| The panels at his afternoon do not only view jazz as a cross-border phenomenon, informing and shifting musical worlds, but consider its political significance, both in the way it survived and influenced diverse social processes. Rainer Lotz takes the trips Afro-American entertainers made to Germany as a background to examine the role of jazz under the National Socialists.
Rainer Lotz, musicologist, political scientist, economist and engineer, formerly worked in the field of development aid. For several years now, he has been doing research into the history of jazz in Europe, and especially into the complex patterns of travel and the connections between Afro-American musicians to, from and within Europe and Germany - from the early German Reich to the Nazi era. He has published a number of anthologies of historical records on this area, as well as more than 160 articles in specialist journals and over eighty monographs, including: "German Ragtime and Pre-History of Jazz" (1985), "Under the Imperial Carpet - Essays in Black History" (1987), "The Banjo on Record" (1993), "Hitler's Airwaves" (1997), "Black People - Entertainers of African Descent" (1997), "Beyond Recall " A Documentation of Jewish Musical Life in Nazi Berlin, 1933-1938" (2001), "Live from the Cotton Club" (2003). He is particularly interested in the significance of jazz in Europe. He is presently working on a discography of German music (of which twenty-one volumes have already appeared) and a biographical encyclopaedia on entertainment in Germany.
Harald Kisiedu studied political science as well as German and German literature in Hamburg. He works as a musician and music journalist. He has published "Zur politischen Rezeption der Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Von der Uraufführung bis zum Nationalsozialismus". In: Viertel, Matthias (ed.): "Achtet mir die Meister nur! 'Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg' im Brennpunkt". Hofgeismarer Protokolle, 1997. He has performed with Champion Jack Dupree, Hannibal Marvin Peterson and Brandford Marsalis.
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