Cultural Spaces as Political Spaces: The Musical Field of the German Democratic Republic

Reframing the GDR-State from a Field Perspective

This article examines the relationship between music and politics in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). By adopting the Bourdieusian concept of field as an analytic tool, the first purpose is to prevent a deterministic perspective on the topic. While it could be claimed that, more than in Western countries, the GDR-State played a crucial role in planning, organizing, and controlling all ‘fields of cultural production’ (Bourdieu, 1993b), this does not entail considering it as a monolithic collective actor but rather as a highly complex bureaucratic ‘meta-field’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 111), distinct from the political field (dominated by the Socialist Unity Party, SED), and ruled by its specific forms of capital (see Bourdieu, 1994). Thus, a field analysis allows us to reframe the relationship between the GDR musical and bureaucratic fields in a more dynamic way than by considering unidirectional acts and top-down decisions on music matters (see Kelly and Wlodarski, 2011), looking instead at these as resulting from the interplay between the two fields. It intends, therefore: (1) to pinpoint which actors participated in the musical and bureaucratic fields and their relationships over time; (2) to understand the musical field as a relatively autonomous field with its own rules, constraints and opportunities conditioning the practices, strategies, and trajectories of the actors engaged in it; (3) to focus on how the symbolic space and cognitive structure of the musical field also resulted from the struggles which took place by participating in the field’s game. Not least, a field analysis allows one to carry out comparative work on the genesis and development of musical fields in countries with different political backgrounds, both in Western and in Eastern Europe (on the use of field analysis for comparative work see: Savage and Silva, 2013).

In other words, instead of conceiving of political decisions in music matters as being produced outside the field, I will consider them as emerging from its own logic, ensuring in this way to avoid explanations which rest on dichotomic categories, such as State versus Society (see Baier et al., 2004; Bessel and Jessen, 1996), or resistance versus adhesion to the regime (Tischer, 2011), and consequently on a dichotomic and undynamic vision of exclusion/inclusion processes.

As Bourdieu suggested, to ‘verify whether the model proposed in Distinction can be applied to the case of the GDR, it is necessary to investigate what principles of differentiation are characteristic of this society’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 15). He then identified political capital, which he defined as a type of social capital ‘acquired through the apparatus’ (1998: 16), as the dominant principle of domination in the GDR field of power; that is, the principle for ‘analyzing the relations among various forms of power’ (Bourdieu, 1996: 265), and consequently ‘thinking about how fields are interrelated’ (Swartz, 2013: 61).

Thus, if one applies this principle of differentiation to the musical field, it follows first that both artists and representatives of State organizations responsible at different levels of the GDR musical institutions participated in the musical field; second, that their position within it depended on the amount and set of political and musical capitals they possessed; and third, that they co-determined the social, symbolic, and epistemological boundaries of the musical field.

This approach allows us to confront two aspects which have otherwise been little discussed until now. The first is that the GDR-State organizations did not act and think homogeneously. By typically focusing on the ideological contents of laws, norms and political discourses, the main accounts of GDR political culture often operate a synthesis (see Bessel and Jessen, 1996; Ludz, 1975) which tends to blur the fact that these ideological contents were produced by individual and collective actors who: (a) competed with each other in the field of power; (b) were differently located in the State hierarchy; (c) had different positions and offices within the various cultural and political institutions of the GDR. As a result, State representatives’ understandings of reality were less represented by a common ideological credo than they were by their practices in the fields and places where they acted.

Secondly, the capacity of State representatives to exercise their own power on cultural matters was defined by their participation in the various fields of cultural production. The fact that these latter were also structured by specific forms of artistic capital entails: (1) that different interests were at stake beyond political ones; (2) that each actor followed his or her own strategy according to the position he or she occupied; and (3), that the political representatives’ power was balanced by the prestige of those artists who possessed more artistic capital. Hence, the symbolic power of State representatives to impose State classifications and principles was more effective when supported by those actors who had been culturally legitimated.

In what follows, I will illustrate more concretely how the musical field was structured and how its social and symbolic spaces changed over time. In addition, this premise will also be useful for clarifying some further points.

Several studies have already stressed how, from its genesis, the GDR-State had difficulty reaching various social strata and milieus, such as the bourgeois milieu, the Protestant Church, and the rural population. The moral and cognitive ideological orientation created at an institutional level was weakened by the maintenance of pre-existing habits (see Kleßman, 1991; Wehling, 1989). Furthermore, as noted by Maier (1999), beginning in the 1960s GDR citizens began to create their own spaces of autonomy within public institutions, especially in workplaces (see Meuschel, 1993).

The position of the sociologist Glaeser (2011) has similarities to the thesis of this corpus of works. Glaeser provides an epistemic explanation of the GDR’s failure, highlighting how ‘understanding processes’ were crucial because GDR leaders attributed a central role to socialist ideas and ideology in the organization of everyday life for GDR society and, consequently, in maintaining and reproducing its institutions. Nevertheless, from the 1970s, their dogmatic interpretation and application of socialism rendered them unable to renew political institutions in the face of an economic crisis and significant social changes, increasing their distance from the everyday experiences of GDR citizens. Consequently, their understanding of socialism produced fetishized institutions which could maintain themselves only within the prescriptive track of Marxist-Leninist ideology.

