Chapter 9

Singing in the Promised Land

Black Musicians in the German Democratic Republic

The crowds were ecstatic, near hysterical, when the African American entertainer and socialist activist Paul Robeson stepped onto the podium at Humboldt University in East Berlin to receive his peace prize and honorary doctorate. Plans to bring Robeson to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) had begun in earnest in 1958, and finally in October 1960 Robeson and the East Germans who had supported him were able to celebrate the fruits of their labor. After being serenaded by university professors in full regalia with an arrangement of the nineteenth-century abolitionist song “John Brown’s Body,” Robeson gave the Berlin crowd exactly what they wanted: his booming voice echoed through the loudspeakers, and beautiful melodies washed over the adoring crowd.¹

Robeson’s visit to East Germany in 1960 symbolized an exchange between a version of the United States that the US State Department was uncomfortable representing and a new nation-state (the GDR) whose existence most nations refused to recognize. The GDR praised Robeson as a “son of a former slave” and civil rights hero, and music lovers and party officials alike found in him a cultural ambassador who testified to the virtues of international socialism. Yet their admiration for Robeson also reveals a distinctly East German ideology that promoted a certain kind of Black authenticity over others. Robeson characterized the kind of African American musician that was acceptable to his East German audience: a jovial, anticapitalist folk-singing giant who was unswervingly loyal to the GDR.

Performances by African American musicians in the communist East German state provide us with a window into GDR views on music and race in an officially antiracist state.² East Germans preached and practiced solidarity with African Americans because they viewed them as victims of colonialism, capitalism, and institutionalized racism. The GDR eagerly welcomed African American musicians behind the Iron Curtain because their backgrounds and credentials legitimized East Germans’ musical endeavors. Black musicians such as Robeson, Aubrey Pankey, George Byrd, and Ella Lee supported East Germans’ visions of the United States and strengthened the GDR’s international status as a cosmopolitan state that was welcoming to others.

The East German state, I argue, composed its own ideology of racial harmony and universalism in classical music. Music critics, cultural leaders, and some Black musicians developed the following position: that East Germany was the most suitable state for Black musicians to achieve their full potential. Released from the strictures of capitalism and imbued with the ideals of universalism and international solidarity, only in communist East Germany could Western art music truly reach people of all races. Here, in their antiracist state, they avowed that Black musicians could finally fulfill their destiny as artists of high culture and join an international brotherhood of musicians.

But what East German audiences practiced was different from what musical and political elites preached. East German reception of Black musicians reveals the limitations of their claims to international solidarity. However much GDR officials identified Black musicians as part of the global struggle for communism, they also created racial interpretations of their music-making. East German attitudes toward Black Americans came to the fore especially when Black musicians performed German music. However sincerely members of the German Socialist Unity Party (SED) may have supported the freedom of African American musicians to perform German music, East German listeners and music critics expressed the opposite just as sincerely: they were either uninterested in or confused by these musicians’ performances of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. In fact, music critics were often skeptical or even resentful of Black performances of German music in cities such as Rostock, Halle, Leipzig, and Berlin. In reviews, personal letters, and interviews, East German critics, musicians, and producers opined that they would much rather have a Black musician sing spirituals for them, play an exotic character in an opera, or perform “Black music” with other Black international residents of the state (such as Ghanaians and Kenyans) than perform German music. Local responses to Black performers of German music reveal the limitations of East Germany’s public discourse of international solidarity and of music-making as a form of community building. The musicians in this chapter whose performances listeners applauded the most enthusiastically either fit preexisting Marxist paradigms of oppression and struggle or evoked romantic and inaccurate depictions of African American culture.

Racism and Antiracism in the GDR

Much like in the Federal Republic of Germany, the myth of zero hour (Stunde null) after the collapse of the Nazi racial state prevented historians for decades from seeing how race functioned in the postwar period. Although public discourse asserted for a long time that racism died alongside Hitler, race thinking in both East and West Germany did not disappear. In the case of East Germany, it was the state’s vows and public declarations of antiracism, rooted in anti-imperialism and anticapitalism, that masked its own racial history.³ In other words, fascism, not racism, was the root cause of pain or suffering around the world. From the state’s beginnings until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the horrors of racism in East Germany took a rhetorical backseat to the evils of fascism, capitalism, and imperialism that the SED claimed it was fighting. GDR constructs of racism were complicated by the frequent declaration that East Germans had eliminated the existence of racism in their society. They were the good guys, protesting the racist practice of segregation in the United States, supporting the quests of African nations for political and economic independence from their European oppressors, and calling for an international brotherhood of racial equals in the name of communism. After having vanquished the evils of racism through their antifascist measures at home, East Germans were now eager to join the fight to liberate others abroad.

Unfortunately, the SED’s stated commitment to fighting fascism and its proclamations that racism posed little threat to the state meant that the party was often ill equipped to deal with acts of racism when they occurred on East German soil.⁴ Moreover, its handling of minorities and outsiders often betrayed its public sentiments of goodwill. Although the GDR banned racism in its 1949 constitution, the persecution of Jews and other ethnic minorities nonetheless continued.⁵ Racial and ethnic minority groups faced a double-edged sword, hearing one thing in public but experiencing another in their daily lives. The GDR publicly embraced foreign nationals who had immigrated to East Germany (by the time the Berlin Wall fell, there were almost 200,000) but had trouble acknowledging that foreigners were frequent targets of violence in their state.⁶ As late as 1989, the SED celebrated its own panoptic rainbow of ethnic minorities from Angola, Algeria, Cuba, and Mozambique while continually barring marriages between foreign workers and East German citizens. And although the rise of neo-Nazi and other racist hate groups was undeniable, their activities remained shrouded in silence as people proclaimed loudly in public that their state had conquered racism.

Strikingly, amid the silence shrouding racism in East Germany, praise for African Americans rang very loud, from the Palace of the Republic in the capital city of Berlin to local elementary schools in the countryside. East German definitions of African American identity demonstrate how essential constructs of race were to the GDR (even if state officials and party dignitaries were unwilling to admit this fact). African Americans became important to the state’s legitimation, and, according to Sara Lennox, were regularly “appropriated into political narratives that promoted East German visions of society.” African Americans became part of “a broader, undifferentiated vision of humanity,” and the SED argued that “unlike imperialist powers, the GDR considered Black people as human beings destined for the happy socialist future already achieved in the GDR.”⁷

The GDR published volumes of African American poetry and literature by writers such as Richard Wright and Langston Hughes as well as memoirs by Robeson and tracts by W.E.B. Du Bois. They invited African American intellectuals, entertainers, activists, and artists to their state and awarded many of them medals of freedom or peace. A ninety-year-old Du Bois—who had lost much of his intellectual credibility in the United States as a result of his communist sympathies—received the East German Peace Medal in 1958, and Robeson received the honor in 1960.⁸ The East German–Black American relationship was symbiotic, for African Americans also needed East Germans. African Americans enjoyed traveling to East Germany because the state provided them a forum where their viewpoints, many of which flew directly in the face of American Cold War propaganda, found a receptive audience. Angela Davis, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other Black Americans gained new audiences in East Germany. People were eager to accept their messages and shame the West for its current social conditions that kept Black people under the oppressive thumbs of colonialism and Jim Crow.

