Graduate Student, Music
Thesis Title: Abilities to Mourn: Musical Commemoration in the German Democratic Republic (1945-1989)
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Berthold Hoeckner
Lawrence Zbikowski Philip Bohlman |
About
This dissertation examines the experience of World War II and its cultural ramifications in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) through the lens of a musical practice in which mourning and commemoration were persistent expressive tropes. In the immediate postwar years (1945–1949), officials and citizens constructed competing versions of the recent past ad hoc, because the nature of the historical moment after total defeat remained in flux. Yet from this chaos emerged a dogmatic interpretation of Nazism in the GDR, founded on the selective commemoration of “anti-fascist” communist heroes at the expense of other victims of the Third Reich. Previous scholarship has neglected the music that accompanied this commemorative practice, regarding it as a mere extension of communist propaganda. This dissertation challenges the ideological singularity of such works. A series of case studies reframe the discussion of mourning from verbal texts to embodied actions, or—varying Freud—from a talking to a performing cure. These compositions demonstrate that music contributed a multifaceted space to rituals of commemoration where competing narratives of the past could coexist, allowing citizens to process the traumas of the postwar period.
In the 2011-12 academic year, Martha is a recipient of the Sawyer dissertation fellowship, sponsored by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, for participation in the Sawyer Seminar "Around 1948: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Global Transformation."