If Glaeser’s hermeneutic institutionalism is useful for highlighting how the GDR-State would continuously produce explanations legitimating its existence and actions, his analysis presents some limits. To support his thesis, Glaeser selects two specific groups, Stasi officers and dissidents, but the former cannot really be considered truly representative of the GDR-State institutions, nor can the latter represent ‘people’s experiences’.

The role of Stasi officers within the fields of cultural production was less relevant than has usually been figured. In the musical field (but we can say the same for the academic field, see Grüning, 2019), they were the last ring of a control chain, but they did not directly determine the epistemological boundaries and symbolic structure of the field itself. What they shared with other State representatives was mostly a bureaucratic habitus, which highlights in turn their distance from the dynamics and struggles occurring in the field. In other words, the fact they were not locally involved in the field’s game led them to literally apply Marxist-Leninist principles, without developing any specific strategy. On the other hand, by taking a restricted group of GDR citizens as paradigmatic of people’s experiences, Glaeser tends to refigure an abstract opposition, which says little about the social and cognitive changes which involved other social groups and about less striking forms of protest than public actions intentionally oriented toward contesting State power.

Returning to the concept of ‘autonomous spaces’ within public institutions, we can readapt it to analyse the building of ‘music scenes’ (see Peterson and Bennett, 2004) in the GDR as formed from a network of musical places (i.e. the clubs). For this purpose, it may be useful to consider a field and a spatial perspective together.

In their introduction to a special issue on field analysis, Savage and Silva (2013) pinpoint how Bourdieu provides both a structural understanding of the field, as a ‘structured space of position’ (Bourdieu, 1993a [1984]: 72) and a phenomenological one which ‘implies a feel for the game’ (Bourdieu 1993a [1984]: 66). According to them, this second rendering of the field leads us ‘to recognize more fully the role of “site effects” and the necessary role of spatial processes in field dynamics’ (Savage and Silva, 2013: 117), that is, to recognize the material and corporeal dimension of the field which, by co-structuring a social (and a symbolic) space, also co-constructs a physical space. This entails considering, first, that field logics materially produce ‘divisions and cleavages’ (i.e. social, symbolic and physical boundaries) and spaces that ‘bring together participants around a shared passion’ (Savage and Silva, 2013: 123), which are culturally shaped and meaningful for those who attend them; second, that power structures of the field are also differently spatialized and consequently differently experienced in specific places. Furthermore, this leads us to pay attention to how actors, by participating in a field game, build their trajectories by moving among and across different places, each one presenting specific material and relational constraints and opportunities related to the broader field logics (see Bottero and Crossley, 2011; Cohen, 1995; Grazian, 2003).

Returning to the reality of the GDR music scenes, this double field-space perspective provides us with some crucial guidelines for the analysis. First, it highlights the existence of what my interview partners defined as the half-formal level of GDR social life, as a result of lived experiences in specific cultural scenes and places. Second, it reveals how the arenas for symbolic struggles regarding the definition and classification of music, music genres and lifestyles were structured in spatial arrangements and, at the same time, occurred in places with different degrees of (political and/or cultural) prestige. Third, it is useful to reflect upon how concrete interactions and social networks, in specific music places and scenes, shaped specific (musical) habitus (see Rimmer, 2010), ¹ that is, specific dispositions for thinking about, perceiving, and evaluating both music and social reality.

In what follows, I will first present the empirical research I have conducted on this field. As a second step, I will deal with some crucial questions concerning the bureaucratic and ideological structure of the fields of music production and musical criticism. Finally, I will provide a dynamic conceptual frame for reconstructing the main (social and symbolic) structural changes of the GDR musical field from the 1950s to the end of the 1980s.

The Empirical Research

The empirical research is based on: (a) 57 official documents produced from 1963 to 1990 on musical political issues by the GDR trade union (Freier Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund, FDGB) and the Free German Youth association (Freie Deutsche Jugend, FDJ); (b) 11 in-depth interviews with key-actors who participated in the fields of musical production and criticism; and (c) 325 articles published from 1970 to 1990 in the journal Musik und Gesellschaft of the Association of Composers and Musicologists of the GDR (Verband Der Komponisten und Musikwissenschaftler der DDR, VKM).

