Music Sociology in the GDR: Under Conditions of Political Dictatorship, Despite of Political Dictatorship
Christian Kaden, who sadly passed away shortly after the Vienna conference, refers to his personal experience as researcher under a dictatorship, the former German Democratic Republic. Often ignored, however, is the fact that scientific activities in such
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ld revise this text for publication. Our sincere gratitude goes to Mrs Ingrid Kaden, who allowed us to publish his speech in its version of September 2015. C. Kaden (*) Humboldt-Universität Zu Berlin, Berlin, Deutschland © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 A. Smudits (ed.), Roads to Music Sociology, Musik und Gesellschaft, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22279-6_9
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studied with Heinrich Besseler during the twenties (Meyer 1934) and was one of the leading persons of the Freie Deutsche Kulturbund (Free German Association of Culture), a political organisation of emigrants in Great Britain. I would not like to be misunderstood: Meyer was a well-trained historian, and his book on English Chamber Music (1946) was an example of (let me put it this way) a decent social history of music. Meyer’s role in the East German scientific development, however, became a completely opposite one: he had to fight for the Communist ideology and to affirm Stalinist aesthetics, especially the so-called ‘Theory of Socialist Realism’. Thus the label ‘Musiksoziologie’, I repeat it, was an element of political deception. What Meyer postulated, as a full professor, was never free from ideological prejudices and it was never oriented to the priority of empirical data. It was ruled by Stalinist mysteries. If you read Meyer’s book on Musik im Zeitgeschehen (Music in the Events of the Day) (1952) you would hesitate to believe that this narrow-minded author was the same person as Meyer, the excellent connoisseur of English music of the 17th century. Up to 1968, Meyer was teaching at Humboldt University. I was among his students. I never learned from him anything about the real social actions and interactions in which music is involved.1 The described situation was characteristic of the destiny of the social sciences in East Germany during the first decades after World War II. Sociology, in general, was evaluated as Anti-Marxist thinking (GfS 1990). It was highly suspicious. The Communist Party’s leaders argumentation itself appeared to be sophisticated; there was no need for an independent ‘sociology’, because a completely developed general sociology was already available, in Historical Materialism (ibid., p. 475). The practical consequences would have been absurd: ‘sociological’ theories became a triviality. And they were reserved for the celebration of 100-yearold dogmas, far from empiric reality. Even more, empirical research, in a broader sense, was incompatible with the ruling Leninist ideology. Consequently, scholars like Karl Popper were denounced as political enemies (Schleifstein 1982). Inversely, the East European ideologists were the enemies of an open society— and an open sociology. But there was one crucial point, contradicting all dogmata: the economy of East Germany proved to be insufficient. That is why Walter Ulbricht, leader of the Communist Party during the ’50s and the ’60s, seriously tried to reorganize it,
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significant exception is Meyer’s contribution to a Music Histor
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