The first comprehensive study of musical Holocaust representations in the Western tradition to examine both musical language and cultural value.

This is the first musicological study entirely devoted to a comprehensive analysis of musical Holocaust representations in the Western art music tradition. Through a series of chronological case studies grounded in primary source analysis, Amy Lynn Wlodarski analyses the compositional processes and conceptual frameworks that provide key pieces with their unique representational structures and critical receptions. The study examines works composed in a variety of musical languages - from Arnold Schoenberg's dodecaphonic A Survivor from Warsaw to Steve Reich's minimalist Different Trains - and situates them within interdisciplinary discussions about the aesthetics and ethics of artistic witness. At the heart of this book are important questions about how music interacts with language and history; memory and trauma; and politics and mourning. Wlodarski's detailed musical and cultural analyses provide new models for the assessment of the genre, illustrating the benefits and consequences of musical Holocaust representation in the second half of the twentieth century.

Dora Apel analyzes the ways in which artists born after the Holocaust-whom she calls secondary witnesses-represent a history they did not experience first hand. She demonstrates that contemporary artists confront these atrocities in order to bear witness not to the Holocaust directly, but to its "memory effects" and to the implications of those effects for the present and future. Drawing on projects that employ a variety of unorthodox artistic strategies, the author provides a unique understanding of contemporary representations of the Holocaust. She demonstrates how these artists frame the past within the conditions of the present, the subversive use of documentary and the archive, the effects of the Jewish genocide on issues of difference and identity, and the use of representation as a form of resistance to historical closure.

Witnessing Witnessing focuses critical attention on those who receive the testimony of Holocaust survivors. Questioning the notion that traumatic experience is intrinsically unspeakable and that the Holocaust thus lies in a quasi-sacred realm beyond history, the book asks whether much current theory does not have the effect of silencing the voices of real historical victims. It thereby challenges widely accepted theoretical views about the representation of trauma in general and the Holocaust in particular as set forth by Giorgio Agamben, Cathy Caruth, Berel Lang, and Dori Laub. It also reconsiders, in the work of Theodor Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas, reflections on ethics and aesthetics after Auschwitz as these pertain to the reception of testimony. Referring at length to videotaped testimony and to texts by Charlotte Delbo, Primo Levi, and Jorge Semprun, the book aims to make these voices heard. In doing so, it clarifies the problems that anyone receiving testimony may encounter and emphasizes the degree to which listening to survivors depends on listening to ourselves and to one another. Witnessing Witnessing seeks to show how, in the situation of address in which Holocaust survivors call upon us, we discover our own tacit assumptions about the nature of community and the very manner in which we practice it.

This collection explores Rancière's thought along a number of music-historical trajectories, including Italian and German opera, Romantic and modernist music, Latin American and South African music, jazz, and contemporary popular music, and sets him in dialogue with key thinkers including Adorno, Althusser, Badiou and Deleuze.

Antifascist and socialist monuments pervaded the landscape of the former German Democratic Republic (1949-89), presenting a distorted vision of the national past. Official commemorative culture in East Germany celebrated a selective set of political heroes, seeming to leave no public space for mourning those who were excluded from the country's founding myths. Socialist Laments: Musical Mourning in the German Democratic Republic examines the role of music in this nation's memorial culture, demonstrating how music facilitated the expressions of loss within spaces of commemoration for East German citizens. Music performed during state-sponsored memorial rituals no doubt bolstered official narratives of the German past. But it simultaneously provided an outlet for mourning in highly politicized environment. The book presents both a history and theory of musical mourning in East Germany. Using a site-specific approach to analysis, author Martha Sprigge demonstrates how the multiple semantic networks opened up by these musical works facilitated many memorial associations without necessitating the overt articulation of a mourned subject. Throughout the country's forty-year existence, music offered East German citizens an audible outlet for working through traumatic losses-both collective and individual-that was distinct from other artistic expressive possibilities. The book reveals the ways that East Germany's extensive commemorative repertoire helped composers, performers, and audiences navigate between the inevitable need to mourn on the one hand, and the seeming impossibilities of mourning on the other.

In Music in the Holocaust Shirli Gilbert provides the first large-scale, critical account of the role of music amongst communities imprisoned under Nazism. She documents a wide scope of musical activities, ranging from orchestras and chamber groups to choirs, theatres, communal sing-songs, and cabarets, in some of the most important internment centres in Nazi-occupied Europe, including Auschwitz and the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos. Gilbert is also concerned with exploring theways in which music - particularly the many songs that were preserved - contribute to our broader understanding of the Holocaust and the experiences of its victims. Music in the Holocaust is, at its core, a social history, taking as its focus the lives of individuals and communities imprisoned under Nazism.Music opens a unique window on to the internal world of those communities, offering insight into how they understood, interpreted, and responded to their experiences at the time.

Surveying irreverent and controversial representations of the Holocaust - from Sylvia Plath and the Sex Pistols to Quentin Tarantino and Holocaust comedy - Matthew Boswell considers how they might play an important role in shaping our understanding of the Nazi genocide and what it means to be human.

Finalist for the 2019 National Jewish Book Award in the Anthologies and Collections Category presented by the Jewish Book Council Silver Winner for Anthologies, 2018 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Writing in Witness is a broad survey of the most important writing about the Holocaust produced by eyewitnesses at the time and soon after. Whether they intended to spark resistance and undermine Nazi authority, to comfort family and community, to beseech God, or to leave a memorial record for posterity, the writers reflect on the power and limitations of the written word in the face of events often thought to be beyond representation. The diaries, journals, letters, poems, and other works were created across a geography reaching from the Baltics to the Balkans, from the Atlantic coast to the heart of the Soviet Union, and in a wide array of original languages. Along with the readings, Eric J. Sundquist's introductions provide a comprehensive account of the Holocaust as a historical event. Including works by prominent authors such as Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, as well those little known or anonymous, Writing in Witness provides, in vital and memorable examples, a wide-ranging account of the Holocaust by those who felt the imperative to give written testimony.

Arguing against the prevailing view that Holocaust survivors (encouraged by a new and flourishing culture of 'witnessing') have come forward only recently to tell their stories,Writing the Holocaust examines the full history of Holocaust testimony, from the first chroniclers confined to Nazi-enforced ghettos to today's survivors writing as part of collective memory. Zoë Waxman shows how the conditions and motivations for bearing witness changed immeasurably. She reveals the multiplicity of Holocaust experiences, the historically contingent nature of victims' responses, and the extent to which their identities - secular or religious, male or female, East or West European - affected not only what they observed but also how they have written about their experiences. In particular, she demonstrates that what survivors remember is substantially determined by the context in which they are remembering.