Research project
within the BMBF joint project "The media heritage of the GDR"
Since the late 1980s, folk (Volksmusik( music has been a mass phenomenon in eastern Germany. Shortly before reunification, the western German Musikantenstadl achieved the second-highest viewing figures on GDR television. In the longer term, folk music programming produced by the tri-state-broadcaster Mitteldeutsche Rundfunk (MDR) proved to be the only non-fictional entertainment format from the Eastern German television landscape to achieve pan-German success.
Beyond its fan base and its role as a target of (West German) cultural criticism, Volksmusik has attracted remarkably little scholarly attention. Consequently, the extent to which thematic and cultural traditions from the GDR entertainment were adopted and transformed within the various formats remains largely unexplored, as do the reasons for the enduring popularity of this mass phenomenon. Rather obviously tradition and identity play central roles in folk music at the levels of lyrics, visual representation, and performance. Yet the meanings and functions of these categories had to be renegotiated and reconfigured in the New Federal States during the 1990s. Older regional traditions merged with identity anchors inherited from GDR, giving rise to new yet simultaneously familiar imagined communities within the transformed inter-German context. What constituted these communities, and how did they position themselves in relation to West German regionalism and the immediate state-socialist past?
These questions will be addressed through the methods of pop history, incorporating both performative and emotional dimensions (Mrozek/Geisthövel). Particular attention will be paid to the media representation of folk music, crucially, MDR’s folk music television programmes. The analysis will also extend to individuals both on and behind the screen. Key figures include presenters such as Carmen Nebel and Achim Mentzel, who successfully continued careers established in the GDR, as well as West German actors of the post-reunification transformation process, notably Henning Röhl, who created MDR’s Feste der Volksmusik series.
In the existing scholarship on the “reunification society” (Wiedervereinigungsgesellschaft), cultural-historical perspectives have generally remained underrepresented. Research on East German folk music would help to fill this gap while simultaneously challenging a historiographical tradition that has tended to focus predominantly on more or less political avant-garde forms of popular music."
