Music, Sound, and Affect in Yiddish-Language Holocaust Cinema: The Posttraumatic Community in Natan Gross's Unzere kinder (1948) (original) (raw)
Hearing the Holocaust: Music, Film, Aesthetics
The presentation of Holocaust memory is a deeply contested topic that regularly appears in contemporary scholarly debates. Film has become particularly important in these discussions due to factors ranging from its use of diverse aesthetic mediums to its immense popularity in American culture. However, while Holocaust film has been the subject of a substantial body of literature, music, a key element of film, has gone virtually unnoticed. Unlike previous inquiries, my thesis addresses this lacuna, focusing specifically on the role of music in Holocaust film.
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...
East European Jewish Affairs, 2018
This paper focuses on two collections of immediate post-Holocaust Yiddish songs: Mima'amakim: folkslider fun lagers un getos in poyln, compiled by Yehuda Eismann in Bucharest in April/May 1945, a copy of which recently appeared in a private collection in Sydney, Australia and song session recordings made by Dr. David Boder in displaced persons (DP) camps in 1946, archived in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Library of Congress. Mima'amakim is a tiny pamphlet containing twelve compositions that would become part of the continuing repertoire of Holocaust songs, alongside eight compositions that disappeared from all other written accounts. Boder's preserved song sessions with Yiddish speakers occurred at displaced persons homes in France, Switzerland and Italy. Both items accompany some of the earliest recorded testimony of Holocaust survivors. The song-spools and the song book are extraordinarily fragile objects, containing material that opens conversations on the place of music inside and outside testimony. Their place at the margin of our understanding of musical experience in the Holocaust prompts the question: how does the affordance of material objects inform our understanding of the construction of repertories, determining exclusion and inclusion of one song over another?
Sounds of Survival: Polish Music and the Holocaust
University of California Press, 2025
Sounds of Survival tells a story of unexpected musical continuity across some of the twentieth century's most cataclysmic events. It examines an integrated Polish and Polish Jewish musical community as its members contended with antisemitism in the 1930s, attempted to survive the Nazi occupation, and established a renewed musical culture amid the ashes of World War II and the Holocaust. Reconstructing these musicians' lives from the 1920s into the 1950s, J. Mackenzie Pierce argues that despite nearly unimaginable violence, many Polish musicians treated the war as a time of reinvention and cultural preservation. Their faith that music was a source of cultural continuity, however, also marginalized experiences of wartime loss, especially those of Jewish victims and survivors of the Holocaust. Sounds of Survival not only reveals that the Holocaust was a central event within modern Polish musical culture; it also shows why its musical aftermath has been difficult to hear.
Sociology Study, 2023
How should we approach Die Kinder der Toten by the Austrian Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek today? And how does the 2019 film adaptation by the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma change the text's reception through focus on intermedial and intertextual elements? So far, the most insightful reviews have centered on the conceptual, contextual and textual-and thus also political aspects of this work. By focusing on intertextual and intermedial components, I hope to illustrate a few aspects of the novel that have yet to be analyzed in the scholarship on Jelinek. Drawing on Derrida's Specters of Marx and on elements of sound studies, literature studies, and film studies, I hope to demonstrate how sound can have a significant spectral presence that connects with other literary texts and media, different world regions in the past, the present and the future.
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.
Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, 2016
Discussing mechanisms of representation in modern Jewish art music in general and post- Holocaust commemoration music in particular, the article examines the dilution of musical signs in Holocaust-related works penned by Israeli composers Noam Sheriff, Ruben Seroussi, and Tzvi Avni. Written within the span of thirteen years, between 1985 and 1998, these works include Sherrif’s (b. 1935) Mechaye Hametim (He Who Revives the Dead, 1985); Seroussi’s (b. 1959) A Victim from Terezin (1995; based on excerpts from Gonda Redlich’s Terezin diary); Avni’s (b. 1927) Se questo è un oumo (1998; a setting of poems by Primo Levi); and Avni’s From There and Then (1994–1998). The compositions under discussion unfold a continuum of aesthetic approaches ranging from postromantic trajectories that stitch musical signs on nationalist teleological constellations (Sheriff), through conscious non-redemptive formulations (Seroussi), to compositional emphases on the migration and translocation of Jewish musics rather than affixed signs of otherness (Avni). The dilution of Jewish musical markers not only attests to the composers’ abandoning of representational apparatuses, but also necessitates a broader look at the dialectical movement of Jewish musics before, during, and after the Holocaust, lest these sounds become objectified or otherwise overshadowed by nationalist constellations.
