The history of music-making in postwar East-Central Europe has lent itself all too readily to clichés. The music, the stereotypes go, was worthless propaganda; the composers were cowed, and the whole region marched in lockstep to the beat of Moscow's drum. Scholars working in the fields of musicology and cultural history have started to add much-needed nuance to this oversimplified picture. David Tompkins is one of them. The product of extensive, painstaking archival research, Composing the Party Line traces the encounter of music and politics in Poland and East Germany during the early Cold War, a period Tompkins defines as lasting from 1945 until approximately 1957. Along the way, Tompkins challenges outmoded ways of thinking about the intersection of cultural production and political power in the formerly socialist societies of East-Central Europe.

Tompkins presents a consistent narrative. He notes that, around 1950, Poland and East Germany had much in common. They were roughly equal in population. Cultural life in each country was being restructured along Soviet lines. And party-state actors in both places were interested in using music as a way to legitimate their authority. The parties in East Germany and Poland each had important early successes in promoting their views of socialist realism, an aesthetic that privileged audience accessibility, references to national culture (such as folklore), an optimistic outlook, and traditional conceptions of musical beauty. Idealism, however, soon hardened into dogmatism, much to the chagrin of the elite musicians who, by and large, had initially been willing to work with the parties in pursuit of common goals. Here the stories diverge. The political center in Poland and East Germany each attempted a course correction during the post-Stalin thaw, but only the East German party successfully maintained its influence among a core group of elite musicians. In Poland, on the other hand, composers disentangled themselves almost entirely from party oversight. Thus despite their similarities around 1950, by 1957 the elite musical cultures in Poland and East Germany had become quite distinct. Part of the value of Tompkins's study lies in charting these differences, which demonstrate the diversity, rather than the uniformity, of cultural and political life in Cold War East-Central Europe.

In each of his five chapters, Tompkins demonstrates how this narrative played out at different levels of Polish and East German society. He begins on the plane of ideology, discussing how party officials, state actors, and musicians were conceptualizing socialist realism both in theory and in practice. He then moves to the composers' unions, examining how the communist parties in East Germany and Poland sought to use these organizations as a means to transmit their ideas to composers and musicologists. From union structures, he turns to the commissioning of new works. Finally, he follows these works out into society, where they were performed at festivals and other concert venues.

This top-down chapter structure might imply that power and ideology in Poland and East Germany radiated unimpeded from the political center. And yet that was hardly the case. Tompkins consistently shows that, far from exerting monolithic, total control, the parties in both countries were engaged in a continual process of negotiation. Even when the cultural sphere was seemingly at its most locked down, there still was some room for musical elites and ordinary citizens to maneuver. In chapter five, for example, we learn that sulky audiences could vote with their feet, refusing to attend the performances that had been mounted for their edification. Party-state actors in both Poland and East Germany softened their hard line in response: in the hopes of getting at least some of their message across, they devised the musical stage revue, a cultural form that aimed to entertain rather than to overtly indoctrinate.

Like audiences, elite musicians could exercise their agency. One of Tompkins's most noteworthy contributions in this volume is his refusal to characterize elite musicians as passive victims of totalitarian control. Instead, he demonstrates that they were active participants in shaping the culture of the stalinist era. Thus in chapter one, we see composers and musicologists debating socialist realist aesthetic theory—adopting some ideas, while challenging others. He compellingly demonstrates that musicians in Poland and East Germany worked with party-state actors to create socialist realism as it was preached and practiced in their respective countries. The picture of socialist realism that emerges from Tompkins's study is therefore one of contingency and fluidity, not that of a rigid, preformed aesthetic template to which composers were expected to adhere.

