Lecture (co-sponsored) | Martha Sprigge | Widowhood, Archives, and the Musical Work of Mourning in Postwar Europe

Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture

"Widowhood, Archives, and the Musical Work of Mourning in Postwar Europe"
Martha Sprigge | Musicology | University of California, Santa Barbara

Presented by Dept. of Music with co-sponsorship from Dept. of Philosophy / Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture / Center for Faculty Development and Excellence

This presentation examines how gendered mourning practices have shaped the historiography of German art music after World War II. It focuses on widows in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany). Artistic widows in the GDR took on considerable emotional labor in the wake of their husbands’ deaths: they maintained their husbands’ gravestones, oversaw their archives, held together their artistic communities, and sustained their ideological commitments. Several were renowned artists in their own right, including Helene Weigel (actress married to dramaturg Bertolt Brecht) and Ruth Berghaus (theater director married to composer Paul Dessau). These women were sidelined in their husbands’ state funerals, because the East Germany’s memorial culture was masculine, stoic, and militarized. Yet the labor of mourning was feminized through archival practice, as widows tended to their husband’s material traces. In this way, women played a critical role in establishing the collections that consecrated their spouses in a national artistic canon. By examining their labors of mourning in depth, this presentation not only reframes the history of postwar German art music around women, but also demonstrates how longstanding cross-cultural feminine mourning customs were adapted to suit new socio-political contexts in the East German state.