Klingender Zeuge – Bernd Alois Zimmermann, „Ekklesiastische Aktion“ – gruppenanalytisch gehört

Abstract

Summary Sounding Witness – Bernd Alois Zimmermann „Ekklesiastische Aktion“ Group Analytically Listened The last work of the Cologne composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann („Ekklesiastische Aktion“, 1970) is interpreted in a group-analytical way as his musical announcement of suicide. Suicide can basically be understood in a group-analytical perspective as a group process personalized in the protagonist. In Zimmermann’s case, the repulsed response of post-fascist West German society to his traumatic experiences as a Wehrmacht soldier in World War II plays a decisive role. The „Ekklesiastische Aktion“ can be understood as a sounding Wehrmacht exhibition both in the presentational symbolism of its tonal language and in the discursive symbolism of the texts used in it. In retrospect, the work makes up performatively for exactly what its composer lacked and drove him to suicide: the emotional response to his war traumatizations by the audience.