Aside from showing how socialist realism was articulated in theory, Tompkins also attempts to show how composers worked with socialist realism in practice. He argues that the music of the stalinist years is valuable beyond its status as a historical curiosity. To demonstrate the extent of Polish and East German composers' engagement with socialist realist aesthetics, he presents long lists of work titles accompanied by brief summaries of these pieces' primary style characteristics; the table of contents also directs the interested reader to a website where she can hear some of the music to which Tompkins refers. Tompkins is not a musicologist, nor does he pretend to be. At times, however, the terseness of the musical description causes his claims of the interest and vibrancy of this repertoire to fall a bit flat. With the discussion of the mass song genre in particular, I was curious to learn more about musicians' interactions with the writers who produced most of the song texts, and how these encounters may have affected the negotiations between cultural elites and the political center that Tompkins discusses in such illuminating ways throughout the book.

But these are small quibbles. Composing the Party Line is a fascinating book, and a necessary one, especially when it comes to understanding the cultural history of socialist Poland.While historians of East Germany have generally been willing to examine artists' entanglements with political power during the stalinist period, scholars of Polish music have tended to marginalize or otherwise seek to explain away composers' activities during this era. Tompkins's task in Composing the Party Line is difficult, because he is attempting to grasp what his historical subjects did and thought at the time, before retrospective assessments of stalinist years cast them as ones of moral compromise and shame. His study is, for this reason, all the more valuable, and it has much to say to musicologists, cultural historians, and all who are interested in the interaction of music and politics in East-Central Europe during the early Cold War. Though this story can all too easily be told in clichés, Tompkins, through attending carefully to documents from the past, has given us a way to see beyond them.

Dass die Künste, und also auch die Musik, im Denken staatssozialistischer Ideologen eine wichtige Rolle spielten, ist bekannt. Weit weniger bekannt ist jedoch, wie diese wich­tige Rolle im Detail aussah. David G. Tompkins hat sich die Aufgabe gestellt, diese Rolle in einer vergleichenden Studie am Beispiel der Situation in der Volksrepublik (VR) Polen und der DDR im Zeitraum nach dem Krieg bis etwa zur Mitte der 1950er Jahre hin­ein darzustellen.

Dabei kann man ihm weder mangelnde Kenntnis der Forschungsliteratur noch Lücken im Archivstudium vorwerfen. Im Gegenteil: Akribisch belegt er jedes von ihm angeführte Detail und zeichnet den Gang der zahlreichen Besprechungen, die Inhalte der immer wie­der erneuerten und veränderten Positionspapiere, die Konferenzen in Partei- und Kompo­nistengremien in allen Einzelheiten nach. Dadurch kann der Autor einige gern gehegte Mythen zu Fall bringen, so etwa die Selbstaussage Witold Lutosławskis, einer der bedeu­tendsten Figuren der Neuen Polnischen Musik nach 1945, er habe nie in irgendeiner Form Kompromisse eingehen müssen. Vielmehr zeigt T. auf, welche Möglichkeiten Komponis­ten angesichts der weitgehenden Kontrolle des Musiklebens durch die Partei tatsächlich hatten – aber auch, wie sie sich arrangierten. Das ist gerade im Falle Polens sehr lehrreich, denn bis heute wird hier gerne das Bild einer Komponistengeneration und eines musika­li­schen Aufbruchs gezeichnet, die sich gleichsam aus dem Nichts wie Phoenix aus der Asche gegen Ende der 1950er Jahre zu lichten Höhen aufschwang, ohne dass die Frage be­rührt wird, wie dieses Nichts tatsächlich aussah.

In der Detailfülle und der akribischen Nachzeichnung der Aushandlungsprozesse liegen die Stärke und der Wert der Arbeit. Der Autor betrachtet sein Thema unter fünf Gesichts­punkten, denen er jeweils ein Kapitel widmet. Eingangs beschäftigt er sich mit grundle­genden ästhetischen Fragen, d.h. vor allem mit der Behandlung der Vorgaben des Sozia­listischen Realismus als verbindlich anzuwendender Stilrichtung und dem Umgang damit in den beiden Ländern. Es folgt ein Kapitel über die Komponistenverbände in beiden Staa­ten, die den zentralen Ort dieser musikästhetischen Diskurse und auch die Schaltstelle zwi­schen den Komponisten und den Machthabern bildeten. Das dritte Kapitel widmet sich den Auftragskompositionen, die im staatlich geförderten Musikleben der staatssozialistischen Gesellschaften eine zentrale Lenkungsfunktion innehatten. Im vierten Kapitel beschäftigt sich der Autor mit Musikfestivals in ihrer Funktion als Orte sozialistischer Musikpädago­gik der Massen, sodann im letzten Kapitel mit dem Konzertwesen. Einige der Texte in die­sem Buch wurden bereits an anderer Stelle veröffentlicht, dennoch ist es T. gelungen, eine in sich schlüssige und kontingente Argumentation herzustellen.