In more detail, Lutz Kirchenwitz, Reinhold Andert, and Gina Pietsch belonged to the song-group Oktoberklub from its inception, playing a leading role in the Hootenanny song-movement which took root in the GDR in the second half of the 1960s. Nevertheless, in the early 1970s, the progressive institutionalization of the movement (renamed as Singebewegung) under the umbrella of the youth organization FDJ marked their paths differently. Lutz Kirchenwitz remained a member of the Oktoberklub and was officially involved in the organizational team of the Festival of Political Songs, which was founded by Oktoberklub in 1970 but which was more and more managed by the FDJ after the World Festival of Youth in 1973. However, at the end of the 1980s, Kirchenwitz was removed from his office. Gina Pietsch continued to work as a professional musician within a further song-group sponsored by the FDJ, ‘Jahrgang ’49,’ before becoming a solo artist in the chanson genre. In the early 1980s, she joined a circle of feminist intellectuals and used her prestige to bring feminist topics to public arts spaces. Reinhold Andert abandoned the song-movement after the World Festival of Youth to begin a career as a songwriter, participating regularly to the Festival of Political Songs until he was no longer invited because of strong criticism of his song texts. In the 1980s, he joined the Writer’s Association of the GDR (PEN), continuing to play as a songwriter within this restricted circle. Stefan Koerbel initially belonged to a song-group in Berlin (LSD) which was in competition with the Oktoberklub. During his career he also worked in the organization of the Festival of Political Songs and for the youth channel radio DT64. He reached the apex of his success with the alternative singing-group (Liedtheater) ‘Karls Enkel’ which played a critical role in the song scene from the mid-1970s to the end of the 1980s. In the early 1980s, he abandoned the group to attempt a solo career as a songwriter. In the early 1970s, Peter Wicke began to work as a private organizer of illegal rock festivals, before accepting the proposal of the Party to hold a ‘chair in popular music’ at Humboldt University. Despite his academic affiliation (until the end of the GDR, he remained an assistant professor), he continued to act on the edge between the musical and academic fields, for instance by organizing radio concerts at Humboldt University or inviting Western musicians to give concerts in the GDR. From the mid-1970s, he also regularly wrote for the journal Musik und Gesellschaft. Petra Schwarz reached the Oktoberklub at the end of the 1970s. For several years she moderated the Festival of Political Songs before starting to work for the youth channel Radio DT64. Wolfgang Leyn was one of the most important representatives of the Folk-movement at the end of the 1970s, assuming a critical position with respect to the FDJ song-movement. Gerlinde Kempenddorf never participated in the song-movement. Politically, she belonged to the more alternative side of the song scene and, at the end of the 1980s, she was active in the protest movements. Wilfried Bergholz was a long-time music journalist for Radio DT64 before choosing to work as a free author. In the 1980s, he belonged to the punk-subculture and was close to the protest movements. Finally, from 1976 to 1980, Norbert Seichert was involved in the organization of the Festival of Political Songs during his tenure as cultural secretary of the FDJ in Berlin. Afterwards, as Party Secretary, he was charged with mediating relationships with the Volksbühne theatre. While he mostly continued to operate in cultural institutions, his career never took off (further biographical information is reported in note 2).

The Bureaucratic Organization and Ideological Structure of the GDR Music Field

Discussing the construction of the modern State, Bourdieu (1994) claims the importance of cultural matter for exerting symbolic power, that is, the ‘capacity to shape perception of social reality by imposing cognitive categories’ as if they were natural (Swartz, 2013: 83). However, from its inception, the GDR-State had difficulty making its symbolic classifications and criteria ‘appear natural’. Especially during the ‘Ulbricht era’, ⁵ it was obliged to resort to physical violence and other forms of repression to impose its own principles of vision and divisions.

The division of Germany into two states with opposed geopolitical orientations meant that the newly founded German Democratic State (1949) needed to legitimate and consequently organize every field of its social life and cultural production according to the values and criteria of the Marxist-Leninist ideology imported from the Soviet Union, while dealing with the persistent elements of previous organizational and cultural structures. ⁶ Furthermore, after the building of the Berlin Wall, new Western cultural trends still easily reached the GDR, catching on especially with the younger generations.

Paradoxically, in the 1960s, increasing interest in Western music also occurred under the motto of ‘socialist internationalism’, favoured by Ulbricht’s attempt to reform youth politics (see McDougall, 2001). During the German youth meeting (Deutschlandtreffen der Jugend), a festival which gathered West and East German young people in Berlin in 1964, the GDR-State set up a radio station, DT64, which broadcast a lot of Western rock songs. The festival provided opportunities for experiencing other forms of sociability, cultural tastes, and practices which, however, contrasted with the State’s application of Marxist-Leninist principles. This short phase of cultural liberalization ended in December 1965, during the Eleventh Plenum of the SED-Party, whose decisions exacerbated the symbolic boundaries with Western culture, imposing limitations on broadcasting Western music on GDR radio, and marginalizing those bands that followed Western musical influences (Poiger, 2000; Rauhut, 1993). Nevertheless, despite stricter rules for listening to and performing Western music, new song-groups inspired by the American folk-rock movement were established, as stressed by various of my interview-partners ⁷ who participated in the early phase of the GDR ‘song-movement’.

When I arrived in Berlin in 1969, I entered the Oktoberklub that was nothing but a pub [. . .] and it already existed, but with another name, the Hootenanny-club [. . .] This name is suggestive, they played these kinds of things, so to speak, with the influence of the American folk-rock movement. (Gina Pietsch)

During this time, I met a group at the demonstration on 1 May, and they demonstrated with guitars, and they sang their songs and the songs of the American civil right movements, ‘We Shall Overcome’, and so Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan. (Reinhold Andert)

Before exploring what consequences the formation of the song-movement at the end of the 1960s had on the GDR musical field, it is worth better pinpointing some structural elements crucial to understanding its logic. More specifically, I will focus on the interdependence between its bureaucratic organization and cognitive structure to better understand: first, the apparently arbitrary way State organizations (re)acted in the face of new cultural (musical) trends emerging in society; and second, the fact that the endurance of principles inspired by a socialist vision of the social life was less the result of political decisions than of local field dynamics.

The Ideological and Cognitive Structure

The ideological structure of the GDR-State was defined by a political-moral opposition between Marxist-Leninist principles and capitalist/imperialist/fascist principles. According to Kurt Hager (1982), the ideologue of the GDR, whereas the former expressed, democratic and humanist positions, desires for peace and social security, the latter expressed contempt for the people and adversity towards progress. For what concerns music, this meant that State organizations were continuously engaged in the efforts of extracting criteria from Marxist-Leninist ideology to evaluate and classify music genres, events, and songs. As emerges especially from official documents over time, political criteria defined aesthetic ones. Socialist music was, in the first place, supposed to express Parteilichkeit (partiality), Lebensverbundenheit (attachment to life), and Volkstümlichkeit (folksiness), the latter substituted in the 1970s with Volksverbundenheit (closeness to the people). In short, the Kampfwert (combat efficiency) of music amounted to its Kunstwert (artistic value).

