ABSTRACT
The beginning of popular music studies in the GDR In 1949, when the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was founded on the occupied territory of the Western Allies in May and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) originated in the Soviet occupation zone in the following October, the dual nationality of Germany was sealed in the long term. Therewith, not only were two entirely different social, political, economic and cultural systems implemented on German soil, also science, academic teaching, and research were laid down on the basis of distinct principles and objectives until the German reunification in 1990. With the foundation of the Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands (Cultural Alliance for the Democratic Renewal of Germany) by exiled artists under the direction of the later first culture minister of the GDR, the poet Johannes R. Becher (1891-1958), in the Soviet occupation zone on 8 August 1945, it has already been made unmistakably clear in which direction the cultural life, including the educational institutions, would have to develop henceforth. One of the seven guiding principles of the founding manifesto is the ‘education of the nation and its youth in the spirit of humanism and against all reactionary, military conceptions’ (Kulturbund, 1946: p. 4). As from 1949, this was the foundation stone of an educational dictatorship, which was uncompromisingly enforced by the ruling unity party of the GDR at that time, the SED.1 It has also profoundly shaped the universities in the Eastern part of Germany, and especially the humanities were forced into a corset of ideological doctrines, which made a free development of science impossible. In the field of music, it happened that artists returning from exile, such as the composers Ernst Hermann Meyer (1905-1988) and Hanns Eisler (1898-1962), found that their time had come to introduce the nation to their own as well as the classical music, and regarded the re-education instruction, placed by the Soviet military administration, as a call to fight against popular music. However, as the nation did not let any authorities prescribe their musical preferences at any time – even the Nazis were powerless against young people’s jazz enthusiasm in the fascist Germany – such endeavours were marked by futility right from the start. The more evident this became, the more militant was the rhetoric, and the greater was the political effort to at least control the popular music when it was simply not possible to prevent it. Sentences
like the following from one of the leading GDR musicologists, Georg Knepler, founding director of the music conservatory ‘Hanns Eisler’ in Eastern Berlin and from 1959 until 1970 professor of musicology at Humboldt University in Berlin, set the tone, with which the forms of popular music were handled in the GDR in the 1950s and 1960s. With respect to jazz, which was considered a synonym for commercial music as such regardless of its roots and forms of musical work, Knepler (1951) declared at the foundation meeting of the Association of Composers and Musicologists of the GDR: ‘This is music, which constitutes chaos, which is chaos, not only war preparation, but war itself. This is an attempt to smuggle war into the minds of people’. The fact that such sentences did not descend from the rows of anti-cultural political bureaucrats, but from scientists and artists with international reputation,2 gave them an even greater impact.
