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Bach’s grave as Communist legacy

ABSTRACT The Communist role in creating an eternalized Bach veneration site in post-Nazi Leipzig has been effaced from scholarly and popular awareness. By problematizing where Bach’s grave came from and why, this article exhibits how modernizing, nation-building elites simplify complex urban landscapes into centralized sacred sites that become so self-evident, the very story of their creation can be unsettling for later generations that inherit them. In exploring how Leipzig Communists used Bach’s grave to jumpstart their city’s usable local role for national identity after Nazism, this article unpacks themes whose applicability transcends East German Leipzig. While Bach veneration was meant to exhibit a distinctively Communist sensitivity for national culture, this deeply modern practice of nationalist mythmaking proved continuous across regimes espousing starkly different ideologies. As the process of sculpting a simplified urban architectural narrative unfolded, the creation of a Bach shrine was closely tied in with the demolition of unwelcome complexities. In the end, Communist commemorative pedagogy forged a digestible historical ensemble, whose invention and selectivity have fallen out of memory. While the Communist role is forgotten, however, the Communist-era staging has transitioned seamlessly to satisfy the present hunger for an edifying and easily consumable national and local past.