These ideological efforts were, however, also influenced by what Wicke in his second interview called the ‘petit-bourgeois’ tastes of the political elite. That is, according to the political functionaries, ‘beautiful’ songs should have a simple melodic rhythm and positive, clear texts. Hence, the difficulty of the political elite to engage with new compositions, genres, and musical trends depended not only on the difficulty of translating abstract ideological principles into aesthetic criteria, but also on their own ‘low musical capital’. Borrowing Bourdieu’s (1986) distinction between embodied, institutionalized, and objective cultural capital, musical capital corresponds to the possession of musical resources capitalized both during one’s first socialization into the milieu and through formal educational training, which define one’s musical taste, needs, and beliefs, and has the strength to impose a system of classification (see Bourdieu, 1993a [1984]: 105). Furthermore, as stressed by Wright, musical capital also entails ‘the self-perception of [musical] legitimacy’, which in turn has consequences on one’s field positioning (2015: 352).

In this regard, the low musical capital of the political elite weakened the GDR’s symbolic power in the musical field ¹⁵ and consequently impacted the power relationships with musicians and music experts. Until the early 1970s, they were recruited to lead cultural institutions because of their closeness to the Party and their institutionalized musical capital (in classical music), performing therefore the double function of mediating State control in the fields of musical production and criticism, and transferring their cultural prestige to the State. As a result, they could continue to apply their own naturalized systems of classifications of music genres and tastes, which were embedded in the pre-existing cultural institutions (theatres, concert halls, etc.), in the new socialist State, maintaining their ‘power to authoritatively establish the value of different forms of culture’ (Di Maggio, 1992: 21) and, consequently, enhancing a conservative orientation in the musical field (interview with Wicke in 2017; see Sporn, 2006; Tompkins, 2013).

Particularly during the Ulbricht era, the leading positions in the Association of Composers and Musicologists (1951) were occupied by composers who were members of the SED Party and, in some cases, holders of political assignments in State organizations, that is, people who possessed a high amount of ‘delegated political capital’ (Bourdieu, 1991). The main representatives of these figures were: Otmar Gerstner (1897–1969), who joined the SED in 1946 and was the first president of the composers’ association (VKM) from 1951 to 1968; Ernst Hermann Meyer (1905-1988), who became a member of the central committee of the SED in 1971, and was President of the VKM from 1968 to 1982; George Knepler (1906–2003), who was an SED member from 1957, director of the Deutsche Hochschule für Musik starting in 1959, and director of the Institute for Music Sciences at Humboldt University from 1970; Nathan Notowicz (1911–1968), who joined the Communist Party in 1940 and later entered the SED, and was the first secretary of the VKM from 1951 to 1968, and general secretary of the GDR Music Council from 1962.

After the mid-1970s, whereas minor changes could be observed in the dominant positions in the field of music production, more meaningful changes occurred in the field of music criticism. Considering the journal Musik und Gesellschaft as a paradigmatic example, Table 1 highlights meaningful changes which affected the volume and set of capitals of some of the main contributors of the journal from 1970 to 1990. ¹⁶ For the analysis, I considered three distinguished forms of political capital (institutional: corresponding to membership or offices in political institutions/organizations; delegated: corresponding to political offices in cultural institutions; and social: corresponding to having relationships with political actors), musical capital (as the sum of embodied and institutional musical capital), cultural capital, academic capital (corresponding to offices and positions in higher education institutions) and subcultural capital (on the concept see: Thornton 1995). The last column synthesizes the main topics treated in the journal by each author (for more details about the determination of each author’s capital’s volume, see Note). ¹⁷

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Table 1.

Sample of authors of Musik und Gesellschaft from 1970 to 1990.

