AS SOVIET FORCES SURROUNDED BERLIN, PREPARING FOR THEIR final assault on the capital in April 1945, many of the city’s musicians continued their creative endeavors. Composer Paul Höffer completed a first draft of his Toccata for solo piano, noting beneath the final fermata, “born under pain, April 15, 1945.”1 On April 16, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra gave a concert featuring Brahms’s Double Concerto and Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration. The following day, Staatsoper coloratura soprano Erna Berger recorded Strauss’s Brentano Lieder at Greater German Radio on Masurenallee.2 As sonic, archival, and historical evidence indicates, despite the regime’s collapse, the third week of April 1945 was another workweek for many of Berlin’s musicians. Musical culture did not begin anew after the collapse of the Third Reich; it simply continued, as artists worked with the materials and personnel at hand—however compromised, however rubbled.
Five days after the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany, on May 13, conductor Hans von Benda decided it was time for a concert. Benda gathered together the remaining members of the Berlin Chamber Orchestra, the ensemble he founded in 1939, along with musicians from the city’s Philharmonic, Staatsoper, and Städtische Oper orchestras—about thirty players in all. With the permission of the city’s newly installed Russian occupiers, the musicians decided to perform in the partially destroyed Schöneberg town hall. In lieu of posters, Benda’s instrumentalists advertised the performance by writing in chalk on the ruins of their apartment buildings. As the conductor had no trouble noting for posterity, the Schöneberg auditorium was transformed “literally from a pile of debris” into “a room worthy of the occasion,” only twenty-four hours before the concert.3 Despite the hall’s smashed windows, the space was freshly painted for the event as Russian soldiers covered Franz Eichhorst’s Nazi war murals. The musicians performed to a packed house, playing orchestral works by Handel, Haydn, and Tchaikovsky, and arias including Giordani’s emotive “Caro mio ben.” In accordance with audience demand, the ensemble repeated the performance five times the following week. For Benda, “with this new life new sounds will come to us, a whole new artistic richness.”4 But for the moment, a fresh coat of paint would have to suffice.
Accounts like Benda’s emphasize resilience despite the debris and ashes left behind by World War II. Yet destruction left its mark on the city’s depleted ensembles, shattered institutions, and occupied radio waves, as rubble became the defining feature of postwar musical culture. Whether figurative or material, rubble was the common postwar fragmentation to be worked through, representing, in turn, the intellectual quandary of the denazification process, a rebuilding material, an audible sonic element, a performance practice, and a compositional aesthetic. The scale of this reconstructive undertaking can be seen in the now iconic visual imagery of postwar Germany, whether in film or photography, where towering urban ruins reveal the arresting and unintentionally picturesque remnants of aerial warfare. But what about the sound of such destruction and its effects on musical culture, from compromised musicians and bombed-out venues to concerts and compositions for which urban ruin was the catalyst?
Postwar accounts of the more famous (and infamous) musicians and composers provide little, if any, information that can help us answer this question. These individuals were generally not living among or in urban ruins, and, consequently, the deprivations of war scarcely ruffle the surface of their memoirs. Instead, they describe their relationships (some positive, some tense, some ambivalent) with the newly arrived Allied occupiers, carefully avoiding any mention of their former collaborations with Nazi cultural functionaries. Conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler kept track of activities in postwar Berlin from his Swiss villa, while in a bucolic village just west of Munich, Werner Egk greeted the American tanks that rolled through his garden at the end of April. Carl Orff was reunited with a former student (now an American cultural officer) who made sure the composer was rehabilitated despite his undisputed success during the regime. In Bavaria, Richard Strauss was so in demand that the Americans created a sign-up sheet for dinners in his home. And although he admitted privately in 1945, “My life’s work is in ruins,” his postwar compositions such as Metamorphosis and Four Last Songs returned to a neoclassical soundworld, far from the rubble of defeated Germany.5
Yet there is a dissonance between more privileged artists, who were largely spared violence by geography, social connections, or material circumstances, and the lived experience of the average civilian musician. In contrast to the accounts of Strauss, Egk, Orff, and Furtwängler, I found a wealth of archival material and musical scores during my research in Berlin that explicitly addressed urban trauma in 1945. These documents openly describe wartime air raids, destruction, violence, and death—in short, musical narratives of German suffering—nearly all of which remain, to this day, unpublished. The sheer amount of evidence, from diary entries and letters to cantatas about Berlin’s bombings, irrefutably shows that musicians rendered the ruined cityscape in aural terms, continuing to compose and perform despite (and even because of) postwar debris. Although their material may have been unpopular with the occupiers, countless forums and institutions hosted and supported these pieces and performances.