Differenziert, nüchtern und ganz an den Quellen orientiert zeigt der Autor auf, dass es auch im Spätstalinismus (der in den Satellitenstaaten des Ostblocks eher als Hochzeit des Stalinismus fungierte), wie in jeder anderen Epoche auch, um den Ausgleich verschiedener Interessen und Richtungen ging, freilich mit dem Umstand, dass in der vollen Ausprägung des Stalinismus die Machtposition der Parteiorgane einen Höhepunkt erreicht hatte. Ohne dass T. es explizit ausspricht, erteilt er mit dieser Beschreibung der gesellschaftlichen Ver­hältnisse im polnischen und ostdeutschen Stalinismus auch den Totalitarismustheorien eine eindeutige Absage. In dem von ihm untersuchten Teilbereich der Gesellschaft war ganz of­fensichtlich zu keiner Zeit die Kontrolle und die Durchherrschung in dem Sinne total, dass eine von oben vorgegebene Linie unweigerlich nur ein einziges Verhalten sämtlicher ande­rer Beteiligten nach sich gezogen hätte. Aber auch das Bild der Nische, in der sich etwa einzelne Komponisten vor dem Zugriff der Staatsmacht mehr oder weniger erfolg­reich zu entziehen gesucht hätten, lässt sich angesichts der differenzierten Beschreibungen des Vf. nicht aufrechterhalten. Gleiches gilt für die Auffassung des Musikmilieus als Ort des Eigen-Sinns einer bestimmten Gruppierung. Gerade T.s Detailgenauigkeit lässt diese und andere in der Forschung oft verwendete Klassifizierungsversuche als fragwürdig er­schei­nen. Ganz offensichtlich waren im Stalinismus nicht nur die Kulturfunktionäre, son­dern auch die Komponisten Akteure in dem Sinne, dass sie immer wieder einen Ausgleich su­chen mussten. Der Autor zeigt auf, dass sich diese beiden Akteursgruppen oft über­schnit­ten, d.h. dass Komponisten oft zugleich auch Kulturfunktionäre waren. Daher er­scheint es nicht als Manko, sondern als Stärke, wenn T. sich am Schluss seiner Betrachtun­gen eben gerade nicht für ein bestimmtes Beschreibungsmodell entscheidet. Hier wird ja auch keine Aussage über die staatssozialistische Gesellschaft als solche getroffen, sondern über die Interaktionen in einem bestimmten Teilbereich berichtet. Parteiorgane und Musi­kergre­mien bildeten ein Kräftefeld ständiger Interaktion, dessen Ergebnis die Musik war, die dann auf den hier beschriebenen Konzerten und Musikfestivals erklang.

