This article is the introduction to the book "The Cold War through music-making in the GDR: political goals, aesthetic paradoxes, and the case of neutral Sweden". This introduction provides an insight into the political and musical situation in the GDR; it discusses terms that are fundamental to the entire book, such as cultural diplomacy, romanticism, classicism, cultural heritage, socialist realism and formalism, and it gives a short introduction to the political and musical relations between the GDR and Sweden. The individual contributions to the book are also briefly introduced.

In this book, researchers from different disciplines use the case of the German Democratic Republic to show how music was employed to further the state's cultural and political policies, as well as influence its international relations, culture, and politics. 

The study spans the Cold War, including the GDR's creation, the great-power struggle for control, the importance of returning war refugees for the construction of the GDR, the building of the 1961 wall, the central intelligence activities and the state's struggle for diplomatic recognition.

Contributors examine the function and position of music within East German cultural politics, focusing on the relationship between music and authoritarian state politicies. While most of the contributions emphasize classical music, referred to in German as ernste Musik, "serious music", some of them also touch on popular music and jazz. Music also constituted a major factor in the GDR's international outreach, particularly to "neutral" countries as Sweden (a central focus of the book).

The volume is editied by Petra Garberding, associate professor in European Ethnology at Södertörn University, and Henrik Rosengren, associate professor in History at Lund University. Contributors are Lars Klingberg, Andreas Lueken, Meredith Nicoll, Matthias Tischer and Stefan Weiss. 

In the GDR there was a folk revival in the 1970s and 80s. Inspired by American artists, such as Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, among others, numerous folk music groups emerged during this period. Groups such as Folkländer, JAMS and Wacholder were very successful, and folk music and folk dance spread. These activities were often seen by the participants as an alternative to the official FDJ singing movement in the GDR. Within the GDR folk scene, musicians and the audience were able to gain a certain amount of political and artistic freedom. One important strategy for this was, among other things, the use of historical song collections published in the GDR, such as the “Steinitz”, the song collections of “German folk songs of a democratic character from six centuries” published by the folklorist and linguist Wolfgang Steinitz. Songs from the Steinitz in particular were often used by folk musicians to express a covert critique of society, which was usually understood by the audience, without risking interrogation by the Stasi. Another strategy was to contact key people, such as the music ethnologist Erich Stockmann, who was employed at the Academy of Sciences of the GDR in East Berlin and was able to arrange important contacts at home and abroad, as well as keeping the musicians informed about interesting musical innovations. This contribution provides an insight into how folkloric and music ethnological knowledge was transformed in order to protest against political injustices as unnoticed as possible by the authorities.

This article is a case study of the contacts between the music sector in Sweden and the GDR in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. The case is the activities of the East-German musicologist and music administrator Gerd Schönfelder (1936–2000) in Sweden at that time, and the debate that arose in the early 1990s when he was accused of having worked for the East German security service, Stasi. The purpose is to provide insight into how music-aesthetic and musicological aspects interacted with politics and ideology in the relations between Sweden and the GDR. In the early 1990s, the availability of material in the Stasi archive was still very limited, and so it was difficult to find out whether it was true that Schönfelder had worked for Stasi, what tasks he had received from the security service and what these tasks meant for his work with Swedish colleagues in the music field. In our article, we try to find answers to these questions by examining how Schönfelder established contact with the Swedish music sector, who were his closest partners in Sweden, and why they were of interest to him. Throughout, we explore Schönfelder’s relationship to Stasi and his work as an ”unofficial employee” for Stasi in Sweden. Finally, we offer a sociological perspective on Schönfelder’s activities in Sweden and the GDR, using Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of field and capital.