Between the critical years of 1945 and 1950, Berlin’s material devastation generated what I call rubble music, or the sound of civilian suffering after urban catastrophe, heard in public forums monitored by the Allies as well as private ones for German civilians. Musicians moved across the porous sectors of the city with relative ease, performing and composing for the occupation powers and collaborating with fellow musicians in East and West Berlin. Before the wall’s construction in 1961, more than fifty thousand East Berliners were employed in West Berlin and crossed the border each day.6
The subject of German victimhood during and after World War II has long been taboo, and it is not one to be undertaken without caution. I am not attempting to establish a kind of continuum of suffering, nor am I arguing that there is in any way equivalency between the German, non-Jewish experience and Jewish victimhood. Furthermore, as I discuss in the ensuing chapters, there were audible tensions and resonances between German and Jewish suffering (and even German Jewish suffering), which inform, complicate, and add nuance to rubble music as a genre. Fortunately, contributions by scholars such as Robert G. Moeller, Anna Parkinson, Monica Black, and Jennifer Evans have provided a framework for discussing the complex set of issues arising from the victim-perpetrator paradigm and the gray zone of complicity after World War II. As Moeller notes, it must be possible “to write a history of the war’s end in which Germans cause immeasurable suffering and Germans suffer immeasurably.”7 Notions of civilian victimhood informed national identity in both East and West Germany, and although these narratives developed divergent paths in the American and Soviet zones, the trauma of Allied bombing raids was a common theme.8
Between 1940 and 1945, the British Royal Air Force, later joined by the US Air Force, extensively bombed Germany in what became known as the Allied air war. Allied bombers targeted industrial areas, factories, and armaments facilities, and the attacks were initially in retaliation for the Luftwaffe’s raids on Coventry and London. By 1943, however, the United States and Great Britain had adopted a broader policy of morale bombing. Designed to undermine support for the Nazi war effort, the attacks decimated urban areas, killing an estimated four hundred thousand to six hundred thousand German civilians, and rendering over 70 percent of the country’s homes uninhabitable. As the seat of Hitler’s government, Berlin held special significance for the Allies, who mounted 363 aerial attacks, making the city the most frequently targeted of World War II. British and American intelligence, hoping to create a firestorm on the scale of Hamburg’s 1943 bombing, complained that the capital’s wide streets and lack of timber buildings made it difficult to light the city aflame, creating “a good deal of consternation,” as one American engineer admitted.9 The psychological toll of repeated bombings and the accompanying lethargy arguably did little to break the population’s morale. Instead, the air war generated more than seventy-five million cubic meters of debris in Berlin alone, rubble that would provide a metaphorical and literal space for Berliners to stage, compose, and broadcast their traumas, however self-inflicted, by 1945.
The Zero Hour and Rubble Arts
Eyewitness accounts of music sounding in Germany’s rubble have tended to focus on the idealized aspects of rebuilding, describing the destruction only insofar as it was a testament to the musicians’ commitment to their craft. Rather than hearing how the rubble changed and informed musical practices, these initial responses portrayed music as life affirming and culturally redemptive. It is no surprise that the authors of these accounts had political reasons to represent their cultural work as a unique, democratic, and occupier-sanctioned form of music making.10 Yet the speed with which concerts, performances, and recitals resumed after the war’s end suggests these activities served a greater purpose than mere entertainment or distraction from harsh realities. These events suggest that music shaped a narrative of postwar national suffering even as the German nation had ceased to exist.
