‘Botschafter der Musik’: The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and the Role of Classical Music in Post-War German Identity

Lauren Freede

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities (2007), pp. 19-29, doi:10.59860/wph.a58b15a

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A contribution to: Working Papers in the Humanities 2

Edited by Louise Crowther, Astrid Ensslin and Jennifer Shepherd

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 2

Modern Humanities Research Association

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Abstract.  This working paper looks at the role of classical music in the establishment of modern German identity. My wider doctoral research project examines the importance of music in shaping differing senses of positive collective identity in both West Germany and Austria since the 1920s, and explores the exclusion of classical music from critical memory narratives, with particular reference to musical autobiographies. This paper focuses more narrowly on the situation in Germany immediately after World War II. While traditional accounts of the period tend to deal with individual musicians, I argue that musical institutions were central to a sense of being German. A brief case study of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra illustrates the tangled relationship between music and politics, and shows the ways in which musical identity was contested. Germans saw positive continuity in their mastery of the classical tradition, while the American occupiers saw the German belief in their musical superiority as a dangerous and unstable base for national restoration. My analysis of the Orchestra reveals that classical music was adopted as a politically neutral source of national pride despite being both highly susceptible to political manipulation and implicated in past militaristic and racist ideologies from which it was supposedly aloof.

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