Some years ago, German historians asked the following question concerning thirty years of extensive research and publication: Is the research about the history of the GDR at its end? Martha Sprigge demonstrates in her professionally written book that there are still fascinating facets to explore. In five chapters, the book offers a close description and analysis of “musical mourning” in the four decades of the German Democratic Republic and therefore also of “socialist laments.” Through carefully chosen examples of mourning practices and places, spaces, and landscapes, the author aims to demonstrate “how music was used to enact the mourning process for East German citizens, where the ruling SED tightly regulated expressions of loss” (6). More exactly, the author focuses on the “labour of mourning” as “musical work” to show the “distinctly socialist mode of mourning that took place in and through music” (6). In doing so, she reconstructs “spaces and acts of remembrance” (9). Her innovative approach combines perspectives of “site-specific hermeneutics on the one hand and a close analysis of compositional practices on the other” (17).
The five chapters follow a loose chronology. Each chapter is based on a prominent memorial site or/and practice in one or several decades. Methodologically, Sprigge's argumentation is based on Pierre Nora's concept of “lieux de mémoire” (18). She asks “how music was heard in memorial spaces” (18) by situating the analysis concurrently into the field of “memory as an embodied practice.” To put it plainly, the history of listening, hearing, and feeling is challenging in terms of available sources. The author succeeds only partly in this claim to grasp the memorial practices as embodied practices but succeeds completely in reconstructing and analysing musical practices at different spaces of socialist mourning and memory. Her book is based on archival work in Berlin (the Archive of the Academy of the Arts and the Bundesarchive) and Dresden (the Saxon State Archive and the university library) as well as extensive study of the secondary literature.
The first chapter, “The Ruins” starts with the last month of the war and is one of the strongest, most convincing chapters of the book. The author examines musical engagements with Germany's destruction centring on the cantor of Dresden's Church of the Holy Cross, Rudolf Mauersberger and his mourning motet “How Deserted Lay the City,” Hanns Eisler's “War Primer,” and Paul Dessau's “German Misere.” These three pieces are examples of so called rubble-music. Sprigge convincingly argues that composing and performing the pieces of mourning music in the aftermath of the war “transforms the rubbles into ruins by aesthetication of rubble and providing a visual anchor for formulating musical responses to their wartime experiences” (27). She presents music's emotional surplus by showing “how music gave voice to the immense rupture caused by World War II” (27).
Whereas the first chapter is based on concrete compositions, Sprigge focusses in the second chapter, “Socialist Cemetery” on practices. She examined two “prototypes for mourning,” the “state funeral” (Staatstrauerakt) and the “state burial” (Staatsbegräbnis) (79) to show the development of the socialist funeral and elaborate how music facilitated the work of mourning within mourning rituals as political rituals. In doing so, Sprigge examines the use of music in the annual commemoration rituals of the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg at the cemetery in Berlin Friedrichsfelde. Whereas in the early years of the GDR more workers’ songs and so-called songs of struggle, as well music from the classical heritage (Mozart, Beethoven, or Chopin) were part of the “state funeral” and the “state burial,” later on new composition from Paul Dessau or Ottmar Gerster were added. The author demonstrates how the specificities of socialist mourning developed with a plurality of meaning between grief and mourning work on the one hand and “resistant mourning” on the other (104), into “a type of action” and political demonstration, because “it was music that multiple meanings of death were presented and coexist” (131).
In the third chapter, “The Church” the author comes back to the case of Dresden's annual rituals of commemorating the wartime firebombing. She inquires into the specific entanglement of antifascist commemorative practices and the sacred church space which offered constant counternarratives by performing Christian mourning rituals. The readers get an elaborative insight into Rudolf Mauersberger's “Dresdner Requiem” (1947–1948) and its performing practices mainly in the decade after the war. By contrast to other chapters, Sprigge constructs her narrative with considerable time gaps till current developments in Dresden's commemoration practices, organized by right-wing organisations.
The fourth chapter, “Concentration Camps Memorials” could have contributed more to the book's central argument. But unfortunately, it is based on a misinterpretation of the historical meaning of concentration camps such as Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Ravensbrück. These concentration camps were places in which Jewish prisoners were imprisoned occasionally as political prisoners between 1936 and 1941; after November 9, 1938, for half a year, there were thousands; and Jewish prisoners were again present in the final phase of the concentration camps’ existence in 1945, after the evacuation of the extermination camps in occupied Poland. The main purpose of the concentration camps, which were built between 1936 and 1939, was the imprisonment of political prisoners, so-called asocial people or criminals, and gay people, who did not fit into the ideal Nazi Volksgemeinschaft. This means that the concentration camps, which were transformed in the GDR into “National Warning and Commemoration Sites” were not the central places of the Holocaust (better: Shoah as the millionfold murder of the European Jews but places of exclusion, persecution, and brutal murder of all kinds of prisoners. The Shoah took place behind the frontlines in the East and in the extermination camps. Therefore, it is a misinterpretation to analyse the SED's approach to the Holocaust primarily based on practices of remembrance at the “National Warning and Commemoration Sites.” This undifferentiated perspective is mirrored also in the outlined history of the Arbeiterliedarchiv, situated in the Archive of the Academy of the Arts in East Berlin. The author relies in this chapter too much on published literature and misses the opportunity to offer a differentiated picture of the entanglement of the politically motivated Sachsenhausen Committee and the multilayered motivation of researchers such as Inge Lammel. It would be fascinating to read how the sound of memorial practices changed over forty years at the sites of former concentration camps alongside changes of political remembrance.
In her fifth chapter, “The Artists’ Cemetery” Sprigge offers a last colourful picture of prominent burials at the Dorotheenstädtische Cemetery. The readers encounter again (by now well-known agents of events presented in the book) the most important artists in the GDR – Johannes Becher, Berthold Brecht, Hanns Eisler, Paul Dessau, and their wives Helene Weigel and Lilly Becher – at the moments of their burials. Sprigge discusses how music became the medium to combine private grief and public claims of politically driven commemoration practices, to bring together multiple interests at the memorial services and in posthumous acts of commemoration.
The interested reader can find in this book an original and innovative perspective on the history of the GDR through the lens of musical mourning in specific spaces. The book convinces in the claim to make visible how “multiple narratives of the past coexisted, even in the GDR's closely monitored memorial spaces” (17). Based on thoroughly explained case studies, the author's central claim becomes evident, that “music was a medium that facilitated the coexistence of mourning and commemoration in the GDR” (13). The study is reader-friendly in its structure, with its transparency in terms of argumentation and conclusion and furnished with overviews, illustrations, and photographs taken by Sprigge.
Another promise the book makes remains unredeemed. The author promises to analyse “performances of grief” (6), but she misses the opportunity to really explain what she means by grief. What we learnt from the book is that socialist mourning had little to do with feelings of loss but a lot to do with political feelings and memories. The reader interested in the history of emotions probably will be dissatisfied at the end, because apart from the mainly politically driven rituals which the readers get to know over the course of the book, it remains undiscussed whose grief and mourning the author is addressing, how these emotions were differently phrased, or how they changed and were used over the span of forty years.
