The Socialist Cemetery

Chapter 2 charts the development of new mourning rites in East Germany, focusing on the role that music played in these ceremonies. Death rituals articulated a new death culture for the socialist state. This chapter examines three aspects of East German death culture: the reestablishment of ceremonies to honor communist heroes from the Weimar Republic, state burials for East German politicians, and manuals published for funeral planning intended for the general public. Visually and rhetorically, state ceremonies were political displays that marginalized the emotional needs of the mourning community. But the music in these services intoned the new country’s connections to customs that the ruling party were explicitly attempting to displace: the Nazis’ heroic burial customs and the mourning rituals of the Lutheran church. In early efforts to fashion a socialist sepulchral culture across multiple artforms, a gap emerged between political ideology and musical reality that allowed composers, performers, and audiences to enact the work of mourning through music.

Concentration Camp Memorials

Concentration camps were a central part of East Germany’s commemorative politics. National antifascist memorials opened at three former concentration camps between 1958 and 1961. The narrative visitors encountered at these memorial sites valorized the camps political prisoners and devoted little—if any—attention to other victims of the Holocaust. Running corollary to these antifascist memorials were efforts to memorialize political victims of the camps in music. This chapter considers two forms of musical activity involved in concentration camp remembrance: collecting songs from the camps as part of the nation’s antifascist heritage, and composing new works about the Holocaust. Both forms of musical activity involved engaging with the memorial traces and spaces of the camps, which inadvertently facilitated more complicated narratives of the Nazi genocide to be voiced in music.

Introduction

By taking the reader on a cemetery walk in the Eastern part of now-reunified Berlin, the Introduction describes how mourning practices, while constrained by the governmental strictures in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), were made possible through musical practices. It positions the book within musicological work on the Cold War and provides an overview of antifascism, which was the central framework for interpreting the nation’s past in East Germany, particularly World War II. Rather than taking a bifurcated approach to German memory politics during the Cold War, a central premise of Socialist Laments is that music was a medium that facilitated the coexistence of mourning and commemoration in the GDR. To demonstrate, the Introduction articulates a theory of musical mourning that combines psychological understandings of grief work with site-specific hermeneutics, arguing that embodied practices are crucial for understanding how mourning took place within the memorial spaces of former East Germany.

The Church

This chapter examines how the East German government commemorated the firebombing of Dresden at the end of World War II. Religious spaces and musical institutions became central to the state’s antifascist propaganda as commemorative rituals for the firebombing took shape in the early 1950s. On the tenth anniversary of the attack, in 1955, local politicians participated in a grand reopening ceremony of the city’s oldest church, consecrated with performances of Rudolf Mauersberger’s Dresdner Requiem (1947/1948). Annual performances of this work allowed congregants to maintain ties to the Lutheran faith in a socialist society, and created a context for the expression of narratives about the firebombing that could not be voiced openly in public spaces. Drawing on performers’ testimonies, audience accounts, and Mauersberger’s revisions to the score, this chapter demonstrates how the Dresdner Requiem served as an outlet for grief in postwar Dresden.

The Ruins

This chapter analyzes music by composers who participated in a widespread artistic preoccupation with Germany’s ruined cityscapes during and shortly after World War II. These first musical responses to the war—written at a time of great emotional, physical, and political uncertainty—had a significant impact on musical mourning practices in the Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany, which became the German Democratic Republic in 1949. The chapter focuses on three examples by composers who wrote musical responses to the air war and went on to have successful careers in East Germany. These composers had very different experiences in the Third Reich: Rudolf Mauersberger was a member of the Nazi Party; Hanns Eisler and Paul Dessau were political and religious exiles. Yet they each used music to make sense of wartime trauma, by transforming the aftermath of the bombing—the rubble—into an aesthetic object—or ruin.

The Artists’ Cemetery

The development of a public commemorative culture in East Germany extended into the development of new funerary rites for cultural figureheads and everyday citizens. Chapter 5 charts the ruling party’s efforts to restructure the spaces and sounds of national sepulchral culture by examining the funerals for six artists buried at a plot reserved for members of the Academy of the Arts in East Berlin. Each artist was honored with a state funeral, aimed not to console the bereaved, but to canonize the deceased as socialist heroes. At these events, the deceased’s friends and family made deliberate efforts to reclaim their legacy within the space of the cemetery itself, and continued these personal reflections through musical homage. In doing so, these mourners were continually renegotiating their relationship to the deceased. This chapter thus shows how the relationship between private mourning and public commemoration was in a state of negotiation throughout East Germany’s forty-year existence.