productive reception of Schiller’sideas about aesthetic education is most evident
in the politicization of music performance, stronglycriticized from liberal and
conservative perspectives, and in the democratization of musicalculture and ed-
ucationinschools and communities.Atthe same time, the cult of the classics
that inspired the 1927 Erfurt performance ofBeethoven’s“OdetoJoy,”with
one thousand workers singingonthe occasionofthe one hundredth anniversary
of the composer’sdeath, furtheredacult of musicalgenius that,accordingto
Garrett,left littleroom for the cultivation of popularmusic as an egalitarian
practice and contributed to later conflicts in the workers’choral movement.
Fig..Bundesfest of the Arbeitersängerbund
“Rheinland,”Düsseldorf,–July,
postcard. Withpermission of Archivder sozia-
len Demokratie der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.
Fig..Erstes Deutsches Arbeitersänger-
bundfest, Hannover,–June,post-
card. With permission of Historische Bildpost-
karten, Universität Osnabrück Sammlung Prof.
Dr.Sabine Giesbrecht.Once again, the resultingmusical and political conflicts and their impact on
the proclamation ofaproletarian“we”can be traced to the ideological divisions
of the lateWeimar Republic, with the development of competing emotional re-
gimes easilyequatedwith the culturalorganizations of SPD and KPD. Conceived
as an alternative to the bourgeois Deutsche Sängerbund (DSB, German Choral
Society), the workers’choral societies had first joined forces in 1877 in the loose-
ly structured Erste Allgemeine deutsche Arbeiter-Sängerbund (First General Ger-
manWorkers’Choral Society) and greatlyexpandedtheir numbers after the 1908
founding of the Deutsche Arbeiter-Sängerbund (DAS,GermanWorkers’Choral
Society). TheDASgrew to more than two hundred thousand membersduring
the 1920sand,after 1926,supported the professionalization of choral singing
and musical education through the publication of theDeutsche Arbeiter-Sänger
Zeitung.During that time,DASconductor Alfred Guttmann (1891–1945) put to-
getheravast collection of workers ’songsand published widelyavailable
On Workers Singing in OneVoice 95