Re: [Marxism] books on postwar west germany

[" Ian Pace" <ian@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: "kersplebedeb" <info@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>


> hi, i was wondering if anyone on this list could suggest a good book on
> general postwar history of the FRG.
If anyone knows one such book that explores the effects of the
denazification process upon culture, and how this has changed (not least in
terms of the ideological conceptualisations of the cultural past) I'd
especially like to know about that. Or does anyone here have some particular
thoughts about this? In my own field of new music, there was a sense, in the
FRG more than anywhere else, that almost everything with connotations of a
German past was by definition to be distrusted, only ever to be engaged with
in a highly mediated fashion. One composer I know wrote a series of works
engaging with volksmusik from his native Franconia (in part as a reaction
against what he saw as the sterility of the avant-garde in the 1970s, when
these works were written). Notwithstanding the fact that he endeavoured to
strip this Franconian music of any vestiges of aggression as he saw it, and
applied some very systematic and abstract procedures to the material (which
would have been impossible without the recent avant-garde history), he was
still denounced as having written fascistic music. Even evoking some genres,
quotations, or stylistic allusions to earlier German composers was treated
with great suspicion. When Karlheinz Stockhausen quoted the German national
anthem in his work 'Hymnen' (amongst many other national anthems, treating
each of them (perhaps naively) as merely emblematic), he came in for much
criticism on similar grounds. Helmut Lachenmann tried to address this with a
highly distorted, fractured, fragmented rendition of the same music in his
'Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied', which could hardly be heard in any sort of
an affirmative manner.

These attitudes have softened somewhat in more recent times, amongst younger
generations of composers, some seeking to rescue something of value in early
German music from all the ideological associations it had come to possess
(in particular stressing the more cosmopolitan nature of German music before
the nationalising influence of Wagner). This is close to my own position,
looking for other ways of reading German musical history other than the
tropes bequeathed by the Nazis; it also pertains to cultural histories in
other nations, perhaps nationalistic histories are a particular feature of
the counter-revolutionary post-1848 era, tied up with the same sorts of
forces that produced the ideologies used to mobilise the European working
classes to fight each other in WW1?

All of these matters are of particular interest to me, and I'd be very
interested in other posters' views, especially those who have engaged with
these questions in other cultural fields.

Solidarity,
Ian



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