Irish Traditional Music in Germany: Nationalism, Nostalgia and Intercultural Transactions

Morgenstern demonstrates how German musicians’ adoption of Irish traditional music allows them to bridge the shameful disjuncture caused by the Nazi appropriation of German folk music. This book locates the experiences of German Irish traditional-music practitioners in the broader framework of modern European history. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork, it illustrates the ongoing centrality of cultural capital and acquired technical prowess in installing gatekeeping mechanisms of inclusivity in the primary performance and transmission settings of German Irish-music sessions and workshops. Felix Morgenstern argues that, while still adapting some regulations of belonging shaped in the music’s place of origin, such arrangements ultimately serve to decouple the translocal, German community of practice from its Irish authenticating centre. Intercultural Transactions proceeds to interrogate such instances of anxious control as part of a larger cultural anxiety, tied to the traumatic misuses of German folk music for extreme nationalist and racist propaganda purposes during the Nazi era (1933–45). Morgenstern posits that nostalgic German gazes upon Ireland have accomplished the transferral and sublimation of patriotic German sentiments onto a proximal European musical tradition. Further, unravelling distinctions between historical, anti-colonial and expansive-imperial, registers of Irish and German musical exceptionalism proves key to comprehending the political alignment of former German post-war artists with Irish rebel songs. In the current moment, such critical inquiry recalls music’s remarkable capacity to sound the nation from multiple angles.