scholarly journals Beethoven Returns to Bonn: Origins, Belonging and Misuse in Mauricio Kagel’s Ludwig van (1969)

2021 ◽  
Vol 107 ◽  
pp. 29-61
Author(s):  
Elaine Fitz Gibbon
Keyword(s):  
West Germany ◽  
Music Culture ◽  
Adobe Acrobat ◽  
German Government ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Cultural Legacy ◽  
East German ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
One Year

In 1969 West Germany, the country was abuzz with anticipation of the approaching Beethoven bicentennial. That year the composer and experimental filmmaker Mauricio Raúl Kagel, born in Argentina to Russian- and German-Jewish parents in 1931 and living in Cologne since 1957, was commissioned by the State to commemorate the momentous occasion. What resulted was a film that surely no West German official had anticipated. Entitled Ludwig van: A Report and strongly inflected by Kagel’s absurdist aesthetic, Kagel’s film critiques the fetish object that Beethoven’s music and person had become in twentieth-century West Germany, touching upon, amongst many topics, East German claims of Beethoven’s “misuse” by the West German government, as well as the rise in the 1960s of the theory that Beethoven was Black. While Ludwig van has been recognized for its sendup of bourgeois music culture, it has yet to be analyzed from the perspective of diasporic experience. Simultaneously a love letter to and deconstruction of Beethoven’s cultural legacy, Ludwig van asks its audience to consider the complex diasporic experiences of avant-garde artists in the wake of WWII. Drawing on work by Brigid Cohen, I argue for the centrality of the theme of migration and displacement in Ludwig van. And in reading two central scenes from the film, I consider, in dialogue with Scott Burnham, what light the fifty-one-year-old film’s critique of the fetishization of origins and genealogy might shed on the celebration of Beethoven’s 250th birthday in 2020, and such acts of memorization more generally. [Please note: This article contains embedded video files. These files cannot be played on all PDF readers. Current Musicology recommends Foxit PDF Reader, Adobe Acrobat, or any other PDF reader capable of reading "enriched" media.]

“Because every recipient is also a potential patient” – TV Health Programmes in the FRG and the GDR, from the 1960s to the 1980s

Gesnerus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-191
Author(s):  
Susanne Vollberg
Keyword(s):  
Public Awareness ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Continuous Coverage ◽  
Public Consciousness ◽  
Television Programme ◽  
East German ◽  
Health And Disease ◽  
Media Systems ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
And Function

In the television programme of West Germany from the 1960s to the 1980s, health magazines like Gesundheitsmagazin Praxis [Practice Health Magazine] (produced by ZDF)1 or ARD-Ratgeber: Gesundheit [ARD Health Advisor] played an important role in addressing health and disease as topics of public awareness. With their health magazine Visite [Doctor’s rounds], East German television, too relied on continuous coverage and reporting in the field. On the example of above magazines, this paper will examine the history, design and function of health communication in magazine-type formats. Before the background of the changes in media policy experienced over three decades and the different media systems in the then two Germanys, it will discuss the question of whether television was able to move health relevant topics and issues into public consciousness.

Kitchen Debates

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Weinreb
Keyword(s):  
Positive Impact ◽  
Attitudes Toward Women ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Female Employment ◽  
Daily Food ◽  
East German ◽  
Home Cooking ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Time And Energy

This chapter compares East German and West German attitudes toward women working outside of the home during the 1960s and 1970s. The two German states had radically different attitudes toward female employment. West Germany discouraged it, believing that women should remain out of the workforce to care for their families, especially their children. East Germany encouraged female labor as essential for meeting the country’s economic needs; women’s employment was seen as necessary for their self-fulfillment and as having a positive impact on their children’s health. Despite these differences, both countries perceived home cooking as women’s sole responsibility, as well as a vital necessity. This belief, among other things, determined the countries’ quite different school lunch policies. Ultimately, the normalization of home cooking and a “family meal” shaped women’s relationship to wage labor by demanding that their time and energy be dedicated to daily food work.

What Is the German’s Fatherland?

