Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 3, No. 2, Summer/Autumn 2018 | Page 14

MUSIC EDUCATION AND THE PRODUCTION OF PRESTIGE
much deeper and more long-lasting than those of a prestigious concert
in front of a thousand people. 1 (Programmabteilung 1966:40)
As this passage from the Goethe-Institute’s 1965 Yearbook demonstrates, the institute’s
culture department aimed its cultural programs at educated elites rather than the general
populace. According to the programming department, the main difference between performance
and education programs lay in their sustainability. Education programs were
believed to be more sustainable due to a trickle-down effect: According to West German
cultural programmers, local elites educated by German musicians would become ambassadors
of West German culture and music themselves, thus disseminating West German
cultural achievements to a wider audience.
This description of the role of music education in West German music diplomacy programs
recalls the model of cultural infiltration that Danielle Fosler-Lussier has described
in regard to U.S. cultural diplomacy of the 1950s. According to Fosler-Lussier, the Eisenhower
administration thought of U.S. cultural diplomacy as a unidirectional process by
which American ideas and values were poured onto a receiving culture so as to influence
and transform it (Fosler-Lussier 2012:53). In a way, this West German model for developing
countries took cultural infiltration one step further, suggesting that West German
music teachers not only infiltrated social elites, but that those elites would then become
accomplices in West German efforts to infiltrate the social margins with the ostensible
accomplishments of the West.
The West German Conductor Otto Söllner in South Vietnam
The example of the conductor Otto Söllner’s musical activities in South Vietnam,
which were supported by the West German Foreign Office from 1960 through
1968, demonstrates how this view of music education as an activity that was secondary
to the prestige that it could potentially produce conditioned the practice of West
German music diplomacy during the 1960s.
Otto Söllner had completed his studies in Munich and Salzburg before becoming a conductor
in Krefeld (1926–1935), Aachen (1935–1939), Trier (1939–1940), and Gießen
(1940–1944). In 1947, he became the General Director of the Opera in Trier. 2 He was
1 “Besonders erwünscht sind längere Aufenthalte in den Entwicklungsländern, wo die von uns
entsandten Vortragenden, aber auch Musiker und Theaterleute, wertvolle Bildungshilfe leisten
können. Man mag einwenden, daß sich eine solche Bildungs- oder Ausbildungshilfe nur an einen
kleinen Kreis von Fachleuten, von Gebildeten oder wenigstens Vorgebildeten, an eine Eilte richtet. Da
aber die Beteiligten aus einem Fachvortrag oder Seminar für ihre praktische Arbeit greifbaren Nutzen
ziehen können, ist die Wirkung sehr viel tiefer und nachhaltiger als die eines repräsentativen Konzerts
vor tausend Zuhörern [ ... ].” [All translations my own unless noted otherwise].
2 The official names of his offices in Trier were Municipal Music Director and Superior Musical Director
for Opera and Operetta (Städtischer Musikdirektor und musikalischer Oberleiter für Oper und Operette).
Zander (2007).
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