Immediately after Germany’s unconditional surrender, artists promoted the idea of a “new beginning” in all aspects of culture. Postwar accounts took great pains to differentiate before and after 1945, using the term zero hour (Stunde Null) to describe the period of transition between the fall of the Third Reich and the establishment of semifunctioning Allied military governments. The narratives of German musicians maintained that this era represented a caesura, belaboring the difficulties of resuming musical productions and reconstituting ensembles given the extent of the air war’s urban destruction. Further, these accounts claimed, music that had enjoyed frequent performances under the Third Reich was ousted in favor of Mendelssohn, as politically sound musicians eagerly reclaimed their autonomy after the fall of an oppressive regime.11 Postwar artists in all sectors and zones had a vested interest in propagating the idea of a fresh start as there were numerous personal and professional advantages to be gained. In this version of 1945, rubble was to be cleared away quickly, not worked through piece by piece. The zero hour was not about the arduous task of sorting debris; rather, its forward momentum repressed this process altogether. Rubble became a liability as it contained the shards of 1945’s exaggerations and falsehoods. The zero hour concept was a convenient narrative of urban and cultural renewal that validated Allied policies and absolved many civilian sympathizers of wrongdoing. In most contemporary accounts, Germany’s musical rubble was treated as an inconvenience to be worked around, not worked through.
Consequently, a second and third generation of scholars began redefining the zero hour as a dichotomy of “continuities and discontinuities,” arguing that while certain elements of culture remained the same as they had been under National Socialism, other facets such as repertoire and personnel experienced radical upheavals. This binary acknowledged, within certain boundaries, the problems and contradictions inherent in the zero hour concept.12 Yet many assumptions about 1945 were rooted in readings of totalitarianism that argued the state unilaterally controlled all facets of German culture. More recent Third Reich historiographies, however, have questioned the extent to which the Nazis were able to regulate all areas of artistic production. Compelling new research by Pamela Potter and others calls into question assumptions that were once undisputed: that the Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer) rigidly controlled all facets of artistic production, and, above all, that German musicians uniformly toiled under oppressive conditions. Instead, as Potter argues, the chamber implemented a number of reforms that even helped improve everyday life for many German musicians.13 These findings demand a reevaluation of music in the postwar period, as they unmoor many prior notions about 1945 and its supposed cultural renewal. If the zero hour was employed for political and aesthetic purposes to describe postwar German culture, then what exactly did this culture take as its primary source of inspiration? The rubble of wartime bombing left traces on mediums from film to literature to art and, as I argue in this book, on music.
Aestheticizing time’s slow decay certainly had a precedent well before 1945. Visual artists since the Renaissance depicted ruins as a marker of religious and historical significance, and by the eighteenth century, Piranesi’s etchings showed nature reclaiming rubbled space. The romantics created landscape paintings and fragmentary character pieces about the crumbling rubble of ancient ruins. Modern aerial warfare of the twentieth century, however, forever altered rubble’s status as a quaint relic of time’s passage. Now such debris could be created in a matter of seconds and on a scale humanity had never before experienced. Although Andreas Huyssen argues the rubble of Germany’s aerial warfare should not be conflated with idealized ruins, many postwar photographs, paintings, films, and musical scores did just that.14 Deliberately aestheticizing warfare’s remnants rendered the urban landscape a massive canvas, removing questions of guilt and moral responsibility to recast the destruction in terms of romantic decay, creating a kind of contemplative rubble sublime.
