The Artists’ Cemetery

Abstract

The development of a public commemorative culture in East Germany extended into the development of new funerary rites for cultural figureheads and everyday citizens. Chapter 5 charts the ruling party’s efforts to restructure the spaces and sounds of national sepulchral culture by examining the funerals for six artists buried at a plot reserved for members of the Academy of the Arts in East Berlin. Each artist was honored with a state funeral, aimed not to console the bereaved, but to canonize the deceased as socialist heroes. At these events, the deceased’s friends and family made deliberate efforts to reclaim their legacy within the space of the cemetery itself, and continued these personal reflections through musical homage. In doing so, these mourners were continually renegotiating their relationship to the deceased. This chapter thus shows how the relationship between private mourning and public commemoration was in a state of negotiation throughout East Germany’s forty-year existence.