Musical Time, Social Time, and the Bourgeois Habitus: Concert-Going as an Urban Social Practice in Nazi Germany

This paper presents current work on the urban social practice of symphonic concert hall attendance during the Third Reich.  Taking as its starting point the cultural conceit that the imaginary museum of musical works which German audiences consumed as they listened to art music in the auratic confines of the symphonic concert hall represented a timeless canon, the aesthetic enjoyment of which suspended time itself, it takes the category of time to explore how the practice of concert going was in fact deeply rooted in a German bourgeois habitus which served to include and exclude and thus constituted, reflected and sustained forms of social power that had emerged before the Nazi era and, indeed, were to survive it.  The seasons of the year, the days of the week and the times of the day around which subscription series were organized were embedded in temporal rhythms that entrenched bourgeois power in a manner that went beyond ticket pricing and hierarchies of cost: as failed Nazi attempts to disrupt social hierarchy through egalitarian pricing measures showed, cost was not in itself the issue: cultures of time were.  As the national community went to war, these social rhythms were, however, dislodged: blackouts and bombing temporarily dislodged a set of hegemonic cultural practices that dictatorial power could not; conversely, the restoration of these social practices and their attendant temporal rhythms after 1945 served to restabilise bourgeois cultural authority in the post-Nazi era.