Yet GDR discussions of musicians such as Robeson and Pankey illuminate how much they believed in romanticized notions of African Americans that bore little resemblance to the realities African Americans experienced in the latter half of the twentieth century. East Germans painted a Weberian image of African American laborers toiling away on the Mississippi. Their depictions preserved them in the late nineteenth century, as if Black Americans were trapped in a music box that continually played “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” As Lennox has argued, East Germans saw African Americans as useful exercises to educate their citizens on the history of Marxism. Schoolteachers informed their students about the history of American slavery to teach them of the evils of capitalism and the struggles Black Americans still faced to overcome institutionalized racism. By framing African American history and identity in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century language, East Germans often relied on much older historical depictions of African Americans to praise them. These antiracist sentiments also made it difficult for East Germans to relate to African Americans who did not correlate to their depictions.

Robeson’s own trip to East Berlin in 1960 illustrates exactly what the GDR portrayal of the ideal African American looked like. A committed socialist who had experienced an awakening of his political consciousness in the 1930s, Robeson firmly believed that the African American struggle against racism, discrimination, and economic oppression could be overcome by throwing off the chains of capitalism and racist Western imperialism.⁹ Robeson’s first visit to the USSR in 1934 proved to be a life-altering event; during his visit, he said, “Here, I am not a Negro but a human being for the first time in my life … I walk in full human dignity.”¹⁰

Robeson’s views went against the United States’ cultural and political agenda in the Cold War. Although the US State Department had been sending African American musicians to Europe frequently to combat international concerns about the country’s institutionalized racism, they attempted to control the message of racial (in)equality in the United States by controlling who could travel abroad on behalf of the United States. Musicians such as the pianist Natalie Hinderas were ideal musical ambassadors because they fostered an image of Black respectability and American patriotism. A prim and proper Marian Anderson singing a Schubert lied in Austria was one thing, but an outspoken Robeson promoting the political worldview of the enemy and proclaiming that the United States was being held hostage by Jim Crow was quite another. To prevent him from touring, the US government stripped Robeson of his passport from 1950 until 1958. After successfully suing the United States to regain permission to travel abroad, Robeson toured Europe between 1958 and 1961 under an international campaign called “Let Paul Robeson Sing.”¹¹

When Robeson traveled to the promised land of East Germany in October 1960, he met an audience eager to confirm that the legends surrounding the Black activist and performer were true. GDR newspaper articles as far back as 1949 had consistently portrayed the concert singer as a Black giant who soulfully sang the “songs of his people.” His musical performances were both profound and simple, rooted in the earthiness of the American South and the struggles of enslaved people. Calling Robeson the “Black [St.] Francis” in one headline, the East German writer Stephan Hermlin reported in hagiographic language on an encounter he had with Robeson at a restaurant in Warsaw in 1949, for example. He marveled at Robeson’s “dark face, one of the most animated, sage faces that I know.” According to Hermlin, Robeson had near supernatural abilities to soothe the audience: “[Robeson] looked ahead, laid his knife and fork on the table, and scrutinized everyone in our circle. He began to sing with some restraint, with an unforgettable dark, melting voice that distinguishes his voice from all others.”¹² Much of this language echoed earlier decades of music criticism, fixating on the perceived darkness of both the Black singer’s skin color and his voice.

Moreover, the account also assigns an almost supernatural quality to Robeson’s singing abilities. According to Hermlin, when Robeson sang “Water Boy” and “Moorsoldaten,” everyone, including the waiter, stopped what they were doing to hear him. The image that Hermlin depicts next is one of a Black prophet singing children to sleep as mothers laid themselves at his feet: “In the monstrous heat sat a mother at Robeson’s feet, her children—with shoulders that drooped with exhaustion—at her bosom, their eyes big and dreaming in the evening light.” When Robeson sang “Curly Headed Baby” for the group of weary travelers, Hermlin writes, “in this moment, I saw, I saw it quite clear, that one of the children [gently fell asleep] in its mother’s lap … Robeson continued to sing under the evening sky, with the children at his feet, a dark St. Christopher, a Black St. Francis.”¹³ This early portrayal of Robeson turns him into saint capable of calming stormy waters with his voice.

During Robeson’s visit to East Germany, both the cultural ministry in charge of his tour and the East German press presented Robeson as a kind, soulful, musical giant, thereby making him an acceptable socialist commodity to musical audiences. They rolled out the red carpet for their “Black brother,” built him a special big bed for the duration of his stay, and assigned him a private doctor and bodyguard (who was shorter than Robeson but who jokingly said he could still leap in front of Robeson’s heart).¹⁴ The East German press and the culture ministry arranged a photograph depicting Robeson with a small (white) eight-year-old girl named Anka who asks him to stay in the GDR. The composition of the image highlights the contrast between the large Black “Negro singer” and the innocent child. The caption that the Berliner Zeitung am Abend utilized under the image simply reads, “Paul Robeson, Your Big Black Friend.”¹⁵ Such verbal gestures, Layne argues, often functioned as mechanisms to contain “the fear of the Other.”¹⁶ It was necessary to present Robeson as friendly, admirable, and, above all, harmless.

Robeson’s visit allowed East Germans to indulge in nineteenth-century Romantic portrayals of African Americans in particular and Blackness more generally. On the evening of Robeson’s arrival into East Germany, for example, a Berliner ensemble offered a concert program featuring “Negro music” to their audience at the Volksbühne Berlin. Music critics placed the music of the evening within the political narrative of slavery and oppression. “Black music,” according to the Berliner Zeitung am Abend, sounded like “melancholy, sadness, and restrained rage against the white robber.”¹⁷ Located “deep in the American South,” and emitted out of the “body and tragedy of Negro slaves,” the “Negro music” performed that evening expressed adversity and redemption. Much of their vocabulary was similar to nineteenth-century portrayals of the Fisk Jubilee Singers.

For Robeson’s Liederabend in East Berlin, he sang works by Bach, Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, Modest Mussorgsky, and Hanns Eisler; a Chinese folk song; a fighting song of the Warsaw Ghetto; and Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s “Ol’ Man River” (his most popular song) to a packed house. Robeson’s art, many declared, was the “real thing,” a musical expression of freedom from the capitalist and imperialist oppression of the American South. Through his soulful performance, Robeson successfully brought to East Germany the song of the Negro, the Neue Zeit gushed, whose music “reaches not only aesthetes and friends of music but speaks to the hearts of men [as well].”¹⁸ In other words, Robeson’s musicianship—like Anderson’s in the 1930s—had universal appeal. East Germans praised Robeson and other Black musicians for singing to them the unique and separate story of African Americans, one that was altogether comfortably un-German and foreign. African American music, Robeson’s tour confirmed, was based on slavery and Black labor, evoking a solemnity and ethnic melancholy. East Germans celebrated his music for its perceived inherent socialist message while also praising it for its differences separating it from the German music of Bach and Schumann. Robeson embodied everything the GDR needed from Black musicians: an exotic spectacle who could be explained by Marxist depictions of the American South and who promoted international socialism.

Figure 28. Paul Robeson meets with an eight-year-old East German girl and her Black baby doll. Before meeting Robeson, she had written him a letter pleading with him to stay in the GDR, writing, “When you’re in America, I’m always afraid for you.” Newspapers such as the Berliner Zeitung am Abend disseminated this image with the caption, “Paul Robeson, Your Big Black friend.” Bundesarchiv, Bild 183–76870–0001 / photo: Ulrich Kohls.

