Music of the Holocaust: How Artistic Works Preserve Memory in Remembrance Culture
Holocaust Music of Remembrance
The relationship between the culture of Holocaust remembrance and artistic music operates through multiple connecting layers. Remembrance culture comprises social mechanisms for transferring knowledge about the past, while artistic music offers a method for transcending that past. Both mechanisms rest on an emotional dialogue between identities shaped under different cultural circumstances. The contents and emotions produced by these mechanisms can intensively transform the identity of listeners, overlapping it with the identity of artists who authentically testified to the historical circumstances of the Holocaust.
More than seven decades have passed since the Second World War and the unimaginable historical trauma of vast proportions that took place during that period. Since then, much research and writing has addressed the notion of historical trauma as a humanistic phenomenon. Scholars such as Daniel Schechter, Judith Kestenberg, Dori Laub, Selma Fraiberg, Alicia Lieberman, Susan Coates, Charles Zeanah, Karlen Lyons-Ruth, Yael Danieli, Rachel Yehuda, and others have studied both the term and the mechanisms of historical trauma. In short, this concept refers to a turning point in history — a traumatic event that splits historical continuity into the periods before and after it occurred.
The word "holocaust" originates from Greek. The expression "holokauston" combines the prefix "holos," meaning "the whole," and "kaustos," meaning "to burn." In ancient Greece, the term referred to the religious rite of incinerating an animal and offering it to the gods. Since the Second World War, the term has stood for the genocide against the Jewish people that killed more than six million individuals. Because the word originally referenced an old Greek pagan custom, Jewish communities prefer using the biblical term "Shoah," which means "a disaster, catastrophe, devastation."
Hundreds of books containing documentary and biographical material, along with countless scientific works inspired directly or indirectly by the Holocaust, affirm the enduring presence of this topic in humanistic scholarly and artistic discourse. In the postwar period, enormous efforts were made to construct a historical representation of the Holocaust. From the very beginning of its remembrance history, questions about the adequacy of various interpretative approaches have accompanied this historical trauma. The period after the Second World War saw discussions arising from the recognition that the trauma caused by the Holocaust defies description and that no adequate narrative exists for its representation. Over time, the center of the problem shifted from producing representations of the Holocaust toward receiving them — specifically, toward the possibilities and limitations of the process of psychological identification and emotional and cognitive dialogue through which later generations can apprehend the Holocaust and incorporate it into their cultural remembrance.
Aleida Assmann, in her book A Long Shadow of the Past, explains the complex historical, social, and political mechanisms through which the representation of the Holocaust developed as a process. According to Assmann, questions about artistic and ethical decisions relating to Holocaust representation are framed differently for each generation. The contemporary attitude toward the Holocaust legacy has been shaped largely by media memory, which in the process of generational change replaced the empirical memory of survivors and witnesses. Although set up by media, the representation of the Holocaust has certainly not been completed or even defined. The impossibility of representing the whole historical truth of the Holocaust secures its future, leading us continually to seek new approaches.
Music serves as a powerful media apparatus well suited for transferring the emotions and atmosphere that accompany personal and historical narratives. Various material elements that evoke the context of musical narrative, combined with the immanent expressiveness produced by musical form during performance, make this art an adequate medium for reviving Holocaust memories. Composers recognized this potential long ago. During and after the Second World War, they wrote politically engaged works as a response to fascist ideology. Despite the undisputed aesthetic and ethical qualities of these pieces, their intentionally political function can paradoxically reduce their immediate emotional effect on audiences.
Artistic music created in the death camps, often criticized as insufficiently political, has only recently begun to gain its true legitimacy as one of the last living gestures of memory. Historian Frank Stern argues that art in democratic societies is not educational propaganda; therefore, the power of artistic Holocaust representations to convince depends not only on content and narrative but also on their aesthetic means. The more immediate impact on the spectator can be produced by how something was said — not by what was said but by how it was said. Performing artistic music created during the Holocaust can directly answer contemporary needs for representing the Holocaust and can immediately compensate for the loss of living gestures of memory. Through reviving this music, authentic experiences of Holocaust witnesses can be transmitted to the present.
