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

This book investigates musically mediated responses to the “catastrophe of the Second World War and the Nazi past” in German literature (1). The primary texts, whose respective publication dates span almost fifty years, are treated roughly chronologically. Although a number of authors and texts are discussed throughout this study, its core consists of four full chapters, each devoted to a single author: Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Thomas Bernhard. With the exception of the Bernhard chapter, where two texts are examined in depth, each chapter revolves around a single work.

In his introduction, and in search of a theoretical framework for the individual readings, Ben-Horin briefly reviews lines of musical thought from Friedrich Nietzsche, Theodor Adorno, and Julia Kristeva. Important for this study is Adorno’s belief that music acts as an “acoustic seismograph that reverberates with reality” (4). According to the account that unfolds in the introduction, Adorno validates and systematizes Nietzsche’s insight expressed in The Birth of Tragedy that music, particularly dissonant music, contains significant potential for documenting cultural memory. In his 1949 Philosophy of New Music, Adorno considers the twelve-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg emblematic for a musical aesthetic that, in refusing to truck with antiquated musical forms, instead exhibits a willingness to register and reflect the shattered and traumatized present. Here, Ben-Horin touches on Kristeva’s insight that music can form a repository of psychic mechanisms, including those related to traumatic experiences.

Ben-Horin places himself within the broad field of musical-literary relations associated with Steven Paul Scher’s enterprising but somewhat dated interventions. With a commitment to tracing the traffic between music and politics, Ben-Horin proposes focusing on both thematic and structural manifestations of music in literature. Thematic manifestations refer to passages where authors discuss certain composers or pieces, which can function as musical subtexts that recall historical and political contexts. And in respect to structural manifestations—which actually form the main focus of the study—Ben-Horin makes a further distinction between structural analogies and tonal imitations: the former documents instances of sentences, paragraphs, or chapters imitating concrete musical forms, whereas the latter describes how language rhythms, generated for example in the repetition of certain sounds, can reach outside of themselves to create meanings that nonetheless resist linguistic conceptualization.

By the strict letter of this study’s subtitle, Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus does not belong. Mann is not reflecting on wartime Germany after the fact but rather fashioning a contemporaneous account of it. Ben-Horin nevertheless starts with this novel since he views it as a foundational example of how the musical biography of German literature came to critically engage National Socialism after 1945. According to the narrative emerging in this chapter, Mann is at heart a musical traditionalist who is sympathetic to Wagner’s views on his own music dramas, namely that they develop and extend a Romantic aesthetic present in Beethoven’s final symphony. However, Mann is also deeply aware of the aesthetic and political shortcomings of Wagner’s all-encompassing project and recognizes, via Adorno, the legitimacy of Schoenberg’s attempt to shape an alternative musical poetics that, by eschewing harmony and tonality, is paradoxically in tune with a fragmented present. Of course the question central to Dr. Faustus and often considered in the secondary literature is whether Schoenberg, fictionalized in the novel as the composer Adrian Leverkühn, ends up unwittingly creating a “dangerous, dogmatic system” (31) that mirrors National Socialist ideology. Ben-Horin is less interested in answering the question than he is in showing how Mann skillfully works these two discursive exchanges, Wagner on Beethoven and Adorno on Schoenberg, into the tissue of the novel.

In his chapter on Grass’s The Tin Drum, Ben-Horin’s focus is not on dissonance revealed through a particular work but rather through “rhythmic patterns of language” and “disturbing sound...