'Se no ora, quando?' The Hidden Musical Testimony of Holocaust Survivors in Australia
In Australia, personal recorded testimony has been a feature of readings of the Holocaust since the early 1980s. Yet up to now, no specific studies in Australia have focussed on a notion of music as a testimonial device. This essay presents a cross-section of musical testimonies gathered from Holocaust survivors living in Australia. Such memories are a crucial part of the psychological and musical life of survivors, post-Shoah, where a wealth of hidden experience lives on in the songs and memories preserved, and each memory is used as a reflexive pedagogical tool in discussing the nature of those experiences. Music acts as a powerful medium in the context of traumatic isolation, describing, educating, mocking, soothing and distracting.
HOLOCAUST MUSIC OF REMEMBRANCE
2016
This work treats the issue of the relationship between the culture of Holocaust remembrance and artistic music. The culture of remembrance comprises mechanisms of the social transfer of the knowledge about the past. Representation of the past and presentation of the artistic music, as a method of transcendence of the past, correspond at multiple levels. The aim of this work is to make a point of the possibility to reinterpret the past through presentation of artistic music. Both mechanisms have been based on the emotional dialogue between the identity created under various cultural conditions. The outcomes of these mechanisms can be contents and emotions which intensively transform the identity of the percipients overlapping it with the identity of the artists who authentically testified about historical circumstances of the Holocaust.
"In Memory of Our Murdered (Jewish) Children": Hearing the Holocaust in Soviet Jewish Culture
Slavic Review, 2014
This article offers the first major investigation of the Holocaust in wartime Soviet music and its connection to questions of Soviet Jewish identity. Moving beyond the consistent focus on Shostakovich’s 1962 Babi Yar symphony, I offer an alternative locus for the beginnings of Soviet musical representation of the Nazi genocide in a now-forgotten composition by the Soviet Jewish composer Mikhail Gnesin, his 1943 piano Trio, “In Memory of Our Perished Children.” I trace the genesis of this work in Gnesin’s web of experiences before and during the war in Leningrad, Moscow, Jerusalem, and Tashkent. Using a range of Russian and Yiddish-language archival sources, I examine Gnesin’s carefully deliberate strategy of aesthetic ambiguity in depicting death, Jewish and Soviet, individual and collective. Recapturing this forgotten cultural genealogy provides a very different kind of European historical soundtrack for the Holocaust. Instead of the categories of survivor and bystander, wartime witness and postwar remembrance, we find a more ambiguous form of early Holocaust memory. Rather than a mark of Jewish difference, Soviet music of the Holocaust emerges as an aspirational form of imperial belonging. Finally, the story of how the Holocaust first entered Soviet music challenges our contemporary assumptions about the coherence and legitimacy of “Holocaust music” as a category of cultural history and present-day performance.
I always have music in my heart and no one can take that away from me." These words from the oldest Holocaust survivor, Alice Herz-Sommer, have a particular resonance for this paper, in which I explore the work of three popular musicians -Geddy Lee, Yehuda Poliker, and Mike Brantwho also happen to be children of Holocaust survivors. Using theories from scholars who have studied the psychology of the "second-generation," I shed light on the diverse ways in which these musicians have confronted their trauma and the trauma of their parents. For Lee and Poliker, this has taken the form of developing personal identities on and off stage as Jewish musicians with a cause, either for social justice or for preserving Holocaust memory; for Mike Brant, who committed suicide in 1975, his career and body of work involved a toxic mix of superstardom and depression, which many in his family, even his mother who survived the Holocaust, linked to his inability to address childhood anxieties about his parents' suffering. The study is a revealing window into two worlds that rarely intersectthat of pop (and especially rock) music and Holocaust trauma. Far from trivializing the study of the latter, this essay enriches our understanding on a number of fronts, especially with regard to how ordinary people who suffered in extraordinary ways sought healing through the power of song.