Name	Born	Institutional political capital	Social political capital	Delegated political capital	Music capital	Academic capital	Cultural capital	Subcultural capital	Period of activity	Topics
Schäfer, H.J.	1930	High		Average	Average	No	High	No	1970–1976	Political commemoration
Markowski, L.	1928	High	High	Average	High	No	Very high	No	1976–1982	Commemoration
Szeskus, R.	1935			No		High	High	No	1970	Music education
Schönfelder, G.	1935	High	High	High	High	Very high	High	No	1972	Popular science
Goldschmidt, H.	1910	Low		No		High	High	No	1972	Music education
Nowka, D.	1924	High		High	High	Low	High	No	1972	Traditional popular music
Meyer, E.H.	1905	High		High	High	Very high	High	No	1973–1976	Music conference
Lesser, W.	1923	Very high		High	High	No	Average	No	1973	Role of mosaicists
Machlitt, M.	1948?			No		Low	High	No	1973	Youth & music
Schmidt, H.	?	Very high		No		No	High	No	1975	Rock music
Pischner, H.	1914	Very high	High	High	Very high	No	HIgh	No	1975	Classical music
Nauck(Wicke) G.	1950	No		No	Average	No	High	No	1976–1987	Music and free time; youth; art and entertainment
Wicke, P.	1951	No		No		Average	Very High	Yes	1976–1987	Entertainment music; rock
Mehner, K.	1939			No		High	High	No	1976	Music and social consciousness
Gülke, P.	1934	Negative		No	High	Low	Very high	No	1976	Classical music
Medek, T.	1940	Negative		No	Very high	No	High	No	1976	Classical music
Natschinski, T.	1947	Low		No	Very high	No	Average	Yes	1976	Music and free time
Amzoll, S.	1943	Very high		High		No	High		1976–1983	Radio; music club; popular science
Schmal, M.	1951	Negative		No	High	No	High		1976–1978	Political and music events
Schramowski,H.	1927	Low		No	High	High	Very high		1977	Music and improvisation
Rienäcker, G.	1938	Very high		No		Very high	Very high		1977	Music conference
Bergunder, K.-E.				No		No	High		1978	Music and politics
Blumhagen, G.	1930			High		High	Average		1978	Youth and music
Hahn, J.				No		Low	High		1978	Disco music
Belkius, G.	1943			No		No	High		1979	Popular music
Elsner, J.	1932			No		Very high	Very high		1980	Classical political music
Noglick, B.	1948			No		No	Very high		1980	Jazz
Felix, W.	1927	Very high		Very high		Very high	High		1980	Classical music
Kaden, C.	1946			No	High	Low	Very high		1981	Popular music and lifestyle
Hanke, H.	1932	Very high (until 1986)		No		High	Very high		1981–1982	Music and lifestyle
Warnecke, P.	1951			No		No	High		1981–1986	Radio; technical progress
Tänzer, B.	1947			No		No	Average		1981–1982	Music event; rock music
Klement, U.	1936			High		Very high	Very high			Electronic music
Wedel, M.	1953	Very high		No		High	Very high		1983–1984	Music event
Schneider, F.	1942	No		No	High	Low	Very high		1986–1987	New music; postmodernism
Klemm, E.	1929	No		No		Low	Very high		1987	Postmodernism

Thus, Table 1 shows that the main changes occurred in the latter half of the 1970s. Until 1975, most of the journal’s contributors possessed a high or very high amount of institutional political capital and a high or average amount of delegated political capital; in some cases, their social-political capital is also well-known. After 1976, only a few authors, belonging to the older generation, still possessed both delegated and institutional political capital. Furthermore, they dealt mainly with topics such as classical music concerts, music events, or conferences. Some of them even had ‘negative political capital’, meaning they either had left the GDR or lost their offices for political reasons or had difficulties publishing. Authors with a high amount of academic capital are distributed over time, but in the last years there were more authors working in low positions within higher education or research institutes. A last meaningful change concerns the possession of musical capital. We see, indeed, that articles written by musicians are prevalent in the 1970s, while after the end of the 1970s the number of contributors pursuing journalistic careers increased, also thanks to the establishment of new academic degree courses in cultural sciences.

Looking more broadly at the whole sample of articles, we can notice the following significant changes, which indicate, among other things, a weakening of ideological formulation in the article writing. This was also used by younger authors as a strategy to make controversial topics accepted (interview with Wicke in 2020):

Ever more articles began to question the traditional division between ‘serious’ and ‘light’ music.

Youth musical tastes, needs and practices were presented as crucial for evaluating music, emphasizing the social functions of rock, folk, disco and punk music.

New philosophical-theoretical paradigms such as ‘postmodernism’ were discussed without condemning them.

The concept of ‘internationality’ was increasingly used, whereas the concept of ‘internationalism’ lost its significance.

The denomination ‘Western countries’ became more frequent, replacing that of ‘capitalist/imperialist countries’.

The concept of ‘struggle’ was less associated with the idea of class struggle, i.e. struggle against something, than it was with the struggle for peace.

The concept of ‘music scene’ was introduced and defined as a ‘free space’, whose sense of belonging depended on relational forms such as friendships.

Under the Honecker government, the new attention paid to entertainment informed the social conditions for discussing these new topics, favouring at the same time structural changes in the ‘space of stances’ (Bourdieu, 1990b) of the field of musical criticism. Nevertheless, the introduction of new evaluative criteria in the field of musical criticism far from the ideological ones, made it difficult for the State to recreate a ‘cognitive unification’ (Bourdieu, 1994: 7), nonetheless favouring the emergence of new competing forms of musical consecration beyond the political one (on the topic of musical consecration, see Santoro, 2010). Most of all however, the introduction of new evaluative criteria impacted on the reproduction and distribution of capitals. The fact that other music genres (i.e. jazz, rock, folk, songwriting), practices and places beyond those related to classical music were legitimated both culturally and politically entailed, first, that the accumulation of musical capital was possible also in other less ‘traditional ways’ and, second, that they challenged or renegotiated the dogmatic understanding of socialism held by the main State representatives.

Social and Symbolic Changes in the GDR Musical Field

Research following Bourdieu’s field theory usually stresses how, in Western countries, the musical field is structured by the internal tension between ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ culture (see Aldredge, 2013; Coulangeon, 2005; Lopes, 2000; Savage, 2006). Whereas similar oppositions also characterized the GDR’s musical field, other political and cultural premises are needed.

