Remembering World War II

In May 1946, the United States Military invited the Ex-Concentration Camp Orchestra to perform for the Allied attorneys and staff of the Nuremberg Trials.  For their concert at the Nuremberg opera house, the orchestra of Eastern-European Jewish survivors donned recreations of their striped camp uniforms and stood beside props of barbed-wire fences and Stars of David (Figure 1).  In her 1990 recorded testimony, Henny Durmashkin, a singer with the orchestra, recalled that the performance carried a special weight: "Everybody was there listening to how the Nazis were being tried…the main thing is that we did appear there, and we did play the usual potpourris of the Yiddish songs, and Hebrew songs, and Ghetto songs."[1]  As Durmashkin's interview makes audible, the evidence presented at Nuremberg was not only visual, but also aural.


This paper concerns female Jewish musicians after World War II who gave witness to their experiences of Nazi persecution by performing songs of the ghettos and camps.  Music's auditory and affective qualities enabled these survivors to begin voicing their traumas, offering them a rare public platform in postwar Germany.Although scholarship on Holocaust testimony has largely focused on oral and literary accounts, I argue that music can also be a testimonial medium by bringing together research by historians, psychoanalysts, literary theorists, and musicologists with accounts of female survivor music-making.  


As Zoë Waxman and Atina Grossmann have shown, Holocaust survival was fundamentally affected by gender, and so, too, was the manner in which postwar musicians recounted their experiences.  Female musicians testified in largest numbers through song, rather than composition, as musicians like Lin Jaldati, Fania Fénelon, and Henny Durmashkin toured postwar Europe.  Jaldati's repertoire was shaped by her internment in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, as well as her acquaintance with Anne Frank, whom she met in the final days of the diarist's life.  After surviving Dachau, Durmashkin gave hundreds of concerts between 1945 and 1949 with the Ex-Concentration Camp Orchestra.  And although discussions of Fénelon's career have largely focused on her controversial memoir (Playing for Time), her years living and performing in East Berlin critically informed her advocacy on behalf of other survivors.  These female musicians reclaimed the repertoire of the camps and ghettos in an effort to empower their persecuted communities by providing sonic evidence of Nazi crimes.


[1] "Henny G., Holocaust Testimony," Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, HVT 1774, 35:12, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

British heavy metal band Iron Maiden are unique in the extent to which their music has referenced historical events. From the life and conquests of Alexander the Great, to the Viking raids on the British Isles, to the Crimean War, to the First and Second World Wars, Iron Maiden's recorded catalogue has addressed a wide range of historical topics. World War II, in particular, features prominently in Iron Maiden's music, with the band having written more songs about it than any other single historical event. However, both the significance of this topic for the band's members and how it fits in thematically with Iron Maiden's larger use of historical subject matter has yet to be explored. This paper examines three songs Iron Maiden have written and recorded about World War II: "Aces High," "The Longest Day," and "Brighter Than a Thousand Suns." In doing so, it demonstrates how Iron Maiden's treatment of World War II was influenced by the collective memory of the war to which the members were exposed growing up in Great Britain. Additionally, it shows how these songs, and Iron Maiden's engagement with historical subject matter, relate to larger issues and themes such as British identity, the use of visual media and performance elements to frame the historical content of their lyrics, and the broader context of Iron Maiden's overall repertoire. Much of the scholarly writing on Iron Maiden's music, including multiple articles published in the journal Metal Music Studies (see, for instance, Elliott 2018 and Roberts 2017), has tended to focus on single songs or albums, rather than tracing long-term topical trends throughout their repertoire. By examining historical subject matter as a recurring theme in Iron Maiden's recorded body of work, this project aims to take a holistic and "big picture" approach that is currently absent from the existing scholarship on Iron Maiden's music. Finally, this research contributes to the field of metal studies, through its examination of a significant trend within the work of a long-lasting and influential band whose music represents an important and understudied repertoire within the heavy metal genre.

In Arnold Schoenberg's _A Survivor from Warsaw_ (1947) the eponymous survivor relates and reenacts a telescoped account of Jewish suffering in Nazi-occupied Europe, culminating in the choral singing of the _Shema_, the central confession of Jewish faith. This artistic encounter between Schoenberg and the Holocaust has been the subject of a vast amount of scholarship and commentary. From the very first of these (List, 'Schoenberg's New Cantata') a recurring sticking point has been that the work 'evokes Hollywood, whether intentionally or not' (Feisst, _Schoenberg's New World_), a possible connection that is usually seen as troubling (e.g. Adorno, 'Arnold Schoenberg') or disqualifying (e.g. Taruskin, 'A Sturdy Musical Bridge').


Taking my cue from Kurt List's detailed 1948 review, which is severely critical of the text and narrative of the work, I propose to compare _A Survivor's_ plot to a number of early popular fictional representations of the Holocaust and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, starting with the now mostly forgotten Columbia B movie _None Shall Escape_ (1944). Arguably the first Hollywood movie to deal with the Holocaust, _None Shall Escape_ details Nazi atrocities through testimony offered at a postwar Allied trial of a single Nazi officer. Its depiction of the massacre of the Jews of one Polish village, in which they suddenly turn to fight, culminating in their rabbi's dying recital of the Kaddish, has striking parallels with the climactic conclusion of _A Survivor_, I suggest. Beyond this striking similarity, however, I argue that Schoenberg's plot follows a common Hollywood mode of depicting fortitude and sacrifice in the face of the Nazi enemy, as seen in war films such as _Mrs. Miniver_ (1942) and _The Moon is Down_ (1943), as well as in radio plays such as _The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto_ (Morton Wishengrad, NBC, 1943).


I conclude, however, with Schoenberg's objection to the Hollywood comparison (Schoenberg to List). Drawing on it as well as Clement Greenberg's classic distinction between 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch' I attempt to elucidate some of the aesthetic assumptions that can explain why the conjunction Schoenberg, Hollywood, and Holocaust seems impossible or objectionable to so many commentators.