To understand the multilayered nature of the modern relationship between Holocaust remembrance culture and artistic music, it is essential first to grasp the position music held immediately before and during the suffering of the Second World War. The second part of the present work positions the phenomenon of artistic music in the death camps within unique traumatic circumstances almost never previously documented by music history. Music can represent an authentic lead into a particular historical situation, so the third part considers the possibility of constructing cultural remembrance by reinterpreting the past through the presentation of artistic music created in the Nazi death camps. The goal is to describe the transferrable mechanism by which music from the Holocaust can shape the memory of later generations.
Music as a Picture of a Historic Situation
Understanding the history of Jewish artistic music in the Western European cultural space provides important context for grasping how a specific aesthetic — as well as an ethical phenomenon — could be created. By the middle of the twentieth century, many Western European artists had consolidated the cliché created by the German composer Richard Wagner and his racist attitude. For the controversial Wagner, Jewish racial identity was inescapable in music. Paradoxically, though this attitude intentionally humiliated the work and talent of Jewish artists, the fact that the topic was discussed so frequently emphasizes the significance that Jewish music held for German and Western European artists and theoreticians of the time.
Lily Hirsch also points to the role that Judaism played in musical activities in the period immediately before the Holocaust. Official data indisputably show the quantitative domination of musicians of Jewish origin on the European continent at the beginning of the twentieth century. Urbanization and secularization created a new demographic picture of Europe that clearly denoted Jewish overrepresentation in classical music. At the start of the twentieth century, a completely clear need arose for radically reconstructing Jewish identity in music. Since this need corresponded to musical trends in central Europe that were striving for emancipation from inherited nineteenth-century conventions and moving toward abstract modernism, once again the presumption was confirmed that the long shadow of the Jewish past continually defined Jewish artistic music in Europe.
Lily Hirsch, in her essay "Under Pressure," investigates the nature of Jewish-origin composers' attitudes toward Judaism as reflected in their musical creative work. She reaches a fairly general and expected conclusion: it is difficult to take a firm stand on the quality of this relationship, since the intention of composers who produce works pointing to the Holocaust or their own Jewish roots is rarely clear. Each composer's motivations are also conditioned by an insurmountable distance between the composer's biography and the music. Composers of that time responded to a rapidly changing context in diverse ways, which can hardly be characterized as passive or inevitable; rather, those responses often turn out to be active choices. The composer choices Hirsch discusses certainly do not glorify resistance, as many texts on this subject emphasize, but at the same time they cannot support simplistic accounts of victimization. The ambivalent attitude toward Jewish heritage contained in the music of that time emphasizes its imminent features: versatility, variability, and disapproval. Jewish artistic music from the Holocaust period, Hirsch finally concludes, bears the burden of its horrific historical context while undermining the essential thinking on which so much of it was based.
This issue, often discussed in an inappropriate tone, frequently insists on insufficiently transparent elements of resistance against Nazi terror while simultaneously glorifying Judaism in works created during the Holocaust. Objective consideration of the background of such expectations points to a clear need to question the adequacy of these attitudes. Traces of musical artistic creativity existed in nearly all concentration camps. Details of saved documentation can be found in numerous virtual museums created in digital media. One example is the website Music and the Holocaust.
In this context, the unexpected strength and fluidity of this music's life pulse represents a particular paradox. In entirely intolerant, terrorist conditions, Nazi authorities strictly controlled and censored Jewish artistic musical expression. The assumption that Jewish composers were allowed to work because of Nazi propaganda needs is well grounded, which is why musical activity was more prolific — even stimulated by the Nazis themselves — in the transit camp known as Theresienstadt.
Music as a Reflection of Life in the Holocaust
According to the respected musicologist and ethnologist Guido Jochen Fackler, author of a text on Theresienstadt with a significant bibliographical appendix, the camp became a synonym for Holocaust music because of both the qualitative and quantitative levels of its musical life, which represents a unique case in the entire Nazi camp system. Representation of the Holocaust in musical compositions is most often circumstantial and appears in two ways: through highlighting the character of music and confirming the exclusive connection between Jews and the Holocaust, or — more rarely — through circumstantial symbolic representation of trauma. Specific circumstances in Theresienstadt favored the construction of German propaganda narratives that functioned to distract and mislead relevant international institutions.
