I enter the ringing halls of the Palais Meran—the top floor of which now houses the Institute for Jazz Research of the University for Music and Performing Arts Graz.1 Coming from the United States,2 the mere concept that this institution is housed in the private residence of the Styrian Habsburg Archduke John already embeds a level of formality and extravagance to which I am unaccustomed. This is a building in which he died; this is a building that his heirs inhabited until 1939, a mere year after Germany's annexation of Austria. It is in the bones of this building itself that Austrian history has been written, shattered, and written over and over again.
I was guided to this collection by my colleague Dr. Lawrence Davies. After hearing me speak on the mythology of Joséphine Baker in Paris during the Second World War, he told me that as a...