Consequently, the country’s destruction captured the imagination of artists, filmmakers, and writers who created rubble films, rubble photographs, rubble art, and rubble literature—genres that used ruin to explore themes of postwar alienation and disillusionment. The term Trümmerfilm (rubble film) first surfaced in 1947, and when it did, critics generally employed it pejoratively.15 Rather than providing a mere escapist outlet, rubble films depicted urban destruction as the primary backdrop for ordinary civilians living in the bombed-out shells of their homes, often contrasting German suffering against the characters’ own compromised political pasts. Filmmakers used lengthy wide-angle shots of bombed cities to fetishize and aestheticize the destruction even as the ruined landscape served as a visual signifier of the Nazi regime’s moral bankruptcy. As Robert Shandley has observed, these are films that “share the fundamental mise en scène of a destroyed and defeated Germany.”16 Berlin alone provided the backdrop to some forty-seven rubble films between 1946 and 1948, including Wolfgang Staudte’s The Murderers Are among Us (1946) and Gerhard Lamprecht’s Somewhere in Berlin (1946), as well as films produced by foreign directors such as Roberto Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero (1948) and Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair (1948).17
Postwar rubble literature engaged with similar themes, as Gruppe 47, a writers’ collective that included Hans Werner Richter, Ilse Aichinger, Günter Eich, Heinrich Böll, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, confronted and documented Germany’s destruction. In Richter’s writings for Der Ruf, a journal he cofounded as a prisoner of war in Rhode Island and reestablished upon his return to Germany in 1946, the author admitted, “The hallmark of our time is the ruin. . . . It lives in us, as we in it.”18 Gruppe 47’s stories of bitter homecomings, the cruel aftermath of war mirrored in the country’s fractured landscape, provided unvarnished texts of nonredemptive sacrifice. When contemporary critics demeaned their literary efforts, Böll argued that “to have offered our contemporaries an escape into some idyll would have been too cruel for words,” or even more to the point, “We found rubble and we wrote about it.”19
The representation of rubble in the visual arts ranged from the romantic to the surreal. Popular rubble postcards sold and circulated among the German public even showed the country’s famous landmarks reduced to rubble and ash. Photojournalist Henry Ries, a German Jewish émigré serving in the US Army, captured early rubble shots of Berlin from the skies, and in Dresden, Richard Peter’s book of ruin photographs, Dresden: Eine Kamera klagt an (1949) memorialized the decimated Baroque cityscape, selling fifty thousand copies in a little over a week.20
Yet rubble photographs generally recast the shattered cityscape as a romantic ruin, featuring either postwar, contemplative landscapes in the vein of Caspar David Friedrich, or a rubble flaneur wandering through the ruins. Rather than an affect of romanticized contemplation, however, Berlin artists Werner Heldt and Karl Hofer used rubble prominently in their surrealist work from 1945 until 1948. Heldt’s series of postwar paintings, including Window View with a Dead Bird (1945) and Berlin at Sea (1946–48) feature destroyed houses melting into an ocean of ruins. In Hofer’s Ruins at Night (1947), Berlin’s rubble becomes garishly laughing musical facades (fig. 1). Behind the upright piano in the foreground sits a destroyed house with piano key teeth and the f-hole of a violin for an eye.21
How rubble was presented in film, literature, photography, and painting varied by artist, medium, and material, and yet there remained certain thematic tropes consistent across these mediums—namely, German suffering and the moral ambiguity of the politically compromised. Yet while scholars have extensively documented rubble’s resonances in other areas of postwar culture, including literature, film, visual art and photography, there has been no corresponding book linking music and ruins. In spite of the ubiquitous music making that was taking place across postwar Germany, rubble histories of 1945 seldom, if ever, consider music in relation to other rubble art forms. (Broader postwar histories, with a few notable exceptions, have been reluctant to integrate music into their analyses, most likely due to the interests and fields of their respective authors.)22 Even if the term rubble music (Trümmermusik) was absent from postwar discourses, musicians, too, explored the sonic possibilities of the rubble. In “The Aging of New Music,” Theodor W. Adorno wrote, “Since the European catastrophe, culture hangs on like houses in the cities accidentally spared by bombs or indifferently patched together.”23 Music, of the new and old variety, could travel unimpeded between roofless, bombed-out houses and through courtyards.
Figure 0.1. Ruins at Night (1947) by Karl Hofer. Reproduced courtesy of akg-images. ©2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG-Bild Kunst, Bonn.
