Musical Biographies: The Music of Memory in Post-1945 German Literature by Michal Ben-Horin (review)

Until fairly recently, cultural memory studies have mainly focused on textual documents and visual artifacts as media for representing the past. Music and other sonic practices have entered the field relatively late, perhaps because sound, being inherently temporal and evanescent, appears less able to preserve and recollect the elusive traces of bygone experiences. Moreover, the ascendency of the ideal of absolute music—instrumental genres not directly based on texts or conveying a programmatic message—has since the Romantic metaphysics of music been seen as evasive of concepts and verbal language, which seem necessary for presenting anything like a truthful and authentic account of history.

For these reasons, Ben-Horin’s study is a welcome contribution to the intermedial exploration of cultural memory and music. According to the author, “[i]n studies of the construction of cultural memory about the Nazi period and the Holocaust, musicological discourse has been neglected” (1). As she argues persuasively, it is precisely music’s subversive potential to refuse the inherent fixities of intellectual concepts and verbal significations that lends itself to conveying the seemingly unrepresentable horrors of the National-Socialist period and the Second World War—traumatic events all too often repressed, ideologically distorted, or forgotten after 1945. Music, in Ben-Horin’s account, opens up alternative memories, representational strategies, and perspectives not necessarily furnished by other media and genres. Relying on Theodor W. Adorno’s musical aesthetics, she argues that modernist music—especially since the Second Viennese School (Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern)—, the use of atonality, and the emancipation of dissonance “resist false views that enforce harmonious images on a disharmonic, damaged reality” (5). It is especially this aesthetics of musical subversion and opposition that tallies with Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic view, which relates music to the semiotic order of fantasy, the maternal, and the revelation of repressed traumas; accordingly, the semiotic disrupts the symbolic domain of verbal significance associated with the law, censorship, and paternal dominance (7). In the literary narratives explored by Ben-Horin, the semiotic articulation leads to the rhetorical figure of the quasi-musical “polylogue,” a complex texture rich in “rhythmic flows, alliterations and phonetic successions” as well as “ambiguities, disorder and non-stabilized meanings” that deconstruct the false stability of homogenizing discourses and repressive ideologies (7).

Ben-Horin applies such theoretical concepts judiciously to a series of “musical biographies”—novels that portray the lives of (semi-)fictitious composers and musicians variously affected by historical trauma, repression, and suffering. The list of titles that Ben-Horin surveys is by now somewhat predictable, having been covered extensively in the critical literature, which she reviews quite thoroughly (with perhaps one major exception, Florian Trabert’s extensive study ,,Kein Lied an die Freude“. Die Neue Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts in der deutschsprachigen Erzählliteratur von Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus bis zur Gegenwart, Würzburg 2011, which covers many writers also addressed in the present volume). Still, Ben-Horin’s original reexamination of this textual corpus succeeds in focusing concisely and incisively on the specifics of the various relations between classical and avant-garde music, a broad spectrum of narrative and dramatic styles, and the vicissitudes of catastrophic memory. Thus, she shows how the composer Adrian Leverkühn in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus is a deeply torn and tortured character, “whose self-destruction resonates with the devastation of Germany” and who develops a musical language of dissonance evoking Schoenberg’s avant-garde style while displaying a melancholic “longing for a lost unity” (15). Wolfgang Koeppen’s novel Death in Rome is—all too briefly—discussed as an answer not only to Mann’s Death in Venice but also and especially to Doctor Faustus, challenging “the bond between twelve-tone composition and fascist ideologies instead of charging it with a stable identity” as Mann seems to do (50). Oskar Matzerath, the grotesque anti-hero of Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum...