Controversial Role: Kurt Thomas and Frankfurt’s Musical Life during the National Socialist Era

Sa role during the National Socialist era is controversial. In any case, the composer, music educator and choir director Kurt Thomas (1904–1973), who from 1939 led the Musisches Gymnasium in Frankfurt, which was intended by the National Socialists as an elite musical school, and was then Thomaskantor in Leipzig from 1956 to 1960, is one of the most influential Shaping Frankfurt’s musical life during the war and post-war period. Numerous highly gifted musical students from all over Germany studied under his aegis at the boys’ boarding school, many of whom were later very successful and had a formative influence in their turn: the later Thomaskantor Hans-Joachim Rotzsch, the long-time Darmstadt general music director Hans Drewanz, the composer Clytus Gottwald, the Jazz musician Paul Kuhn, the Frankfurt architect Teuto Rocholl and the Frankfurt lawyer and cultural promoter Rüdiger Volhard, to name just a few.

Apparently pretty much without exception, these students and other contemporary witnesses, who are now very old or have already died, have spoken again and again and in many respects very well about Kurt Thomas, who in old photos on official occasions in uniform with a swastika appears like a strict Nazi. In the denazification process in 1947 he was classified as a “follower”. The positive statements about the headmaster, who also headed the Frankfurt Kantorei in the 1960s, can be heard in the 2011 documentary “Sons of Muses” by Philipp Clarin, a son of the actor Hans Clarin, who was also a student at the Musisches Gymnasium. At the same time, you can see how the students in Nazi propaganda films such as “Jugend musiziert” became extras in Hitler Youth uniforms. Meanwhile, pictures that Kurt Thomas himself took as an enthusiastic amateur filmmaker of everyday life at the boarding school show that everyone there was usually dressed in civilian clothes. In the film, the students often describe how Kurt Thomas used all means possible to protect them from military service, in the end only having to let a limited number go to the Volkssturm, and those who fanatized and wanted to go to war voluntarily due to the general evil of the time. prevented from doing so.