Composing a Universal Brotherhood: German Music in the GDR

In his memoir on growing up as an American in the GDR, the white American émigré Joel Agee could still recall his experience watching Aubrey Pankey perform German music in Rostock:

Pankey’s performance of German lieder for shipyard workers in Rostock illuminates how much German music was at the foundation of the East German state.²⁰ After 1945 and in the wake of Nazism, music became an important tool for refashioning German identity. Broadcasting music by Beethoven and Mendelssohn, East Berlin’s culture ministry believed in the 1940s and 1950s that musical performance was a powerful way to destroy fascism and encourage socialism. Moreover, Pankey’s performance speaks to the GDR’s commitment to disseminate high culture and art music to the masses.²¹ The state intentionally promoted a variety of musical concerts and programs to create the kind of socialist musical life from which they believed their citizens could benefit.²² To that end, farmers, workers, youth groups, and other members of the socialist state were encouraged to create choirs, sing mass songs, and participate in East German musical culture. They held on to a belief first vocalized in the late nineteenth century that all classes of society should have equal access to the music of Germany’s great composers.²³ In so doing, GDR musicians and dignitaries often promoted an image of their nation of music-makers as more community oriented than the decadent West. People in the countryside and in the city, they posited, should equally celebrate the music of Beethoven and be able to hear the music of Bach.²⁴

The music of Bach, Beethoven, and, in the case of Pankey’s performance, Schubert, mattered greatly to the East German state’s legitimation efforts and attempts to foster national pride. Lacking the political legitimacy and strength of its western neighbor, the SED relied on culture to bolster its claims that the GDR was the “real” Germany. The GDR’s past became essential to the culture ministry’s definitions of the present. As they turned to historical narratives to locate their present, GDR officials used historical composers to cultivate, in Laura Silverberg’s words, “an image of the GDR as the exclusive heir to German musical heritage.”²⁵ Writers such as Frank Schneider, an East German who published in the journal Musik und Gesellschaft, penned maudlin sentiments that tied Beethoven’s musical legacy and perceived political activism directly to the goals of the East German state. Beethoven, according to Schneider, was not worthy of praise simply because he had been a masterful composer; rather, he had entered the realms of greatness because he had been “one of the early fighters for the principles and ideals that we have made reality in the conditions of the socialist society.”²⁶

In the process of fortifying their Germanness, the SED reimagined the German masters as national heroes whose fiery music foreshadowed the creation of their glorious East German state.²⁷ Members of the SED worked tirelessly to create a cultural heritage that reflected a teleological arc of progressive humanism from the Enlightenment to the origins of the GDR by way of the 1848 revolutions.²⁸ Bach became a proto-revolutionary, Beethoven a fighter against the aristocracy, and Wagner stood as a champion of socialist revolutionary ideals.

What they created, in other words, and what Black musicians such as Pankey performed, was their own national canon of music. Rehabilitating German composers such as Wagner, Handel, and others, musicologists and music critics in the GDR such as Ernst Hermann Meyer insisted that their revisionist histories of music were more accurate than those of the recent past.²⁹ What made these figures great was their connection to the people, their strong, individual commitments to Enlightenment humanism, and their music, which functioned as a mirror of the German people.³⁰ To that end, the culture ministry dictated in 1964 that the purpose of missions of cultural diplomacy should be to “spread the truth abroad that the GDR is the true protector and champion of the great cultural heritage of the German nation.”³¹

This new narrative of German musical universalism thrived in the small but active world of East German musicology and music criticism. In the case of music, the GDR was the true heir. The Nazi past represented a horrifying betrayal of German musical values, and the decadent West across the Iron Curtain had departed from them, instead becoming a musical snake pit of formalism and Americanism. East German musical culture, released from the bonds of capitalism and fascism, maintained a civic duty to uphold the great musical masters of Central Europe and share their music with the world.

The GDR as a Promised Land to Black Musicians?

The GDR’s discourses of antiracism and German musical universalism syncretized into an ideological position unique to the East German state: only in the GDR were Black classical musicians fully able to perform the music they loved dearly for an audience who appreciated their worth. The reasons for this were twofold: first, East Germany offered the same historical tradition of musical excellence that traced back to the times of Bach; and second, East Germany offered Black musicians political freedom from racial persecution.

The case of the African American conductor George Byrd captures East German formulations of Black success and German musical uplift in the GDR. Byrd was a successful guest conductor in East Germany between 1950 and 1990 who led orchestras in Berlin, Halle, Magdeburg, Eisenach, Jena, Schwerin, Leipzig, and Dresden. A Juilliard-trained musician, he rose to prominence in 1955 after attending a workshop led by Herbert von Karajan. Byrd made frequent public declarations of his love and admiration for the Austro-German musical canon (German Romantic composers were his favorites), which the Sächsische Neueste Nachrichten highlighted in their 1961 interview. “You are coming to Dresden,” the interviewer begins, “with an emphatically classical German program. May we ask where your musical bond to German classical music traces back to?” After Byrd responds that he first fell in love with German music at Juilliard and then later under Herbert von Karajan (who in particular expanded his love of Schubert and Schumann), the reporter circles back again to Byrd’s insistence on performing German music. “We are delighted,” he told Byrd, “about how highly you regard and how well you know our composers.”³² The reporter’s use of the possessive (“our composers”) suggests that music and German national belonging were intertwined—and out of Byrd’s natural musical range.

Wherever Byrd went, his performances inspired conversations about his commitment to performing classical (and mostly German) music. Following a performance of works by Handel, Debussy, and Brahms in Magdeburg in December 1959, music critics praised Byrd’s handling of the orchestra, reporting that Byrd “is very familiar with the German-speaking world.”³³ The Dresden newspaper Die Union remarked that “as a master apprentice of Herbert von Karajan, [Byrd] has shown a remarkable intimacy with German music. Above all he honors Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms, his special ‘favorite.’ ”³⁴ Some figured that Byrd’s uncanny familiarity with German music and German culture could be related to his remarkable language capabilities, implying in the process that Black people speaking German was unusual: “Byrd speaks a very good German; his language skills are there not just grammatically, but rather [he has acquired] everything from the basis of sound.”³⁵ Upon attending a performance of Byrd’s in which he conducted music by Haydn, Schumann, and Hector Berlioz in Leipzig, the critic for Der Morgen remarked that the conducting of this “dark-skinned, slender, spirited artist” was not “any more foreign than concepts of performances under German conductors.” Byrd was an ideal interpreter of German music because of his cultural immersion in the German-speaking world.

But Byrd was more than an authentic interloper of German music. He was proof that the possibility for cultural authenticity and musical mastery lay within the Black diaspora’s grasp—but only in East Germany. Musicians like Byrd, critics argued, had opportunities to perform in the GDR that were unavailable to them in the United States. Following a performance that Byrd conducted on the 216th anniversary of the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester, the music critic for the popular and arts-heavy daily newspaper Leipziger Volkszeitung praised Byrd. “Just twenty years ago,” the critic writes, “something like this would have been inconceivable. People filled with racial hatred would have made such a guest performance impossible, just as when they chased Gewandhaus Kapellmeister Bruno Walter away because he was a Jew.”³⁶ Unlike West Germany, East Germany had overcome its history of racial hatred.

