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Transcending Dystopia tells the story of the remarkable revival of Jewish music in postwar and Cold War Germany. Covering a wide spectrum of musical activities and geographies across the country, this book provides a panoramic view on how music contributed to transformations within and beyond Jewish communities after the Holocaust.
List of contents
- On Transliteration and Translation, Spelling, and Names
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue: Moving Toward Silence
- Introduction: Against All Odds--The Jewish Gemeinde as Sonic Community in an Age of Mobility
- Part I: After the Rupture--The Interregnum and the Culture of Rebirth
- Chapter 1: In the Midst of Rubble: Rebuilding a Musical Life in Berlin
- Chapter 2: Out of the Depths: The Case of Munich and the South
- Chapter 3: Communal Encounters--Frankfurt am Main and the North
- Chapter 4: Remnants in the Soviet and French Zones and Beyond
- Chapter 5: Remembering the Holocaust: Mourning and Celebration
- Chapter 6: Disseminating Survival: Jews, Music, and the Media
- Chapter 7: The End of Dystopia?
- Part II: Music in Motion: The Jewish Communities in West Germany
- Chapter 8: Returning and Leaving: Frankfurt in Flux
- Chapter 9: Rebuilding with or without Organ
- Chapter 10: Cantors on the Move
- Chapter 11: Regenerating a Choral Music Culture
- Chapter 12: Music in Social Life
- Part III: The Presence of Absence: Jewish (Heritage) Music in East Germany
- Chapter 13: Dystopia under Communism: The Communities in the Crossfire of Politics
- Chapter 14: Werner Sander and the Formation of the Leipziger Synagogalchor
- Chapter 15: Facing Cultural Stagnation: Musical Life after Sander
- Chapter 16: "Making Antifascist Politics Visible"--Jewish Heritage Music and Cold War Politics
- Chapter 17: The Leipziger Synagogalchor in the Service of State Propaganda
- Chapter 18: Jewish Culture in Public Diplomacy, Memory Politics, and the Curious Case of Halle
- Chapter 19: Projecting Utopia: Jewish Heritage Music Abroad
- Chapter 20: The Politics of Commemoration and Reorientation
- Part IV: Music as Vortex in Jewish Berlin
- Chapter 21: The Establishment of the Jüdische Gemeinde von Groß-Berlin
- Chapter 22: The Anniversary Year of 1971 and the Dawn of Détente
- Chapter 23: The Rise of the Jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin
- Chapter 24: Deterioration and Recovery: The Jüdische Gemeinde Berlin, Hauptstadt der DDR
- Chapter 25: Toward a New Communal Future: Parallel Sound Worlds and Rapprochement
About the author
Tina Frühauf is Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University and serves on the doctoral faculty of The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the editor of the award-winning Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, and Postwar German Culture (OUP, 2014) and has published widely on German Jewish music culture and twentieth-century music.
Summary
By the end of the Second World War, Germany was in ruins and its Jewish population so gravely diminished that a rich cultural life seemed unthinkable. And yet, as surviving Jews returned from hiding, the camps, and their exiles abroad, so did their music. Transcending Dystopia tells the story of the remarkable revival of Jewish musical activity that developed in postwar Germany against all odds. Author Tina Frühauf provides a kaleidoscopic panorama of musical practices in worship and social life across the country to illuminate how music contributed to transitions and transformations within and beyond Jewish communities in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Drawing on newly unearthed sources from archives and private collections, this book covers a wide spectrum of musical activity-from its role in commemorations and community events to synagogue concerts and its presence on the radio-across the divided Germany until the Fall of the Wall in 1989. Frühauf's use of mobility as a conceptual framework reveals the myriad ways in which the reemergence of Jewish music in Germany was shaped by cultural transfer and exchange that often relied on the circulation of musicians, their ideas, and practices within and between communities. By illuminating the centrality of mobility to Jewish experiences and highlighting how postwar Jewish musical practices in Germany were defined by politics that reached across national borders to the United States and Israel, this pioneering study makes a major contribution to our understanding of Jewish life and culture in a transnational context.
Additional text
It is a masterful interdisciplinary work on a little-studied time period in Jewish musical history, and provides an important framework for looking at the musical life of other postwar Jewish communities in the future.