Fackler quotes jazz musician Eric Vogel, who speaks of a conscious retreat into the inner world of illusions — a defense mechanism musicians used against the painful recognition of their role as instruments of propaganda. Vogel's testimony indicates that musicians were not unaware of their exposure to Nazi abuse but had chosen nonetheless to continue their activities.
According to Fackler, music was an integral part of life in Theresienstadt. Musicians were allowed to perform, and the children's opera Brundibár was performed there more than fifty times, speaking to the popularity and importance art held for prisoners. Through mutual artistic activities, these isolated, disempowered, and dehumanized people fought to preserve their dignity, finding the strength and will to create. Music's role in Theresienstadt was not only to consolidate prisoners; its mission was psychological, educational, and cultural-political. Their refusal to accept their situation provided an inspirational example to other prisoners. Music thus became a means of preserving both the musicians' identity and that of their audience. Music provided comfort and hope that they might survive, and the interest in and need for music in the camp were very intense.
It is not unusual for people to seek meaning in extraordinary circumstances through art. According to Viktor Ullmann, one of the most prolific composers in Theresienstadt, the unique circumstances of internment "increased" his musical activities, and his efforts toward art were proportional to his desire for life. Music reflected a primordial human need for expression and survival, serving as a testament to the human spirit even in the darkest times.
Human life had to be preserved, saved, survived, described, and remembered. The more precarious survival became, the greater and more urgent the need to describe and remember life. This explains why musicians in the camp devoted so much energy to educating fellow prisoners. Aware of life’s fragility, their only hope was that art would outlast any historical moment.
Ulman became conscious of his Jewish identity only in Theresienstadt. It was there that he first set texts in Yiddish to music, as in his song cycle Drei Jiddische Lieder, op. 53. Still, true to his own sensibility, he remained devoted to the modern currents of European music and wrote chiefly in German.
Hans Krása was also a German-trained disciple, but his temperament linked him to the Czech avant-garde rather than Ulman’s world. Krása took full responsibility for his talent only during internment. His children’s opera Brundibár is frequently performed today. Along with Anne Frank’s diary, this work is the period’s most important artifact and a unique testament to the shocking fate of Jewish children.
Another major composition created in Theresienstadt is Vier Lieder nach chinesischer Poesie. Its author is Pavel Haas. This cycle of songs for baritone and piano, based on Chinese poems translated into German, carries symbolic titles that wholly reflect the composer’s moods—full of sadness, nostalgia, longing for home, hope for survival, and the wish to be reunited with loved ones. The songs Ich vernahm Wildgänse and Fern ist der Mond der Heimat speak of sorrow and homesickness, while Im Bambushain offers a calm, idyllic contrast. Durchwachte Nacht deals with overcoming despair and the immense joy sparked by a vision of reunion with the woman he loved. The cycle was performed many times after the war and achieved great success. Its success was bolstered by frequent performances from baritone Karel Berman, who premiered it in Theresienstadt in 1944 and was among the few who survived.
Haas was naturally pessimistic, and this trait peaked in Theresienstadt, especially just after his arrival. Lonely and nostalgic, he needed time to adapt. He only began composing after his friends and fellow prisoners insisted. He channeled his state of mind into his music.