Byrd’s performance in Leipzig, the critic believed, also had to be placed within the context of Black people’s struggles against capitalism and colonialism. Using the same line of thinking as Adorno and other German critics in the 1920s, the critic writes, “when people in capitalistic countries acknowledge—by sheer necessity—the musicality of Negroes to some extent, do not forget that the Negroes (with a few exceptions) still have the dubious privilege of playing in jazz bands as exploited and showcased objects. Only very few Negroes succeeded in obtaining a solid music education and an opportunity for development of their respective capabilities.”³⁷ Black people in the capitalist West, in other words, were limited to playing jazz instead of the more “elevated” music that the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester offered its listeners.³⁸

To this critic, Black concertizing in East Germany was evidence that Black people could finally achieve their full potential—but only under socialism. “At the 16th Gewandhaus concert [of the season],” the author writes, “George Byrd proved what high musicality the Negro possesses in the interpreting of classical music from European nations. This [high musicality] can only let us guess what other achievements we can expect from the Negroes, once their full equality exists not just on paper in the USA, and once the still oppressed countries of Africa have ultimately freed themselves from colonial slavery.”³⁹ This common belief in Black people’s eventual-but-never-realized progress confirms Elaine Kelly’s argument that, “in the context of solidarity art, Black and Asian heroes could be imagined as preterm incarnations of the fully developed socialist being. There was little scope, however, for more complex or embodied realizations of the other.”⁴⁰ At the same time, however, the author tapped into a historical discourse of Black potentiality that stretched all the way back to the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ arrival into Germany in 1877. Since at least the nineteenth century critics have suggested that Black people were capable of great musical achievement; yet that moment of arrival never seems to come.

Byrd’s reception is no different from this established mode of thought. Although the decks had been stacked against Byrd as an African American growing up under racist Jim Crow, he had remarkably overcome the limitations imposed on Black musical achievements. Thankfully, the writer implied, East Germany was different from the capitalist West, because only in the GDR could Black people break away from the constraints of capitalism, fight against the culture industry, and achieve new musical heights. Only in antifascist and antiracist nations such as the GDR could Black people finally accept the gift of German music and all of the promises of racial uplift that came with it.

In these formulations, East Germany was the most suitable place for Black classical musicians to do what they wished. And perhaps sometimes it was. Take, for instance, the premiere of Ella Lee in the title role of Tosca at the Komische Oper Berlin in East Berlin in November 1961. Only a few short months after Grace Bumbry sang as the exotic “Black Venus” in Bayreuth, Lee’s debut on the other side of the Berlin Wall broke new ground in the opera world, albeit quietly and lacking international fanfare.

Puccini’s opera Tosca tells the tale of a young woman named Floria Tosca caught between love and politics in Napoleonic-era Italy. Desperate to save her beloved from a vengeful and obsessed Baron Scarpia, Tosca strikes a deal with Scarpia to ensure her lover’s freedom in exchange for submitting to Scarpia’s sexual advances. Tosca falls victim to Scarpia’s ploy to kill her lover anyway. Unable to rescue the man she loves from political execution, she takes her own life rather than let Scarpia’s evil schemes succeed.

Ella Lee’s performance differed considerably from Grace Bumbry’s premiere for three reasons. First, Lee’s performance as Tosca was a much bigger role than Bumbry’s Venus. Unlike Venus in Bayreuth, which required Bumbry to be on stage for approximately thirty minutes, the majority of the opera rested on Lee’s shoulders. The part of Tosca is, as operagoers call it, a diva role. Singing one of the most popular numbers in opera, “Vissi d’arte,” Tosca showcases a soprano’s musical talents and emotional depth.

Second, whereas Bumbry’s portrayal of Venus in Bayreuth tapped into preexisting orientalist notions of hypersexualized Black women, Lee’s time on stage as Tosca was a noticeable departure from this kind of typecasting because the opera Tosca was not a musical work featuring exotic or otherworldly characters—nor did the Komische Oper Berlin choose to portray Lee as such. The character of Tosca is, as Puccini and his librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa made her, a romanticized heroine in love with a man of noble heart.⁴¹ Julian Budden writes, “Puccini’s Tosca is a credible woman of the theater, lacking neither intelligence nor humor, and capable of genuine dignity.”⁴²

Third, the character of Tosca is at the center of a romantic love triangle as the object of two men’s attention. Beautiful, pious, and steadfastly loyal to the man she loves, Tosca is a popular figure among opera’s women.⁴³ Her beauty and grace are so great that they cause Scarpia to utter, “Tosca, you make me forget God!”⁴⁴ On stage, the two white male singers vied for Lee’s affections for reasons other than her perceived exoticism.

The GDR was eager to tout Lee’s performance as proof that their state was the most suitable to host Black classical musicians—not West Germany. Because the GDR had eliminated racism, Black opera singers such as Lee could finally pursue their musical calling. East Germany was especially keen to point out how frequently West German opera stages had improperly handled Black singers in their productions. Witnessing the scandal of Bumbry’s performance unfold in West Germany, the Berliner Zeitung reported that racist, vitriolic attacks did not happen in East Germany. Unlike West Germany, which harassed Vera Little at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in Carmen in 1952 and booed Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron at the same house, East Germans, the reporter scoffed, do not discriminate against “Negroes and Jews.” Such terrible acts of discrimination do not “exist [in the GDR], as is evidenced by the enthusiastic applause for the American Negro singer[s] Ella Lee and William Ray in the Komische Oper or [our] accommodations for Negro students.”⁴⁵ As I discussed in chapter 7, West German critics made the same rhetorical gesture: holding up African American musicians as evidence of their political progress. Both West and East Germany were eager to condemn the other, and used Black musicians as evidence of the other side’s failings.

East German critics articulated their denunciations of West Germany within the framework of both the civil rights movement and the Holocaust. One critic referenced Nazism and the Holocaust in his estimation of the Bayreuth Festival Opera House and its treatment of Bumbry. He writes that only “where the mentality is still brown [fascist] could such terrible demonstrations of German master-race thinking [Herrenmenschentums] arise.”⁴⁶ For Vera Little’s debut as Carmen in 1958, East German newspapers compared the West German audience’s treatment of her to “the discrimination [against] colored students at West Berlin high schools.”⁴⁷ They also tied her performance to American attempts at desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, arguing that West Germany was heading down the path to Jim Crow. After recounting a Ghanaian student’s experience being barred from West German establishments and comparing it to the “Carmen scandal” at the Berlin City Opera (the precursor to today’s Deutsche Oper Berlin), one op-ed piece asked “if people in West Berlin also wanted to [have] a Little Rock.”⁴⁸ East German newspapers declared that West German actions against Black opera singers were “race baiting,” plain and simple.⁴⁹ Which stages, a Neue Zeit editorial asked, are willing to celebrate Black women instead of marginalizing them?⁵⁰

Black musicians also argued that East Germany was a better environment for their musicianship. Although the conductor George Byrd never overtly expressed his political views, choosing instead to see himself as a great arbiter of German Romantic music, one of his performances nonetheless invites a political reading. In April 1961, Byrd conducted the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin (or RSB, East Berlin’s answer to the Berlin Philharmonic) in a concert program of pieces by Dmitri Shostakovich. Featuring the Soviet violinist Leonid Kogan as soloist, the RSB performed Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto in A Minor with Byrd on the podium. Performing for a sold-out crowd, the evening’s artists included an American, a Soviet Russian, and many East Germans. These performers exuded a different kind of international solidarity than the capitalist West, critics gloated. Newspapers such as the Berliner Zeitung, for example, called the event “A Concert as a Sign of the Fraternity of Peoples” (Konzert im Zeichen der Völkerfreundschaft), and they saw the evening’s festivities as a musical collaboration between several Cold War nations.⁵¹

