Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation by Amy Lynn Wlodarski (review)

While scholars have written extensively on Holocaust representation in film and literature, its role in musical compositions, performances, and commemorations has remained relatively understudied. Musicologist Amy Lynn Wlodarski thus makes important interventions with her monograph Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation. Wlodarski employs the concept of secondary musical witness as a lens to explore fraught issues of Holocaust representation, which, she contends, "promotes the perception that a 'sense of the real' lays buried somewhere beneath the veneer of language" and offers "moral, ethical, and historical agency." (1) In five chapters, Wlodarski situates four postwar compositions into ongoing debates surrounding the ethics and limits of Holocaust representation: Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw (1947), Hans Eisler's film score to Nuit et Brouillard (1956), the Holocaust memorial cantata Jüdische Chronik (1960–1961), and Steve Reich's Different Trains (1988). Grounding her study in an impressive array of musicological, literary, and historical scholarship, Wlodarksi offers an interdisciplinary approach to Holocaust musical witness that seriously considers composers' transmission of "textures of fact" and "textures of memory" and the resultant representational issues.

Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw serves as the focus for two of the five chapters, and through a detailed musicological analysis and critical examination of its reception history, Wlodarski shows how the work itself enacts traumatic memory. Schoenberg's use of the twelve-tone technique, Wlodarski argues, "challenges standard 'mediations of musical culture' by disavowing and discarding former historical models for musical expression." (50) Her thoughtful musical analysis convincingly demonstrates how Schoenberg employs the twelve-tone musical structure to "encode ideas about traumatic recall." (13) While Schoenberg's libretto contains historical inconsistencies (e.g., reference to gas chambers in the Warsaw Ghetto), Wlodarski contends that Schoenberg's "imagined account" allows the composer to freely engage musical witness through his eschewal of musical and textual limits of expression. She also explores the role of philosopher as witness, and a critical reading of Theodor W. Adorno's writings from the 1950s and 1960s complements her musicological analysis. At the heart of chapter 2 lie questions of ethics and aesthetics related to Holocaust representation. Wlodarski deftly navigates Adorno's writings on the subject and she ultimately concludes that musical witness "may risk a transfiguration of the event that skews our comprehension of its horror, if only for a moment." (53)

Hans Eisler's score to Alain Resnais's film Nuit et Brouillard evidences the ways in which some composers consciously avoided sentimentalization of the Holocaust. Eisler's employment of Brechtian alienation techniques in the soundtrack fosters an "emotional remove," but, as Wlodarski skillfully illustrates, Eisler also incorporates emotive elements that facilitate empathic unsettlement. In her analysis of three scenes, she shows how Eisler depicts interrogative, empathic, and unsettled emotional witnessing that "collectively constitute a political form of empathic unsettlement in order to advance the postwar goals of the film." (71) Wlodarski concludes that, through his emotive musical witness, Eisler ultimately rehumanizes the victims and rescues them from "spectral silence."

While previous chapters focus on the composer and philosopher as witness, chapter 4 explores the state as witness through the Holocaust cantata Jüdische Chronik's reception history in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Composed by five composers from East and West Germany, Jüdische Chronik served as a "pan-German third space for commemoration" (92) that also advanced the GDR's political and ideological agendas. Wlodarski draws on Marianne Hirsch's concept of postmemory to explore Jüdische Chronik as a "postmemorial site of witness that preserved that state's problematic relationship to its fascist past." (94) As Wlodarski expertly details, the cantata was featured in national commemorations and even became part of the official educational curriculum, which urged educators to teach the work not as a "Jewish chronicle" but rather a "historical chronicle." She considers the work's genealogy to demonstrate the implications of political cooptation and exploitation of secondary musical witness.

In a similar vein, Wlodarski's final chapter...