Abstract

Many of the first Holocaust testimonies involved music. Yet decades later, we still have not come to terms with the fundamentally sonic nature of these accounts. Audible Testimonies: Surviving the Third Reich in Music and Media explores the early postwar sounds of survivor musicians in Germany, demonstrating that their compositions, recordings, and performances are forms of witnessing. Individuals persecuted by the Nazis, including Jewish Holocaust survivors, political prisoners, Communist resistance fighters, and members of the Black German community turned to music making to document their recent experiences. Whether the Terezín memory pieces of Erich Adler, Fasia Jansen’s musical protests, or the liberation concerts of cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, sounding testimonies gave musicians who survived the Third Reich a public, audible platform. Their stylistic choices were as varied as their experiences, heard in the jazz, folk, pop, and classical music they performed in displaced persons camps, the Nuremberg Opera House, and at the first Eurovision Song Contest. These eye- and earwitnesses shared a testimonial impulse to represent their trauma in sound, whether through the reclamation of repertoires banned under the Nazis, the composition of original work, or staging performances in former sites of Fascist terror. By considering musics united in time and place, but radically different in content, this book makes forgotten, decayed, or impartial sources audible to construct a theory of musical testimony.