Furtwängler's rise to musical pre-eminence in Germany was rapid. It took a mere thirteen years for him to progress from the journeyman position of third assistant conductor to Hans Pfitzner at the Strasbourg Opera from 1909 to 1911 to that of one of the leading musical directors in Germany when in 1922 he assumed the late Arthur Nikisch's mantle as head of the Leipzig Gewandhaus and Berlin Philharmonic orchestras. Yet this rise took place against a background of turbulent political upheaval during which Germany experienced the end of the Wilhelmine Reich, the carnage of World War I, the shock defeat of 1918 and the faltering attempts at democracy under the nascent Weimar Republic.

Furtwängler's first substantive appointment was as chief conductor in the ancient Hanseatic town of Lubeck from 1911 to 1915, where the nature of his work was largely determined by the cultural tastes and values of the patrician families of the Bürgertum whose social ethic and customs provided Thomas Mann (1875–1955) with such rich material for his 1901 novel Buddenbrooks. In a retrospective look back at the Lubeck of his youth Mann later wrote