IN THE END, MUSICIANS AND COMPOSERS WERE NOT unlike the urban planners and architects who worked to find a cohesive narrative of German reconstruction. In a 1946 Berlin lecture, Hans Scharoun, future architect of the Philharmonic’s new concert hall at Potsdamer Platz (completed in 1963), discussed Germany’s urban destruction. Scharoun noted that the “ruptured city form,” ultimately “gives us the possibility to design an urban landscape” to “compose that which is overwhelming and scaleless into manageable and proportional parts.”1 Scharoun’s emphasis on the possibilities of form and structure, and the ability “to compose,” literally, a postwar cityscape, overtly links the Stadtlandschaft (urban landscape) and Kulturlandschaft (cultural landscape). Across Germany, musicians and architects reconstructed musical and structural forms over the rubble of the old. As Emily Richmond Pollock notes in her work on the meticulous reconstruction of Munich’s National Theater, bombed in 1943 but painstakingly rebuilt in 1959 to look like its nineteenth-century predecessor, German officials opted for a return to, rather than a break from, tradition. These decisions had far-reaching implications for the city’s conservative musical culture and its relationship to National Socialism, raising difficult questions concerning cultural amnesia and civilian suffering.2
The legacies of rubble music did not end in 1950s Germany. With Allied funding and vested ideological interests in all four sectors of Berlin, the politicization of musical organizations only intensified. By 1949, all large-scale musical institutions were firmly entrenched geographically and, by default, along occupation borders. Despite these divisions, in East and West Berlin, notions about German victimhood and civilian suffering persisted in both private and public spheres. Just as Robert G. Moeller and Frank Biess have shown that notions of German victimhood shaped the fledgling Federal Republic and German Democratic Republic, so, too, did these narratives leave an audible mark on the musical cultures of East and West Germany.3 Institutional programming and leadership decisions reflected the difficult compromises that the Berlin Philharmonic, Städtische Oper, and Staatsoper made within their ranks and with the occupiers to continue performing.
The shortcomings of the denazification process plagued the Philharmonic in the ensuing postwar years. In 1952, Wilhelm Furtwängler was renamed the Philharmonic’s director for life, a position he held until his death two years later. Even though Herbert von Karajan had performed with the orchestra a total of only four times, in December 1954 the ensemble voted to appoint Karajan to be their new conductor, effectively terminating Sergiu Celibidache’s contract. A former Nazi Party member (in fact, the conductor had joined twice, once in Salzburg and again in Ulm during the 1930s), Karajan’s selection was riddled with controversy.4 The orchestra was only six weeks away from embarking on a concert tour of the United States, meant to be a show of gratitude for the Americans’ efforts during the Berlin Blockade. The Philharmonic’s Intendant, Gerhart von Westerman, believed the orchestra’s new conductor would have to be someone of whom Columbia Artists Management, the ensemble’s New York presenter, would approve. Because the agency, in Westerman’s estimation, “expects us to appear with a German conductor at the helm,”5 he felt Karajan was a better choice than Celibidache. Karajan’s presence drew protests and controversy in New York outside of Carnegie Hall, but his performances were praised for their artistry by critics and audiences. He remained the Philharmonic’s chief conductor and artistic director until 1989.6
As the city’s sectors moved further apart politically, the opera houses of East and West also had little choice but to make their respective compromises. While the Communist Party believed the Staatsoper to be a vital cultural institution for the burgeoning East German state, the Städtische Oper aimed to resurrect the country’s musical traditions from the ruins of the Third Reich. Even though both opera houses sought to produce antifascist operas, they pursued this goal by radically different and often contradictory means. In West Berlin, this meant premiering new work by German composers, such as Werner Egk, even if they had already been highly successful under National Socialism, or staging prewar repertory to maintain links with the German musical past. Beethoven’s Fidelio became a signature of the Städtische Oper.
