Review: Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps (original) (raw)
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Music in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps
The Routledge History of the Holocaust, 2007
From Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 until the liberation in 1945, music played an integral role in daily life under Nazism. In diverse contexts—political rallies and ghetto youth clubs, opera houses and military bands, concert halls and concentration camps—music was a medium through which the Nazi Party imposed its racist and nationalist ideals, and through which its victims expressed their opposition to the regime and confronted what was happening to them. This chapter focuses on musical life amongst Nazism’s victims, Jews and others, in the ghettos and camps. Prisoners were most likely to encounter forced music of various kinds, particularly in the camps, where music often functioned as a means of torture. Forced singing of German marches was a regular feature of the daily roll-call, and official inmate orchestras played regularly at hangings and executions. At the same time, many inmates engaged in and derived great benefit from voluntary music-making, despite the restrictions and risks involved. Most of the larger Jewish ghettos established choirs, orchestras, theatres and chamber groups that existed for periods of months and even years. In the camps, prisoners held clandestine sing-songs and concerts and established musical groups. The music that they performed ranged from popular pre-war songs to opera and operetta, folk music, jazz, classical repertoire, choral music, film hits, religious music, and dance melodies. In addition, hundreds of new songs and pieces were created, in Yiddish, Polish, Czech, German, Russian, and other languages. Musical life under Nazi internment was as varied as the inmate populations themselves, which included people of diverse ages, nationalities, religions, sexualities, and political affiliations. It thus has much to tell us about the spectrum of prisoners’ responses. This chapter offers an overview of key issues in the history and historiography of the subject, and concludes with some thoughts on how music enriches our understanding of the Holocaust and the experiences of its victims.
2021
When we think of the the Holocaust, we rightfully remember the atrocities committed by Hitler and his Nazi regime. However, we often fail to recognize the beautiful, albeit tragic, music that was composed in the concentration camps, specifically in Terezín. In this project, I study the Jewish composers and lyricists who contributed to this musical output, specifically Viktor Ullmann, Hans Krása, Pavel Haas, and Schmerke Kaczerginski. The goal of this study is to identify and examine specific components of resistance within these composers’ works and show how they come together to create a larger opposition to Hitler’s regime despite oppressive and exploitative conditions. In going about my research, I studied numerous musical scores written during the Holocaust. I then chose those that best represented this artistic resistance and elaborated on them. I also read articles, books, and documents that gave me a further insight into the art and life of this tragic period. Additionally, I...
Music & Politics , 2016
Primo Levi, in what is one of the most prominent written accounts of life in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, recounted an incident he witnessed in the infirmary there: The beating of the big drums and the cymbals reach us continuously and monotonously, but in this weft the musical phrases weave a pattern only intermittently, according to the caprices of the wind. The tunes are few, a dozen, and the same ones every day, morning and evening: marches and popular songs dear to every German. They lie engraven on our minds and will be the last thing in the Lager that we shall forget: they are the voice of the Lager, the perceptible expression of its geometrical madness, of the resolution of others to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more slowly afterwards. 1 Levi forcefully describes how music purposefully attacked prisoners' identities, certainties, self-conceptions, and sense of humanity. The fact that music played an important role in the Holocaust is neither a new discovery nor is it surprising. We know, based on survivors' memoirs, that music was part of daily life in National Socialist concentration and extermination camps. Survivors' accounts clearly convey how concentration camp prisoners could draw on music as a resource to aid in their survival, but music served equally as the most striking symbol of the inherent lunacy of the camp. Levi completes his description of the incident in the infirmary: " We all look at each other from our beds, because we all feel that this music is infernal. " 2 Levi uses the term " infernal " deliberately and links the music in the camps to Dante's Inferno. By emphasizing the danger inherent in music that was—in this context—demonic and nightmarish, Levi attributes to music a rather specific impact. " Can music be considered as a form of torture? " was the question recently posed by musicologists in a special edition of the journal Torture. 3 The guest editors were two of the academics responsible for the creation of the Free Floater Research Group, Music, Conflict and the State, situated at the University of Göttingen. Over the course of six years, group members contributed to an investigation of the relationship between music and violence in contexts marked by uneven power dynamics. 4 Drawing on Article 5 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they defined torture as " cruel, inhuman and degrading
Music in the Holocaust as an Honors Colloquium
Honors in Practice , 2020
Abstract: Forbidden Sounds: The Music of the Holocaust considers the historical events of the Holocaust in the context of music. The honors course explores diverse roles that music played during the years 1933–1945, including the Nazi use of music as a means for censorship and discrimination; music performance and creation in various Jewish ghettos and concentration camps in Europe; and ways that composers, performers, and audiences used music for emotional and physical survival and for spiritual resistance during World War II and after. The author provides a rich and varied curriculum, culminating with student performances and a series of public concerts, lectures, field trips, and independent studies. Challenges and strategies for teaching music to non-majors are discussed. Keywords: Holocaust (1939–1945)—songs & music; Terezín (Czech Republic: Concentration camp)—composers; Jewish ghettos; testimony (theory of knowledge); music education
Music in Nazi-Occupied Poland between 1939 and 1945
Musicology Today
The paper is a survey of research on music in territories of occupied Poland conducted by the author in recent years, as well as a review of selected existing literature on this topic. A case study illustrates a principal thesis of this essay according to which music was used by the German Nazis in the General Government as a key elements of propaganda and in appropriation of conquered territories as both physical and symbolic spaces.
Musical Expressions of Incarcerated Jewish Composers during the Holocaust
Gvanim, 2020
The final article in this volume turns to a more conventionally understood expression of Antisemitism, the Holocaust. However, Galit Gertsenzon contributes a perspective often overlooked when people think about Jewish responses to persecution. In her article, Gertsenzon considers musical compositions by three composers from 1936 to 1944 in order to delineate their respective musical aesthetics of resistance. She highlights not only the anger and calls for action in these works, but also the themes of hope, dignity, and redemption that make these pieces compelling responses to Antisemitism in their time and for today. Composers discussed include Mordechai Gebirtig (Es Brent), Gideon Klein (Piano Sonata, Songs Op. 1), and Pavel Haas (Al Sefod).
2011
Recent scholarship on Nazi music policy pays little attention to the main party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, or comparable publications for the general public. Most work concentrates on publications Nazis targeted at expert audiences, in this case music journals. But to think our histories of Nazi music politics are complete without comprehensive analysis of the party daily is premature. One learns from this resource precisely what Nazi propagandists wanted average party members and Germans in general, not just top-level officials and scholars, to think-even about music. Therein, we see how contributors placed a Nazi "spin" on music history and composer's biographies.
Listening to ethnographic Holocaust musical testimony through the 'ears' of Jean-Luc Nancy
Too often, musical experience in Holocaust testimony does not receive the sort of careful attention and openness that characterises the act of listening. For the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, listening (écouter) is to be distinguished from entendre, the latter having the dual meanings of to hear and to understand. This paper examines my own ethnographic project interviewing approximately one hundred Holocaust survivors, listening to memories of individual musical experiences from time spent in ghettos, camps, in hiding and in partisan groups.