More recent musicological scholarship has probed the material remnants of postwar Germany to unearth long-buried (or long-suppressed) counternarratives of trauma. Amy Lynn Wlodarski has explored how the postwar ruins of France informed the work of American composer George Rochberg, who traversed the battered landscape as a soldier and wrote about his experiences in his diary, creating compositional sketches he would return to some forty years later. Martha Sprigge focuses on Dresden’s ruins and cantor Rudolph Mauersberger’s commemorative compositions for the Kreuzkirche boys’ choir. Emily Richmond Pollock’s work on Munich’s rubble analyzes the contested relationship between architecture, the air war, and operatic performance. Andrew Oster argues that postwar radio opera (Funkoper) was itself a form of rubble music, free from the visual trappings of sets and costumes which were scarce given the widespread destruction.24 Historians of postwar music have also thoroughly documented the institutional frameworks across 1945 Germany. Elizabeth Janik’s contributions on German musical culture from the late nineteenth century to 1989, David Monod’s study of American musical denazification, and Toby Thacker’s work on Allied musical reeducation all concern bureaucratic infrastructures and Allied policies. These excellent studies focus on the complicated relationships between occupier and occupied.25
Rubble and its musical possibilities extend far beyond the borders of postwar Germany. Elizabeth McAlister has linked music in the ruins of post-earthquake Haiti with efforts to reconstitute community after crisis. Krysta Ryzewski writes about the ruins of Detroit, tying together abandoned and postindustrial spaces with musical performances in the former automotive capital. Alex Cannon explores how Southern Vietnamese musicians use what he calls “the musical ruin,” or a dismantling of traditional musical forms to reflect contemporary Vietnamese society. Focusing on the American government’s nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands during the 1950s, Jessica Schwartz has explored the ruined voices of female survivors after the fallout, establishing important links between the body, nuclear silences, and trauma.26 These contributions cast Berlin’s unique position in stark relief to other rubbled sites of the twentieth and twenty-first century. No sudden firestorm, nuclear testing, earthquake, or economic crisis befell the German capital, but the craters of hundreds of aerial attacks left unique resonances for civilian musicians, who grappled to find new vocabularies to describe their experiences.
Accordingly, the first four chapters of Rubble Music concern the tangible, physical work required to reconstitute ensembles, opera companies, and radio stations from the debris. Each chapter treats rubble figuratively and literally by analyzing the metaphorical rubble of compromised, denazified citizens as well as the physical remnants of aerial bombing. The Philharmonic, the Staatsoper, and the Städtische Oper staged events within weeks of the cease-fire, despite the destruction of their concert halls. Ruined personnel and rubbled holdings remained, as civilians and soldiers worked to locate musicians, scores, and venues.
Chapter 1 focuses on the rubble sorting of the occupiers as they divided the city into four sectors and implemented their respective music policies and denazification programs. Authorities believed that Nazism had tainted the arts and that artists who had remained in Nazi Germany were gravely compromised. The Allies would need to classify the thousands of musicians remaining in defeated Germany, artists whose activities ranged from active collaboration with the regime to passive, if begrudging, acceptance of the Nazi musical establishment. Yet recognizing the “non-Nazi bricks” in the ashen rubble piles of Berlin would prove easier said than done. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 present the audible rubble work of Berliners themselves, as they reconstituted orchestras, opera companies, and radio stations from the ruins. Although the Allies supposedly monitored these institutions, they soon became sites for Berliners to perform their own suffering in public forums. As a sonic and visual trope across Germany, the towering bombed facades of churches and historic venues provided stunning aesthetic configurations for postwar concerts. Civilians used opera stagings, commissions, and broadcasts to express their victimhood, as Berlin’s institutions became platforms to begin working through the trauma of war.
The last chapter of Rubble Music, chapter 5, turns to more private expressions of German victimhood as I look past Allied-controlled spaces to performances and compositions by and for other Berliners. While the occupiers were concerned with questionnaires and blacklists, civilians were experimenting with rubble as a performance and compositional aesthetic. Rubble, romanticized in both musical genre and textual content, was the foremost concern for the first generation of postwar composers as their Lieder transformed haphazard urban destruction into something much more deliberate: the ruins of German suffering.
Living in the only German city divided by all four occupiers, Berlin’s musicians were uniquely poised to benefit from and toil under the ensuing Allied competition for the best players, facilities, and programing. Despite material challenges, the city became the locus of the most ambitious reeducation experiment of the twentieth century, exemplifying the tensions and contradictions of postwar Germany. To reach common ground with the German intellectual establishment, the Allies designed their respective reorientation agendas with classical music in mind. Musical production would become increasingly tied to political shifts within the city, regulated by Allied cultural officers and later checkpoint permissions, and influenced by economic and humanitarian crises such as the currency reform, polio epidemic, and Berlin Airlift (Luftbrücke).