2015 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jannis Panagiotidis
Keyword(s):  
East Germany ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
German Immigrants ◽  
German Nation ◽  
Labor Recruitment ◽  
Ethnic Germans ◽  
East German ◽  
The Government ◽  
The 1960S

This article deals with the migration of “ethnic Germans” from socialist Eastern Europe to the GDR in the decades after the Second World War. Post-expulsion resettlement from that region is commonly associated with Aussiedler migration to West Germany. Contesting the idea that East Germany displayed no interest in Eastern European Germans, this article shows that the GDR, which challenged the West German claim to be the sole representative of the German nation, also received ethnic German immigrants, mostly from Poland and the USSR. It argues that the distribution of roles between the two German states, with West Germany being the prime destination for resettlers, was not clear from the outset. It was only after Polish–West German “normalization” in 1970 that the FRG became the almost uncontested “fatherland” for Eastern European Germans. West and East German approaches resembled each other as long as they were predicated on humanitarian family reunification. They diverged as the GDR attempted co-ethnic labor recruitment in Poland in the 1960s. These efforts met with limited success, as East Germany was the weakest link in a cross-bloc “tetradic nexus” with the German minority in Poland, the Polish state, and West Germany. Meanwhile, the GDR authorities eyed grass-roots migration initiatives by Soviet Germans with suspicion, as they undermined the government aspiration to control the movement of people. The article finally argues that movement of labor had no priority in the project of socialist economic integration, which gives reason to suspect a link between limited migration and failed COMECON integration.

Provisional State, Reluctant Institutions: West Berlin's Refugee Service and Refugee Commissions, 1949–1952

2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 822-843
Author(s):  
Eric H. Limbach
Keyword(s):  
Police Officer ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Political Asylum ◽  
Police Station ◽  
West Berlin ◽  
East German ◽  
One Year ◽  
Northern City

In May 1951, the Hamburger Freie Presse published an article on the alleged experiences of Hans Schmidt, an East German police officer (Volkspolizist) who had sought to register earlier that year for political asylum in West Berlin. The newspaper profile followed the twenty-one-year-old Schmidt from his unit's barracks in the northern city of Rostock, across the still undefended border between Brandenburg and West Berlin, to a police station in the northwestern district of Spandau, where he announced his intention to flee to West Germany.

Dancing along the Wall

2020 ◽  
pp. 265-286
Author(s):  
Victoria Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
West Germany ◽  
The West ◽  
Martha Graham ◽  
German Government ◽  
White House ◽  
East Berlin ◽  
The Us ◽  
East German ◽  
Wire Fence

“You Are Leaving the American Sector,” signs read as Martha Graham and her company crossed from West Germany to celebrate Berlin’s 750th anniversary. The East German government sought reunification; for the communists, “reunification,” “peace,” and thus the promise of “human bonds” became political weapons. Although the “Stalin Note” in 1952 promised West Germans “the rights of man” and some freedoms, Stalin demanded military neutrality. The US and West German governments finally decided it was communist propaganda. “Peace” remained a contested term with the “peaceful Soviets,” positioned against a “warmongering America.” Graham’s East Berlin repertory featured Frontier, the same work of Americana that had she had presented at the White House in 1937 and then more recently under Gerald Ford. Unlike Graham’s pioneer woman, East Berliners stood in front of a wall, a barbed-wire fence; Graham’s dancer stood in front of a fence and envisioned an expansionist future—not a stopping point. “The girl is seeing a great landscape, untrammeled,” Graham said to an East German of her pioneer woman, performed by an African American dancer to emphasize racial inclusion as an American tenet: “It’s the appetite for space, which is one of the characteristics of America. It’s one of the things that has made us pioneers.” Five months later, Ronald Reagan stood in the West demanding, “Tear down this wall.” Reagan and Graham worked in tandem to bring East Germany into the Western fold.