Ein dritter Akteur in diesem Kräftefeld war das Publikum, d.h. die Musikkonsumenten – leider erscheint es hier nur am Rand. Das ist zwar von der Wahl der Quellen her erklär­lich, denn anders als beispielsweise der Komponistenverband hat das Publikum kein wis­senschaftlich auswertbares Quellenmaterial hinterlassen. Sowohl Komponisten als auch Kulturfunktionäre hatten jedoch den Anspruch, für die „Massen" zu wirken, sodass deren Urteil bei den Interaktionen zwischen Parteiorganen und Komponistengremien mitein­be­zogen werden musste. Wie wichtig das Urteil des Publikums tatsächlich war, zeigt sich da­ran, dass am Ende des hier betrachteten Zeitraums in Polen ein musikalischer Aufbruch einsetzte, den in dieser Form niemand so richtig vorausgesehen hatte. Der Warschauer Herbst und die Jazz-Festivals in Sopot und dann in Warschau ließen Musik unverhofft zu einem Phänomen werden, das sich eine Zeitlang im Zentrum des gesellschaftlichen Dis­kurses befand. Die Beliebtheit und die positive, sogar enthusiastische Reaktion der Zuhö­rer auf diese Musik waren so nicht geplant und lassen sich auch nicht mit den Initiativen von Partei- und Komponistengremien erklären.

Ganz offensichtlich spielten hier andere Faktoren eine Rolle, deren Beschreibung nicht Gegenstand des besprochenen Buches ist. Das Beispiel Polens zeigt das deutlich: Der Auf­bruch nach 1956 ist nur in geringem Maße darauf zurückzuführen, dass die Parteiorgane schwächer wurden, sondern vor allem auf die bereits lange vorher erfolgten Ausrichtungen des musikalischen Milieus des Landes: In der Zwischenkriegszeit hatte die musikalische Elite Polens sich in Frankreich im neoklassizistischen Stil ausbilden lassen, und Lutosław­ski war direkt nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg einer der ersten Musiker, die für das polnische Komponistenmilieu Modernität einforderten. Auch im Jazz knüpfte man Ende der 1950er Jahre an die Entwicklungen aus der Zeit vor und vor allem direkt nach dem Krieg wieder an. Dies alles aber sind longue-durée-Prozesse, die sich allein mit der Herangehensweise dieses Buches, also mit der Nachzeichnung der Interaktion zwischen Partei- und Kompo­nistengremien im späten Stalinismus, nicht fassen lassen. Der Ankündigung des Autors, dass seine Arbeit die Unterschiede in der Musikentwicklung in Polen und der DDR erklärt, kann man also nur bedingt zustimmen.

Wohl aber wird etwas anderes deutlich, worauf der Autor ebenfalls hinweist: Die VR Polen und die DDR gelten für gewöhnlich als zwei sehr unterschiedliche Länder. Der mu­sikalische Aufbruch in Polen nach 1956 und das Ausbleiben einer solchen Mobilisierung in der DDR passt da gut ins Bild. In der Zeit des Spätstalinismus aber, und darauf weist der Autor bereits eingangs hin, waren sich Polen und die DDR wenigstens hinsichtlich der hier betrachteten Musikdiskurse so ähnlich wie selten – und das wird in T.s Darstellung in be­eindruckender Weise deutlich. Die Verhältnisse waren nicht gleich, und sie entwickelten sich auch zunehmend auseinander, dennoch ist es sehr lehrreich zu erfahren, dass beson­ders zu Anfang eine weitgehende Deckungsgleichheit der Verhältnisse in den musikali­schen Milieus beider Länder herrschte – trotz der so unterschiedlichen kulturellen Aus­gangslage. Im polnischen Komponistenmilieu gab es in dieser Zeit noch ein relativ großes Vertrauen in die politische Führung und in die Parteifunktionäre, ähnlich wie in der DDR. In beiden Ländern war die Autorität der Staatsführung und der Parteiorgane noch verhält­nismäßig hoch. Das Setting war also aller kulturellen Unterschiede zum Trotz vergleichs­weise ähnlich. Das Auseinanderfallen der musikpolitischen Lage in der DDR und der VR Polen ist vor diesem Hintergrund umso beeindruckender.

Diese Rezension erschien zuerst in der Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 64 (2015) H. 1.