In an interview with the Sächsische Neueste Nachrichten in 1961, a reporter asked Byrd why he was willing to risk traveling to the other side of the Iron Curtain to perform in spite of pressure from West Germany and the United States to pull out of his engagements. His answers are interesting although perhaps misleading. “Those kinds of bans don’t interest me,” Byrd replied. “I’m coming as a guest conductor to the orchestras willing to have me as a human being and as an artist. I am happy that, through the general political situation, we Negroes can breathe a bit more freely, and I see it as my great task to work for the universal art and for my oppressed brothers. Advocating for world peace is a matter dear to my heart.”⁵²

Of course this is a bit glib. Byrd, like many Black conductors during the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, was frustrated by the difficulties Black conductors encountered finding permanent positions as music directors of orchestral ensembles.⁵³ Indeed, his own career was an emblem of these frustrations: Byrd never managed to secure a permanent position as the head of an orchestra. Instead, he guest-conducted orchestras throughout Europe until his retirement. Byrd’s frequent trips to East Germany, then, serve as a reminder that the GDR offered Black Americans paid opportunities to perform regardless of their ideological commitments or political views.

When confronted about her decision to perform Tosca in the GDR, Lee also minimized the political ramifications. In an interview in 1961, Lee argued, “Art has nothing to do with politics.” Defending herself on the telephone from her West Berlin apartment, she said, “[Walter] Felsenstein offered me the first major role of my life … Anyway, I have no idea what is going on here in Berlin—I’m not interested in politics. If you wish to speak with me about art: anytime! But politics: never! Politics does not have anything to do with art!” An editor from the Berliner Zeitung disagreed: “She has no idea what she is doing. She is ready to betray not only West Berlin but also her American countrymen for her career. But she has no idea what she is doing.”⁵⁴

It seems highly doubtful that Lee had not considered the political implications of her decision to perform with the Komische Oper Berlin only one month after the erection of the Berlin Wall. It is more likely, however, that she, like Byrd, refused to be entirely forthcoming in her reasons for taking on this musical work. As an African American opera singer, would she have been able to sing the role of Tosca in the United States? Although it had become somewhat easier for African Americans to land principal roles in operas in the United States since Marian Anderson broke the racial barrier at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1954, it was still difficult to find work.

What the GDR offered, what it claimed it could give that other nation states could not or would not, was freedom from typecasting and racial pigeonholing. Positioning themselves as a musical promised land for Black talent, opera houses, symphony orchestras, and other musical institutions sometimes made radical choices in the hiring and promoting of Black musicians to show the West that there were better ways to support marginalized peoples in the world of classical music.

Performing Race on East German Stages

Nevertheless racism continued to exist and persist in East Germany. As Robeson’s own stay in East Berlin has already illustrated, the conflict between promoting antiracist ideologies within East Germany’s music scene and desiring Blackness to function and form in familiar patterns shaped German musical culture. Holding both aims and wishes at the same time was not a contradiction to audiences attending Black performances across the Iron Curtain.

The Komische Oper Berlin’s use of Black singers provides a striking example of how a musical institution and its audience could be capable of performing racism and antiracism. Led by Felsenstein, the Komische Oper Berlin was the premiere opera house in East Germany. It had won international acclaim for its commitment to creating believable music theater. “To astonish with honesty is Felsenstein’s artistic purpose,” the critic Ronald Mitchell marveled.⁵⁵ Crucial to the Komische Oper Berlin’s success was its international cast of singers. Felsenstein was relentless about hiring international guests to sing, even when it became increasingly difficult to do so.

It was the Komische Oper Berlin that showcased Lee as Tosca, and it was also the opera house that hired Lee and William Ray, an African American baritone, to perform as the fairy Queen Titania and King Oberon in Benjamin Britten’s opera, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Paired together as a Black couple, the actors embodied the supernatural world of the fairy kingdom, one visibly different from the “real” Athenian one. Always implicit but never fully articulated, their shared Blackness performed a dramaturgical function in the opera and in GDR high culture of the 1960s.

Reviews of the opera, which appeared on the front page of East German newspapers, including Der Morgen and Berliner Zeitung, also emphasized the unique pairing in the Komische Oper Berlin’s casting. Ilse Schütt, the music critic at the Berliner Zeitung am Abend, commended Felsenstein’s casting as an appropriate choice, saying that the hiring of the African American singers “fulfilled a part of the director’s concept.”⁵⁶ Heinrich Lüdicke, the critic at Neue Zeit, writes, “The elven pair Titania/Oberon were embodied by Ella Lee and William Ray, two American singers with dark skin, who in their appearance ideally match the exotic sovereign dynasty of the elf kingdom.”⁵⁷

Most important, the singers’ exotic appearance convinced listeners of the magic realism Felsenstein strove to create in the opera. The critic Ronald Mitchell, an attendee, also applauded Felsenstein for “using the Negro singers William Ray and Ella Lee as Oberon and Titania” to project the otherworldliness of the play in an outer-space atmosphere of exploding atoms, satellites, and spacecraft.⁵⁸ A Berliner critic also insisted that the Black singers’ unique voices were elemental in contributing to the fantasy-like setting of the opera. “Oberon and Titania were embodied by Negro singers William Ray and Ella Lee, and the natural tone of their voices, [especially] the first-rate, light, brilliant soprano of the female singer, lifted the two figures out of the world of men.”⁵⁹ Praising the supposedly natural tone of Black voices traces back to the time of the Fisk Jubilee Singers.

Although listeners loved Lee, whom they called “a dark-skinned artist from the USA” with a “sensual” and “dark-glowing” voice, they were not in love with Ray as Oberon.⁶⁰ Ray was a convincing Oberon on stage—until he opened his mouth to sing. Britten’s original libretto and musical score called for a countertenor in the role of Oberon, but Ray was a baritone singing a transposed version of the role. Most critics argued that the change of range obscured the musical effect Britten had intended. One critic complained that in this new production, “Oberon, the light elf king, was not a high falsetto tenor like Britten wants, but rather a grave, earthy baritone; the acoustic shade of the spheres were therewith blurred.”⁶¹ Even outright praise of Ray’s abilities still couched his performance within the framework of Britten’s original score. It was possible, one critic said, that Britten’s scoring for countertenor “hindered the [musical effect]” when transposed down to the baritone range.⁶²

If Ray made for a terrible Oberon, why, then, had Felsenstein hired him for the role? Implicit in Felsenstein’s staging, whether Felsenstein wished to admit it or not, was an assumption that placing two Black singers together was a natural pairing. Although Felsenstein rarely described the physical appearance of Ray and Lee, their race and gender nonetheless mattered to his production. Evidence suggests that Felsenstein’s gendered interpretation of the countertenor role overwhelmingly informed his reading of Britten’s opera. In short: Felsenstein did not find a countertenor role for this opera believable. In an internal memo written to the staff of the Komische Oper Berlin long before Felsenstein began working on this production, he disparaged the idea of Oberon as a countertenor. “Assigning Oberon to a countertenor is for all of us as inconceivable as casting an alto, because the love conflict of OBERON-TITANIA is the central starting point for the whole piece and its poetry; and therefore demands in every way a manly OBERON embodiment.”⁶³ Because countertenors have historically been understood as gender subversive, being tied to histories of castration and emasculation, Felsenstein could find nothing supposedly masculine in Oberon singing in a high falsetto voice.⁶⁴

Expressing again his core value that opera must convince audience members to suspend their disbelief, Felsenstein demonstrated in this internal document that he was entirely comfortable altering Britten’s work to deliver on what he thought to be a more believable portrayal of the tumultuous love affair between Titania and Oberon in their magical elf kingdom. Felsenstein desired a performance of heteromasculinity that he thought only a deep-voiced baritone could provide. Ray could be, then, the ideal singer for Felsenstein’s staging of the opera in terms of Felsenstein’s understanding of gender roles for this work.