The GDR-State intervened in the social structure of the musical field primarily by allocating different forms of capital. We can list two main forms: ‘delegated political capital’, corresponding to the possession of ‘political assignments’ in cultural institutions; and ‘institutional musical capital’, corresponding to the possession of educational certificates. A certificate (Spielerlaubnis) was also required for performing musical entertainment in formal cultural institutions. Possessing the Spielerlaubnis gave performers, in turn, the opportunity to increase both their own prestige and economic profit: ‘It was a matter of money. In your certificate was written how much you could earn, so one began with an A-level, but there was the possibility to upgrade’ (Gerlinde Kempendorff). The GDR-State also acted, however, through exclusionary practices, for example by negating the permission to perform (Auftrittsverbot), not granting the educational certificates and, in extreme cases, expatriation.

We can, then, pinpoint a specific logic ruling the GDR musical field over time, defined by two interrelated differentiation processes, respectively among and within the musical subfields. The GDR-State dealt with these processes differently over time. Whereas the Ulbricht government continuously tried to stem the spread of ‘new music genres’, Honecker’s strategy was to include them within the interpretative framework of ‘socialist music culture’. The latter strategy had, however, the consequence of reproducing the GDR’s ideological structure within each subfield, creating internal moral, political and social boundaries. In other words, once one subgenre was accepted as ‘socialist’, its social and symbolic structures were separated, for example, between an ‘authentic’ and ‘positive’ socialist rock music and a rock music ‘corrupted’ by the influence of imperialistic culture. By institutionalizing the cultural elements more suitable to its ideological and bureaucratic structures, and then by supporting those who more willingly accepted this compromise, the State’s strategy aimed to weaken the potential autonomy of the new subfield. The crucial point, however, is that the increasing bureaucratization which accompanied the institutionalization of new musical subfields also entailed the lengthening of its chains of control. This factually undermined State control, favouring ‘strategies of elusions’ (that is half-formal strategies), such as inventing new bands, which were not yet banned, or performing in districts and provinces where the prohibition of performing (Auftrittsverboten) was not valid (interview with Gerlinde Kempendorff).

Focusing now on the symbolic structure of the GDR musical field, we can identify four stages. In the 1950s, the musical field was dominated by classical music, whereas popular music, such as workers’ and battle songs, occupied the bottom space of the field. In this regard, the cultural value of the song constituted the main principle of distinction in front of a similar political value. The core of the classical music subfield included compositions attributable either to the political tradition of real-socialist music (i.e. Hanns Eisler and Kurt Weill) or the humanist tradition (i.e. Beethoven, Handel, Mozart, Schumann, Bach, etc.), bearers of universal and progressive values, and of a bourgeois understanding of music as well (Jungmann, 2011). On the other hand, free atonal compositions were labelled as ‘formalist’ and ‘revisionist’ since they did not respond to the Marxian music aesthetic based on the theory of reflection (Brockhaus, 1971; Rienäcker, 2006). Jazz was, instead, degraded by powerful representatives of classical music, such as Knepler and Müller, as a ‘degenerate art’, an expression of decadence (Meißner, 2013), hinting in this way at a specific lifestyle that was taking root in jazz clubs.

As noted in the previous section, in the 1960s, facing the success of rock and beat music, the GDR-State reacted in an ambivalent way. After a short phase of cultural opening, in 1965 rock music was condemned for encouraging the retreat into private life (Rauhut, 1993; Wicke, 1996). Nevertheless, the stigmatization of rock music was also related to the political elite’s difficulty in understanding it: ‘There was a plenum of the central committee of the SED, and then it was said, if the young people want to sing, they can sing, but reasonable things [. . .] And then Ulbricht said: ‘we have to dump this ye ye’, and then the Singebewegung [song-movement] was established’ (Willfried Bergholz).

The following step was, therefore, the ideological and organizational appropriation of pre-existing musical spaces by the ‘invention of the Singebewegung’ (Kirchenwitz, 1993). In the 1970s, under the new geo-political position of the GDR (in 1973 it joined the UN), the Honecker government intensified the strategy of institutionalizing the existing ‘half-formal’ cultural spaces related to entertainment music. ¹⁸ This, however, entailed a stricter organization and control from the top, which in turn generated internal splits. So, in the early 1970s, the inclusion of jazz in the socialist musical landscape exacerbated the internal cultural distinction between Dixieland jazz musicians closer to the ‘petit-bourgeois taste’ of the political elite, and the free jazz scenes, attended by a public with higher musical capital (Poiger, 2000).

The institutionalization of the Singebewegung produced three field effects. First, an independent rock scene took root outside the official musical spaces. ‘Illegal’ concerts were organized in peripheral open areas and tolerated by the State as long as the ‘private organizers’ were able to maintain order. The establishment of a ‘half-formal’ rock scene entailed, therefore, not only the creation of music events, but also of careers and economic activities outside State control:

At the time [1974], I organized rock concerts and I earned a lot [. . .] Nevertheless, it was very hazardous work, and you were also responsible for the musicians, and I went through a hard time, when especially foreign musicians did not respect the contracts. And you were also responsible for the public. So, I said: ‘well, if they make me a proposal [a chair in popular music at Humboldt University].’ The reasons for the proposal were the following [. . .] at the beginning of the 1970s there was a lot of pressure from the top. And it was a phase when rock music began to be publicly supported and there was also funding for the university. (Peter Wicke in 2017)

Hence, the institutionalization of rock in the 1970s went not only through musical but also academic institutions, culminating in with the establishment of an international music event, the ‘Rock for Peace’ concert (Rock für den Frieden) organized by the FDJ youth organization starting in 1982 (see Larkey, 2007).

