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Musik in zwei Diktaturen: Verfolgung von Komponisten unter Hitler und Stalin.

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Musik in zwei Diktaturen: Verfolgung von Komponisten unter Hitler und Stalin. By Friedrich Geiger. New York: Barenreiter, 2004. [274 p. ISBN 3-7618-1717-7. [euro]34.95.] Music examples, bibliography, index.

The reason for comparing the persecution of composers in two societies would seem to be obvious: if one can demonstrate that the similarities between the societies are compelling enough to make a comparison worthwhile, then the act of comparison illuminates similarities and differences in enforcing ideology, in reacting to similar (or the same) phenomena, etc. Ideally, comparison also throws into sharp relief essential features of the societies that would be easier to overlook if the societies were studied individually. Before even demonstrating how the regimes of Hitler and Stalin are suitable for comparison, however, Geiger makes a point of beginning his work by noting that comparison of only a single, well defined aspect of the two societies is a means for German social sciences to avoid recourse to theories of totalitarianism that concern themselves with abstract models and systems to the exclusion of circumstances and motivations. It also avoids the wholesale comparison of regimes, the problematic nature of which Geiger conjures up by the passing but telling mention of Ernst Nolte and the Historikerstreit--namely, the risk of being perceived as relativizing or even excusing Nazi atrocities (assuming the writer did not have the intention of doing so outright).

The implication would seem to be: If the historiography of German music is to be taken seriously outside of the field of musicology (or even, increasingly, within it), then it must interpose itself into recent trends in the discourses of the German social sciences. Whether this is in fact the motivation behind Geiger's selection of topic or method is, of course, ideally irrelevant (although one notes that the work is in fact his Habilitationsschrift for the Cultural Studies Department at the University of Hamburg), and it is to his credit that his investigation of Soviet musical phenomena is not conducted as a mere foil to that of the German ones. In fact, his strong reliance on Russian archival material--despite his modest but no doubt true observation that the...

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