The reconstruction of Berlin’s cityscape was, in many ways, the earliest sound of the Cold War, with competing factions and conflicting ideas about German culture and the country’s role within postwar Europe. Russian, American, British, and French occupiers were concerned with Berlin’s musical culture and the symbolic capital that came with supervising some of the most prestigious ensembles in Germany. While their respective denazification and reeducation programs shared little in the way of content, the occupiers attempted to introduce Berliners to the music of their respective nations. The Americans were relatively new to using the arts to further a political ideology, having only recently treated music as a medium for propaganda through the creation of the Office of War Information.27 The British occupiers, with limited governmental funding, worked closely with American cultural officers to promote a democratic musical culture. The French, occupying two industrial districts of Berlin with no major ensembles or venues in their sector, focused primarily on importing artists and sponsoring performances of French music. It was the Russian occupiers, however, who were most skilled at mobilizing culture for their political agenda. Soviet cultural officers created an elaborate network of organizations to support the city’s artistic community, bringing German communists back from exile in Moscow to lead the cultural reconstruction of the city. By building trust between cultural officers and their German counterparts, the Soviets made early, important gains where the Western Allies struggled.28
Yet for all of their policy clashes and irreconcilable political differences, the great unifier in East and West Berlin was destruction, for, as Elaine Kelly notes, “the juxtaposition of culture and rubble was a common one across all four of the occupied zones in the late 1940s.”29 German civilians emerged from the cellars and bunkers of their city, and in the flotsam and jetsam of humanity it was often difficult to tell who was a former collaborator or who was simply a follower (Mitläufer). “Berlin was only more corrupt, more decadent, more degenerate than the rest of Germany,” according to one American intelligence officer.30 It was up to the Allies to mete out punishment or to show leniency to the occupied as the future of Germany, and that of postwar Europe, hung in the balance.
If the Allies had larger bureaucratic ideals in mind, however, the aims of most German civilians were more immediate, as conductor Hans von Benda and musicians like him searched the rubble for a “new life” in the form of “new sounds.”31 After his May 13 concert in the Schöneberg town hall where, only days before, the Hitler Youth burned incriminating city records of Jewish civilians, Benda marveled at “the peoples’ need for culture” (Kulturwille), elated that artists were finally free from “the shackles of the Hitler era.”32 Yet despite the celebratory nature of his claims, musical culture was anything but liberated from the stain of collaboration. With rubble all around, how artists worked through, cleared away, or built over this debris would set the course of musical culture in both East and West Berlin for decades to come.
Notes
1. Paul Höffer, Toccata, score, 1945, Paul Höffer Papers, Carton 21, Staatsbibliothek, Berlin. “Unter Schmerzen geboren, 15.4.45.”
2. Dienstbuch G 100 and 335, Berlin Philharmonic Archive; Erich Hartmann, Die Berliner Philharmoniker in der Stunde Null: Erinnerungen an die Zeit des Untergangs der alten Philharmonie vor 50 Jahren (Berlin: Werner Feja, 1996), 28; and Erna Berger, Auf Flügeln des Gesanges: Erinnerungen einer Sängerin (Zurich: Atlantis, 1998), 79.
3. Quoted in “Neues Leben—neue Klänge: Gespräch mit Hans von Benda,” Berliner Zeitung, May 21, 1945
4. Quoted in Ibid. See also Wilfried Welz, ed., Rathaus Schöneberg: Stationen einer politischen Karriere (Berlin: Spitz, 1995), 60–65; Richard Brett-Smith, Berlin ’45: The Grey City (London: Macmillan, 1967), 135; Hans von Benda, “Phoenix aus der Asche,” Tagesspiegel, May 16, 1965; Brewster S. Chamberlin, Kultur auf Trümmern: Berliner Berichte der amerikanischen Information Control Section Juli-Dezember 1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1979), 89n105; and Toby Thacker, Music after Hitler, 1945–1955 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 34, 51–58.
5. Quoted in Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, Four Last Songs: Aging and Creativity in Verdi, Strauss, Messiaen, and Britten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 53. See also Werner Egk, Die Zeit wartet nicht: Künstlerisches, Zeitgeschichtliches, Privates aus meinem Leben (Mainz: Schott, 2001), 369; Wilhelm Furtwängler, Notebooks, 1924–1954, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Quartet Books, 1989), 155–63; Raphael Woebs, Die Politische Theorie in der Neuen Musik: Karl Amadeus Hartmann und Hannah Arendt (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2010), 111–18; Klaus Lang, Celibidache und Furtwängler: Der große philharmonische Konflikt in der Berliner Nachkriegszeit (Munich: Wissner, 2010), 1–32; Michael Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 138; Kurt Wilhelm, Richard Strauss persönlich: Eine Bildbiographie (Munich: Kindler, 1984), 398; Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 373–74; and Alex Ross, “Monument Man,” New Yorker, July 24, 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/richard-strauss-and-the-american-army.
