"Des Lagers Stimme"--Musik im KZ: Alltag und Haftlingskultur in den Konzentrationslagern 1933 bis 1936 (review)

Until recently, many scholars seemed to think that the most remarkable thing about music in concentration camps was that it had existed at all. How, in the midst of horror, could those facing death turn to music? In the mid-1980s, when extensive studies of music in Theresienstadt began to appear, there emerged a fuller recognition of the presence of music and musical activities. However, that recognition was based on the idea that if and when there was music in the camps, it marked special moments. Music might provide evidence for fleeting moments of beauty or, more rarely, reveal attempts at resistance.

In this exhaustive volume Guido Fackler takes a different approach, directly and convincingly contradicting the notion that music should not have been present in the camps: Rather than remaining outside the world of horror and degradation, music was a crucial and constant component of the everyday world of the camps. Music did not offer simply an alternative by filling rare moments available for entertainment; rather it provided a cultural fabric that stretched across the entire life of the camp. Music helped constitute the Alltag, the everyday, and therefore it was inseparable from the collective culture of the camps. To understand that everyday culture fully requires one to listen not just to the music of the prisoners, but to their musical voice--"the voice of the camp" in Fackler's title--which serves as one of the most trenchant contexts for interpreting the cultural system of the camps and the Holocaust.

Essential to his portrayal of the everyday culture of music is the sheer volume of source material Fackler has plumbed: memoirs, interviews, and other forms of documentation, as well as scholarly studies from many relevant disciplines. Moreover, the author has worked extensively with what appear to be countless scholarly projects conceived to uncover and recontextualize new forms of representing the everyday culture of music-making. For scholars of Holocaust and genocide studies, this second domain of research, broadly situated in Fackler's home field of European folklore studies, deserves special attention, for it is here that we discern the texture of the everyday.

From the outset, it is important to recognize that the documentation allowing a more complete picture of the everyday is, in its own way, abundant. Through intensive research of existing archival materials and by carefully extracting data from the most recent studies of individual and collective lives, especially the work of a new generation of German scholars, Fackler has been able to create a more complete picture. There are, for example, repertory lists of songs from several camps (e.g.,Esterwegen, pp. 141ñ43). Oral variants from standard German folk and popular songs appear in transcription, as recalled by those who sang them and reinterpreted by Fackler to clarify their political and ideological meanings (see especially chapter 3).

Everyday camp culture encompasses a much more complex soundscape, ranging from the frequent broadcast of music through loudspeakers to the ways in which music-making spilled over into the surrounding communities. When guards visited local musical events outside the camp, for example, they effectively served as conduits, albeit unidirectional, between the closed world of the camp and the public sphere beyond. It was not uncommon for the German guards to form musical ensembles of their own, and to rehearse and perform in the presence of prisoners. The arrival of new inmates, especially political prisoners, could also provide an occasion for processions through city streets leading to the camps; in such instances musical practices contributed to the daily forms of humiliation.

Several critical considerations motivated Fackler's decision to focus on the first three years (1933ñ36) of the Nazi era. The camps were then located within German borders and the inmates, largely imprisoned on political and social grounds, were...