Music & German national identity

Musical Times, Autumn 2003 by Whittall, Arnold

Uber alles? ARNOLD WHITTALL Music & German national identity Edited by Celia Applegate & Pamela Potter University of Chicago Press (Chicago & London, 2002); x, 319pp; L31.50 / L14 pbk. ISBN 0 226 02130 0/0 226 02131 9.

'Yet another interdisciplinary symposium' the world-weary reader of books on and around music may grumble. But this one is less routine than many, if only because music and matters German have had such a complex and intense relationship for several centuries. Take the National Anthem. In an absorbing chapter tracing the rise, fall and rise of the 'Deutschlandlied' (first line, 'Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles') Jost Hermand focuses on a fundamental irony:

after 1914, the nationalist Right twisted it so strongly to their imperialistic intentions that its liberal origins have been rendered unrecognizable - perhaps permanently. The beauty of its [Haydn] melody and the democratic meaning of a number of its verses notwithstanding, the song will always evoke democracy's tragic failure in Germany (p.267).

Opened out, this can suggest that, in a German context, not even great music can always escape association with repressive national(ist) impulses. Rather, the more determinedly German music aspires to the sublime (whether as serene or as awe-inspiring) the more oppressive and dictatorial it risks becoming.

Nationalism is always more likely to be about unity than diversity. But where art is concerned, national identity is primarily a matter of language, and several of the most interesting chapters in this book show how exemplary the texts of folksongs and hymns could be. Charting the progress and character of the forty-four-volume Landschaftliche Volkslieder collection, begun in 1924 and completed in 1972, Philip Bohlman notes that the songs in question 'are secure, even frozen, in a timeless, mythological world, and to a quite remarkable degree they reflect that complex of myths that Christian Graf von Krockow [in Von deutschen Mythen, 1995] has associated with German national identity' (p.120). But if the most intense manifestations of German nationalism are evidence of a flight from the real world, Bruce Campbell's illuminating study of a phenomenon of the Weimar Republic, the Spielschar Ekkehard, 'an amateur music and dance group that grew out of the German youth movement' (p.128), demonstrates that this inculcated a vision of Germany

firmly anchored in both the 'ancient' German traditions of folk song and in the greatness of German classical music. Yet it was meant to be taken as forward looking, and combined volkisch racial unity with an emotional vitalism and idealism that was part youth movement and part expressionism (p.137).

Despite the thumb-nail sketch style which the symposium format inevitably imposes, such an interpretation leaves one in little doubt as to the special cultural intricacy of the relations between art music and more popular or commercial styles. No less illuminating is Doris Bergen's essay on the 'campaigns to "dejudaize" and "Germanize" sacred music' in the years of the Third Reich (p.141). Bergen has a point when she suggests that

although music critics and propagandists might have put forward the symphonies of Beethoven and the operas of Wagner as crowning achievements of the German nation, Ordinary Germans' arguably felt a more intimate connection to church music as an expression of their national identity (p.141)

- and the way in which text and music of many folk songs actually resembled hymns helped reinforce that connection. In addition, the fact that during the 1930s the Protestant bishop of Bremen tried to change the Jewish names of churches, like Bethel and Zion, into 'the "Hindenburg" and "Horst Wessel" churches' (p.149) would indeed suggest a nation taking leave of its senses, were it not for the widespread failure, according to Bergen, of local communities to put such Draconian instructions into practice.

Music and German national identity is very much of its time in allotting relatively little space to 'major', serious composers. There are excellent essays by John Daverio on Schumann's late choral music, and by Thomas Grey on Die Meistersinger, but instead of something which breaks new ground on Strauss or Hindemith, there is only an essay on the extreme case of Pfitzner by Michael Kater, which has obvious kinship with his study of the same composer in his earlier book Composers of the Nazi era.

Daverio provides a very useful indication of the extent to which

the mixture of martial and religious elements in Schumann's 'revolutionary' music is a sounding metaphor for the intertwining of politics and religion in the German romantic outlook on society as a whole,

always remembering that 'the religion of the early romantics had less to do with the tenets of a specific faith than with the idea of religious faith itself (pp.68-69). Meanwhile, Grey performs the even more valuable task of gently reminding the world that 'Wagner's ideal state is an aesthetic one, in which public and private alike are subject to the beneficent rule of art' (p.82), and that even though 'Die Meistersinger is the product of a national consciousness directly antecedent to National Socialism', it is 'no more or less so than a work like Brahms's Triumphlied' (p.100). The alleged Wagnerian dimension of National Socialism crops elsewhere, for example in Hans Rudolf Vaget's 'National and universal: Thomas Mann and the paradox of "German" music'. Anyone who has read Berthold Hoeckner's recent discussion of Mann's Doctor Faustus in Programming the absolute may find Vaget a little theory-lite. But this is still a worthwhile traversal of the historical and literary context in which Mann sought to defend Wagner from elevation to the role of 'the patron saint of a troglodyte Teutonism' (p.163), while driven to write a novel in defence of the thesis that