Flaschenkinder. Säuglingsernährung und Familienbeziehungen in Deutschland und Schweden im 20. Jahrhundert By Verena Limper. Vienna and Cologne: Böhlau, 2021. Pp. 532. Hardcover €70.00. ISBN: 978-3412519759.

Abstract

Hayes was earning “outrageous sums of money” for his engagements (110)? How do we know that “applauding African American concert performers sometimes functioned as a symbolic gesture of protest against American racism” (122)? Scholars can disagree on how to interpret sources, but the material in Thurman’s book is always riveting. We learn that in 1909, “a stormy colonial debate reached parliament about a Black musician named Gustav Sabac el Cher” (91). In fact, the matter before the Reichstag was the downsizing of troops stationed in Cameroon, which provoked a lengthy speech from General Eduard von Liebert. Briefly lamenting the music budget (why did German battalions need a bass drum and why couldn’t musicians double as combat soldiers?), von Liebert mentioned a rumor that a Prussian cavalry regiment had a Black drummer and a Prussian infantry regiment had a Black “conductor or drum major.” There was, however, no debate: von Liebert (who later joined the Nazi Party) acknowledged that “race is a question normally avoided” and quickly returned to the subject of the military budget. Quibbling with details does not undermine the book’s forceful argument. For example, the sexist and racist term “pretty, exotic bird” is how one man, in 1975, recounted first seeing the Black woman who became his partner—it was not a trope in “West German magazine articles” (227)—but the fascination with sexuality and celebration of interracial unions are crucial to changes in the reception of Black musicians. The attentive reader will be surprised that musicians and institutions are reintroduced in subsequent chapters, but flawed copyediting in no way diminishes the significance of the book. Thurman’s courage to tell a different story, one suppressed for generations, will inspire musicologists and historians to listen more carefully to how race and gender were experienced in the exalted spaces of classical music.