National-Patriotic Armament in Germany after 1870 in the Youth- Pedagogical and the Music-Didactical Discourse

The idea of the heroic in music is the effect of the interplay of several components – a socio-political ‘(zeit)geist’ that feels drawn to attribute a heroic character to the actions and attitudes of individuals, a verbal discourse on music that characterizes musical configurations as ‘variants’ of non-musical phenomena, and, thirdly, compositional techniques that support such a view.

I will reconstruct these components in the German discourse of the period following 1870 – the German victory over France and the first unification of the German countries in Western history – and the early 1930s – the time at the end of the German Weimar Republic and the Austrian First Republic, and the seizure of power by the Nazis in Germany. This period was marked by numerous heroizations in the socio-political and musical discourse. It was not only the instigators of patriotism and nationalism who used the heroic zeitgeist and the tendency towards hero-worshipping to advance their political goals; at the same time, the music-hermeneutic discourse gained increasing importance in music literature – coincidentally, albeit not unsuitably. On the one hand, the musical discourse was based on ideas that described music in terms of human traits including heroic action modes. On the other hand, the discourse's participants believed that these action modes could be recognized in musical compositions and they associated them with compositional developments, at least since Beethoven, which underpinned the heroic musical discourse.

Following 1870, Germany (as well as other nation states in Europe) became increasingly patriotic, nationalist, and militaristic. In this politico-cultural climate, the heroic discourse praising the patriotic military-hero was popular, especially in the education sector. Numerous pedagogically oriented publications – textbooks for schools and youth literature – revolved around individuals to which their authors and editors explicitly attributed a heroic character. The publications pointed to heroes – and sometimes also heroines – from the past and the present: Greek and Roman fighters; Germanic legendary figures such as the Nibelungs; defenders of Austria against the Turkish threat in the sixteenth century such as Niklas Graf Zrinyi and Nikola Jurišić; and the combatants active in the wars of liberation from Napoleon (1813–15) and the First World War, such as the anonymous young victims from the battle of Langemarck.

A Concept with an Imperative, but no Content

In current scholarship and everyday discourse, heroism is a sensitive, ambiguous topic. On the one hand – and primarily on the eastern side of the Atlantic Ocean – heroes and heroines have become dubious in light of the ubiquity of the heroic jargon of various twentieth-century dictatorships. As a consequence, hero-worshipping has only subliminally survived in niches of European societies: TV shows praise everyday heroes and heroines who rescue cats from roofs, pop bands label themselves heroes, intellectuals proclaim the post-heroic era, and computer games and epic films feature heroic figures.

On the other hand – and on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean – it is undisputed that heroes and heroines, living, dead and fictional, have always played a significant role in human societies, especially as moral and political role models. Moreover, there are also recent trends in medicine and psychology, that draw on past heroic discourses in order to propagate heroic capacities in the present. Labelling their activities as ‘heroism science’ to be investigated in the framework of blog posts, publications and biennial conferences, these agents claim that every individual is supposed to possess heroic capacities, which serve as universal means for self-engineering and personal success, and as a world-healing remedy.

What are these heroic capacities and qualities that stimulate individuals to call other individuals heroic? It is essential to the concept of the heroic that what is considered heroic varies greatly depending on the speakers and the contexts in which they use the term. When speakers use the terms ‘hero’, ‘heroine’, or ‘heroic’, they are not referring to a particular, intersubjectively consistent set of qualities, but are primarily articulating their admiration for the specific behaviours and qualities of those individuals to whom they refer. That is, by calling individuals or their behaviour heroic, they upgrade them and, simultaneously, create, through purely linguistic means, the phenomenon to which they refer with the label ‘heroic’. Additionally, attributing such high values to selected characteristics (by means of the label ‘heroic’), the speakers implicitly suggest or even demand that the heroes or heroines’ examples be followed. In this way, individuals who have been labelled heroes and heroines function as paradigms for moral imperatives in society.

In the late 1980s the terms ‘posthistoire’, ‘end of history’, and ‘loss of history’ (henceforth PEL) began to enter the West German discourse on music. Writers on music applied these terms—which had originally been coined in theology, the philosophy of history, and sociology—to music-historical phenomena, first and foremost the latest compositional developments in contemporary music, the so-called ‘postmoderne Musik’. Central for the connection between postmodern music and the PEL terms was the—appropriate or fictional— diagnosis of a crisis of history. German musicologist Ulrich Mosch pointed this out in 1993: ‘With the crisis of the understanding of history … an issue emerges that appears to be essential to a theory of musical postmodernism in both determining the position of musical phenomena with regards to the past as well as the future.’

This essay analyzes the musicological discourse on postmodern music in the long 1990s, when the discourse turned to PEL theories. To provide a foundation, the essay traces the origins of the PEL terms and their meaning in their original context—religious and philosophical thought of earlier periods. It then analyzes to what end they were included in the discourse on (postmodern) music in the long 1990s and how they impacted the discourse in music-historiographical and -aesthetical respects.

The origin of the diverse theories to which the terms refer can be traced back to different periods: the decades after 1945 when the world population looked back at two world wars, the Holocaust, and the dropping of the atomic bomb; the mid-nineteenth century, after the Enlightenment had begun to fade; the mid-eighteenth century and the beginning of the Enlightenment when intellectuals were suffused with optimistic spirit; and as far back as the first to third century bce with the texts of the Tanakh, to be later also canonized as part of the Old Testament. To understand the idea of the ‘end of history’ as it is relevant to the theory on postmodern music, it is necessary to understand its origins in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.