Is there a Jewish way of not saying things? The years following the Holocaust were a time when many artists, psychoanalysts, and global leaders were focused on two overlapping crises: that of the refugee, children especially, and that of language, as many sensed that human communication had undergone a seismic shift during the war. Drawing from these intellectual and artistic currents were two feature films shot in Europe between 1947 and 1949: Fred Zinnemann's Hollywood production The Search , and the Yiddish film Undzere Kinder (Our Children), directed by Natan Gross and starring the renowned comic duo of Shimen Dzigan and Yisroel Shumacher. Employing similar cinematic tools, these films nonetheless make very different propositions about the relationships between pain and speech. To understand these differences, I press upon the idea of language communities: Yiddish and Anglo-American cultures, I argue, guide people to different perceptions of the psyche, of love, and of power. On December 27, 1948, LIFE magazine featured an image of a young orphan named Terezka, with hair unkempt and wild eyes glaring at the camera. She served as an example of how "Children's wounds are not all outward." The prominence of images
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.
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
Studies in European Cinema
The article examines the figure of the 'lost child' in feature films of the immediate postwar period. The figure's enormous symbolic value as innocent victim and future generation granted the 'lost child' a key position in postwar discourse, including films which tried to grapple with the moral and physical destruction of the continent after 1945. National film industries, particularly of the perpetrator nations, employed the 'lost child' for genre stories in which the postwar chaos is being mastered and a new, masculine national self is rebuilt. However, films made by victim groups outside a national context rely on the 'lost child' to broach the destruction of their identity by war and persecution. Analysing two films, Fred Zinnemann's The Search (1948) and Natan Gross's Unzere Kinder (1948), I argue that both use the child figure to deal with traumatization as part of the reconstruction of communal and intergenerational relations. This does not result in stories of masculine mastery but in narratives that incorporate moments of trauma process emerging around destroyed mother-child relations. The films, encoding traumatization in film language, develop a rich cinematic language along questions of identity and form an early instance of post-traumatic cinema. KEYWORDS Postwar cinema; Holocaust film; lost child; posttraumatic cinema; Yiddish cinema; World War II; postwar identity When World War II ended with Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945, the extent of destruction and death in Europe and the enormity of crimes committed by the Germans and their collaborators had left Europe in a political, social, cultural, and humanitarian crisis. This crisis found a point of discursive and practical management in the figure of the war child. 1 Children's position as the next generation made them a group of particular importance. In one of its propaganda films, the US War Department described them as 'the human raw material of each shattered nation's tomorrow, each nation's preview in flesh and blood of its future' (Miller 1946, 00:01:16). Children received extensive political attention as well as practical help from (local) governments, the Allies, charities and relief organisations (Zahra 2001). As Theodore Andrica concludes in his documentary film Children of Europe (1948, 00:22:30), 'In no area of national and international recovery is so much being done by all governments as in organised childcare .' At the same time, children's status as minors and CONTACT Ute Wölfel
Coping Through Music: Displacement Music in the Jewish Identity (WWII)
Rebuilding Jewish identity in post-World War II displacement camps was a daunting task for any Holocaust survivor. Using the music of Henry Baigelman and The Happy Boys as a lens, displacement camp songs and their place in the new phase of Ashkenazic culture are explored. The songs “We Long for a Home,” “I May Fall in Love Only Once,” and “There Awaits the Day” are used as examples of Baigelman's work because they capture the attitude of eternal hope in spite of despair and destruction that characterized Jewish life after the Holocaust. Jewish Holocaust survivors continued to live in fear after the end of the Holocaust, especially in Poland, where anti-Semitic pogroms still took place regularly. Their identity as citizens of a European country had been compromised by persecution, and many were unwilling to be repatriated to their home countries. The only identity left to these survivors was their Jewishness, their Ashkenazic roots, the culture of which had been nearly annihilated. Through incorporation of pre-war musical and Jewish culture, a return to their religious roots, the advent of Zionism, and the versatile expression of music, a Jewish identity could be rebuilt and reframed, and the deep psychological scars of persecution and displacement could be soothed. The Happy Boys, as survivors from Vilna, Poland, exemplify these aspects by placing lyrics about the Jewish experience in displacement camps to songs (specifically jazz-influenced songs) that existed prior to the war, itself a meaningful practice in Ashkenazic folk culture. Through exploration of prior Jewish and European culture and of The Happy Boys, the traditionally based yet unique displacement camp song and its value in rebuilding an Ashkenazic identity among Polish Jews is revealed.