Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis

14. Music as Resistance - Nick Strimple

319 Nick Strimple 14 Music as Resistance Long after World War II, Norwegian television broadcast an interview with Paul (Rabinowitsch) Sandfort, a survivor of Theresienstadt concentration camp who had been active as a trumpet player there. When asked why music played such an important role in the camp, Sandfort said, “it is because you hunger. You do not hunger just for food.” At this point the interviewer interrupted him, saying, “the fact that they hungered for food in the camp is understandable. But that they also had a hunger for culture is almost incomprehensible. Can you say something about that?” Part of Sandfort’s reply was, “even though [we] talked about food then, the hunger for culture was just as strong, just because we did not have it. We talked about large dinners, but we only had a small crust of bread; but it tasted good. Nowadays in our society people would let a piece of molded bread, lying in the street, lie. But if you are hungry you pick it up, and then it tastes heavenly. It is like that with music, too, with culture: that if your life really hangs by a thread, then expressing yourself and being able to consume , eat, enjoy and absorb culture is more important, almost more important than food.”1 Paul Sandfort was expressing, from his own experience, what the Canadian commentator Jean-Jacques van Vlasselaer more recently articulated: I believe that culture is born the day a human being becomes conscious of his or her mortality. Meaning originates from the presence of closure. Culture is a means of domesticating closure. The artistic gesture is born when one realizes death is inevitable. A work of art tries to tame death, facing it, braving it, in order to better possess it. Culture affirms our mortal humanity. It is an invented source of life. 1. Transcript of undated Norwegian television interview, courtesy of David Bloch. 320 Nick Strimple The concentration camps with their organized violence tried to eradicate words, speech, language, the cultural gesture. They were the ultimate defeat of the human being.2 It can be argued, then, that every effort to stay alive in the ghettos and camps was an act of resistance. After all, rabbis in the camps constantly preached to their fellow inmates that they must do whatever was necessary to remain alive. Still, there were many instances when music provided the impetus to move beyond basic survival or the maintenance of ritual observances (even in a culturally secular sense, for instance, concerts), and actually shake a collective fist in the face of National Socialism. Below are examples. Jewish (and Other) Music as Resistance in Prewar Germany Among the first acts of the National Socialist government in 1933 was the establishment of concentration camps. These camps were not designed for Jews specifically but rather for political opponents of the Third Reich; and inmates , on stipulation that they leave Germany permanently, could have their freedom purchased by someone on the outside. The earliest example of a camp song is “Die Moorsoldaten” (“The Peat Bog Soldiers”), which was composed in the Börgermoor camp. The music, by Rudi Goguel, is typical of marches and cabaret songs popular during the Weimar Republic and later; and the text, by Johann Esser and Wolfgang Langhoff, is similar in tone to later camp songs: Wohin auch das Auge blicket Everywhere you watch Moor und Heide nur ringsam Bog and marshes all around Vogelsang uns nicht erquicket The chirping of the birds does not    please us Eichen stehen kahl und krum Oaks are standing bare and crooked Wir sind die Moorsoldaten We are the Bog soldiers Und ziehen mit dem Spaten ins And we move with the spade into the   Moor   bog Is das Lager anfgebaut Is built up the camp Wo wir fern von jeder Freude Where we, far from every joy, Hinter Stacheldraht verstaut Are locked up behind barbed wire. Wir sind die Moorsoldaten We are the Bog soldiers Und ziehen mit dem Spaten ins And we move with the spade into the   Moor   bog 2. Tracks to Viktor Ullmann (Vienna: Edition Selene, 1997), 12–22. 321 Music as Resistance The first performance was probably on August 27, 1933, although confusion exists among various accounts—some of them firsthand—concerning its creation , performance, acceptance in the camp, and later subsequent migration throughout Europe. Most agree that the camp commandant banned the song soon after...