The second field effect concerns the forming of a Liedszene (song scene). In front of the increasing State control of the activities of the singing groups, various members decided to give up and take up careers as Liedermacher (songwriters, see Note 2), making evident the internal political differences. On the other hand, the State’s support for professionalizing amateur singing groups was generally seen as an opportunity for pursuing a career, also independently from the State’s goals: ‘and after three years I had my Berufsaufweis [Spielerlaubnis, permission to play music] [. . .] for jazz, rock, singing and chanson, and in the GDR this meant having a lot of freedom’ (Gerlinde Kempendorff). A further consequence was the search for new musical styles different from those promoted by the FDJ song-movement (i.e. chansons, Lied-theater, cabaret), through which artists aimed to distinguish themselves by their musical and artistic competence. In this way, they also introduced a different form of consecration based on personal success, which could reach an international public, as in the case of Kurt Demmler (interview with Norbert Seichert) and was partially autonomous from the State. Finally, the structural differentiation of the subfield also entailed spatial effects, that is a spatial differentiation of artists’ social trajectories based on both the prestige of the place where it was possible to perform and its degree of autonomy:

Well, in 1985 we could do what we wanted, we didn’t go on television or radio, we didn’t produce records, but in the small clubs we could do what we wanted. (Stefan Körbel)

At the time, concerts in student clubs were always very important. There were the Bärenzwinger in Dresden, Moritzbastei in Leipzig, and Franzklub [in Berlin]. In these places you just had to go when someone played. There was a feeling of community, we experienced a bit of freedom there. (Gerlinde Kempendorff)

These excerpts from interviews highlight two important features of how the Liedszene, as well as the rock scene, functioned. First, the possibility of performing music in certain cultural institutions was related to the artist’s position in the official ‘scale of prestige’, depending both on the ‘music level’ certified in the Spielerlaubnis and the music genre played. Second, even the music clubs had a spatial hierarchical structure based on the distinction between ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ clubs, which also expressed the success of the musicians but on a different scale from the official political one.

Lastly, the third field effect concerns the establishment of a folk scene in juxtaposition with the ‘Oktoberklub music style’ (Reinhold Andert). The followers of the new folk movement were inspired by old German folk songs and the musicality of Irish folk songs, made known in the GDR in 1974 thanks to the performance of The Sandy Family at the Festival of Political Songs (interview with Wolfgang Leyn). They also invented and reinvented popular festivals, both in the urban and rural areas of the GDR (Leyn, 2016).

In the 1980s, the emerging punk, heavy metal and hip hop scenes not only accelerated the differentiation processes among music sub-genres but also undermined the logics ruling the GDR musical field. This does not mean that the new scenes were refused by the State. Conversely, they were also partially institutionalized. So, for instance, in 1984 the state-owned film studio of the GDR, Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA) directed a film Flüstern und schreiten on the punk and hard rock scenes, whereas starting in 1987 DT64 devoted the program ‘Tendenz hard bis heavy’ to heavy metal music. Three aspects are rather noteworthy: first, thanks to technological developments, the practitioners of the new music sub-genres were able to produce their music autonomously; second, they were not interested in playing in the official musical institutions; third, they refused to acquire ‘educational certificates’, so consequently their performances were mostly illegal (Galenza and Havemeister, 2013).

As Wicke claimed (in 2020), by refusing an official musical education, an official public space to play in, and institutional channels for reproducing their own music, ‘the compromise with the State was broken’.

Parallel to the emergence of new sub-musical scenes, the Liedszene also faced an internal crisis, caused by the expatriation of Biermann in 1976, ¹⁹ and deepened by the establishment of competing artistic scenes in the broader intellectual field.

To conclude, in the last stage of the GDR-State, both political and musical capital lost their relevance for defining social trajectories within both the musical and intellectual fields. In the first case, differently from the previous generation of rockers and Liedermacher, the new underground scenes did not attribute any value to institutionalized musical capital nor to institutional culture in general. As Wicke stressed (interview in 2020), most of the people active in the underground scenes lived thanks to plain and repetitive jobs and had little institutionalized cultural capital. They were not interested in pursuing an artistic career, since a career was possible only through State institutions and rules. Thus, while in the 1970s the State was still able to include the different ‘scene capitals’ (Otto, 2015) in the logics of the musical field, in the 1980s this strategy was unsuccessful, not so much because the new subcultural scenes were excluded by the State, but because even their partial institutionalization was no longer based on their political character.

To better explain, it may be useful to pinpoint some crucial differences in terms of political disposition between the former and the latter generations of scene creators. Both the members of the former and the latter generations rarely possessed ‘delegated political capital’. However, the members of the former generation often possessed a minimum amount of ‘social political capital’ that allowed them to continue to play publicly, without risking too much. Social political capital was, therefore, not simply used to achieve privilege and make a career, but also to make a career while maintaining ‘a bit of freedom’ to express one’s own political worldview. This attitude entailed that one’s career could only be pursued in ‘half-formal places’ and through ‘half-formal practices’ which conformed little to State standards but did not put into question its ideological core. We can then hypothesize a further form of political capital, ‘emotional political capital’ also crucial to building social political capital. Emotional capital means a set of emotions and feelings that are a part of one’s own habitus, which are embodied though socialization, and that are crucial ‘in the formation and maintenance of political and social identities’ (Barbalet, 1998: 159). In this regard, participation in music events and scenes related to recognized cultural institutions, created emotional capital which, while useful to the State for maintaining control, returned to their holders emotional resources for continuing to participate in the game. I stress here the political dimension because, in the last resort, it was the idea of socialism that constituted the object of emotion, as well as the reason for conflicts with the State about how to understand it. Differently, the latter generation of scene creators did not cultivate this form of emotional political capital. On the one hand, this means that the State was no longer able to provide them with adequate identification resources and gathering places, as it is evident from the fact that they mostly performed music in private spaces, in courtyards or in ‘wild natural’ spaces where forms of political and social control were limited or difficult to impose. On the other hand, they did not need to compete in the musical field to distinguish themselves, and therefore were not interested in negotiating with the State either the criteria which defined the sense of this distinction or their sense of socialism.