The youngest of the four most significant Theresienstadt composers was Gideon Klein, born in 1919. His tragic death is considered the greatest loss to 20th-century Czech music. Exceptionally talented and skilled, Klein was remarkably active in the camp, helping to lift the community’s spirits. With his genius, he arranged one of classical music’s most beautiful and moving works: the famous Lullaby, a piece for soprano and piano based on a traditional melody with a Yiddish text. On the manuscript, the title appears in German as Wiegenlied, though the song is now famous by its Yiddish text Sh’chav Beni, which describes a mother soothing her child, telling him to sleep and rest, while repeating the word “the night, the night” in a high register that resembles a scream. Tensions between Jews, Germans, and Czechs were an everyday reality in Theresienstadt, and this small, seemingly innocent song reflected the microcosm of that reality. After the war, the song inspired controversy around Czech musicologist Milan Slavický, who argued that Klein did not change his ambivalent attitude toward Judaism in the camp but merely used it for communal purposes. Other scholars, like Nir Cohen, believe Klein was preoccupied, almost obsessed, with searching for the meaning of his roots, finding his answers in art. His stance toward his origins may not have changed much, but it certainly appeared in the music he created in Theresienstadt (Cohen 2006: 26–27). The Lullaby, along with several original compositions Klein wrote in the camp, represents music of the post-war period that was performed frequently, steadily gaining popularity until it achieved full recognition for its contribution to 20th-century art. This powerful and unique music, born under brutal conditions of internment, has earned its rightful place—not only out of respect for authors killed too young, but also as distinctive, impressive artistic work in its own right. It is the greatest legacy of the Theresienstadt musicians. Nevertheless, as Fockler warns, a certain “myth about Theresienstadt” built through numerous memorial concerts “carries with it a tremendous danger of ‘fictionalizing the historical place’” and its prevailing living conditions. For that reason, it must be emphasized that the phenomenon of music from Theresienstadt should not be regarded as separate from a symbol of humanity in inhumane conditions.
The unique conditions in which these works were created make impartial assessment more difficult. Still, some shared characteristics can be identified. Most prominent are many musical elements that convey profound sadness, darkness, and an ominous tone. Also evident are prevailing musical innuendos, shaped by characteristic gestures and quotations that clearly reference styles of composers outside the camps—in whose works we also find ideas related to the Holocaust theme—which certainly would have been suppressed by German censors had they been more overt. For this reason, these works often contain secret, coded communication that does not always concern Jewish identity. Finally, images of death appear frequently.
We conclude that musicians used their activity to express their perception of the historic moment. They did so in two ways: by emphasizing the character of Jewish music through innuendos, and/or through indirect symbolic depiction of trauma. The Holocaust as a “paradigmatic trauma” can be presented through a narrative articulation of “networking memory and remembrance (inner worlds), a historic event (outer worlds) and the existing physical and mental pain” (Đaković 2014;153). Musical works created during the Holocaust represent narratives in which the “networked” trauma of the Holocaust is articulated through musical symbols. In the following chapter, we will focus on how art evokes emotions and evokes the memory of trauma, and how, through revival of this music, it is possible to transmit the authentic experience of the dead who bore witness to the Holocaust.
### Music as “a Living Gesture of Memory”
On one hand, many coincidences connect the phenomenon of musical art with the phenomenon of memory and remembrance. In the introduction to The Long Shadow of the Past, Aleida Assmann speaks of artistic experience that joins two gates, two spaces, and two times through a single artistic idea. A similar transcendent experience can occur when hearing music inspired by the Holocaust. The time frame in which a composition is revived becomes the gate where two spatial and temporal dimensions merge into one artistic idea, or two historical situations. Assmann called this a “remembrance frame,” highlighting it as important in building identity through the conscious narrative articulation of a traumatic experience.
Trauma as a concept was investigated after 1980. An important symptom of traumatic experience is the long-term impact of its consequences. Thus, “the symptoms of a trauma can show after many years,” and “the potential for mental distress […] can be transferred in an unconscious way from a generation to a generation.” This mechanism can be overcome if, within an appropriate social setting, “dissociative and unconscious parts of the trauma are successfully transformed into the conscious form of remembrance” (Assmann 2011;115).
Communication plays a crucial role in overcoming the Holocaust’s trauma. Jan Assmann believes neither language nor the ability to communicate arises from within the human being alone, but rather in exchange with others, in the circular and recursive interplay of the inner and outer self (Assmann 2001;17). Aleida Assmann adds that people are indivisible as individuals but not self-sufficient identities; each “myself” is linked to a collective “ourselves,” and collective identity provides an essential foundation for each individual identity (Assmann 2011;19). When investigating individual remembrance, Assmann states that memories are formed only through communication, in the exchange of experience with others. The analogy between Assmann’s view and music as a phenomenon based on the artist’s dialogue with the audience is obvious. The relationship between the individual and the community is important within the artistic tradition that treats music as a communication phenomenon—both in composing and performing.
