German Workers' Singing Association

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The German Workers 'Singers' Association (DAS, rarely also the German Workers ' Singers ' Association) was an organization of workers 'culture in which workers' choirs were united. In the mid-1920s, DAS had 225,000 members, making it the third largest working-class organization in Germany after the Workers' Gymnastics and Sports Association and the Solidarity Association for Bicycle and Motorists . The DAS saw itself as a counterweight to the bourgeois German Singers Association , whereby the number of members of the DAS always remained far behind that of the DSB.

Emergence

In 1877 the First German Workers 'Choir Association was founded in Gotha , in which many of the previously loosely operating workers' choirs were organized. Workers' choral societies first became important during the Socialist Laws, during which they often served as refuge for members of the illegal social democracy. As a result, many of the clubs were banned.

Another forerunner organization of the DAS was founded after the end of the persecution of the socialist laws and with the rise of social democracy in the course of social tightening, the song community of the German workers' choirs with 16,000 members, mostly male, at that time. In 1892 the song community was formed . She founded her own publishing company to provide the workers' choirs with sheet music prints.

In 1908, the German Workers 'Choir Association with an estimated 55,000 members emerged from the song community of the German workers' choirs .

After the First World War , a DASB commission headed by Alfred Guttmann compiled the choir collection for mixed choirs with 305 pieces of music on 839 pages. In 1929 the sheet music collection for male choirs without accompaniment appeared, also edited by Guttmann , in which Arnold Schönberg also participated.

job

The DAS was part of the workers' education movement, which had the goal of providing the proletariat with education that it would not have been able to do because of its role in the production process. The DAS should help ensure that workers receive an arts education. This consisted, for example, in the fact that the choral societies rehearsed works of bourgeois music, in particular by composers whose work was itself part of the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary development in the 18th and 19th centuries. The works of Beethoven, Mozart and above all Handel, whose political implications were accompanied by a certain technical simplicity, were therefore very popular.

Especially after the end of the First World War, singing trend songs became increasingly common, as more and more works of this genre were created during this time under the impact of the October Revolution . The relationship between trend songs and the cultivation of bourgeois music increasingly resulted in differences that often served as a projection screen for the increasing division of the labor movement. The communist working-class singers demanded the practice of revolutionary songs and the effect they had on the outside world with the help of concerts in backyards, etc., while DAS, which was now clearly dominated by social democrats, often froze in a conservatism that finally manifested itself in a sharp decline in membership at the end of the 1920s. As a result, communist counter-drafts to the DAS were founded, which never had a relevant number of members, but achieved a certain external effect through their activism. These foundations initially stood in opposition to the tactics of the KPD , which pursued to continue to operate in the DAS and to strengthen revolutionary positions there.

Festival in Hanover 1928

The 1st festival of the German Workers' Singers Association took place from June 16 to 18, 1928 in Hanover with between 44,000 and 50,000 participants. The song festival was opened by the President of the Reichstag, Paul Löbe . During the festival there was a big parade of the participants through the city. 57 major events and seven “top concerts” were organized, and Ludwig van Beethoven's Missa Solemnis was also performed.

1933-1945

After the transfer of power to the NSDAP , the workers' choirs were also targeted by the NS authorities. The repressive measures, however, concentrated primarily on the communist worker musicians. In the first weeks and months of National Socialist rule, the DAS federal leadership tried to find a compromise with Nazi cultural policy in order to ensure the survival of the choral societies. All political activity was banned from the associations and attempts were made to present the work of the DAS as non-political work on German cultural assets.

In May 1933 the DAS officially dissolved and the choral societies were integrated into the National Socialist cultural organizations, for example the German Singers' Association , as part of the process of conformity. From then on, individual associations continued to work from an explicitly left-wing perspective and, similar to the time of the socialist laws, served, for example, as a shelter for supporters of the illegal SPD or KPD . Others, in turn, integrated themselves completely into the Nazi ideology and henceforth occupied themselves with studying harmless German songs. The Nazi authorities refrained from blanket bans for a long time, on the one hand because the former DAS associations actually saw an opportunity to promote Nazi mass culture, and on the other hand to better monitor opposition efforts in the still politically active associations.