Finally, the conflicts within the intellectual field between the ‘original’ Liedszene and the new artistic-intellectual scenes were due less to differences in political goals (i.e. a more democratic socialism and more individual freedoms) than to the competition between two models of the public intellectual which entailed, in turn, two different understandings of public consecration. Whereas the members of the former Liedszene still measured their efficacy as public intellectuals on their capacity to perform publicly, be appreciated by a wide public, and distinguish themselves through their own musical competences, the members of the new artistic scenes related their efficacy to the capacity of defining themselves symbolically as victims or opponents of the State, not least, as emerged in several interviews, thanks to the increasing attention of Western media, especially towards the church scene.

Conclusions

This article has examined the relationship between music and politics in the GDR-State by following a field analysis, with the aim of addressing multiple purposes at the same time: (a) avoiding an essentialist and deterministic understanding of this relationship, considering how the GDR musical field organized strivings (Martin, 2011) among political actors and artists engaged in its game; (b) stressing the interdependence between the political and cultural dimensions of the musical field; (c) providing an analytic frame for comparative work with other political contexts in both Western countries and countries of the Soviet bloc.

The analysis rests, in turn, on two premises. First, following Bourdieu’s understanding of political capital (1991) as the main organizational principle of the GDR social space, I have considered the musical field as structured according to the volume and set of political and musical capital. I then additionally divided both the capital forms into sub-capitals, respectively, in social political capital, delegated political capital and institutionalized political capital and embodied musical capital and institutionalized musical capital. Second, according to more recent studies which explore the legacy of Bourdieu’s field concept (see Bottero and Crossley, 2011; Grazian, 2003; Savage and Silva, 2013), I have looked at the spatial effects of the field logics, that is, on the one hand how the social structure of the musical field was (differently) spatialized in physical musical places with different political and cultural prestige, and on the other hand how actors, while searching for a sense of belonging to a ‘scene’, built different strategies in and through the physical musical spaces to maintain or negotiate their social position in the field of musical production (and/or criticism).

The empirical material concerned official documents of GDR-State institutions and organizations on music and youth matters, in-depth interviews with actors who participated in the GDR musical field in the last 20 years of its existence, and articles from the main journal on music of the GDR.

The first part of the analysis consisted of exploring the efficacy of the symbolic power exerted by the GDR-State on the fields of musical production and criticism, by focusing on the interplay between its cognitive and bureaucratic structures. Whereas the first was based on Marxist-Leninist ideology, the second was defined by a network of cultural institutions more or less close to the direct or indirect control of political power. With respect to the bureaucratic organization of the musical field by the GDR-State, we would add that it was not uniform because it was not uncommon that the various GDR organizations and institutions pursued different cultural and political goals. This disfunction in the bureaucratic chain of control generated ‘spaces of freedom’ (both at a field level and physically) for performing music more independently from State control. On the other hand, especially from the 1970s, the increasing success from the bottom of alternative ‘music scenes’ strengthened the GDR-State’s strategy of institutionalizing them, especially with the purpose of involving the younger generation in official cultural life, but consequently increasing the level of bureaucratization of the musical field.

For what concerns the cognitive structure of the musical field, the aesthetic classification of music genres and works according to the political values of Marxist-Leninist ideology could be assured only by actors with high symbolic (cultural) capital and who were close to the Party. This means that the political evaluation of music matters was filtered by musicians and music scientists acting in the field of musical production and/or criticism. For what concerns the latter, pivotal changes in its social structure may be observed starting from the end of the 1970s, favouring in turn the introduction of new evaluative criteria and marking a change in the relationship between political actors, artists (or music producers), and music critics at a broader level.

The second part of the analysis attempts to reconstruct the main social and symbolic changes of the field of music production during the existence of the GDR-State. Especially under the Honecker government, the strategy was to include the emerging music genres in the legitimated musical socialist culture up to that moment labelled as amoral and deviant (e.g. jazz, rock). However, this strategy caused continuous internal splits within the corresponding scenes between an institutionalized pole and a half-formal pole. Thus, people closer to the ‘half-formal’ pole, while cultivating more alternative lifestyles and musical styles through which to express their criticism towards State politics, factually continued to participate in the broader game of the GDR musical field, sharing with the other participants the same illusio. The crisis of the GDR musical field at the end of the 1980s cannot, therefore, be simply traced back to a general increase of criticism toward the power and control of Party organizations over music, but it rather depended both on the GDR-State’s difficulties in including the new music scenes (punk, metal, etc.) in the field game and on the split within the song scene (also paradigmatic of the split in the broader intellectual scene), among those who continued to express internal criticisms but accepted the GDR model of musical consecration, and those who sought and obtained recognition outside the GDR-State through the support of the Church and Western media.