The detail-oriented Felsenstein sent Ray a letter before the premiere asking him to make changes to his acting and singing that emphasized Felsenstein’s wish for Ray to play an assertive, hetero-masculine character in contrast to Lee’s feminine Titania. His suggestions ranged from smaller details (“Can you please pick up the flowers off the floor with your right hand? It will make it more direct and passionate.”) to ruminating on central themes in the opera. For example, Felsenstein encouraged Ray not to restrain himself during his first fight with Titania on the stage, since the fight established Oberon’s motivation for tricking Titania into falling in love with a donkey.⁶⁵ Felsenstein’s stage directions and hiring of Ray reflect his belief that it was necessary to find a more traditionally heteromasculine baritone for the role of Oberon to provide balance and symmetry to the feminine and spirited Titania.

Because Felsenstein had long discarded Britten’s request for a countertenor as the fairy king, it was easy for him to envision instead a Black baritone to pair with a Black soprano. Race remained the silent yet visible agent that sparked Felsenstein’s imagining and created public conversations on magic realism in musical theater. Further proof of Felsenstein and the Komische Oper Berlin’s belief that racial difference was essential to their production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: as they continued to stage the opera throughout the 1960s, they continually sought out African American opera singers to play the roles of Titania and Oberon.⁶⁶

The Komische Oper Berlin’s practice of Black casting to visibly authenticate a production did not dissipate. In the 1970s, they again turned to hiring two Black American singers to constantly perform the roles of Porgy and Bess in Gershwin’s opera of the same name. Prior to the Komische Oper Berlin’s premiere of the work in January 1970, all productions of Porgy and Bess in Europe had been tours sponsored by the US State Department. But the Komische Oper Berlin’s production was entirely German-led in its initiative and in its production, staffing, and staging. And the Komische Oper Berlin stated that they wanted to produce this opera to express solidarity musically with those suffering from oppression, seeing African American victimization as a result of capitalism. So the Komische Oper Berlin—now led by Götz Friedrich—took on a controversial opera that even some American opera houses still wouldn’t touch.

But they forgot about race’s power. They misunderstood or underestimated how central race and Black American culture were to the performance and reception of this work. However much they wanted race to disappear or for it to not matter, race ended up coloring the politicized production they wanted to stage. After agreeing to take on Gershwin’s “Negro opera” and deciding to translate the work into vernacular Saxon German (the song “It Ain’t Necessarily So” became “Wer’s glaubt, der ist selber dran schuld”), one of the first questions that emerged among the production staff was how to portray the characters. Although the production team stated they were against using blackface, they nevertheless smeared a coppery brownish tint on the cast. But that still was not satisfactory. Throughout the many months that the show went on, the opera house hired several different African Americans to perform the two lead roles of Porgy and Bess.⁶⁷ Implicit in hiring them was the assumption that the musicians’ Black bodies and Black voices provided in their estimation a racial authenticity to this musical performance.

The show was one of the most popular productions in East Berlin that year and was sold out for its entire run. And although critics praised Friedrich for not distracting his viewers with the question of race (which they called “of secondary importance”) and instead keeping their gaze on what really mattered (capitalist oppression), nearly all reviews focused on the perceived authentic Blackness of the opera and its performers. Race was an inescapable, unshakable element of this production and its reception. Both racially progressive and conservative in its casting, the Komische Oper Berlin was never able to escape the problems of race-based casting throughout its tenure.

Fighting Back: Aubrey Pankey Speaks Out

No figure encapsulates the tensions and contradictions of racism and musical universalism quite like the African American baritone Aubrey Pankey. Outspoken, unapologetic, and firm in his convictions that communist East Germany should be working harder to support its communities of color, Pankey led a life in East Germany battling against the racism he witnessed in East German cultural productions and in representations of African Americans. Utilizing the same rhetoric of freedom from adversity that the East German state espoused, he consistently threw their turns of phrase back in their faces. As a Black classical musician in East Germany, he argued that he should be able to pursue his musical ambitions. Yet it was the racist imagination of the East Germans that was stymieing his progress.

Pankey’s career in East Germany is an important case study because he had not only performed in German-speaking Europe prior to WWII but also lived in Germany after the war, pleading asylum in East Germany in the 1950s. He had tried for a while to find a home beyond the Iron Curtain before landing in East Berlin in 1955. After having been denied residency in France following his protestation of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (convicted of spying for the USSR), Pankey had spent several years concertizing in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania, pleading asylum in several of those countries without much success.⁶⁸

During his concert tour to Czechoslovakia in February and March of 1955, for example, Pankey pled asylum, and his asylum letter to the minister of foreign affairs in Czechoslovakia, dated February 23, 1955, reveals Pankey’s deep commitment to minority rights and socialism. As “an American citizen and especially a Black American that has continuously identified himself with the cause of peace, the rights of minorities, and most of all the oppression of Black Americans,” Pankey argued that he was especially exposed to persecution, which led to his expulsion from France in 1953. His passport, which he argued the US government had been trying to take from him since 1951, was to expire in June 1955, four months after he wrote his asylum letter. He wrote that there were several reasons why the West, and the French especially, were persecuting him and his wife, first and foremost: “Because I am a member of the American Communist Party.” He noted that he had befriended cultural representatives in various countries across the Iron Curtain and had participated in trade unions, organizations that supported communist principles, and other “peace organizations and organizations fighting against discrimination.” Because of all this involvement, he argued, the French and American communist presses were continuously reporting on his activities.⁶⁹

The Czech Communist Party inquired in Budapest on March 4 why Hungary had denied Pankey asylum and learned that “he was not granted political asylum because the relevant Hungarian authorities were not convinced that the named indeed faced discrimination or political persecution from the authorities of the United States of America.” Czech officials’ hesitancy to grant Pankey asylum concerned “whether Pankey who is a singer, and his wife, who does not speak Czech, would be able to earn a living wage. In connection with this it is also necessary to decide if Pankey would be allowed to go on concert tours to democratic countries.”⁷⁰

In the same month that Pankey applied for asylum in Czechoslovakia, members of the SED in East Germany also picked up his case. Jan Koplowitz, a German-Jewish author and member of the SED, brought Pankey’s situation to the attention of the German intellectual Karl Tümmler, who wrote an official letter to Professor Hans Pischner, musicologist and head of the department of music at the Ministry of Culture. Noting that Pankey, “a Negro with American citizenship,” was touring East Germany before embarking on a tour to Denmark, Tümmler wrote to Pischner to see if Pankey could settle in the GDR. “Above all,” Tümmler opined, “we need to examine what his life would look like after such a step. Is he the kind of artist who, for example, can live on his concerts for a longer period of time, or is he suitable to be a teacher at a music conservatory, as Koplowitz said? Politically, there will hardly be any difficulties in granting him political asylum; he isn’t a member of a party.”⁷¹ After these deliberations, Pankey’s petition was approved, and he officially became a refugee in the GDR. Following his successful appeal for asylum, Pankey settled in East Berlin with his wife and concertized throughout East Germany.

