In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

20 West Germany Retrenchment versus A Survivor from Warsaw The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, or West Germany) figures prominently in most American musicological narratives of Western Europe during the Cold War because of its distinctive relationship with the United States, and because of its unrivaled support for new music. That support included dedicated international events, most famously Darmstadt’s Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (IFNM), which worked in tandem with radio stations to commission, record, disseminate, and promote new repertoire. Initially, this agenda featured music that had been repressed by the Nazis; eventually, the focus shifted to newly composed music. It also nurtured composers from abroad, some of whose works were ignored or maligned in their own countries.1 From this perspective, the FRG resembles a kind of Cold War musical hothouse, a nation whose cultural mission was to cultivate modernist and avant-garde repertoire that was too fragile or thorny to flourish in any other soil. That mission did not go unchallenged: there was notable resistance to this repertoire and to the use of federal funds to pay for it. New music met with both unparalleled support and virulent resistance in the FRG because, while the festival-radio enterprise was internationally renowned, it was also anomalous—a man-made biosphere in an otherwise inhospitable climate. Scholars of European history who study musical culture have noted this, as have some musicologists publishing in Germany.2 Despite the undeniable significance of Darmstadt and new music in general, the postwar period was primarily a time of retrenchment, one in which “West German musical culture and its educational infrastructure were largely unreconstructed.”3 West German performance and reception of Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in the 1950s occasioned a collision between advocates of new music, whose position has been well studied, and the less-well-known West Germany: Retrenchment / 21 forces of retrenchment. Schoenberg, and A Survivor in particular, acted as a lightning rod for a host of real-life postwar controversies, the importance of which is not readily apparent when accounts focus only on West Germany as a haven for new music. Anxieties about the role of former Nazis in postwar society, persistent anti-Semitism, the memory of the Holocaust, resentment of the occupying military presence, unease about the return of émigrés (either in person or symbolically, in the form of their art), and the ongoing controversy about modernist music all shaped the reception of A Survivor in postwar West Germany. Of these themes, the importance of returning émigrés for the reconstruction of West German musical life in the postwar period is now garnering musicological attention.4 It is estimated that only about thirty thousand of the half-million German-speaking emigrants returned, and reintegration into postwar society was frequently difficult. By the beginning of the 1950s, approximately 7.9 million ethnic Germans from the former eastern parts of the Reich and East Central Europe had also migrated to West Germany, accounting for about 16 percent of the country’s population and further complicating relations among postwar citizens.5 As with émigré populations generally, remigration of musicians and musicologists was the exception, and nonremigration was the rule. Maren Köster reports that only two hundred to four hundred of approximately four thousand displaced musicians returned to the Germanys after the war. This is a tiny fraction of the number of literary figures who did so, and a statistic that has probably contributed to the relative absence of this topic in musicology.6 However negligible these data may appear, remigration was a vital component of postwar society, particularly when one expands the concept beyond the physical presence of the composer to include the presence of music by composers who had not been heard under the Third Reich. Schoenberg never returned to Germany, his country of residence and employment when he left Europe altogether in 1933, but the reception his music received there after such a long hiatus indicates that some experienced its return as a kind of symbolic remigration. Remigration for the pioneer of dodecaphony was further problematized by his Jewishness. Marita Krauss has noted that all returnees were outsiders , easy targets “for resentment and anger” about Germans’ wartime suffering , but Jews were particularly susceptible because of persistent antiSemitism , fears that they would take revenge, projection, and guilt on the part of those who had remained.7 In December 1946 only 22 percent of Germans in the American zone thought émigré Jews should return unconditionally , and in...

Share