David Tompkins' Composing the Party Line is a unique work in that he undertakes a transnational comparative analysis of specific cultural aspects of the Stalinist period, namely the production, performance and reception of music, primarily classical and modern music, but also popular music like mass songs and entertainment combining music and spoken word. Unless the reader is already familiar with the history of Stalinism in Poland and the GDR, it is best to read this work with other books on the cultural history of the period. [1] The Stalinist era started with the creation of the GDR in 1949 and the establishment of the PZPR, the Polish United Workers' Party, in 1948. It was marked by the interval of the June uprising in East Germany in 1953, and concluded with Khrushchev's secret speech and the Polish October of 1956. For a full appreciation of the book's argument, the reader may also want to consult the audio samples chosen by the author, assembled here: http://people.carleton.edu/~dtompkin/DavidTompkins/music.html.

Tompkins' intervention in studies of the Stalinist period is valuable due to its precise focus on the role of music in the functioning of official cultural life in the new socialist states. His basic argument is quite simple, and he illustrates it with a generous use of archival data detailing the various aspects of the professional lives of Polish and East German composers and musicians. His data concerns primarily the type and number of compositions written as a result of commissions and party directives, meant for performance in factories, schools, rural locations, as well as reviews of such performances. He discusses many instances of such ideologically-tinted (or not, as it turns out) performances and their context. What is really valuable about this volume, however, is how the author presents the patterns structuring the musical world of that era, such as the tug-of-war between party officials and everyone else concerned, or the relationships between performers and audiences as well as between promoters and the state – which is a very interesting section of Chapter Five, "The Concert Landscape," entitled "Unauthorized Concerts" (p. 218-221).

What emerges is a picture more nuanced than what readers may expect from a cultural history of the period. First, Tompkins demonstrates to what extent the people operating in the musical world of both countries, although with important differences, were actually largely sheltered from the brutal workings of the state security apparatus. As he argues in the first chapter, composers were mostly free to follow or contest and expand the directives concerning the form and content of their work, since the directives were presented by musicologists who, while backed by the party in their efforts to "re-educate" composers about how their craft should conform to the needs of their new societies, were nevertheless still considered just musicologists, whose views may and did clash with the opinions and goals of composers. What is more interesting, however, is when these views did not clash and produced a body of work that is not as negligible as it may seem. To demonstrate how relaxed the position of composers was in relation to the state, Tompkins interrogates the earnings of Polish composers ("The Struggle over Commissions," p. 135-144). He cites surprisingly impressive sums disbursed not only as payment for finished new mass songs, cantatas, and dances, but also as scholarships or stipends. These were often associated with numerous music festivals or other celebrations, like Stalin's 70th birthday, which called for new musical material to be performed during countless hours of concerts, sometimes stretched over the course of months. Such evidence suggests that despite the concessions composers may have felt they had to make, they were able to live quite comfortably thanks to state support for their craft, even if it only partially conformed to the realist socialist model, which sheds a new light on the condition of these musical elites and their relationship with the state.

This assessment corresponds with a first-hand account by a Polish diplomat who defected from the Polish People's Republic in 1953, dr. Marek Stanisław Korowicz, who contained his memories of Stalinist Poland in his "W Polsce pod sowieckim jarzmem" ("In Poland under the Soviet Yoke"). In this interesting memoir, which Tompkins did not consult, there is a whole section on classical music, which Korowicz enjoyed, and his glimpse reveals that "Music is a good profession, musicians are sought after, especially outside of big cities, and they belong to the best paid categories of workers" (p. 179). [2] He speaks of several good orchestras operating at the time, among them the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra (mentioned by Tompkins on page 223), which often traveled throughout the country, performing non-communist themed works to sold-out houses, despite the high prices and scarcity of tickets in relation to demand (p. 180-181).

Tompkins also offers an analysis of the different socio-historical contexts in which the parties of People's Poland and the GDR operated. He discusses the ties dating back to the wartime era that some principal musical actors – like the German composer Hans Eisler or the leading Polish musicologist Zofia Lissa – forged with Soviet socialist-realist theoreticians during their exile in the USSR (p. 23, 47). He also points to the traditions that competed with Soviet models for both writing and playing music in both countries, such as the older local festivals in small towns like Rheinsberg or Görlitz, which were reinvented by the new system to involve the participation of amateur musicians and discussions between composers and audience (p 184-185). Interesting examples of opposing forces were prewar impresarios, who undermined the state booking agency's monopoly in the GDR for a while (p. 220-221), or the relatively strong Polish composers' union (founded before 1948, therefore predating any explicit relationship to the party) (p. 97), and major orchestra directors, who bended the rules of the game to their advantage (p. 72, 224, 229-230).

