Dreams of Germany

Music and Transnational Imaginaries in the Modern Era

Neil Gregor, Thomas Irvine

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789200331
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

For many centuries, Germany has enjoyed a reputation as the 'land of music'. But just how was this reputation established and transformed over time, and to what extent was it produced within or outside of Germany? Through case studies that range from Bruckner to the Beatles and from symphonies to dance-club music, this volume looks at how German musicians and their audiences responded to the most significant developments of the twentieth century, including mass media, technological advances, fascism, and war on an unprecedented scale.

PART I

Spaces and Moments of Affect

CHAPTER 1

“The German in the Concert Hall”

Concertgoing and National Belonging in the Early Twentieth Century

HANSJAKOB ZIEMER

For many early twentieth-century observers of musical life, it seemed a truism that music had the power to build social and national communities. Karl Storck, a German music journalist, author, and commentator, noted in 1906 that music offered the “strongest powers for the creation of a feeling of togetherness, and in general for the creation and formulation of a shared sensation.”¹ According to Storck, visiting the symphony hall fostered in the audience an image of itself as a national community, one that closely connected listeners with fellow listeners, with musicians, and with composers. Performances in the concert hall created social meaning by allowing listeners to assume the similarity of their experiences to others’. These ideals attained great significance in the social and political context of World War I, when music was ascribed an active role in the construction of a German Heimatfront. A few weeks into the war, Storck reiterated his belief in the community-building power of music when he wrote that the concert hall was the place “where effectively the one and only thinking, the same yearning, the same anxiety, and the same joy fill all hearts.”² In Storck’s view, the symphony hall created an audience that could symbolize and actualize the nation in a joint experience.

For contemporaries, the concert hall was a site where the abstract idea of the nation became tangible in a sensory way. The experience inside the concert hall seemed to allow the nation to be heard, felt, and visualized very much in the sense set out by historian Michael Geyer, who has defined the function of culture in wartime as an “enactment of the identity of the nation.”³ But although historians have often readily accepted the assumed community-building function of concert and opera halls and the accompanying national connotations, few have analyzed how these social relationships were constructed and the national imaginary appropriated in specific historical settings. If concert halls indeed function as “islands of community among the great sea of impersonal relations of the modern city,” as Christopher Small has argued, we need to ask how such communities were in fact constructed as national, and how they embodied social ideals.⁴ I use these two verbs here to emphasize the distinction between them: communities were constructed, not naturally given; and they embodied ideals of social imaginaries that existed prior to the concert-hall visit. But what was the precise role of the national in this process, given that it was in competition with other social imaginaries circulating at the time? What did the references to the body during performances and the assumptions of similarity of experience mean, and how and to what ends was the national used in listening experiences? This chapter addresses the everyday culture of concertgoing and its role in the emergence of contemporary reflections on community, body, and nation. It shows how images of the national were constructed and deconstructed in the concert hall during and after World War I, and how they symbolized certain supposedly German characteristics. If there was a “German in the concert hall,” as the well-known journalist Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt claimed in 1927, that figure was contested by contemporaries, who used the concert hall as a model of perfection and imperfection at the same time.⁵ From the historian’s point of view, the ephemerality of both the performance and the audience can shed light on the ephemerality of the nation as well.

This approach builds on insights from recent scholarship on the imagining of German national identity in relation to music. Rather than focusing on composers as nationalist icons, intellectuals as agents of nationalist ideologies, or musicians as bearers of German superiority, scholars have emphasized how conceptions of identity and recognition can articulate themselves in the concrete act of music-making within a certain community and thus “take the presence of that community as a more or less stable entity, with dominant values and beliefs, for given,” engendering “a shared sense of nation, confession, class, gender, occupation or something quite different again.”⁶ One could easily add to this list a sense of the regional, the local, or the international. The fundamental point is the move away from essentialist definitions of what music can potentially reveal or represent as national traits and toward the practices of music-making and listening—in short, of concertgoing. It is in these acts that, as Celia Applegate has pointed out, “music-making and nation-making converged in many places and times.”⁷ Such an approach is possible when ideologies of music as an “absolute art” and the “most abstract art” are no longer the starting point for historians. Instead of its supposedly objective qualities, I emphasize the sensory quality of music, the “most concrete art and least mediated of all artistic activities”: the audience members are immersed in a world of sounds that are interpreted.⁸ To this extent, an audience can indeed be described as an “imagined community” in Benedict Anderson’s sense—not just as a fantasy, a simple escape or mere contemplation. Arjun Appadurai reminds us that imagination always entails concrete acts and that “imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work and form of negotiation between agencies.”⁹ In what follows, this interaction between imagination and practice is analyzed in order to show the precariousness of nationalized communities in the Weimar Republic.

