Art as Utopia: Parsifal and the East German Left

The reception of art in the early years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was governed by two significant factors. The first was the premise that the conditions of state socialism would inevitably yield to a communist utopia. The second was that art would facilitate this evolution by illuminating the seeds for utopian development that already existed both in the GDR and in t*he Germanic cultural heritage more generally. These axioms came together in Georg (György) Lukács’s theory of reflection, which underpinned the Soviet socialist realism that was introduced to East Germany in the wake of World War II. Art, Lukács proclaimed, should provide a depiction “of the subtlety of life, of a richness beyond ordinary experience,” through which it can “introduce a new order of things which displaces or modifies the old abstractions.”¹

Opera was held to be an ideal art form in this context. Despite concerns in other Marxist quarters about its elitist connotations and escapist tendencies,² adherents of socialist realism were convinced of its value for East German society. Characteristic was Walther Siegmund-Schultze’s declaration in 1953 that opera, because of its multifaceted nature, had historically “seemed to offer the best conditions for a vivid reflection of all reality.”³ This perception of opera as a realistic art form found support in the theatrical realism that was championed by Walter Felsenstein at the Komische Oper in East Berlin.⁴ Like Lukács, Felsenstein was convinced that art could reveal truths about society that were not accessible through everyday life. Theater, he argued, has the capacity to awaken the connection with the elemental that modern society has obliterated: when modern man “experiences the re-creation of the elemental in the theater, he rediscovers once again the elemental in himself”⁵ Felsenstein’s construct of realism in this context had little to do with mimesis. He was interested not in reproducing the superficial appearances of society onstage but rather in penetrating its surface to reflect deeper truths. In terms of opera, this involved the immersion of the audience in a unified and credible theatrical experience, with the aim of revealing to them a work’s inner meaning. As Götz Friedrich and Joachim Herz explained, Felsenstein’s Musiktheater entailed “the musical and scenic realization of a plot with the goal of translating a work’s humanistic content and expressive power into the listening spectator’s experiences and insights.”⁶ To this end, plots were rendered coherent, their social relevance foregrounded, and the disparate elements of opera reconciled to create the illusion of unity onstage.⁷

The aesthetics of reflection that dominated in the early GDR necessarily privileged a certain type of repertory. The operas accorded the warmest reception were those whose content was deemed to have rational value for the emerging socialist society. As was the case across the arts, preference was given to works that were judged either to offer a template for the actions needed to achieve a communist utopia or to contain within them an image of the idyllic society that would emerge in the GDR. In this vein, Georg Knepler celebrated Fidelio as a call to arms, claiming that at its crux was the message that “one must be prepared in the struggle against injustice to take up arms,”⁸ and heralded the vision for Germany that Wagner set forth in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: “A great figure is at the center; living human beings, who shape their own destiny, are the heroes; [and] the Volk is given an important role as a participant in art and in the destiny of the hero.”⁹

In later decades, as the chasm widened between the idyllic world that was “reflected” in socialist art and the decidedly grimmer realities of life under Erich Honecker’s actually existing socialism, straightforward correlations of art and society rang hollow. Intellectuals remained convinced of art’s utopian qualities; they perceived these increasingly, however, in terms of potential rather than reflection, and turned to art as a means of illuminating alternatives to the status quo. This required...