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The development of a public commemorative culture in East Germany extended into the development of new funerary rites for cultural figureheads and everyday citizens. Chapter 5 charts the ruling party’s efforts to restructure the spaces and sounds of national sepulchral culture by examining the funerals for six artists buried at a plot reserved for members of the Academy of the Arts in East Berlin. Each artist was honored with a state funeral, aimed not to console the bereaved, but to canonize the deceased as socialist heroes. At these events, the deceased’s friends and family made deliberate efforts to reclaim their legacy within the space of the cemetery itself, and continued these personal reflections through musical homage. In doing so, these mourners were continually renegotiating their relationship to the deceased. This chapter thus shows how the relationship between private mourning and public commemoration was in a state of negotiation throughout East Germany’s forty-year existence.

A Survivor officially breached the iron curtain on April 15, 1958, when Herbert Kegel and the Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra performed the work in concert. The performance is situated within the context of state expectations for radio; concerns about fending off the American cultural invasion, as well as its nuclear threat; the contested role of dodecaphony—and Schoenberg in particular—in East German cultural politics; the relationship of the East German state to its Jewish citizens; and the bureaucratic process by which A Survivor was approved for performance and recording. Despite being performed in its entirety and in its original version, discourse about the work was subject to de-Semitization by the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) so that it could serve an antifascist agenda. The historical event of the Warsaw ghetto uprising was appropriated similarly across the Soviet bloc. The chapter explores Kegel's connection to Paul Dessau, as well as the role of Werner Sander, cantor for the Leipzig community. Finally, the chapter compares the treatment of Jewishness and antifascism in reviews from newspapers representing the different political parties.

This chapter analyzes music by composers who participated in a widespread artistic preoccupation with Germany’s ruined cityscapes during and shortly after World War II. These first musical responses to the war—written at a time of great emotional, physical, and political uncertainty—had a significant impact on musical mourning practices in the Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany, which became the German Democratic Republic in 1949. The chapter focuses on three examples by composers who wrote musical responses to the air war and went on to have successful careers in East Germany. These composers had very different experiences in the Third Reich: Rudolf Mauersberger was a member of the Nazi Party; Hanns Eisler and Paul Dessau were political and religious exiles. Yet they each used music to make sense of wartime trauma, by transforming the aftermath of the bombing—the rubble—into an aesthetic object—or ruin.

Herbert Kegel and the Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir also gave the Polish premiere of A Survivor from Warsaw when they performed it at the Warsaw Autumn Festival on September 28, 1958. Thus we have the extraordinary case in which Germans came to Warsaw to perform a work about the German destruction of that city's Jews just fifteen years earlier. This performance is situated within the context of very difficult cultural and political relations between East Germany and Poland, as Poland embraced the Thaw, while East Germany resisted it. While many critics noted the Jewish theme of the work, the ruling political party in each country omitted that detail and described the performance as an act of atonement. This ambiguity allowed the “atonement” to be interpreted as repentance for destroying the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 or for destroying the city of Warsaw in 1944. This chapter recounts the negotiations between the cultural agencies in both countries and studies Polish reviews. They are overwhelmingly positive about A Survivor and equally negative about the other pieces on the program, by East Germans Paul Dessau and Johann Cilenšek.