Review of Kultur und Musik nach 1945: Ästhetik im Zeichen des Kalten Krieges, edited by Ulrich J. Blomann

Abstract

In March 2013, Ulrich Blomann invited a group of academics, musicians, and critics to Hambach Castle for two days of presentations and discussions on the influence of the Cold War on music and culture. This volume, consisting of an introduction by Blomann and fifteen essays, commemorates that event. Blomann’s opening address establishes the premise that German scholars and critics have been insufficiently sensitive to the ways in which the political realities of the Cold War shaped musical ideas and products after 1945. He characterizes this gap in scholarship as a consequence of the West’s “propagandistic” insistence on the link between autonomous art and political freedom and sees the failure to investigate connections between music and politics in this era as a dogmatic avoidance, even a blindness, born out of Germans’ unwillingness to confront the realities of denazification and reconstruction (13). The volume’s essays focus mainly on divided Germany, with brief forays into North and South Korea and the Soviet Union, and address Blomann’s call to arms through heterogeneous methodologies, with some authors giving specific historical case studies and others attempting a more theoretical or reflective project. [1st paragaph]