Description
The Great German Recorder Epidemic: Reinventing the Recorder, 1925–1950
by Robert Ehrlich
Instant Harmony Essay Series, no. 1. Published 2021.
In this Essay, Robert Ehrlich examines the origins, spread, and consequences of the “recorder epidemic” in 1930s Germany. In the final years of the Weimar Republic, the recorder was reinvented as a simplified, “organic” instrument suitable for mass-production, then marketed as a Volksblockflöte, or “people’s recorder,” after the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933. By the end of the decade, inexpensive school recorders had emerged “triumphal” as a familiar symbol of the indoctrination of children in the Hitler Youth. Several passionate advocates of the recorder, forced into exile as Jewish refugees, brought their dedication to the instrument with them. Thus redeemed from association with the horrors of the “Third Reich,” the school soprano recorder came to be adopted internationally after the War in elementary music education.
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