World War I and the Weimar Republic
The rather eclectic collection of materials from this period includes original sheet music of the "German Submarine Song" sung by German navy soldiers heading towards England alongside a poster for a concert in the Tonhalle in Munich, where music by composers Felix Mendelssohn and Richard Wagner was performed in the same evening. In 1850, three years after Mendelssohn's death, Wagner published his famous essay Das Judentum in der Musik (Judaism in Music), where he attacked the music of Felix Mendelssohn and other German-Jewish composers. A performance of Wagner's music alongside Mendelssohn's stands out in light of the explicit anti-Semitism of Wagner and his attack on Mendelssohn. Such a program would not appear twenty years later. While Wagner and his music were venerated by Hitler, Mendelssohn's music was banned in Nazi Germany and his monument in front of the Gewandhaus in Leipzig was removed and destroyed by the Nazis in 1936 in an attempt to erase Mendelssohn's contribution from the history of German art music.