The chapter begins with the radicalized national imagination during World War I and focuses on writing about and practices of concertgoing before and after the defeat of 1918. It examines these practices on three different levels: the level of ideas, where the ideal of achieving homogeneity was critically discussed; the level of behavior, where pathologies of the body were observed and reforms to concertgoing were proposed in bodily terms; and the level of listening experiences, where projections of race and nature were used to describe music in a practice of national othering. Concertgoing practices around 1920 were expressions of larger conflicts of the time, and concertgoers felt they were at a historical crossroads. In a piece on changes in music listening published in 1928, for example, the young music critic Kurt Westphal remarked that “we do not yet master the nineteenth century; for the greatest part it still masters us.”¹⁰ This applied not just to challenges within the concert hall, but also to challenges within society at large.

Imagining Communities during World War I

Dreams of national unity seemed closest to realization in reports about the convergence of nationalist imaginaries and nationalist practices in symphony concerts during World War I.¹¹ The journalist Karl Storck, mentioned above, was just one example of a larger group of music intellectuals who promoted national unity through shared musical experience and saw the concert hall as an ideal location in which to experience such unity in reality. In a society entirely dominated by war, journalists, conductors, musicians, and composers relied upon prewar practices of concertgoing and on Romantic visions of the power of music as they established a consensus about how to encourage “Germanness.” They nationalized repertoires, dedicated particular concerts to nationalist purposes (“patriotic concerts”), excluded foreigners from the program, and interpreted musical experience solely as an emotional expression of the present. Rudolf Cahn-Speyer, a conductor, composer, and journalist, pointed out that the concert hall was not there for abstract intellectual pleasure, but served to “heighten the feelings we are aware of at this moment.”¹² Wartime concerts were credited with the power to overcome the internal fragmentation of the audience and the dominance of individual experience:

All our current striving is directed at emphasizing what is shared by all; we are ready to subordinate the individual to the grand general goals and needs. … As interesting as it is in normal times to get to know things alien to us—we now want to enjoy what everybody can enjoy. … Everybody strives to feel together with others as a great unity, and that is why the audience wants to listen to the works of older masters.¹³

Seen as a microcosm of society, the concert hall seemed to offer an experience of emotional community. Conductors, critics, and musicians concluded that concertgoing could function as a model for how society in general should be experienced.

This model of unity was appropriated for other features of the nationalist imagination. Faced with the loss of lives and a growing uncertainty as to the outcome of the war, the themes of mourning, death, transfiguration, and consolation acquired special attraction for listeners in search of coping mechanisms. The concert-hall experiences offered a space for identification with war victims. With the help of the hermeneutic approach still in fashion among journalists at the time, observers could portray the concert performance as an embodiment of mourning and a translation of the battlegrounds in France and Russia to the home front. Thus, a concert report written after listening to Franz Liszt’s Heldenklage interpreted the musical performance as a ceremony “for all the heroes who have already sacrificed their lives for the German way of life and the German land.”¹⁴ The performance was visualized as a funeral procession marching through the concert hall, the woodwinds representing the “weeping and sobbing of the crowd” as it mourned the hero.¹⁵ Visual images such as these, and the widely used interpretive tools of musical hermeneutics, helped to create a heroic moment and drew the music into the service of nationalism.

Although such images of mourning and heroism did not disappear after the war, questions of how to achieve social cohesion in the face of national defeat now became the chief concern among observers of concert life. The general belief in the nationalizing function of the concert-hall experience began to crumble. However, the fiction of a unified audience did not completely lose traction. Prewar ideas of the concert hall as an urban gathering place were already being revived by reformers of the concert hall toward the end of the war. In 1916, from the trenches of Verdun, the Frankfurter Zeitung journalist Paul Bekker wrote a monograph on perception in the concert hall in which he attempted to establish “musical form” as an outcome of the work of social relationships in society. For Bekker, music was the product of relationships between composer and listener engendered through their embeddedness in a specific environment and their sharing of a particular context. “The sound image is an image of society realized as acoustic material, not an aesthetic but a sociological sound property.”¹⁶ Since the listeners filled the perception space together, they created a “collective being.”¹⁷ For Bekker, the concert hall replaced the earlier functions of church and religion and became a site where the “people,” or Volk, could be defined: “Resting on the broad basis of a Volk community without religious or social distinctions—that is our concert hall.”¹⁸ In Bekker’s vision, music complemented what the state h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Spaces and Moments of Affect
• Part II: The Local, the Regional, the National
• Part III: Globalizing Musical Germanness
• Part IV: Fantasies, Reminiscences, Dreams, Nightmaress
• Index