Audible Testimonies

Many of the first Holocaust testimonies involved music. Yet despite the central role that music played in the traumatic aftermath of the Third Reich, it was not perceived as testimonial. 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 were forms of witnessing. Individuals persecuted by the Nazis, including Jewish Holocaust survivors, political prisoners, Communist resistance fighters, and members of the Black German community, intentionally documented their experiences with music. Whether the Terezín memory pieces of Erich Adler, Fasia Jansen's musical protests, or the Ex-Concentration Camp Orchestra's appearances in their striped uniforms, 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: reclaiming repertoires banned under the Nazis, composing original works, and staging performances in former sites of Fascist terror. By considering these musics—united in time and place, but radically different in content—this book makes audible forgotten or decayed sources to construct a theory of musical testimony.

Abby Anderton is an Associate Professor of Music at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research interests include post-catastrophic music making, performance and Holocaust testimony, and female composers. Her first book, Rubble Music (2019), explored Berlin's classical music culture in the wake of the Third Reich. Anderton's work has been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, the Holocaust Educational Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Institute for the History of the German Jews in Hamburg.