Pankey had a successful career in the 1950s and 1960s as a concert artist. But he also faced conflicts because of his decisions to perform classical music. His interactions with Germans are so fascinating because, unlike other musicians featured in this book, Pankey seemed to have had no qualms about accusing German musicians and music lovers of racism, no misgivings about documenting his experiences with race and racism in the German public. For example, in April 1959, Pankey contacted Erich Went, Albert Norden, Hanns Eisler, and Gerhart Eisler regarding his decision to boycott a concert of American music in which he had been asked to perform. His letter of complaint, which found its way to Alfred Kurella, the head of the culture ministry, accused members of the German State Opera in East Berlin of typecasting him for the role of a stereotypical Black preacher against his will. The German State Opera had planned a musical program of American works by composers with communist leanings, such as Earl Robinson, for a performance in May 1959. They invited Pankey, a trained classical singer, to perform in the composer’s cantata, The Lonesome Train, and Pankey initially believed that the invitation had been offered because of the merits of his musicianship. Pankey later refused to perform in this musical work because, “as it turns out, the invitation was extended to me not because I am a singer, or an American, but strictly because I am a Negro.”⁷²

Figure 29. Paul Robeson and Aubrey Pankey in East Berlin, 1960. Photo: Herbert Görzing © Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Paul Robeson Archive, no. 516.014.

In asking Pankey to play the African American preacher, the German State Opera administration illuminated its own ideas of what constituted African American identity. They believed, rightly or wrongly, that Pankey could lend an element of authenticity to the role that an East German performer could not. Whereas other musicians in the cantata would have singing roles, the role offered to Pankey required no singing. Pankey’s race and the perceived cultural traits associated with it superseded his nationality and his training. Writing to Gerhart Eisler, Pankey stated:

The SED’s responses, all documented internally, reveal a sincere attempt to address the problems of race, authenticity, and stereotyping in which Pankey and the German State Opera were embroiled. A few days after receiving Pankey’s letter, Norden contacted Kurella to inquire if the SED could take action against the German State Opera and the state broadcasting committee (StKfR or SRK) in charge of this performance. Kurella replied, “It appears to me that we should have also commented on behalf of the culture department of the party against this discrimination.” He continued, “The letter by the Negro singer Aubrey Pankey that you sent me gives us cause to finally take a stand against … the sadly still widespread form of racial discrimination against Negroes. When certain people hide behind their very loud working propaganda for the ‘poor Negroes’ … what they show as their culture is actually backhanded racial hatred.”⁷⁴ Kurella recognized that Pankey had been assigned a role that fit well-known stereotypes in East German culture about African Americans.

Following this exchange, Kurella wrote immediately to Pankey to thank him for making the SED aware of this discriminatory act. Although Kurella seemed unsure how to proceed, he invited Pankey to discuss the matter with him further and made clear his own opinions on race under socialism:

Pankey replied to Kurella, thanking him for understanding his situation. The concert went on as scheduled on May 22, 1959, without him. Headlines called it “Music of the True America” and “Earl Robinson—The Voice of America.”⁷⁶ The concert, officially called “New American Music,” offered a series of pieces on the theme of social justice. Pieces included “Schwarz und Weiß,” “Blues der Freiheit und Gleichheit,” a few compositions by Hanns Eisler (Robinson studied with Eisler when Eisler was in the United States), and “Casey Jones,” an American left-wing parody about railway workers.⁷⁷ The evening concluded with Robinson’s cantata About Lincoln, The Lonesome Train.⁷⁸

No music reviews mentioned Pankey, so we must assume that he did indeed follow through with his decision to boycott the performance. Hanns Eisler appeared at the beginning of the performance, however, to talk about the cantata, and critics framed it in terms of the fight for justice and racial equality between Black and white people.⁷⁹ “Blacks and whites who fight for freedom and peace,” a music critic for the Berliner Zeitung explained, “are prevented in America from having their works performed.”⁸⁰ No article mentioned Pankey’s conflict with the German State Opera; rather, they all emphatically emphasized how this performance supported the cause of African American civil rights.

This was not the only time Pankey contacted officials in the SED to protest his treatment. In February 1961, Pankey wrote again to the SED, asking that his letter be published in the Norddeutsche Zeitung. The situation closely resembled his first protest to state officials. Pankey had just given a Liederabend in Rostock, and the music critic from the Norddeutsche Zeitung criticized Pankey’s performance, arguing that Pankey should have taken on the “thankless role of prophet in the fatherland” and performed more African American spirituals, especially in the Volkstheater Rostock, a stage on which he felt at home. As a result of his poor repertoire selection, Pankey did not live up to his international reputation. “This time there were three English Baroque arias, (including Handel), five international pieces, and ten German art songs,” the critic complained. Worse, the critic argued, Pankey had only performed six spirituals for the audience. Considering that was the one genre the audience had expected him to perform, why, the critic asked, had Pankey neglected his duties?⁸¹

In many ways, this critic’s review illustrated the gulf between Pankey’s reasons for singing German music and East German listeners’ desires for an exotic, African American musical performance. “How many beautiful possibilities could there have been if Pankey had performed Negro art first and foremost and not oriented his [concert program] around the supposed wishes of a traditional concert public?” the critic asked. He was also displeased with Pankey’s performance because he believed that he fundamentally lacked the language skills, the intonation, and the expressive potential to carry the weight and significance of these German lieder, especially lieder like Schubert’s “Der Doppelgänger,” which the critic called “a central piece of German music literature.”⁸² Pankey’s only real appeal came when he performed Argentinean songs by Carlos Guastavino and French pieces by Fauré and Debussy. Moreover, the critic argued, Pankey’s performance of spirituals was his best and perhaps only real contribution to the evening’s festivities. In other words, Pankey was the most convincing, sincere, earnest, and authentic when he was not performing German music.

On February 28, 1961, Pankey responded to the critic in a letter he hoped would be published in the Norddeutsche Zeitung and circulated in the culture ministry. He noted that throughout all his travels across the globe, concertizing in London, Paris, Prague, Budapest, Beijing, Berlin, Dresden, and Vienna, he had never before responded to a music critic’s review. “Had [the critic] constricted his criticisms to my voice, my interpretation, and technique, there would be no reason for this letter,” Pankey wrote. But, he continued, “Your reporter has assigned himself the task of politically analyzing my [concert] program. His ideas regarding my political and cultural obligations towards my people are actually and effectively racist.” Pankey continued, “I consider it a serious political problem when a music critic of the GDR sings the same tune as white chauvinists. They are the ones who ask Negro singers to limit themselves to singing spirituals. This is the attitude your commentator takes. He might have other reasons for it, but the effect is the same.”⁸³

What Pankey wanted was the right to sing German music. Much as in 1932 when he faced criticism for singing German lieder in Salzburg, he defended his decision to do so. He lamented, “Any progress by a Negro artist was solely achieved through struggle—nothing was handed to him. What he has achieved encompasses the same rights that non-Negro artists are granted: when he is a singer, to have the freedom to choose what he will sing, and even to specialize in German lieder as I have done.” “Negro actors,” he continued, “were limited to the roles of servant, rapist, clown, or church singer, and Negro musicians were only allowed to play jazz. Yet even under capitalism, there was some progress, even though the fight continues, because Negro artists are still discriminated against.”⁸⁴ African Americans had fought for years, Pankey fumed, to destroy the barriers imposed on them that limited their musical opportunities. Yet in the GDR, East Germans perpetuated the same stereotypes that Pankey had faced on the other side of the Atlantic.

