At the same time it was searching for precedents in mid- to late-nineteenth century literary, artistic, philosophical, and political trends, the Völkischer Beobachter remained obsessed with tracing the path and progress of music after Wagner and devising ways to explain these developments in a manner that aligned this music with the Nazi program. Central to the National Socialist agenda was promoting the continued validity of the romantic tradition, while correspondingly refuting modernist developments in music. One way to oppose the influence and significance of modernism was to invoke once more the popular music of the nineteenth century – for instance, a Strauss waltz – as a defensive bulwark: “When you sit in a big city café listening to music in the Weimar Republic and then all of a sudden – after the hooting, moaning, and whining of modern jazz music – hear the soft, loving sounds of a particularly beautiful waltz, you will probably laugh and say: ‘That can only be by a Viennese – a Strauss!’” Waltzes by Johann Strauss, Sr. (1804–1849), the paper insisted, had something “invincibly lively and electrifying about them”: consequently, they remained popular even if the “rhythm of the day” had changed. Though struggling through a cold, hard, planned life – “surrounded by the noise of machines and the thousands of wheels passing in traffic” – modern Germans were “still moved by the lyrical nightscape of a Strauss waltz – ever reminded that a Viennese waltz is the language of our soul, the rhythm of our pulse, the flow of our blood, the throbbing of our heart.”