A change in the quality and quantity of the repression measures can be seen with the preparations for war and the first real expansion efforts of the German Reich, but at the latest with the outbreak of the war in 1939. So in 1936/1937 the scheduled destruction of the song books of the DAS began, which continued until then could be used by the choral societies on the condition that no “Marxist” songs were rehearsed or performed. In the following years, the number of arrests and bans increased more and more, until finally, also due to the war, the former DAS choral societies were practically nonexistent.

The revival of the workers' choirs and an umbrella organization was no longer successful after 1945 due to a profound cultural change and the aftermath of National Socialist cultural ideology. In the FRG, workers' music experienced a small, but often folkloristic heyday in the course of the changes of 1968, in the GDR attempts were made to install a proletarian music movement with the singing movement from above.

literature

  • Inge Lammel : Workers song - Workers song . A hundred years of workers' music culture in Germany. Essays and lectures from 40 years 1959-1998 . Hentrich and Hentrich, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-933471-35-4 .
  • Inge Lammel: The formation of the workers' music culture in Germany as the basis for socialist music development before 1945 . (Diss.), Berlin 1975.
  • Dietmar Klenke , Peter Lilje, Franz Walter , Peter Lösche (eds.): Workers singers and people's theaters in the Weimar Republic . Dietz, Bonn 1992, ISBN 3-8012-4011-8 . ( Solidarity community and milieu 3), ( Political and social history 27).
  • Werner Kaden : Signals of departure. Music in the mirror of the “Red Flag” . Verlag Neue Musik, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-7333-0030-0 .
  • Rainer Noltenius (Hrsg.): Illustrated history of the workers' choirs. Writings of the Fritz Hüser Institute for German and Foreign Workers' Literature, Series 1: Exhibition Catalogs on Worker Culture, Vol. 8, Klartext Verlag, Essen 1992, ISBN 3-88474-007-5 .
  • William Koehler: The Politics of Singing: The German Workers' Choral Association in Comparative Perspective, 1918–1933. Lambert Academic Publishing, Saarbrücken 2011, ISBN 978-3-8465-3627-8 .
  • Alfred Guttmann: Foreword to the choir collection of the German Workers' Choir Association, mixed choirs. DAS Verlag, Berlin, 1926.
  • Alfred Guttmann: Mixed choirs without accompaniment . Score. In: Alfred Guttmann (Ed.): Choir collection of the German Workers' Singers Association . Verlag des Deutschen Arbeiter-Sängerbund, Berlin 1926, OCLC 647509145 , foreword by the editor (This choir collection was not available in book and music stores and was only given to members of the DAS. In addition to the volume of scores listed here, there are separate editions for the individual vocal groups soprano , Alto, tenor and bass).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Alfred Guttmann: Mixed choirs without accompaniment . In: Choir collection of the German Workers' Singing Association . Publishing house of the German Workers' Association, Berlin 1926.
  2. ↑ DNB 974790273
  3. ↑ Richard Bodek: Red Song: Social Democratic Music and Radicalism at the End of the Weimar Republic , Cambridge 1995, footnote 7 Link to the digitized version , accessed on September 11, 2018
  4. ↑ a b c Jörn Wegner: The Workers Music Movement in National Socialism , Berlin 2008 Text from Kulturation.de , accessed on September 11, 2018
  5. ↑ Linden mirror. Lindener district newspaper, Hannover-Linden, issue March 2008, p. 3 Link to the digitized version , accessed on September 11, 2018
  6. ↑ Simplicissimus of August 13, 1928, p. 263 Link to the digitized version , accessed on September 11, 2018
  7. ↑ WDR-3 broadcast Tonart on September 11, 2018 , accessed on September 11, 2018