The differences between the situations of performers in both countries are also sufficiently appreciated here, in the foregrounding of such factors as the freedom to move between the two Germanies in the fluid period before the rise of the Berlin Wall. The East German authorities felt even more compelled than the Polish ones to legitimize themselves in the eyes of the populace due to the presence of a Western alternative that also strove to appropriate the German musical tradition in its effort to establish itself as the rightful and truly progressive German state (p. 208, 227).

Defections among East German musicians were apparently common and they were not matched by a corresponding influx of musicians from the West, which created a problem for GDR authorities, while some of the festivals organized in the East, like one in 1952, attracted a sizeable group of West Germans in its audience (p. 183), which makes for an interesting twist. But the emphasis that both states placed on the role of music in remolding their respective societies was so great that it created problems across the board in that there were not enough professionally trained performers to step up to the challenge of bringing the new music to the people in all towns, villages, and workplaces, which was the authorities' ambitious and practically unattainable goal. What resulted instead was a series of orchestra breakups or mergers and a proliferation of substandard entertainment, often in the form of "Estradenkonzerte" or "imprezy estradowe" (p. 224, 227) which were marked by an uneasy balance between the desire of the parties to both entertain and educate.

The only shortcoming of this monograph is that in some instances the author fails to satisfy the reader's curiosity concerning the stories of specific composers or pieces, which could be enriched by adding more comments on reception, or an analysis of the lyrics of mass songs, like on pages 61-62, where in the space of one paragraph Tompkins mentions ten different songs written by various composers, without giving the reader so much as a hint as to how they were evaluated by audiences. And titles like "Fritz the Tractor Driver," "Thanks to the Soviet Army," or "The Party is Always Right" just beg for some kind of a human-interest story. Perhaps a closer reading of memoirs, like Korowicz's, or an accompanying oral history would enhance this aspect of the research.

[1] For a good grounding in this subject area, you may want to look up Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-cultural History of the GDR (ed. by K. Jarausch), in which such terms as "the welfare dictatorship" or "modern dictatorship" are introduced in an attempt to define the character of East German society. As Jarausch points out, "State and party rule established in the first two decades of the GDR's existence developed a remarkable measure of modernizing elan, a belief in progress, and a will to tackle problems." At the same time, East Germans also witnessed the crushing of their civil society and "stifling of innovation and dynamism," which set the stage for the continuing paradoxes of "real socialist" life (Jarausch, p. 20).

Jarausch, Konrad H (ed.) Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR. New York: Berghahn Books, 2009.

It is also recommended to glance at David Bathrick's discussion of the dynamic relationship between Marxist theory, socialist practice, and conservative criticism of avant-garde bourgeois art forms (Bathrick, p. 88, and his discussion of Bertold Brecht) for a better understanding of the struggle over the form and meaning of socialist music.

Bathrick, David. The powers of Speech: the Politics of Culture in the GDR. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

In Poland, the Stalinist era is all too often portrayed as filled completely with shame, injustice, and waste. In this context, Tompkins' work corresponds to Andrzej Paczkowski's earlier evaluations of the overblown and incompetent bureaucracy that was created in the years 1945-1952 in Poland in order to replace previous forms of management in both the economy and administration at large (Paczkowski, p. 156).

[1] Paczkowski Andrzej. Pół Wieku Dziejów Polski: 1939-1989. Warsaw: PWN, 2007.

[2] Korowicz, Marek Stanisław. W Polsce Pod Sowieckim Jarzmem. London: Katolicki Ośrodek Wydawniczy Veritas, 1955.