Combat group of working-class singers

The Kampfgemeinschaft der Arbeitersänger (KdA) was an amalgamation of workers' choirs. In contrast to the social democratically dominated German Workers' Singers Association (DAS) , the KdA was communist.

General

The KdA was founded in 1931 as a spin-off from the DAS. Several communist spin-offs from the DAS preceded the establishment. Examples include the Socialist Workers' Singers Association and the Free Workers Singers Association . The split was on the one hand to be explained by the deep rift between communists and social democrats, on the other hand artistic controversy, especially about the programming, were a reason for the rift. The DAS responded in 1930 with a wave of exclusions against active communists and enforced this with sometimes brutal means, such as the destruction of sheet music and the removal of the property of the particularly strongly communist-influenced choral societies. After the Central Committee of the KPD had always fought and condemned the earlier splits from the DAS, it finally recognized the founding of the KdA and thus the cementing of the split in the workers 'movement in workers' music as well. From then on, the KdA differed from the DAS in its more outward-looking way of working, the cooperation with agitprop groups and the stronger development of its own music , while the DAS continued to stick to the traditions of the workers' choirs of the turn of the century.

1933 KdA was banned by the Nazis immediately and pushed their clubs into illegality, while most of the choirs of the DAS into line and were incorporated into the Nazi organizations (at least formally).

During its existence between 1931 and 1933, the KdA had a membership of around 4,000. This contrasted with the well over 200,000 members of the DAS and almost two million members of the bourgeois German Choir Association .

Combat Music Magazine

The KdA magazine was called Kampfmusik . It was published monthly from 1931 with an average circulation of 6,000 copies by Verlag für Arbeiterkultur Berlin. It was eight or twelve pages long. The responsible editor was Ernst Hermann Meyer .

Significant members

Hanns Eisler
Ernst Hermann Meyer , editor of the magazine Kampfmusik of the Communist Kampfgemeinschaft der Arbeitersänger.

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 .

Werner Kaden : Signals of departure. Music in the mirror of the “Red Flag” . Verlag Neue Musik, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-7333-0030-0 .

Notes / individual evidence

↑ Lexicon of socialist literature, page 238, quoted in: Bettina Hinterthür: Notes according to plan: the music publishers in the Soviet occupation zone, GDR - censorship system, central planned economy and German-German relations until the early 1960s. Footnote on page 142, Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2006. ISBN 3-515-08837-7 .
^ Konrad Niemann: In memory of Ernst Hermann Meyer. In: Contributions to musicology, issue 3/1989. Published by the Association of Composers and Musicologists of the GDR in Verlag Neue Musik Berlin (East), page 155 ff. A contemporary obituary

[1] Lexicon of socialist literature, page 238, quoted in: Bettina Hinterthür: Notes according to plan: the music publishers in the Soviet occupation zone, GDR - censorship system, central planned economy and German-German relations until the early 1960s. Footnote on page 142, Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2006. ISBN 3-515-08837-7 .

[2] Konrad Niemann: In memory of Ernst Hermann Meyer. In: Contributions to musicology, issue 3/1989. Published by the Association of Composers and Musicologists of the GDR in Verlag Neue Musik Berlin (East), page 155 ff. A contemporary obituary