Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 3, No. 2, Summer/Autumn 2018 | Page 13

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
sies into the Goethe-Institute (Kathe 2005:149). As a result, the Goethe-Institute grew
rapidly in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A significant number of programs, however,
remained in the German Foreign Office where traditional views of the value of cultural
diplomacy predominated under a conservative government until 1967. With the beginning
of the first Great Coalition (Große Koalition) between the center-right Christian
Democratic Union (CDU) and its sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) on the
one hand and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) on the other, the Foreign
Office for the first time fell under the control of the Social Democrats. Consequently,
the comparatively liberal cultural diplomacy by intermediary organizations such as the
Goethe-Institute, which had launched a jazz diplomacy program in 1963/1964 (Dunkel
2014), was contrasted by conservative approaches to cultural diplomacy predominating
in the Foreign Office.
As this article argues, the Foreign Office regarded cultural diplomacy primarily as the mediation
of culture-based prestige (see Fosler-Lussier 2015:23–46). This conceptualization
of cultural diplomacy had implications for the evaluation of musical practices within
the German Foreign Office, leading to music diplomacy programs that emphasized
top-down processes rather than supporting bottom-up music education programs and
cultural exchange. While the Foreign Office’s programs contributed to a West German
strategy of image building, they were unapt to support democratic structures abroad.
On the contrary, the Foreign Office primarily measured the value of music education
programs by the extent to which they contributed to the Foreign Office’s primarily goals:
the reaffirmation of German musico-cultural achievement, the visibility of West German
culture (“Présence de l’Allemagne”), and the forging of alliances with governments
of other nations as part of larger Cold War strategies. As such, West German music diplomacy
of the 1960s was characterized by a disregard for both local audiences and democratic
participation. It contributed to what historian Michael Latham has described as
the ideology and practice of modernization�a Cold War Western political project that
attempted to increase the Western sphere of influence by supporting stability rather than
equality and democratic participation (Latham 2011).
These goals were true not only for the organization of concerts by renowned West German
musicians, but also for music education programs. During the mid-1960s, the
Goethe-Institute’s culture department discussed a potential shift in its cultural programming,
seeking to establish music education as an additional strategy in its cultural diplomacy.
The Goethe-Institute’s cultural programming department described its reasoning
behind this shift in the following way:
Longer stays in developing countries, where lecturers, but also musicians
and theater ensembles can provide important educational aid, are
particularly desirable. One might object that such educational aid is directed
only to a small circle of experts�to educated, or at least pre-educated
people, to an elite. However, since the participants and their practical
work can profit tangibly from lectures and seminars, the effects are
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