In the East, the struggle for operatic socialist realism dominated critical and popular discourses, as tensions came to a head between artists who had spent the war years in Moscow, a concentration camp, or the West.7 Most East German Communist Party leaders (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED) were prewar KPD members (German Communist Party), newly returned to Berlin from Russia, with little sympathy for artists like Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, Paul Dessau, or Staatsoper intendant Ernst Legal, who had spent the war years either in the United States or in Nazi Germany. Tägliche Rundschau, the party organ of the SED, criticized the Staatsoper and Legal in a blistering 1950 article, deeming the house’s productions to be “alien to the Volk” and calling on authorities “to stop the reign of shadows on the stage of the Berlin Staatsoper,” due to “a handful of untalented mystics and formalists that have crept into the management.”8
The conflict culminated in a scandal over the premiere of Brecht and Dessau’s 1951 opera, Das Verhör des Lukullus (The Trial of Lucullus), as SED leaders suppressed the work for what they perceived as its formalist tendencies and inaccessibility. Ernst Legal would be forced to resign at the Staatsoper shortly thereafter for his support of the contentious Lukullus premiere, and that same year, Frida Leider resigned to focus on her teaching at the Hochschule für Musik.9
Aside from institutional reconstruction, programming, and personnel decisions of the city’s ensembles, the complex legacies of rubble music were also heard in compositional choices and alternative performance practices across postwar Germany. These aesthetic decisions reflected the disillusionment of a postwar period bereft of redemption and closure, and drew attention to the lingering resonances of war’s trauma as a younger generation of musicians came of age. In selected works of these avant-garde composers, we can hear traces of the ruin musical aesthetic instead of the Darmstadt School’s insistence on a bold, uncompromising new start.10
These pieces directly reference the air war and bodily infirmity. A teenaged Karlheinz Stockhausen spent the war working at a Wehrmacht field hospital, tending to soldiers struck by Allied incendiary bombs. This grisly, grim work left a marked impression on him, and a number of his postwar compositions make direct reference to the composer’s wartime traumas. As Jane Fulcher has compellingly demonstrated, Stockhausen’s seminal electronic work, Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths) (1955–56), was the composer’s response to these experiences. With a narrative from the Book of Daniel, which describes three Jewish men surviving trial by fire, Stockhausen later wrote that he was himself “a youth in the fiery furnace.”11 Yet the enigmatic composer did not elaborate on the obvious and troubling parallels between this furnace and death camp crematoriums. Was he fashioning himself as a victim, equating his suffering with those who had perished in the Holocaust? Or was the furnace an allegory for urban Germany in flames from Allied bombs? The cacophony of sonic wartime experience is also heard in Stockhausen’s 1968 Short Waves (Kurzwellen) and the “Oktophonie” of the composer’s monumental opera cycle Licht (1977–2003), which featured an 8-track tape simulating the explosions, crashes, and bombs of the air war.12
Alexander Kluge and Ben Lerner have argued the air war also informs a contemporary performance of John Cage’s As Slow as Possible in Halberstadt, Germany. American bombers leveled Halberstadt in April 1945, leaving behind some 1.5 million cubic meters of rubble.13 The city’s St. Burchardi Church, itself a ruin, has hosted a performance of Cage’s piece since 2001 when a specially installed organ began the composition with a rest of seventeen months. With As Slow as Possible set to conclude in 2640, its tones are reminiscent of the once ubiquitous sound of the air raid siren in Nazi Germany, a warning signal that vibrated between 300 and 400 Hz.
Suffering and bodily ruin can be heard in the work of still other postwar composers. Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s service on the Eastern Front as a reluctant Wehrmacht soldier informed his opera Die Soldaten (The Soldiers) (1957–64), which combines diverse influences from Germany’s rich musical past, such as Bach chorales and twelve-tone rows. Iannis Xenakis’s experiences as a member of the Greek Resistance and bodily injuries sustained during the ensuing Greek Civil War can be heard through the jet engines and crashes of Diamorphoses (1957).14 Whether these works by Stockhausen, Zimmermann, Xenakis, and Cage serve as first- or secondhand witness to aerial bombing or armed combat, they are united by their explorations of physical and psychological trauma—the unresolved rubble of the war’s violence and destruction.
Aside from these musical scores, performances in Germany from the latter twentieth- and beginning of the twenty-first century also made use of urban ruin and decay, ruminating on the legacies of the Allied air war in myriad ways. Thousands of bunkers and air raid shelters remained after World War II, and across urban Germany, these spaces were repurposed because the cost and time to destroy them exceeded available material resources. More recently, these spaces have become music venues, such as Berlin’s Artist Homes initiative, a Hohenzollerndamm bunker converted to gallery space, a concert hall, and practice rooms.15 One tower of Hamburg’s Heiligengeistfeld bunker serves as a popular music venue for bands (Übel und Gefährlich); in Aachen, the Goffartstraße bunker became a music club; and in Cologne, the massive bunker on Berliner Straße is now known as Culture Bunker Cologne, staging dance, music, theater, and comedy events.16 Structures once used to shelter and defend the people’s community are now the repurposed spaces of the air war—their permanent concrete walls standing in stark contrast to the ephemerality of musical performance.
In the postwar period, institutions, musicians, and composers blurred the distinctions between the romantic sublime and the ruinous terrain of aerial warfare by transforming rubble into ruins. The rubble wanderer and the ruin flaneur became one and the same, traversing the capital in contemplation of German suffering, however self-inflicted, however self-imposed. As eyewitness and “earwitness”17 accounts, musical scores, and archival documents reveal, music, as “the most German of the arts,”18 played an indispensable part of this narrative. The uniquely sonic possibilities of wartime rubble, in both the acoustic and performative senses, resonated for decades to come.
Notes
1. Hans Scharoun, lecture, September 5, 1946, in Hans Scharoun: Bauten, Entwürfe, Texte, ed. P. Pfankuch (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1974), 158. See also Francesca Rogier, “The Monumentality of Rhetoric,” in Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault, eds., Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 167.
