Friedrich Blume

[1] With the transference of Fritz Stein to the management of the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin in 1933, he simultaneously held the professorship at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel from 1 May 1933; he was confirmed in the position a year later and worked there until his Emeritus in 1958, from 1939 as Professor.

At the University of Kiel, he was first employed as a non-employee Professor and would finance his position there every year through scholarships, which were recommended by the Kiel-based NS lecturer, Eggers, as well as the dean of his faculty.

Nevertheless, he regarded his "probable" involvement as an active Nazi, but Blume favored a much lower sum of scholarship than the Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy, Prof. Weinhandl.

The American musicologist Pamela Potter writes: "The objections raised by the lecturer's office came originally either from Amt Rosenberg or the Propagandaministerium (Ministry of Propaganda).

Similar assessments have been expressed by, for example, the Nazi music experts Albrecht Dümling, Gisela Probst-Effah (University of Cologne), Eva Weissweiler, the French composer Amaury du Closel or the British musicologists Ernest Newman and Richard Freymann.

[9] After the end of World War II, The Racial Problem in Music was placed in the Soviet Occupation Zone on their banned book list,[10] but not in West Germany, where it remained available in some large libraries.

Against the backdrop of biological, ideological, as well as musicological influences, hasty attempts were made to infer from the person of the composer, tone systems, melody, rhythm, etc., their race-specific characteristics.

[13] In 1944 Blume repeated in the 2nd edition of his book Das Rasseproblem in der Musik his statement of 1939: "daß wir von dem Zusammenhange zwischen Musik und Rasse wissenschaftlich vorläufig keinerlei gesicherte Kenntnis haben" (that we have no scientific knowledge of the relationship between music and race for the time being).

[15] Prieberg, however, only interprets these sentences as a lip service and explains a few pages further in his Handbook explicitly that he does not consider Blume a "Nazi".

[16] In Blume's 1947 denazification, the mechanism under the chairmanship of the legal scientist and earlier "fanatical advocates of the racial laws" (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 9 May 2012), and later Minister of the Interior of Schleswig-Holstein Hermann von Mangoldt into category V ("unencumbered"), Blume's writing Das Rasseproblem in der Musik was once again the subject of a short controversy.

[17] In 1942 Blume took up the suggestion of Karl Vötterle, the founder of the Bärenreiter-Verlag, to become their editor for the preparation of the encyclopaedia Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Music in History and Present).