Tight Lips Sink Songs in Germany

If any hills here are alive with the sound of music, it must be coming from a hiker’s CD player.

Germany may have been the wellspring of Bach, Brahms and Beethoven, but today it is a country that has collectively lost its voice.

Public singing has been out of style for so long in this country that many adults cannot remember the words to a single folk song and only 10% of schoolchildren can carry a tune, compared with 90% in the 1960s, say scientists alarmed at the silence and its consequences.

“Nowadays, the only times you hear Germans sing are at soccer games and when they’re very drunk, and in both cases they are simple, stupid songs sung badly,” laments Georg Christoph Biller, director of this city’s St. Thomas Boys Choir, housed in the church where Johann Sebastian Bach was once cantor.

Even Biller’s renowned choir and music boarding school is affected. No longer able to attract enough applicants who have ever given voice to music, the St. Thomas Academy has added a preschool program for boys 7 to 9 years old to teach them the fundamentals before they try to find harmony with their older brethren.

The wide-ranging disinterest in and distaste for public singing has been a long time in the making in Germany, although this country is not the only one where people mumble through “Happy Birthday” or the national anthem. With computers, video games and television offering flashier--if passive--entertainment, singing as an expression of happiness or as a pretext for socializing is just as rare in the United States.

But because singing in public was misused by the Third Reich to incite the masses and convince Germans they were ubermenschen--a super race--the inhibitions here are far more powerful and difficult to conquer. Now neither patriotic songs nor a pledge of allegiance begin the German school day, and the national anthem is sung only before international sports events.

“After World War II, in the 1950s and 1960s, people began identifying singing with the Nazis,” says Karl Adamek, a music therapist at the University of Muenster who has spent much of his career researching the physical and psychological benefits of singing. “It was said that singing makes people dumb, and all of a sudden it was out of the school curriculum.”

That lack of funding and support led to today’s shortage of music teachers; in some regions only 20% of the positions are filled.

Musicologists contend that this is a nationwide case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Just because Hitler used the singing of folk songs as one means of agitation shouldn’t stifle the natural impulse to break into song any more than his impassioned oratory should discredit all forms of public speaking.

“Singing is like gasoline: It generates power. One can do something positive with that energy, like building a hospital or feeding the hungry, or something terrible,” says the 49-year-old Adamek, a member of the first postwar generation. “But in neither case is the gasoline guilty.”

Adamek and other European researchers are passionate about singing because, they say, people who don’t indulge a natural instinct for self-expression through song suffer measurable physical, psychological and social disadvantages.

A six-year study of Berlin students by Frankfurt musicologist Hans Guenther Bastian suggests that children who sing and play instruments perform better in all disciplines and are more socially adjusted than those who show no musical inclination. Swiss academic Ernst Waldemar Weber was able to establish similar connections and get school curriculum regulations in his country revised to ensure that students were regularly engaged in singing.

Adamek’s work has shown that babies who are sung to by their mothers, even while in the womb, are more content, easily consoled and alert to their surroundings. Academics in France have concluded that singing relaxes the body and opens the mind by releasing hormones connected with happiness and well-being.

So why isn’t the whole world singing?

Thomas Blank, another Muenster musicologist and founding member of Il Canto del Mondo, an international association dedicated to reviving song as part of everyday lifestyle, says people are silenced by inhibitions and their failure to measure up to models of perfection.

“It’s embarrassment that holds people back. They want to be liked, and think if they don’t sound like Pavarotti they will be regarded poorly by others,” Blank says. “But this is just a complex that has developed, especially among Germans. Fallibility is actually a desirable quality. Imperfection invites empathy because we are all imperfect.”

Music teacher Gunter Berger has studied the causes and effects of Germany’s rejection of public singing and has come to much the same conclusions as Adamek and Bastian.

“Pop music is the only music kids learn anymore because of the Americanization of Germany,” says Berger, who conducts the last surviving choir supported by a state broadcaster, the Leipzig-based Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk network. “There is much about American music to admire, but a country should have its own culture as well.”

Hardly anyone outside the narrow circles of musicology has any notion of the physiology of singing or how failing to sing can shackle the human spirit, Berger says. That is why parents often think they are doing their children a favor by putting on a record or CD instead of singing lullabies themselves or making song part of a family evening.

“It’s a vicious circle,” says the conductor. “People feel hung up about singing because they’ve never done it for entertainment or relaxation, so they don’t sing and they come to believe that they can’t.”

The failure of schools to offer singing lessons perpetuates ignorance about vocal music. Prior to the 1960s, all elementary and secondary teachers had to know how to play two harmony instruments and sing to sheet music without accompaniment to earn a certificate, Adamek recalls.

Birgit Jank, a music professor who grew up in the Communist east but has spent most of the past decade in Hamburg and Berlin, blames 1950s sociologist Theodor Adorno for infecting the German populace with his theory that “singing makes you dumb” and therefore vulnerable to destructive forces like Hitler.

“The result is that today there are hardly any situations in which people are expected to sing in public, and they have become completely self-conscious about it,” says Jank, who has studied the divergent attitudes toward singing in eastern and western Germany.

Easterners tended to sing more, at least in comparison with western Germans, she says, in part because the old Communist regime appreciated the inspirational qualities of vocal music and sought to tap them. But she also sees a purely pragmatic explanation for the slightly more prevalent singing in the east: There was less money available to buy instruments during the Communist era, and singing was free.

Like many of the specialists devoted to music, Jank is optimistic that with time and encouragement fellow Germans will find their voices again.

“I believe people have a natural impulse for singing. Folk music programs on television draw huge audiences, and I believe this is because people feel less inhibited singing along in the privacy of their own homes,” she says. “Karaoke singing might also reflect this natural urge, although it is probably the technology that appeals to 14-year-olds who otherwise could never be compelled to get up before a crowd and sing.”

One venue in which singing has survived the postwar taboo is in churches. But with church attendance down dramatically over the past few decades, so too is participation in church choirs.

“People have the idea that singing is some kind of exhibitionism,” complains Herbert Hildebrandt, choirmaster at the Berlin Cathedral for the last 40 years. “Even on Christmas Eve, the church was full but hardly anyone was singing.”

He also connects the dearth of choir singers to the changing nature of work, with the majority of women now employed outside the home and many people of both sexes unable to attend choir practice because of later work hours, out-of-town travel and weekend escapes.

But mostly the problem is the restraints people have imposed on themselves, he says, noting that the limits should be easy to throw off with the right inducement.

“It’s difficult to animate people, even those who want to sing, because they have a fear of looking foolish,” Hildebrandt says. “They wonder, ‘What would my wife think if I just suddenly broke out singing?’ ”

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Williams was recently on assignment in Leipzig.