Fellows Spotlight: Johanna Yunker

by Brianne Felsher

Johanna Yunker

Art cannot be separated from the history and culture that surround and influence it. Johanna Yunker is proving this point in “Socialism and Feminism in East German Opera,” the dissertation she is writing as a graduate student of musicology at Stanford University and a Geballe Dissertation Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. Her work looks at the careers and works of two East German artists: Ruth Zechlin, composer and musician, and Ruth Berghaus, opera director and choreographer. How were these women’s lives and artistic products influenced by the socialist state? By the avant-garde art community? By East Germany’s particular type of feminism? These are the questions that Johanna Yunker explores in her work.

The answers are complicated: “Women in East Germany had a very unusual position [because of socialism],” Yunker explains. They had a “literary feminism… It was not about protesting or changing laws.” She shows how the two artists approached womanhood, feminism, and gender roles in different ways. Director Ruth Berghaus’ 1982 production of Les Troyens, for example, featured a strong female lead as well as a program that included exerpts from the novel Cassandra by Christa Wolf, one of East Germany’s most influential female writers. In contrast, Ruth Zechlin wanted people to think of her simply as a composer, not, as many people did, always a “female composer.” Zechlin said of her music, “To me it is entirely unimportant if a work was composed by a woman or a man. It just counts if the music is good or bad.”

Yunker spent a year in Berlin learning German, listening to opera and sifting through musical scores, newspaper reviews, photographs, and decaying VHS recordings of productions from the 1980s. Although both Zechlin and Berghaus have passed away, Yunker was able to gain unprecedented access to both womens’ personal archives through contact with their families. She has been able to digitize much in these archives to preserve them for future generations.

After she receives her doctorate, Yunker expects to teach music, and hopes to “continue [researching the] large cultural picture.” We shall be watching as she integrates feminism, culture, and art of the twenty-first century into her own professional and personal life.