Elizabeth Janik. Recomposing German Music: Politics and Musical Tradition in Cold War Berlin. Leiden: Brill, 2005. xv + 356 pp. $213.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-90-04-14661-7.

Reviewed by Samuel Goodfellow (Westminster College [Fulton])
Published on H-German (August, 2006)

Musical Cold War

Despite the fact that many consider classical music an apolitical art that bypasses linguistic and visual messages to appeal directly to individual emotion, little doubt remains that music has long reflected the political and social questions of the day. What remains less clear are the specifics of how classical music has been used as a weapon of propaganda. Elizabeth Janik's book illuminates the way that the emerging Cold War recast and divided the German musical tradition by examining the pivotal city of Berlin. The crucial selection of Berlin permits Janik to generate a detailed, in-depth study of the local, national and international debates within the German music community and across the Soviet and western occupation zones. By 1951, Janik argues, two clearly distinct musical strategies had crystallized, reflecting the ideologies of the two superpowers as well as the priorities of the newly formed German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany.

The first three chapters chart the development of musical tradition in Berlin from the nineteenth century to 1945. By "musical tradition," Janik means more than just the music itself, but also the "institutions, beliefs, practices, and personnel" that surround the presentation of music (pp. xiii-xiv). As early as the nineteenth century, the Berlin musical tradition had already developed key divisions that anticipated the Cold War split. Indeed the effect of the early chapters is to lay out the degree to which the East-West chasm was not merely the product of immediate political exigencies. The Royal Court Orchestra, as its name suggests, was an officially sponsored institution and was countered by the Berlin Philharmonic, and later the German Opera House, which were independent. Additionally, as the audience evolved from the aristocratic court to the educated Bürgertum, the idea of music became more national and more scientific as evidenced by the development of musicology.

Following World War I, several important contexts changed. Mass media in the form of radio and phonographs enabled the delivery of music to an ever larger audience, which could, in turn, be more selective about its tastes. This development, of course, raised significant questions about the social role of music. Music might serve socialist purposes in addition to national and bourgeois goals. "New Music," influenced by Arnold Schoenberg and his twelve-tone system of composition and advocated by a new avant-garde, proposed a new definition of musical progress emphasizing new expressions of sound over traditional harmonies. Wider audiences, the greater role of technology, the development of new, more dissonant music and the extension of the civilizing role of music and Kultur to the lower classes coalesced to provide a dramatic reshaping of the meaning of music, especially in Berlin, the cultural capital of Germany. Traditional musical tastes and institutions, however, had not vanished, and the Weimar Republic saw a heated a debate over the future of music. This debate was to reemerge after 1945.

In the context of a deeply polarized cultural world, the Nazis forged their own synthesis, politicizing music but at the same time rejecting the "musical bolshevism" of the avant-garde. Particularly opposed to New Music, the Nazis conflated ideas about music with ideas about race, driving many composers and musicians to emigrate and others to conform to a rigorously centralized system. Weimar's debates over music survived, but were driven outside of Germany.

In 1945, Berlin became a microcosm of Germany and its cultural issues. The occupiers, notably the Soviet Union and the United States, espoused different ideas about the role of culture and music and competed in the symbolic capital of Germany for cultural superiority. Ironically, they shared the idea that music, like all other culture, was political and should be manipulated to leverage support in the Cold War. The Soviets favored state-run, centralized cultural institutions, while the Americans leaned towards a private or market-based solution to culture. Complicating the rebuilding of cultural institutions for the occupying authorities was their shared goal of denazification, which went beyond the Fragebogen and questions of individual guilt to encompass more imponderable issues such as the responsibility of German culture for the success of Nazism. Not only did the Soviets and the Americans want to win the cultural Cold War, they wanted to use culture to build a new and healthier Germany.

Initially, the Americans were slow to respond, coming as they did from a culture which did not embrace state-sponsored patronage. The Soviets, for their part, immediately targeted culture as a way to enhance their influence. This fundamental difference between privatized and publicly supported culture pervaded all forms of cultural production. Externally derived, but not unprecedented, this new debate fit awkwardly into the German context, which had accommodated both traditions. By 1948, the Soviet Union renounced formalism in music, declaring it decadent, bourgeois and lifeless. For its part, the United States saw the Soviet denunciation of formalism as hewing too closely to the attitudes of the Nazis. Vestiges of the old debate between traditional and New Music resurfaced. From 1945 to 1949, Berlin fumbled towards increased hostility.

The rupture, however, took place in 1950-51 after the creation of the two German states and the more permanent division of Berlin. Musical traditions hardened in 1950-51 around separate institutions, ideologies and patronage supported by the FRG and the GDR; structurally it was no longer realistic to talk about a shared musical tradition in Berlin. Instead, the two parts of Berlin became showcases for their respective sides of the Cold War.

This book is a solid addition to both the social history of German classical music and the social and political history of the immediate postwar era. If I have a criticism, I would have liked to have read more on the explicit connections between musical traditions and the broader postwar cultural policies. Music, after all, seeped across cultural disciplines, having become integral to radio and film--both modern media--and playing a role in theater, cabaret and even festivals. On its own terms, however, the book successfully lays out the cultural and intellectual debates that took place within the institutions and structures that maintained and nurtured classical music.

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Citation: Samuel Goodfellow. Review of Janik, Elizabeth, Recomposing German Music: Politics and Musical Tradition in Cold War Berlin. H-German, H-Net Reviews. August, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12180

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