We could say there is a similarity between individual remembrance, as Assmann defines it, and classical music as a technically completed musical form, shaped by the individual experience of the artist who creates musical content through the prism of a personal perspective. Musical content must be personalized through the act of composing, since the artist’s memory almost always plays an important role when shaping a musical form—as shown by the music composed during the Holocaust.
Assmann’s conclusion that individual memory encompasses far more than the store of irreplaceable personal experience—since individual and collective memory always intersect within a person (Assmann 2011;24)—points to a similarity with musical form. Given that form feeds on the “intersecting” of subjective artistic content and the context objectivized by that content, and considering music as form intended for collective performance, it determines the path from the intimate to the public, from the personal to the collective.
Writing about the intersection of empirical and collective memory, Aleida Assmann traces the path from individual to social, individual to collective, and individual to cultural memory. In these reflections, a similarity between memory and musical form can be recognized. Assmann says individual memory is always socially grounded (ibid;267), and performance is a social event with ritual features. According to Assmann, the transfer from individual to collective memory can be achieved through participation in rituals, where the past is interpreted, communicated, and practiced so that it remains in the present (ibid;268–289). It hardly needs emphasizing that music as a form lives in direct presentation, that is, in the present. Moreover, the similarity between cultural memory and music is apparent in the content of memories which, as Assmann says, exist “in order to have a dialogue with them and make them an element of our identity” (ibid;271).
Music holds a special place in restoring and preserving the memory of the Holocaust. An authentic and convincing representation of trauma should engage all our senses, and the acoustic element of memory acts as an emotional catalyst in the perception of content and the construction of narrative memories. The concert, as a form embodying a musical narrative, is an ideal platform for reconstructing past experience “touched by the spirit of time and place.” A live performance of a work of art exists only in interaction with the audience. This interaction can never be repeated identically, and thus lacks a fixed, constant form. This particular quality creates a constant need for its repetition.
Memory is very important in the presentation and perception of music. First, it appears during the creation of music, which is shaped by the personal, collective, and cultural memories of earlier layers of knowledge and emotions in the artists making music. Then the effect of music is transferred through live energy by means of interaction to the layers of sensory and intellectual cognition in the listener, where it becomes new individual memory (Rapajić 2012;1). It is important to note that performing music of Holocaust remembrance should carry a clear commemorative function to underscore the circumstances from which it emerged; if the listener is unaware of the composer’s inspirations, the reception of the music may or may not consciously connect with the narrative of the Holocaust trauma.
Assmann concludes that historians are needed to “reconstruct” the past, while artists are equally necessary to “rematerialize” it. Through their expressive resources, the arts “expand historical imagination and are able to create pregnant forms of the past present.” She emphasizes the importance of “be[ing] connected with specific histories and authentic places in order to protect the memories from [...] increasing separation from the reality,” adding that “the future of remembrance depends on its ability to be restored.” Remembrance requires support from “repeated motives and repetitive gestures,” since refusing to construct cultural remembrance leads “to the return of incontrollable strikes of the past” (Ibid: 323–324).
For the same reasons, Holocaust music deserves equal status on the artistic stage. Its quality warrants this recognition, yet it is often sidelined because performing it—with all its connotations—unsettles parts of the audience. Music occupies a unique place within civilizational cultural remembrance, as its medium readily transfers authentic emotions tied to traumatic experiences. Applying Assmann’s theoretical framework opens possibilities for narrating Holocaust trauma through composing and performing music, assuming such presentation can serve as an effective mechanism for shaping remembrance in later generations. Analysis reveals that the mechanism’s outcomes include contents and emotions that intensely transform the identity of hearers, embedding in their minds the spirit of place and time while overlaying it with the identity of artists whose positions and lives authentically attest to the historical circumstances of the Holocaust. Consequently, banal controversies surrounding Holocaust music should not prevail in the future; civilized humanity has the option to construct cultural remembrance and thereby secure its survival.