6. Elaine Kelly, Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic: Narratives of Nineteenth-Century Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 14. For more about East and West German compositional collaborations, see Joy Calico, “Jüdische Chronik: The Third Space of Commemoration between East and West Germany,” Musical Quarterly 88, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 95–122.
7. 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): 153. See also Anna Parkinson, An Emotional State: The Politics of Emotion in Postwar West German Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 113–45; Monica Black, Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 16–18; and Jennifer Evans, Life among the Ruins: Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War in Berlin (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 1–15.
8. Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 1–20.
9. Quoted in Jörg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, trans. Allison Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 98. See also Robert G. Moeller, “On the History of Man-Made Destruction: Loss, Death, Memory, and Germany in the Bombing War,” History Workshop Journal 61 (Spring 2006): 107–8; Paul Steege, Black Market, Cold War: Everyday Life in Berlin 1946–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 20; and Dietmar Süss, Death from the Skies: How the British and Germans Survived Bombing in World War II, trans. Lesley Sharpe and Jeremy Noakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1–18.
10. For a few representative examples, see Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, Battleground Berlin: Diaries, 1945–1948 (New York: Paragon House, 1984), 35; Hartmann, Die Berliner Philharmoniker in der Stunde Null, 29–36; Heinrich Weber, Die Geschichte des Lehrergesangvereins Nürnberg e.V., 1878–2003 (Nuremberg: LGV, 2003), 117.
11. For accounts that perpetuate this narrative, see Ulrich Dibelius, Moderne Musik, 1945–1965 (Munich: R. Piper, 1966); and Siegfried Borris, Über Wesen und Werden der neuen Musik in Deutschland: Vom Expressionismus zum Vitalismus. Beiträge zu einer neuen Musikkunde (Berlin: A. Steffan, 1948).
12. For a representative example, see Heinz Geuen and Anno Mungen, Kontinuitäten | Diskontinuitäten: Musik und Politik in Deutschland zwischen 1920 und 1970 (Schliengen, Germany: Argus Editions, 2006), 1–17.
13. Pamela M. Potter, Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 1–47, 130–214. See also Alan Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater and the Visual Arts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 32–69, 176.
14. Andreas Huyssen, “Nostalgia for Ruins,” Grey Room 23 (Spring 2006): 7–10.
15. For one example, see “Arche Nora läuft vom Stapel,” Der Spiegel, July 19, 1947. The article reported that the film Nora’s Arc, featuring a tale of four friends rebuilding their lives while living in the hull of a wrecked ship, would feature specially designed nautical scenery to ensure the film would “not become a ‘rubble film.’” For more on the negative critiques of rubble film and rubble literature, see Stephen Brockmann, A Critical History of German Film (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011), 183; Jaimey Fisher, “Who’s Watching the Rubble-Kids? Youth, Pedagogy, and Politics in Early DEFA Films,” New German Critique 82 (Winter 2001): 92; Heinrich Böll, “In Defense of ‘Rubble Literature’ (1952),” in Missing Persons and Other Essays, trans. Leila Vennewitz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 126; and Kathryn Sederberg, “Writing through Crisis: Time, History, Futurity in German Diaries of the Second World War,” Biography 40, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 323–41. My thanks to Kathryn Sederberg for her thoughts about the term rubble literature (email correspondence with the author, September 14, 2017).
16. Robert Shandley, Rubble Films: German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 3.
17. Eric Rentschler, “The Place of Rubble in the Trümmerfilm,” in Ruins of Modernity, ed. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 435; Johannes von Moltke, “Ruin Cinema,” in Ruins of Modernity, ed. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 406; Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 233; and Amanda Z. Randall, “Austrian Trümmerfilm? What a Genre’s Absence Reveals about National Postwar Cinema and Film Studies,” German Studies Review 38, no. 3 (October 2015): 573–95.