2. Emily Richmond Pollock, “Pride of Place: The 1963 Rebuilding of the Munich Nationaltheater,” in Dreams of Germany: Music and (Trans)national Imaginaries, ed. Neil Gregor and Tom Irvine (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019), 145–68.
3. See Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Robert G. Moeller, “Germans as Victims? Thoughts on a Post–Cold War History of WWII’s Legacies,” History and Memory 17, no. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2005): 147–94; and Frank Biess, Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1–16, 43–69.
4. Klaus Lang, Celibidache und Furtwängler: Der große philharmonische Konflikt in der Berliner Nachkriegszeit (Munich: Wissner, 2010), 389; and Michael Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 58–64. Karajan joined the Nazi Party in 1933 while living in Salzburg, where he quickly became a rising star. When he relocated to Ulm in 1935, he joined the party once again.
5. Quoted in Susanne Stähr, “Epochenwechsel mit Herbert von Karajan,” in Variationen mit Orchester: 125 Jahre Berliner Philharmoniker, ed. Gerhard Forck (Berlin: Henschel, 2007), 1:269.
6. See “Musicians Oppose Concert Here by ‘Nazi-Led’ Berlin Orchestra,” New York Times, 20 February 1955; and Howard Taubman, “Touchy Problem: Question of Art and Politics is Raised anew by Berlin Philharmonic Visit,” New York Times, March 6, 1955.
7. Elaine Kelly, Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic: Narratives of Nineteenth-Century Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3–17; and Joy H. Calico, “The Politics of Opera in the German Democratic Republic, 1945–1961” (PhD diss., Duke University, 1999), 1–47.
8. Quoted in Calico, “The Politics of Opera,” 34. From “Das Reich der Schatten auf der Bühne,” Tägliche Rundschau, November 19, 1950.
9. Frida Leider, Playing My Part, 1888–1975 (New York: Da Capo, 1959), 209–10; Joy H. Calico, Brecht at the Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 109–22; Calico, “The Politics of Opera,” 29–36. The opera was renamed Die Verurteilung des Lukullus (The Condemnation of Lucullus).
10. My thanks to Annegret Fauser for a recent conversation at the 2016 American Musicological Society in which we discussed Darmstadt’s relation to rubble music.
11. Quoted in John Smalley, “Gesang der Jünglinge: History and Analysis,” Program Notes, Masterpieces of 20th-Century Electronic Music, Lincoln Center, New York, 2000. See also Jane F. Fulcher, “From ‘The Voice of the Maréchal’ to Musique Concrète: Pierre Schaeffer and the Case for Cultural History,” in The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music, ed. Jane F. Fulcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 381–402.
12. Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 344; and Robin Maconie, Other Planets: The Complete Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 374.
13. To listen to Cage’s As Slow as Possible, visit “Organ2/ASLSP,” at http://www.aslsp.org/de/. Kluge and Lerner discussed Cage’s piece at a joint lecture at Princeton University: “The Sky Stops Painting and Turns to Criticism,” Lecture and Reading, Princeton, NJ, October 21, 2016. For more on Halberstadt’s destruction, see Alexander Kluge, Air Raid (London: UK Seagull Books, 2012) and Helmut Puff, Miniature Monuments: Modeling German History (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 223–28. Concerning air raid sirens more generally, see Jörg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, trans. Allison Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 328.
14. Richard Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century: The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 189.
15. For more on the bunker, see “Artist Homes: Der Bunker,” http://www.artist-homes.com/; “Der Kulturbunker vom Roseneck,” Der Tagesspiegel, February 17, 2017, http://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/bezirke/charlottenburg-wilmersdorf/berlin-schmargendorf-der-kulturbunker-vom-roseneck/19404612.html.
16. Concerning acoustic memories of the air war, see Robert Maier’s edited volume, Akustisches Gedächtnis und Zweiter Weltkrieg (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2011). For further information concerning bunkers and their postwar afterlives, see Elke Purpus, Günther B. Sellen, Walter Geis, and Helmut Buchen, eds., Bunker in Köln—Versuche einer Sichtbar-Machung (Essen, Germany: Klartext, 2006); Michael Foedrowitz, Bunkerwelten: Luftschutzanlagen in Norddeutschland (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 1998); and Helga Schmal and Tobias Selke, Bunker: Luftschutz und Luftschutzbau in Hamburg (Hamburg: Christians, 2001).
17. Carolyn Birdsall uses “earwitness” to write about civilians whose accounts of fascism are marked by the sonoric experience of sirens and bombings rather than visual destruction. Birdsall’s term comes, in part, from the Elias Canetti short story, Der Ohrenzeuge (The Earwitness), in which the title character wants to indict individuals with sonic, rather than visual, evidence. Carolyn Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space in Germany, 1933–1945 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 11.
18. Thomas Mann, The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Knopf, 1961), 123.