All Quiet on the German Front? Germany in the Post‐Detente Era

1984 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 438-450
Author(s):  
Edwina Moreton
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
German Government ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
German Question ◽  
Soviet Foreign Policy ◽  
East German ◽  
Post War ◽  
Sensitive Issues

WHEN ALL ABOUT THEM IN EASTERN EUROPE WERE LOSING their heads, the Russians could always count on the East Germans. Now nobody, least of all the Russians, seems so sure. Whether or not East Germany's leader, Erich Honecker, visits West Germany this autumn as planned, the German question is back on the political agenda of both East and West. The sharp battle-by-reprint, during the summer of 1984, in the party newspapers of East Germany and the Soviet Union over the permissible degree of contact between the East German regime and the West German government has revealed in public a remarkable rift within the Warsaw Pact over one of the most sensitive issues in post-war Soviet foreign policy: strategy towards Germany.

scholarly journals The “Vietnam Legion”: West German Psychological Warfare against East German Propaganda in the 1960s

2014 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 164-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Busch
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Public Diplomacy ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
Information Campaigns ◽  
Psychological Warfare ◽  
East German ◽  
Nazi Past ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Key Aspects

Studies in the wake of the “cultural turn” in diplomatic history have shown that propaganda and public diplomacy were key aspects of Western Cold War strategy. This article expands recent literature by focusing on propaganda practices at the grassroots level, making use of West and East German archival records to trace information campaigns in relation to the Vietnam War. In addition to explaining the organization of East German propaganda campaigns, the article explores the methods used by the psychological warfare section of West Germany’s Ministry of Defense. This section maintained an unofficial network that helped publish “camouflaged propaganda” at home as well as in France and Great Britain. Germany’s Nazi past was an important aspect of East Germany’s campaign that accused West Germany of having deployed a “Vietnam Legion.” Interestingly, Germany’s Nazi legacy also cast a shadow over the methods West German psychological warfare experts relied on to counter East German accusations.

Book Reviews

2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 88-107
Author(s):  
Louise K. Davidson-Schmich ◽  
Jennifer A. Yoder ◽  
Friederike Eigler ◽  
Joyce M. Mushaben ◽  
Alexandra Schwell ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Print Media ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The West ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
German State ◽  
East German ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Konrad H. Jarausch, United Germany: Debating Processes and Prospects Reviewed by Louise K. Davidson-Schmich Nick Hodgin and Caroline Pearce, ed. The GDR Remembered:Representations of the East German State since 1989 Reviewed by Jennifer A. Yoder Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945-1970 Reviewed by Friederike Eigler Peter H. Merkl, Small Town & Village in Bavaria: The Passing of a Way of Life Reviewed by Joyce M. Mushaben Barbara Thériault, The Cop and the Sociologist. Investigating Diversity in German Police Forces Reviewed by Alexandra Schwell Clare Bielby, Violent Women in Print: Representations in the West German Print Media of the 1960s and 1970s Reviewed by Katharina Karcher Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin, ed., Fascination and Enmity: Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914-1945 Reviewed by Jennifer A. Yoder

SOUND, MEANING AND MUSIC-DRAMA IN LACHENMANN'S DAS MÄDCHEN MIT DEN SCHWEFELHÖLZERN

Tempo ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 68 (268) ◽  
pp. 20-33
Author(s):  
Laurence Osborn
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
Search For Meaning ◽  
Cognitive Capacities ◽  
Music Drama ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Unique Approach ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Musique Concrete ◽  
Cultural Baggage

AbstractThis article argues that Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern demonstrates a unique approach to music-drama that stems from the perceptual capacities of listeners, and their desire to search for meaning in what they hear. Beginning with the claim that Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern can be viewed as the culmination of an aesthetic project begun at the point of Lachenmann's emergence as a distinctive voice of the European avant-garde during the 1960s, the article first examines two major aspects of Lachenmann's aesthetics – musique concrète instrumentale and aura – outlining a composing philosophy that has been at the heart of Lachenmann's practice throughout his career. The article claims that Lachenmann sought to establish a rejuvenated semiotics, freed from cultural baggage and tied to the perceptual and cognitive capacities of listeners. Drawing upon the studies of Naomi Cumming and Luke Windsor, it outlines a theoretical framework that takes into account this composing philosophy and its implications, applying it in analyses of various excerpts from Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern. My analysis illuminates a music-drama that forms around the interplay of internally represented images and sensations, the emergence of which is facilitated by a musical language that prepares sounds to take on certain types of meaning. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the possible implications this has for audience members.

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