Wolfgang Boetticher

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Wolfgang Boetticher (1914–2002) was a German musicologist who taught for many years at the University of Göttingen. He was born in Bad Ems and became an editor and arranger of many Robert Schumann works, especially for the Munich publishing house G. Henle.

He studied musicology at Humboldt University in Berlin after receiving piano training from notable teachers. While a student, he was active in Nazi organizations and later held positions in Nazi student groups, the Reichsstudentenführung, and the National Socialist People’s Welfare. He joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and worked there full-time. He also held roles in the Rosenberg office and in the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce (ERR) during World War II, participating in looting and confiscations of musical materials, including items from Polish libraries and the collection of Wanda Landowska. He became a member of the Waffen-SS, reaching the rank of Unterscharführer, and he helped produce the Lexikon der Juden in der Musik, a Nazi-era reference work.

In 1942 he was promoted within the ERR, and by 1944 he was a private lecturer in Berlin. He received the Robert Schumann Prize of the City of Zwickau in 1943. After the war, Boetticher began teaching at Göttingen in 1948, was made a professor in 1955, and became director of the Musicological Institute in 1957. He also served as dean of the Faculty of Philosophy (1972–1974) and spent a 1963 visiting professorship at Charles University in Prague.

Boetticher’s Nazi past became widely known in post-war Germany. In 1963 Joseph Wulf published documents showing his involvement with anti-Semitic content in the Schumann area, including his work on the Lexikon der Juden in der Musik. Despite this, Boetticher continued his academic career. Later assessments of his Schumann research criticized his methods and some of his letters as possibly forged or unreliable, though he remained an influential figure for some time.

Toward the end of his life, Boetticher stopped giving lectures after the ERR-related disclosures, and he left behind memoirs that glossed over his wartime activities. He died in Göttingen at the age of 87.