Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Sprigge, Martha Anne

Titel

Abilities to mourn: Musical commemoration in the German Democratic Republic (1945-1989)

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations Publishing

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• From 1945 to 1949, in the wake of their total defeat in World War II, German citizens and officials constructed multiple, often competing, narratives of the wartime years. Yet as Cold War divisions took shape, a dogmatic interpretation of the Nazi past emerged in the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ) and later German Democratic Republic (GDR). This narrative celebrated communist heroes, upheld East Germany as an antifascist state, and prohibited alternative accounts of the nation's past. This dissertation examines a significant and under-examined cultural phenomenon that emerged from this process of national self-fashioning: a musical practice of mourning and commemoration. I document how modes of mourning and commemoration developed in the GDR that were distinct from, and orthogonal to, their Western counterparts, placing East German music within a broader discourse of mourning, trauma, and "coming to terms with the past" in postwar Germany. Contrary to Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich's popular notion that mourning was impossible behind the Iron Curtain, this extensive repertoire of commemorative works exemplifies the abilities for mourning available to East German citizens through composition, listening, and performance. My study is based on the distinction between "hard" and "soft" memory, as outlined by historian Alexander Etkind. Rather than considering these forms of memory as mutually exclusive, I demonstrate how music mediated between these modes of remembrance, allowing multiple versions of the past to coexist within a single composition. Thus music provided a multifaceted space for mourning—a "performing cure" distinct from other artistic expressions of loss in literature, architecture, visual art, and film. Four musical case studies elucidate this theory, each shedding light on a different compositional technique used in the service of mourning. Together, these analyses offer a comprehensive examination of musical mourning in the GDR and position this practice within artistic responses to the multiple traumas that shaped postwar Europe.