The Unpastoral: Walter Ruttmann and the Politics of Symphonic Form

The musical analogy that underpins Walter Ruttmann’s Weimar-era city film Berlin. Die Sinfonie der Großstadt has generally been understood as a cipher for his uncritical, quietist political perspective—the idea being that Ruttmann aestheticizes rather than analyzes the formal harmonies of the modern capitalist metropolis. I argue here that the musical analogy has precisely the opposite function. The symphonic form has a longstanding tradition as the emblem of bourgeois humanist societal ideals: the symphonic “sounding together” of multiple, heterogeneous voices, together with the temporal development from harmony, through dissonance, back to higher-level harmony, combine to represent a particularly nineteenth century, geschichtsphilosophical understanding of humanity’s inherent tendency to harmoniously commune. As both a classical musician and an educated member of the German bourgeoisie, Ruttmann would have been intimately familiar with this musico-political tradition, which makes the question of what he does to it inherently political as well—and what he does is subject it to the most deflationary of parodic inversions. The result is a radical critique of modernity that differs profoundly from the critiques of Ruttmann’s Marxist contemporaries, and which may be all the more contemporarily relevant for this difference.

Duke Scholars

Author Sarah Milne Pourciau German Studies