In response to the critic’s expression of disappointment that Pankey did not live up to his expectations of what a concert by an African American artist was supposed to entail, Pankey mentioned Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson, Todd Duncan, and Ellabelle Davis as examples of African American concert musicians who had successfully performed a variety of repertoire. His concert program was no different from these internationally acclaimed musicians, he argued, who also sang music by Handel, Schubert, and Richard Strauss in addition to performing African American spirituals. As for the reporter’s claim that Pankey had an accent when he sang German, Pankey argued that the reporter’s sentiments revealed yet another form of anti-Black racism, one rooted in nationalism:

In this regard, Pankey’s comments echo Laura Tunbridge’s argument that by the 1920s, the Liederabend was understood as an international concert program.⁸⁶ If the goal was for the singer to offer a wide selection of musical works in multiple languages and styles, Pankey had indeed accomplished that task. Pankey finds the critic’s remarks about his accent hypocritical considering how willing listeners are to hear German singers perform English folk music. His accusations confirm that when it came to German art music, East German audiences desired a uniform musical identity.

Pankey also found grave offense in the critic’s assertion that he had somehow betrayed the African American people with his Liederabend. “In my position as an artist I have always represented my people,” he argued. “When I sing, this is a part of the struggle that is happening in our world today—the struggle for the rights of every American Negro, for the rights of the African people in his home country, for the right of the oppressed to freedom and dignity. My professional and personal life is closely linked to the struggle of my people for equal rights, freedom, and peace.”⁸⁷ Pankey was a political exile and refugee in East Germany who believed in the cause of African American civil rights. How dare this critic believe otherwise?

“I am of the conviction,” Pankey concluded, “that an artist serves his people through art. I have been punished for that conviction by the authorities in my native country. That’s why I live in the German Democratic Republic, where I have found a new home.”⁸⁸ East Germany was supposed to be different from the West, Pankey implied. The citizens of the GDR were supposed to be involved in the fight against racism and its effects on people of African descent because of the ideology the GDR had been founded on and promoted. Yet in this instance, a prominent voice in GDR culture had disappointed the performer, disseminating instead the messages Pankey had been fighting against since his departure from the United States.

Pankey’s letters of protest against the German State Opera and the Norddeutsche Zeitung illustrate the types of miscommunications, misunderstandings, and misconceptions that occurred between Black people living, working, or traveling in East Germany and the white Germans who observed them. From the GDR’s foundation until the fall of the Berlin Wall, some East Germans continued to disseminate beliefs and perspectives of authentic African American music and culture that differed from the actual experiences of African Americans performing music in their country. Pankey, a singer who had survived Nazism, expulsion from France, and a few years wandering through Eastern Europe as a nomad, was aware of these tropes and he was steadfast in his refusal to accept their promulgation.

Figure 30. Aubrey Pankey holding a copy of Matthew Josephson’s biography of the nineteenth-century French writer Stendhal. Photographer unknown © Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Jan Koplowitz Archive, no. 86.

Pankey’s experiences and outspoken criticism of his treatment highlight in a way that Robeson and others could not the conflict between abstract notions of African American identity and the local encounters that threatened to undo these constructs and dispel them as myths. Pankey’s performance of German lieder illuminate two different levels of thinking at work: the socialist antiracism that the state promoted and the ongoing depictions of African American identity rooted in the pre-1945 era. He makes it possible for us to see how difficult it was for Musikfreunde who thought that they were being racially welcoming to see outside their own worldview. Pankey, a musician committed to building socialism and fighting against racism, used the language of the East German state (language he believed in) to encourage the people he encountered to rethink their own racial and musical understandings.

Race and German Music After 1989

A few months before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, George Byrd conducted the RSB at the Palace of the Republic and the Dresden Philharmonic at the Dresden Kulturpalast in what would be his last performances in the soon-to-be extinct German Democratic Republic. Byrd had been a conductor of the Dresden Philharmonic off and on for more than twenty-five years.⁸⁹ Unlike past concerts that were German-centered, this concert featured the music of Gershwin (both An American in Paris and Rhapsody in Blue), Leonard Bernstein, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Camargo Guarnieri. The evening’s activities provided the audience with much joy and excitement, according to the presses: “Everywhere the dancing demeanor dominated [the concert hall] with a distinct African American impact.”⁹⁰ Byrd and the Berlin and Dresden orchestras had given East German listeners fun, exciting evenings of American music. “Due to his vitality, his spontaneity, his special ‘feelings’ for the music of his homeland,” one critic concluded, “he guaranteed [his audience] an authentic rendition of these works.”⁹¹ Here, Byrd offered East German audiences a concert of American music that would have been right at home in New York’s Lincoln Center.

But here, Byrd also fulfills the role of the African American musical entertainer bringing an authentic interpretation of American music to the East. African American music—deemed melancholic and an expression of oppressive systems of capitalism and imperialism—fit the bill, and East Germans applauded performances that offered them the “real thing”: authentic Black experiences that could speak to their particular musical, political, and social worldview. Reporters wrote that they eagerly anticipated Byrd’s next guest appearances with both ensembles for the next season, but those performances never took place. The East German state disappeared, and its history of hosting African American musicians was quickly forgotten.

A month after Byrd’s last performances in the GDR, protestors at one of the increasingly well-attended Monday demonstrations held up a sign that said, “Germany for Germans, Blacks out of the GDR.”⁹² The two events—Byrd’s last performance and the Monday demonstration—should not be divorced from each other. Rather, they offer another illustration of how German nationalism functioned to keep Black people out of it. Black musicianship was to be celebrated in the GDR—so long as it stayed comfortably outside the bounds of German culture. Contrary to contemporary discourses that have expressed surprise at the resurgence of German nationalism after 1989, German nationalism was not a new phenomenon after all but rather an ideological continuity that remained in the region even after the end of the East German dictatorship.⁹³

East German approaches to Black classical musicians were dualistic in nature. Cultural figures and state leaders were committed to upholding a long-standing German musical tradition on the one hand and expressing a vocal commitment to antiracism and anticolonialism on the other, perhaps not recognizing just how antagonistic to each other the two ideals had become in German history. The GDR claimed that it was the nation most suited to fostering Black musicianship because of its anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, and antiracist stances. Linking their musical culture to the tradition of musical universalism grounded in the nineteenth century, GDR leaders argued that their musical canon belonged to everyone, including Black people. Their musical past was a beautiful and harmonious one, stretching back to the music of Bach and Handel and reaching to the present day through the practices of musical ensembles such as the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester. Yet the GDR’s antiracist, anticolonialist self-image starkly differed from the musical and cultural identity that the state and its listeners had constructed.⁹⁴ East German reception of African American musicians reveals how it was possible for audiences to hold multiple and even competing notions of musicianship and belonging in their minds. And East German praise and condemnation of Black musicians also reveal how the desire for Black authenticity could undo their own public commitment to musical and racial egalitarianism.