CHAPTER 1 German Influences Choirs, Repertoires, Nationalities Joep Leerssen The Choir’s Message, the Choir as Medium The German League of Choral Societies held its seventh festival in Breslau in 1906–07. The official programme gazette opened with a poem by the cel- ebrated figure-head of cultural nationalism, Felix Dahn, distinguished profes- sor at the local university, authoritative legal historian, former volunteer in the Franco-Prussian War, author of many a patriotic poem, and famous for his best-selling series of historical novels set at various periods of German and Germanic history. In English translation, the poem runs like this: To the German people God has given / Music of richest sonority In order that rest and struggle, death and life / may be glorified to us in song. So sing on, then, German youth / Of all things which can swell your heart! Of the persistence of true love / Of true friendship, gold and ore; Of the sacred shivers of pious awe / Of the sheen of spring and the joy of the forest Of Wanderlust, roving from land to land / And of that darling son of sunshine —Do not neglect that!—the golden wine. / Yes, sing of all things high and lovely, But above all cherish one specific song / Which should resound inspiring and roaring: The song of the German heroic spirit! / The song of manly duty and honour, Of faithfulness uncowed by fear / Which jubilantly hurls itself onto the foes’ spears And in death wrests victory! / Only he who is willing to die as well as live © Joep Leerssen, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004300859_003 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0Joep license. Leerssen - 9789004300859 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 10:58:03AM via free access Choirs, Repertoires, Nationalities 15 For this song, unlike any other—/ Only he is worthy to intone it: The song of the hard-won Reich!1 Dahn’s verse was aimed at a readership of middle-class, middle-aged, subur- ban or small-town German males who once a week indulged in their leisure pursuit of choral singing with a glass or two of beer afterwards. But the self- image which it articulates and celebrates was far less anodyne: it addresses its audience as a convivial Bildungsbürger with a slumbering readiness to go berserk for the noble cause of the Fatherland. Dahn himself, chosen herald and figure-head of the Festival, was the perfect embodiment of this type of ‘manly German,’2 uniting scholarship, literature and military prowess in his career. The verse also breathes Dahn’s characteristic, fey heroism, which fetishizes death in battle (joyously thrusting oneself onto the enemy’s spears), and which was most epically expressed in the vastly popular Ostrogothic historical novel Ein Kampf um Rom (1876), which inspired its youthful readers (many of whom would come of age post-1919) not only with rugged Germanic primitiv- ism but also with a penchant for tragic, death-seeking, total-destructive defeat, Götterdämmerung-style. Given this undertone in the closing lines of the poem, it is all the more surprising to see it twinned with the watered-down, sentimental remnants of 1 In the original: “Dem deutschen Volk hat Gott gegeben / Ein Harfespiel vom reichsten Klang / Daß Ruh’n und Ringen, Tod und Leben / Uns weihend schmücke der Gesang. / So singe denn, du deutsche Jugend, / Von allem, was das Herz dir schwellt: / Von wahrer Liebe ew’ger Dauer / Von echter Freundschaft, Gold und Erz, / Von frommer Ahnung heil’ger Schauer / Von ew’gen Sehnens Glück und Schmerz: / Von Frühlingsglanz, von Waldeswonne, / Von Wanderlust landaus, landein, / Und von dem Lieblingssohn der Sonne / Vergeßt ihn nicht!—vom gold’nen Wein. / Ja, singt vom allen Hohen, Schönen!—Doch eines Sanges pflegt zumeist, / Begeisternd, brausend soll er tönen: / Der Sang vom deutschen Heldengeist! / Das Lied von Mannespflicht und Ehre, / Von Treue, die kein Schrecken zwingt, / Die jauchzend in der Feinde Speere, / Im Tod den Sieg erkämpfend, springt! / Nur wer da sterben will wie leben / Für dieses Lied, dem keines gleich,—/ Nur der ist wert, es anzuheben: / Das Lied vom schwer erkämpften Reich!”; in Klenke (1998), 170. All translations are by the author. 2 Dietmar Klenke’s benchmark analysis (1998) traces the history of the German choral move- ment in terms of the self-image its repertoire proclaimed, that of the ‘singing German male’; I here render Klenke’s key concept of the deutscher Mann as ‘manly German.’ Alongside Klenke, my main source for the development of the German choral movement is the excel- lently-documented Elben (1887), written from within the movement whose values it cele- brates as volkstümlich, ‘in touch with the national spirit.’ On Felix Dahn as völkisch, see Frech (1996) and, more generally, Wahl (2002). Joep Leerssen - 9789004300859 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 10:58:03AM via free access 16 Leerssen high Romanticism: the themes of love, friendship, life outdoors, the twinning of Nature and informal religious piety, far-flung foot-journeys, and wine-fueled conviviality. All these elements, capped and trumped by the overriding theme of heroic, militant love of the fatherland: all this is listed by Dahn as the the- matic inventory of the national heritage of German song and German conviv- ial singing; indeed, it is celebrated by him as something which constitutes the German’s God-given national character. It would be unfair to judge this hackneyed piece of occasional verse by poetical standards; it is a public speech in verse form, and aims for the low- est common denominator of rhetorical effect, glibly using all the established high-minded tropes and turns of phrase that one would expect. Dahn’s piece of verse, similar to dozens, hundreds of similar effusions from the period, is highly exemplary and representative. Banal as it is, it forms part of that ‘banal nationalism’ (Billig 1995) which all-pervasively dominated and flavored the public climate of these decades; literary background noise, unremarkable in its individual instances, but present everywhere. At the same time, Dahn’s verse gives us not only a character-type of the ‘manly German,’ but also an excellent listing of the repertoire of one of the most potent platforms of patriotic mobilization in nineteenth-century Germany: the choral society.3 With its roots in the late-Romantic decades after 1810, the choral society became an informal, self-organizing, bottom-up form of sociability which across all the German lands (and, indeed, beyond) united many young-adult to middle-aged males from a middle-class background around a repertoire of shared values: romantic, convivial, and feistily national. The repertoire, as aptly typified by Dahn, was a spontaneously generated res- ervoir of self-indoctrination; the bonding atmosphere of leisure-time glee clubs with occasional trips and festival participations helped to disseminate the ethos of the ‘singing German male’ both socially and geographically, until it merged into the groundswell of mass-mobilized militaristic chauvinism in Wilhelminian and Weimar times (cf. also Leerssen [2015]). The spread of the choral movement brings together the spheres of cultural diffusion (the spread and canonization of a corpus of texts and ideas) and of social mobilization (the ramifying diffusion and self-replication of a pattern of sociability). It thus brings together the social-historical and the culture- 3 I conflate, in my use of ‘choir’ or ‘choral society,’ the various German terms Gesangverein, Liederkranz and Liedertafel. For the history of the choral movement I rely principally on Klenke (1998) and Elben (1991), as well as the relevant chapters written in the context of more broadly social or musical histories, such as Brophy (2007) and Minor (2012). Joep Leerssen - 9789004300859 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 10:58:03AM via free access Choirs, Repertoires, Nationalities 17 historical study of the history of nationalism. The latter has been better studied than the former, and it may therefore be useful to emphasize at the outset the culture-historical importance of the choral movement as a repertoire-carrier, a ‘medium’ no less important than media like newspapers, radio, or television. The repertoire issue will be addressed in the first half of this chapter, which involves two components: the ability of the choral movement to effect a very wide and deep social penetration of its repertoire, and the rhetoric of that repertoire itself. Song Performance, Embodied Communities Since the classic work of Benedict Anderson on the nation as an ‘imagined community’ we have got used to a default understanding that large-scale, long- distance and high-impact communication in modern societies requires medi- atized mass-circulation broadcasting. That, after all, is one of the implicit but characteristic features of the modernization process upon which the rise and spread of national thought is contingent: the fact that (to invoke Tönnies’s old Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft distinction) modern societies no longer rely on the face-to-face communication (word-of-mouth, gossip) characteristic of small- scale traditional communities and centered around places of congregation such as the inn or the village pump, but instead mediatize. Communication does not move directly from sender to immediate receiver but is broadcast from sender to a diffusely general and anonymous audience by means of printed texts or other intermediary carriers (the etymology of terms like imme- diate or intermediary stresses the point). Nation-building, and indeed the dissemination of all large-scale post-Guten- berg ideologies ever since Lutheranism, is usually seen as involving, unavoid- ably, the use of modern media, which in turn define the very idea of modernity and also underpin the rise of a Habermassian public sphere (beyond its first origins in the theatre, the coffee house, and other places of congregation).