Liesel Markowski

Liesel Markowski (born: Liesel Carow; 1 July 1928 – 23 January 2019) was a German musicologist.

Life Liesel Carow was born in Rostock. Her father was a successful entrepreneur with a higher degree in Economics, but in 1940 he was conscripted for military service and in 1945 he died from wounds acquired in the fighting. Between 1943 and 1945, Carow lived with her mother at the family's beachside holiday home at Markgrafenheide in order to avoid the bombing over the city. From there she made her way to the Lyzeum (as the school was then known) in Rostock each day, which involved the narrow gauge coastal railway, a lot of walking, and a journey time in each direction of two and a half hours. War ended in May 1945. In 1947, she passed her school final exams (Abitur) which under many circumstances would have cleared the path to a university level education. Since 1945, however, a large central portion of Germany, including Rostock, had been administered as the Soviet occupation zone. As the daughter of a "bourgeois" small businessman – even a dead one – Liesel Carow found herself at or near the back of the queue for university places, and she was unable to study Law or Chemistry at Rostock as she had hoped. However, her mother, who had trained as a seamstress and always done the sewing for the family, had taught her the basics of tailoring. She accordingly undertook an apprenticeship in the garment industry, emerging with both a qualification and an enhanced level of socialist credibility for the emerging "workers' state". She also pursued music as a hobby, singing in a Bach Choir and taking singing lessons. That provided a basis from which she was able to gain a place at the newly formed German Music Academy (later the "Hanna Eisler Music Academy") in Berlin, where she studied singing. Later she switched to Musicology, and it was in this discipline that she passed her exams at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1959.

After her husband was killed, during the middle 1980s Liesel Markowski studied for and obtained her doctorate. Her work was supervised by Günter Mayer from the Humboldt University although the doctorate itself was awarded by another Berlin academic institution, the Central Committee's Academy for Social Sciences. Her dissertation was entitled "Mass Media and Music in the theory and practice of the composer and music theoretician Hanns Eisler ("Massenmedien und Musik in der kompositorischen Praxis und im theoretischen Denken Hanns Eislers"). The return to full-time research involved taking a temporary break from her editorial duties and her salary was for a time suspended, but she was supported by a stipendium during this period. Eisler, the man who had composed the East German national anthem, was an interesting and fruitful choice of subject on various levels, although unfortunately the dissertation has not yet been published. 1988 Patriotic Order of Merit in silver