Socialist Escapes

Breaking Away from Ideology and Everyday Routine in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989

Cathleen M. Giustino, Catherine J. Plum, Alexander Vari, Cathleen M. Giustino, Catherine J. Plum, Alexander Vari

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857456700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Europa orientale

During much of the Cold War, physical escape from countries in the Eastern Bloc was a nearly impossible act. There remained, however, possibilities for other socialist escapes, particularly time spent free from party ideology and the mundane routines of everyday life. The essays in this volume examine sites of socialist escapes, such as beaches, campgrounds, nightclubs, concerts, castles, cars, and soccer matches. The chapters explore the effectiveness of state efforts to engineer society through leisure, entertainment, and related forms of cultural programming and consumption. They lead to a deeper understanding of state–society relations in the Soviet sphere, where the state did not simply "dictate from above" and inhabitants had some opportunities to shape solidarities, identities, and meaning.

PART I

Concert Halls and Estate Museums

CHAPTER 1

Instrumentalizing Entertainment and Education

Early Cold-War Music Festivals in East Germany and Poland

David G. Tompkins

Youth of the cities, youth of the countryside,

Join together in an ensemble

And in harmonious chorus raise

A joyful and happy song:

Of work, of future dreams,

Of happiness already forged

And of beautiful days of freedom

Conquered together with Bierut.¹

Tadeusz Sygietyński, Song about Bierut (Piosenka o Bierucie)

For the communist parties of Central Europe in the early Cold War, the arts were a key tool for influencing their populations and implementing political goals. Music occupied a particularly important position in German and Polish cultural life, and cultural officials accorded it an unusual power to affect worldviews. As seen in the song lyrics above, communists and their sympathizers considered music to be a powerful, unifying force that would mobilize their citizenries behind the leadership and aims of the party.² Music festivals in particular served as an entertaining break from everyday life and a way to shape the perceptions and passions of citizens. In the Stalinist decade after World War II, cultural officials in East Germany and Poland organized music festivals on a breathtaking scale in order to produce an enjoyable and meaningful leisure activity that would promote party ends.³

The music performed at these festivals was to be socialist-realist, the aesthetic ideology mandated for all the arts under Stalinism.⁴ In the musical realm, socialist realism meant that music should be straightforward and melodic, and accessible to untutored audiences. Text-based music, such as the ubiquitous mass song, should communicate a political message and also be catchy and appealing. Music was to build on the national traditions of the country; consequently, socialist cultural authorities encouraged folk themes and works by composers who could be included in a progressive view of historical development. Both the East German and Polish communist parties sought to promote a nationalism infused with socialist ideals, and music mixing folk motifs, national traditions, and party messages fit this goal well.⁵

Music festivals functioned as escapes on two levels through the mid-1950s. For a population emerging from war and facing the daunting task of rebuilding, music festivals offered a simple break from an often difficult quotidian reality, although they were greatly influenced by the pervasive Stalinist ideology of the decade. In both countries, composers and audiences often and increasingly pushed for them to be an escape on another level, an escape from ideology as either autonomous artistic events or as uncomplicated entertainment. This chapter first explores the East German case, where the Socialist Unity Party (SED) maintained its political influence over music festivals with only minor concessions, even after Stalin’s 1953 death and the subsequent thaw, or loosening of party control, throughout the Soviet Bloc. Here, music festivals were escapes only in this first sense. After initial success around 1950, the SED’s Polish counterpart, the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), gradually lost influence over musical festivals in the context of the post-Stalinist thaw, and they thereby became true escapes in both senses. After an examination of different types of music festivals in East Germany and then Poland, a final section will look at two international youth festivals with a strong musical component, held in East Berlin in 1951 and Warsaw in 1955, to further illuminate the nature of these musical escapes in these two initially similar, then increasingly divergent national contexts.

East German Music Festivals: Ideology-Filled Escapes

A wide array of music festivals took place in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) during the decade following the devastating Second World War.⁶ In this era of rebuilding, hard work, Stalinist ideology, and deep Cold War tensions at the epicenter of the superpower conflict, music festivals provided an escape for the people, albeit one strongly marked by the vision of East Germany’s SED. During the post-Stalinist thaw, embodied as a “New Course” of greater openness and less political control in the GDR, officials made some concessions to composers’ wishes for more experimentation and to audience desires for less politicized entertainment, but these were minor, and overarching ideological control of music festivals remained largely with the party and its sympathizers in the musical world.⁷

East German music festivals, which occurred with astonishing frequency in an area with a longstanding tradition, took three broad forms in the first post-war decade. First, there were small but prestigious festivals often associated with the East German Composers’ Union and attended by the educated, middle- and upper-class concert-going public, and occasionally by workers. Secondly, local festivals in towns of varying sizes were also a common variety of festival that workers often attended. Finally, the festival format that offered the most common musical escape from the everyday was that of amateur festivals, which included ensembles of nonprofessional performers playing for a diverse audience. The SED maintained considerable ideological control over all three of these festival types. While it made some limited concessions to composer and audience demands for less ideology and more simple entertainment, especially during the post-Stalinist and consumer-oriented New Course, the SED continued to maintain considerable influence throughout the thaw of the mid-1950s and beyond.

Several small but high profile music festivals of the first type took place in Berlin and Leipzig during the first half of the 1950s, nearly all of which exhibited strong SED influence. Two of these festivals were linked to regular congresses of the Composers’ Union, an institution that grouped all professional composers together and that existed in all Soviet-Bloc countries. The festivals in 1952 in Berlin and in 1954 in Leipzig reveal musical events that were a festive break from the everyday for composers and audiences, but that were nonetheless dominated by the SED and thus not an escape from pervasive ideology.

