“The Lachmann Problem”: An Unsung Chapter in Comparative Musicology [Be àyat Lakhman: Perek àlum be-musikologyah hashvaatit, kolel mikhtavim ve-hartsaot shel Robert Lakhman she-terem pursemu] (review)

“The Lachmann Problem”: An Unsung Chapter in Comparative Musicology by Ruth Katz is the first comprehensive insight into the short life and the important contributions of the ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann (1892–1939). Lachmann was born in Germany into a Jewish nonobservant family—a fact that would influence the course of his living and work situation after 1933. Although not yet formally trained, Lachmann began his work as an ethnomusicologist at the prison camp in Wünsdorf during World War I, where he collected non-Western and particularly Arabic music from prisoners of war. Shortly after the war, in 1918, he formally began to study musicology in Berlin, under Johannes Wolf and Carl Stumpf, and continued the studies in Arabic he had begun earlier. Lachmann focused on what was then called “Oriental music,” especially the traditions of urban and rural Tunisia and other parts of North Africa. Due to his geographic focus and experience, he was appointed head of the Phonogram Commission at the Congress of Arabic Music that took place in Cairo, in 1932. There he was responsible for selecting and recording the performances of Arabic musicians from Morocco to Iraq. Lachmann’s contributions to the discipline of ethnomusicology or, as it was then called, Comparative Musicology, were most important. As one of the founders of the Gesellschaftzur Erforschung der Musik, formed in 1930, he was influential in developing the discipline; he also served as the editor of the society’s quarterly journal, Zeitschriftfür Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft during its short existence from 1933 to 1935.

Katz’s study is not a chronological story of Lachmann’s life, and it does not intend to be a biography. Using selected documents and correspondence held at the Archives of The Hebrew University and The Jewish National and University Library (Lachmann’s personal files), both in Jerusalem, Katz aims at reemphasizing “the relevance of particular junctions . . . to the development of scientific work” through “positioning Lachmann at the cross-roads that affected his life and scientific work” (17). Thus, “The Lachmann Problem” presents itself as a mosaic of Robert Lachmann’s life, embedded in historical context, and with strong focus on his years during Palestine emigration from 1935 to 1939.

A hybrid between edition of correspondence (but as such incomplete and not sufficiently critical) and biography (but not structured as such), the book is divided into three parts: A prologue that offers glimpses into Lachmann’s life before 1933 and that situates the early history of The Hebrew University, the Docudrama (an annotated edition of letters in the English original, or translated from the Hebrew or the German), and an epilogue followed by an extensive apparatus of appendices. A compact disc with musical examples for Lachmann’s Radio Talks he gave in 1936–37 is attached on the back cover.

The prologue begins in 1933 with Lachmann’s “early retirement” or dismissal from his position at the Berlin Staatsbibliothek under the Nazi government— a good 50 pages further we eventually learn the actual reason (66). Indeed, Lachmann’s case was no exception: When the Nazi government promulgated the so-called Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service on April 7, 1933, most Jewish employees in the public realm were dismissed. Although Lachmann enlisted in 1911 to serve his country, he was not among the few that were exempted (exemptions extended, for example, to veterans of World War I, but by the fall of 1935 even these exemptions were by and large canceled). The prologue further provides information about Lachmann’s background and social milieu in the context of the Weimar Republic and “Jewish” Germany. Katz details that “it is important to remember that, between the two World Wars, the Jews constituted...