While their sublime beauty may seem apolitical, the cultural treasures of J.S. Bach and Leipzig’s Thomaner (St. Thomas Boys’ Choir) have been deployed by diverse regimes eager to reinforce their legitimacy. Generations of scholars have examined facets of how Nazi and SED cultural politics sought to mobilize Bach’s legacy.1 Now, after two decades of extensive reading in diverse local and national archives, personal memoirs, musical journals, and historical newspapers, Corinna Wörner has published her 2019 dissertation (defended under Wolfgang-Uwe Friedrich at the University of Hildesheim) about how the ideologically opposed dictatorships shared a desire to utilize the Thomaner (arguably the most famous ensemble in Germany) to serve their national and international propagandistic goals. Investigating the tenure of cantors Karl Straube (1918–1939), Günther Ramin (1940–1956), Kurt Thomas (1957–1960), and Erhard Mauersberger (1961–1972), Wörner demonstrates how, over the course of the Third Reich and first two decades of East Germany, the Thomaner occupied a gray zone between free artistic expression and collaboration. Although both Saxony’s Nazi Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann and Leipzig’s district SED party secretary Paul Fröhlich sought to undermine the famed cultural institution’s bourgeois and Christian background, Wörner observes, cantors and school administrators often won Berlin’s intervention to grant them considerable artistic independence so long as they advertised their ruling ideology’s “legitimacy through the arts” (p. 609) by towing the ideological line and performing at political events.

Wörner embraces a thematic structure wherein each chapter covers the same chronology. After the introduction, her second chapter surveys successive school principals and cantors from 1931–72. Sometimes these biographical sketches seem too brief and would benefit from further analysis. For instance, the intriguing character of Ekkehard Tietze – beloved by the Thomaner during his interim cantorate from 1956–57 – was rejected by the SED as “too Christian” and replaced by the West German Kurt Thomas (p. 71). Wörner’s verdict merely scratches the surface, however, since Thomas himself composed church music, and Tietze not only enjoyed a successful career after 1957 as musical director at Potsdam’s Friedenskirche: he also fled to the West in 1979 to work with his longtime associate Karl Richter. Along with Ramin, Richter was probably the twentieth century’s most famous interpreter of Bach, so it was an honor for Tietze to briefly succeed him upon his untimely death in 1981. Further complicating matters, as Wörner notes, was Richter’s own candidacy as the SED’s first choice to replace Tietze. When Richter chose to stay in Munich, this left “only the second candidate Kurt Thomas” (p. 87). Such detail outside of Leipzig is crucial to disentangle these complex artistic personalities beyond the notion that the SED rejected Tietze on account of his Christian background; far more evident is the SED obsession with prestige from the West, which backfired when their West German candidate – the former Nazi Thomas – proved too unwieldy and went back to Frankfurt.

The third chapter examines the history of teachers at the Thomasschule, as well as the social composition of choir members and students. Wörner’s observation that many former Nazis continued to teach under SED rule would have been analytically enriched by Charles Lansing’s case study on educational development under Nazi and SED rule. Though lesson plans shifted, Lansing shows, the same teachers often taught under both regimes.2

The fourth chapter features Hitler Youth (HJ) and Free German Youth (FDJ) influence. Both regimes rejected the traditional Thomaner sailor outfits (the Nazis put the choirboys into HJ uniforms, the SED mandated simple white shirts); but by 1976 the SED reinstated them, since “the marketing core of the choir uniforms was too meaningful to eliminate it forever,” especially as such outfits might generate more tickets and thus foreign currency during tours (p. 273). After the fifth chapter narrates how each regime used the 1937 and 1962 anniversary celebrations to propagate its ideological possession of Bach, chapter six recounts the era’s repertoire and concerts. Here Wörner extends her frequent parallel between the Thomaner and their Dresden counterparts: the Kreuzchor ensemble, which enjoyed “a personal continuity lacking in Leipzig” (p. 28) as it was led from 1930–71 by Rudolf Mauersberger (the elder brother of eventual East German Thomaskantor Erhard Mauersberger). Finally (preceding a closing summary), chapter seven examines broadcast concerts and international travel. The very fact the Thomaner commenced such travel in 1920 begs for further analysis of Weimar-era prehistory (just as the “Musikgymnasium” conception stemmed from the early 1920s).

Greater engagement with scholarly literature would advance the book’s analytical sharpness. Particularly stark is the mere cursory mention about “a perspective from outside” amid footnote citations of Pamela Potter’s pathbreaking work.3 Toby Thacker’s findings about artistic continuities before and after 1945 – not least SED efforts to venerate Bach as a secular composer – are also given little attention.4 Given the ambitious bounds of Wörner’s research, one yearns for a deeper takeaway from the fascinating complexity of biographical motivations and artistic limitations under contrasting ideologies. What have we learned about artists, multilevel state actors, or the very functioning of dictatorships over time?

The book’s extensive data offers tantalizing clues. For instance, Wörner could have devoted a full chapter to Günther Ramin, who directed the Thomaner under both systems. Ramin famously played as organist at Hermann Göring’s wedding in 1935 and the Nuremberg party congress in 1936, both of which “little damaged” his reputation under socialism (pp. 68–69). After conducting the Thomaner in Hitler Youth uniforms at Nazi events, proving they were an “integral component of National Socialist cultural life” (p. 206), Ramin resisted socialist infiltration. Indeed, with the fall of his adversary Mutschmann in 1945, Ramin enjoyed considerable space for artistic independence under socialism, such that the 1950 Bachfest was “a high point of his time in office,” crowned by a 50,000 Mark national prize (pp. 70, 619). What can Ramin’s contrasting relationship with each regime tell us?

This hefty tome’s meticulous detail offers valuable reference material for specialists who study artistic expression under extreme ideologies. For her prodigious knowledge about the Thomaner, Wörner is also well-poised to fill gaps she identifies, including the choir’s entanglement with the Stasi (perhaps also Gestapo?) or an assessment of the choir’s lengthy Honecker-era cantorate of Hans-Joachim Rotzsch, who was controversially compelled to resign in 1991 because of his decades-long service as a Stasi informant. A keen specialist, Wörner has marshalled fascinating data that deeply enriches our understanding of how music and politics intersected under Germany’s two twentieth-century dictatorships.

Notes:
1 See for instance Thomas Höpel’s comparative research across regimes in Leipzig and Lyon in Kulturpolitik in Europa im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen 2017). I have explored how factions crystalized across ideological lines and hotly debated how to enthrone Bach’s remains in Leipzig’s built space as a usable local and national identity after Nazism. Andrew Demshuk, A Mausoleum for Bach? Holy Relics and Urban Planning in Early Communist Leipzig, 1945–1950, in: History & Memory 28, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2016), pp. 47–89; idem, Bach’s Grave as Communist Legacy, in: Canadian Slavonic Papers 63, no. 1–2 (June 2021): pp. 119–147.
2 Charles Lansing, From Nazism to Communism: German Schoolteachers under Two Dictatorships, Cambridge 2010.
3 Pamela Potter, Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of Visual and Performing Arts, Berkeley 2016. Wörner also cites but does not engage with Jonathan Huener and Francis Nicosia (eds.), The Arts in Nazi Germany: Continuity, Conformity, Change, New York 2006.
4 Toby Thacker, Music after Hitler, 1945–1955, London 2007.