgen Osterhammel have come to adopt a transnational approach in the broadest sense, the field of German studies has much more unevenly adopted the transnational perspective.” Intervening into this state of affairs, Lennox offers at the end of her essay a series of important methodological challenges to guide German studies scholarship in a transnational direction. She writes:

How are cultural representations affected by impulses external to the nation state... and how does the cultural product position itself vis-avis those impulses? To what degree does the text directly thematize these questions, and how must we read differently to find the answers? How and why do German-language texts respond differently to the same transnational phenomena from texts with other linguistic origins? How are the national and the transnational explicitly or implicitly represented in the text???

Given the global reach of jazz in the 1920s, such questions will be crucial for thinking through Germany’s encounter with the music. While I address these questions in more detail below, for the moment, the framework offered by Lennox suggests that when thinking through jazz on the global stage, it is necessary to consider the global, transnational context of the jazz’s dissemination and reception alongside the music’s African American origins.

There were three primary means by which the transnational space of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century inflected Weimar Germany’s encounter with jazz. To begin with, this period witnessed a proliferation of racial thinking along social Darwinist lines. As Fatima El-Tayeb argues, during the period leading up to the First World War, Blackness and Blacks became a central component of the ideology of race within German biological, as well as philosophical, sciences.”* Across a wide range of thinkers, Africans, or rather Blackness, as a socially constructed identity, emerged as the ultimate category of otherness for white European identity. Yet colonialism and its inherently global nature also meant that, in practice, the separation of white and Black, as in the case of America, was a difficult proposition, to say the least. Within Germany’s colonies themselves, crucial questions had to be asked about “race mixing” between Black and white, for example regarding the citizenship of offspring between white Germans and Black Africans.’ While in Germany proper, a Black community was in the process of formation from the 1880s onward.” Though the history of the African diasporic presence in Germany stretches much further back in history, German colonialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries fundamentally changed how, where, and under what circumstances white Germans and members of African diaspora confronted each other. Further, because such traffic between Germany and Africa did not take place in isolation, but within the broader Western European colonialist project, port cities like Hamburg and financial capitals like Berlin and Frankfurt witnessed significant numbers of African migrant workers.?’ One of the arenas through which this presence entered into German consciousness was popular culture.?® Beyond well-known associations of Blackness with chocolate as in the advertising figure of the “Sarotti Mohr,’ commercial advertisements of the period for tobacco, soap, and numerous other commodities were suffused with images of Blackness.” Additionally, the entertainment industry in the form of Völkerschauen, or “ethnographic shows,” such as those of Carl Hagenbeck, not to mention the variety theaters and music halls regularly employed Black performers, as has been documented in works by Eric Ames and Rainer Lotz for example.*°

To turn back to the topic at hand, how did these phenomena inform and how in turn were they informed by the German engagement with American culture during the period roughly between 1890 and 1945? For one, around the same time as the African diasporic presence was garnering greater visibility within Germany, one witnesses an initial entry of American and African American popular culture that in many ways presages much of Weimar’s initial encounter with jazz, as is discussed in chapter 1.*! Central here were new technologies of mechanical reproduction like the phonograph, in addition to an unprecedented influx of mass-produced sheet music. These developments exponentially increased the number and modalities of German contacts with American music and culture. Simultaneous to this expansion of American mass culture, African American artists, with the incumbent complexities of cultural production under Jim Crow, were gaining greater visibility within the United States and abroad, in Europe and Germany, for example. This meant that Germany’s first significant exposure to American popular music (cakewalk and ragtime) was one in which the distinction between white and Black music was both on display and very much up for grabs. It is therefore unsurprising that within the German reception of these phenomena, one witnesses some of the same tropes regarding Blackness, rhythm, and capitalist commodification that can be found within the early debate on jazz during the 1920s. While Astrid Kusser has produced an important monograph on cakewalk dancing from a transnational perspective, with my conclusions generally echoing her own, the relative sparseness of scholarly discussion of cakewalk and other forms of American culture during Wilhelmine Germany, even compared to the literature on jazz during the Weimar Republic, let alone Nazi-era jazz, is striking.** That these earlier encounters have until very recently largely been ignored has much to do with the prevailing mythology regarding jazz in Weimar Germany.’

Mythologies of Weimar Jazz Culture

As I suggested earlier, the idea that jazz is important to Weimar culture is by no means new and hardly anyone writing a cultural history of the period would fail to refer to jazz’s presence or general significance. Yet at the level of the actual history of jazz in Germany, such discussions for the most part remain at the level of superficial glosses—a few names of jazz bands or African American performers are mentioned before turning to other matters—or, alternatively, look at jazz in isolation from the issues addressed above. Most significantly, scholarly analyses have all too often depended on outdated secondary literature, for example, Horst Lange’s Jazz in Deutschland (Jazz in Germany), for details regarding jazz bands in Germany.** One result of this is the persistence of a very specific mythology regarding jazz in 1920s Germany. This mythology approaches jazz anachronistically and with the hindsight of around one hundred years of writing on jazz, rather than investigating what jazz meant to Germans, Americans, and members of the Black diaspora in 1920, 1925, or 1930. More specifically, I would like to suggest that most discussions of jazz in Weimar Germany have remained embedded in what Scott DeVeaux has called the “jazz tradition.”5 By this term, he means to indicate the broad con-