The Ruins

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.

Toward Tokyo Bay

Okinawa received much more media attention from mid-May, after the German surrender. The censors also relaxed restrictions on reporting the kamikaze story, which reinforced the growing sense on the home front that the Pacific War was particularly brutal and bloody. As Harry Truman, the new president, looked for ways to end it, attention shifted to the air war. The air force happily publicized its incendiary bombing of Tokyo, followed by the destruction of the five largest cities in Japan. Even before the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, such carnage drew little protest across America.

Introduction

Innocence is central to German memory politics; indeed, one can say that the German memory landscape is saturated with claims of innocence. The Great War is commonly portrayed as a loss of innocence, while the Nazis sought, in their way, to reclaim that innocence by proclaiming Germany as the innocent victim. After World War II, denazification and courts established administrative and legal boundaries within which claims of innocence could be formulated and adjudicated, while the “zero hour” and “economic miracle” established a basis for a different form of reclaiming innocence, one roundly critiqued by Theodor W. Adorno in his essay “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?”1 In the 1980s, Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s famous pronouncement of the “grace [Gnade] of a late birth” (also translatable as “mercy,” “pardon,” or “blessing”) became the touchstone for a resurgence of war children’s (Kriegskinder) memory. In the 1990s, the myth of the Wehrmacht as largely innocent of atrocities was publicly challenged. Today, rightwing critiques that cast Holocaust remembrance as a politics of shame draw upon tropes of innocence, of German air war victims and post-war generations, while right-wing images of migrants are cast in classic forms of threats to the purity of the “national body” (Volkskörper). The quickening pace of contemporary debates over Germany’s colonial past pointedly questions the innocence of today’s beneficiaries of colonialism, drawing attention to the borders and contours of implication.