In the fall of 1952, the Festival of Contemporary Music in Berlin was organized in conjunction with the first regular congress of the newly formed Composers’ Union. This festival functioned as a showpiece event, and party and government officials, as well as the composers themselves, placed great stake in the selection of the pieces to be performed. Roughly twenty concerts, including dozens of new works by GDR composers, offered an overview of the new music of the era, from politically themed mass songs to large-scale choral works. For East German officials focused on creating a new socialist culture from above in the early 1950s, bringing music to the masses proved less important than the nature of the music itself, and most concerts took place in traditional concert halls for the usual concert-going public. Nonetheless, one concert featuring contemporary mass songs and cantatas by East German luminaries Hanns Eisler and Paul Dessau, and sung by the legendary communist singer Ernst Busch, was organized on the grounds of the Bergmann-Borsig factory. Eisler and Dessau succeeded as two of the most adept composers at creating melodic and accessible music with a politically light touch celebrating peace, workers, and socialism. According to one observer, workers in the audience responded positively.⁸ Workers here and in other official reports seemed receptive to some of this socialist-realist music, especially if the ideological message was relatively subtle. In general, however, workers did not attend most of these concerts at the 1952 festival, a concern addressed at the 1954 version held in Leipzig.

To the surprise of party officials and musical elites, urban workers rose up in June 1953 throughout the GDR to protest higher work norms and dissatisfaction with the SED more generally. Officials responded initially with concessions both to ordinary citizens and to artists, although these were limited and gradually scaled back in succeeding years. Organizers accordingly focused more on catering to the masses at the 1954 music festival in Leipzig than during the previous festival. Although the post-Stalin New Course had led to some relaxation of ideological control in many areas of East German life, musical and otherwise, this important festival continued the SED’s push to politically influence society. Party officials desired socialist-realist music, and particularly emphasized the potential effects of this music on the rest of the population.⁹ During the discussion at the related Composers’ Union Congress, participants frequently mentioned the links between music and society. For example, leading musicologist and composer Ernst Hermann Meyer stated in reference to one of the festival concerts, “Music has an important function in shaping [peoples’] consciousness.” Other leading composers called on their colleagues to compose for the masses in order to win them over to the SED’s program, as well as to lift their cultural level in general.¹⁰

In light of these sentiments, 1954 festival organizers made a significant push to invite workers to the various concerts, which took place in traditional concert venues and thus provided an escape from the everyday for workers largely unexposed to music in this context. Furthermore, composers met with ordinary audience members after the performance and encouraged them to take part in post-concert discussions connected to the festival. One such discussion was about a concert of more serious, recently-composed works, including Günter Raphael’s Sinfonia breve (1949), Rudolf Wagner-Régeny’s Suite from the opera Persische Episode (Persian Episodes, 1951), Helmut Riethmüller’s Divertimento for Piano and Horns, and Ottmar Gerster’s Symphony No. 2 Thüringische (Thuringian, 1949–52). Female workers from a Leipzig factory found most of the music, “Dreadful! Horrible!” but were pleased by Gerster’s symphony, the program’s one unambiguously socialist-realist work with traditional harmonies, clear melodic lines, and uncomplicated local patriotism.¹¹ Most other audience members also seemed to enjoy the Gerster, but the other, more complex works came under heavy criticism from a broad cross-section of audience members.¹² One official claimed that most audience members disliked the music and regretted attending, and another noted that a large portion of the audience left the concert hall after the first half.¹³ This was an escape that clearly did not satisfy. Despite the general distaste for most of this more serious and demanding music, the positive reception of Gerster’s socialist-realist symphony motivated cultural officials both to pressure composers for similar works and to continue to reach out to a broader audience.

The interaction between workers and composers culminated in the appearance at the Composers’ Union Congress of two men from the nearby Leuna factory. They had attended a different concert of serious new works by both younger and older GDR composers, including Max Dehnert’s Heiteres Vorspiel für Orchester (Cheerful Prelude for Orchestra, 1949), Paul Kurzbach’s Divertimento für kleines Orchester (Divertimento for Small Orchestra, 1954), Dieter Nowka’s Konzert für Oboe und Orchester, Jean Kurt Forest’s “Three Arias” from the opera Patrioten (1951), and Max Butting’s Sixth Symphony (1945). These works by East German composers attempted to fulfill the postulates of socialist realism while still allowing for challenging and sometimes more complicated music. One metalworker expressed his disappointment with this concert in strong terms, and encouraged composers to write music that would be more accessible and enjoyable upon the first hearing, asserting that he and his comrades would not come back for another unpleasant experience.¹⁴ Another metalworker, serving as the factory choral director, reported on the long post-concert discussion he had organized among workers, musicians, and composers. He described the active musical life at the factory, and urged composers to write for these workers.¹⁵ Audience members embraced the opportunity to attend such concerts, thus clearly exhibiting an appetite for such diversion. Their reactions, however, demonstrate that these escapes fell short of satisfying workers; while many were open to socialist-realist music, they also wanted to be entertained. Both composers and cultural officials took such comments seriously, debated how best to write for such audiences at this and other meetings, and even formed personal relationships with individual factories in order to be in contact with and help musically educate workers. These composers, who chose to live in the GDR rather than moving to West Germany, felt a more significant connection to communist political aspirations than their counterparts in Poland.¹⁶ These two high-profile festivals provided well-attended escapes from everyday routines in the GDR, but they were also events that manifested the vision and influence of the SED. Thus, while presenting something new and unusual, they did not offer an escape from official ideology.

The second type of East German festivals largely followed this template. Local and amateur festivals provided an opportunity for composers, diverse audiences, and ordinary citizens as performers to step outside of the everyday, while remaining in an atmosphere that the SED essen...