In one of the classic texts on German collective memory after the Second World War, The Inability to Mourn, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich examine the emotional blockage they saw as afflicting Germans after the losses they had suffered and felt, and the losses they had inflicted and found difficult to acknowledge. The inability to mourn after the war, however, had been preceded by an official unwillingness to mourn during the war, as the Nazi regime did not want to recognize any public ceremonies that might suggest final victory was in doubt. The accumulating losses on the battlefield, including deaths and disappearances that ultimately reached perhaps four to five million, the deaths (perhaps half a million) in the ever-more-devastating air raids—forget the slaughter inflicted on others, which provoked no grief even if it troubled some citizens—could not entirely be ignored. In this essay I examine the way in which the classical music of mourning assumed a twilight existence during the war. Music became a contested field of control between citizens facing the grief from bombing and the deaths of their loved ones, and Goebbels’s propaganda ministry, with often specific instructions to the local Nazi Party on when and how to commemorate the dead.

In The Allied Air War and Urban Memory: The Legacy of Strategic Bombing in Germany, Jörg Arnold suggests that the Nazi state did not develop “commemorative practices that would endow the violent death of civilians with meaning.” And in a pattern Arnold has noticed in several German cities, as the casualties increased, the number of commemorations of civilian deaths dropped. The failure to mourn is most evident after the fall of Stalingrad, which effectively reversed the sweeping German victories in the Second World War. In Kassel, the focus of his archival research, the party discontinued funeral services after the summer of 1943. This was less a change in policy than the consolidation of a position implied in the very nature of National Socialism, which honored, rather than mourned, sacrifice for the state. For example, the Magdeburgische Zeitung reported about one commemoration, “This was not a funeral ceremony in the usual sense of the word. Beyond pain and suffering, it demonstrated the will and determination to draw new strength from their sacrifice for the struggle for victory.”