More than almost any other art form, music became the central testing ground for answering the question of whether and how culture had survived the break in civilization under National Socialism in the period after 1945. In home and foreign affairs, it functioned as an "uncontaminated" complement to literature as a field that was politicized early on, especially by political remigrants. Friedrich Meinecke's concept of the Goethe Societies ("Reading Goethe, Listening to Bach") had already brought music and literature together and functionalized them as "art" in terms of "Vergangenheitspolitik". It was only through this functionalization and the associated symbolic charging after the Second World War that the idea of the (musical) work of art attained widespread acceptance, which its opponents in particular criticize today as the hegemonic figure of thought of the 19th century. The project deals with the consequences of the cultural and political constellation after the Second World War for German (music) culture.

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