18. Quoted in Alexander Rothe, “Rethinking Postwar History: Munich’s Musica Viva during the Karl Amadeus Hartmann Years (1945–63),” in Musical Quarterly 90/2 (2007): 230. The original German source can be located at Hans Werner Richter, “Literatur im Interregnum,” Der Ruf 15, March 1947. For an excellent analysis of rubble literature, see Stephen Brockmann, “German Literature, Year Zero: Writers and Politics, 1945–1953,” in Stunde Null: The End and the Beginning Fifty Years Ago, ed. Geoffrey J. Giles (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 1997), 59–74.
19. Böll, “In Defense of ‘Rubble Literature’ (1952),” 126.
20. Douglas Martin, “Henry Ries, 86, Photographer Who Captured Berlin Airlift,” New York Times, May 26, 2004; Martha Sprigge, “Dresden’s Musical Ruins,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 144, no. 1 (2019): 83–121; and Ann Fuchs, “The Bombing of Dresden,” in Cultural Impact in the German Context: Studies in Transmission, Reception, and Influence, ed. Rebecca Braun and Lynn Marven (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), 36–57.
21. Stefan Rasche, Das Stilleben in der westdeutschen Malerei der Nachkriegzeit: Gegenständliche Positionen zwischen 1945 und 1963 (Muenster: Lit Verlag, 1995), 72–81; and Ronald Taylor, Berlin and Its Culture: A Historical Portrait (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 288–89.
22. See, for example, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945–1948, trans. Kelly Barry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), or Hermann Glaser, The Rubble Years: The Cultural Roots of Postwar Germany (New York: Paragon House, 1986), as both these cultural histories omit music. A notable exception, however, is Pamela Potter’s Art of Suppression, which gives histories of visual and performing arts under the Nazis and in the immediate postwar period.
23. Theodor Adorno, “The Aging of New Music,” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 199–200.
24. Amy Lynn Wlodarski, “Reconstruction after the Rubble: The War-Inspired Compositions of George Rochberg,” AMS Rubble Seminar, November 2017; Amy Lynn Wlodarski, George Rochberg, American Composer: Personal Trauma and Artistic Creativity (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2019); Emily Richmond Pollock, “Rebuilding and Retrenchment at Munich’s National Theater,” AMS Rubble Seminar, November 2017; 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; Sprigge, “Dresden’s Musical Ruins,” 83–121; and Andrew Oster, “Rubble, Radio, and Reconstruction: The Genre of Funkoper in Postwar Occupied Germany and the Federal Republic, 1946–1957” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2010), 139.
25. Elizabeth Janik, Recomposing German Music: Politics and Musical Tradition in Cold War Berlin (Leiden: Brill, 2005); David Monod, Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification, and the Americans, 1945–1953 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); and Thacker, Music after Hitler.
26. Elizabeth McAlister, “Soundscapes of Disaster and Humanitarianism: Survival Singing, Relief Telethons, and the Haiti Earthquake,” in Small Axe: A Caribbean Platform for Criticism 39 (November 2012), 22–38; Krista Ryzewski, “Making Music in Detroit: Archaeology, Popular Music, and Post-Industrial Heritage,” in Contemporary Archeology and the City, ed. Laura McAtackney and Krysta Ryzewski (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 69–90; Alex Cannon, “Tradition, still Remains: Sustainability through Ruin in Vietnamese Music for Diversion,” Ethnomusicology Forum 25/2 (2016): 146–171; and Jessica A. Schwartz, “A ‘Voice to Sing’: Rongelapese Musical Activism and the Production of Nuclear Knowledge,” Music and Politics 6, no. 1 (Winter 2012), https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mp/9460447.0006.101/--voice-to-sing-rongelapese-musical-activism?rgn=main;view=fulltext.
27. For more on the Office of War Information’s musical activities, see Annegret Fauser, Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 77–93.
28. Poet Johannes R. Becher was among the most illustrious artists to return, flown in by Soviet authorities to lead the Kulturbund. See Johannes R. Becher, “Manifest und Ansprachen,” in Gründungskundgebung des Kulturbundes zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands (Berlin: Aufbau, 1945), 32–40; Joy Calico, “The Politics of Opera in the German Democratic Republic, 1945–1961” (PhD diss., Duke University, 1999), 29–36.
29. Kelly, Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic, 12.
30. Nicolas Nabokov, Old Friends and New Music (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951), 262.
31. Hans von Benda, Berliner Zeitung, May 21, 1945.
32. Ibid. See also Welz, Rathaus Schöneberg, 59–63.