Session Abstract

There are few more clicheed images of German bourgeois culture than that of the middle classes listening to works of the musical canon in the auratic surround of the symphonic concert hall while outside war raged or a genocide unfolded. Whether 'culture' is taken to be the other of mass violence (as a refuge from the violence of war) or as its progenitor (as the originator of conceits of superiority, and thus the inspiration for that violence) writings on German musical culture echo with stubborn assumptions concerning the relationship between politics and art that critical thought appears unable to dislodge.  A second, associated cliché is rooted in highly ingrained assumptions about social class and its associations with cultures of discipline and authority. It has become similarly axiomatic that whilst imbibing and reaffirming the values of German cultural nationalism these overwhelmingly middle class audiences were engaging in the assertion of social distinction and thus social power. It has become a commonplace, moreover, that these audiences were simultaneously imbibing a peculiarly C19th emotional regime and a regime of the senses, disciplining their ears to engage in concentrated listening and their bodies to perfect stillness in a culture of self-control – they were, in other words, both asserting social hegemony and succumbing to a regime of control with implicitly authoritarian overtones. Although the founding text of this research was written in respect of Paris (Johnson, 1995) - demonstrating, if nothing else, that German experiences were hardly unique - in a German context, the historiographical, political, and ethical stakes in writing about such phenomena always seem to be higher, because in Germany, so the unspoken assumption, citizens were not disciplining themselves for its own sake, but always for something else – and that something was (implicitly) fascism. In this sense, writing about the symphonic concert hall is a last redoubt of the Sonderweg thesis.

This panel, which is aimed at cultural historians of music, pursues alternative approaches to conceptualizing the interstices between music consumption, bourgeois social practice, and national identity. Most obviously, it starts from the recognition that such social practices were transported to and played out in spaces which were not only opposed to the culture of aggression which stands at the centre of this narrative but also direct victims of it. In juxtaposing papers on the civic practices of symphonic concert attendance in interwar Germany with papers on the maintenance on such habits in expatriate and exile communities on the one hand, and German-Jewish ghetto inmates on the other, it explores the ways in which a normative set of practices present in German society were maintained in spaces in which one might imagine them to have been jettisoned, and to what effect. How and why were such practices maintained and sustained even by those driven out of the society which called them its own, and to what effect? What does this tell us about the emotional purchase of such normative regimes of sociability even under conditions of exile, duress, and torture?