Music In The Camps – a Personal Reflection

Over the years, I’ve been asked why, given my interest in music lost during the Nazi years, I have not shown a greater interest in the music composed in the camps. I’ll come to address that point later, but this posting is an attempt, despite what appear to be numerous contradictions, of an exmplanation.

Probably due to the accessibility of scores, parts and material in the Auschwitz archive, there has been an increase in research as to what music was written and performed in places where murder was the constant companion.  Oddly, the scores – such as they are – already tell us a great deal by the fact that many are barely more than sketches or song sheets or parts of an arrangement.

What comes across as fascinating and even a little shocking is the upbeat nature of a good deal of this music.  There is a suggestion that in the midst of agony, there was some pretence of normality with easy listening, entertaining light music always accessible and available. But to whom? And why? It’s not always clear if the music was intended for guards or inmates. Nor is it clear who the performers were – or the arrangers. These baffling issues go some way in a much needed demystification of the concentration camp. 

Media over the decades since the Eichmann trial have offered a simplistic binary of savagery and nobility that has coloured our perception. This binary has led many to see music in the camps as something magical, mythical and even divinely redemptive. And yet, I suspect that nothing could have been further from the truth. Shirli Gilbert’s Music in the Holocaust. Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps (Oxford Historical Monographs. Oxford University Press, 2005.) though published twenty years ago tells a more nuanced and disturbing story.

Cinema and popular culture over the past decades have created a faux nobility about having been a concentration camp inmate. The dirt, the indignity, the lice and hunger became badges of honour, endured like a recruit in combat training.  Or as Gilbert puts it: “…something that could acquire meaning within the broader narrative of Jewish suffering.” The only light in this hideous darkness was music – ever good and ever godly. How often have I heard wide-eyed sentiments that music in the camps proved man’s ability to search and find beauty in even the most horrible situations. Or music proved the invincibility of spirit, as if composing in a camp was an act of defiance. This is all only partially correct and as I wrote in my book Music of Exile, the camp anthems commissioned by the Nazi camp leaders from whichever composer they happened to have in their midst could, in some manner of speaking, become acts of defiance.  There was something dialectical about singing an anthem and then punching out the words that suggested enforced compliance, such as the refrain Arbeit macht frei in Herbert Zipper and Jura Soyfer’s Dachaulied.  Yet even here, the dialectical twist is complex – for the perpetrators, such expressions of oppression were intended to be belted out loudly as acts of humiliation. For those being forced to sing such lines, they saw themselves spitting them out in contempt. The truth is where one wishes to find it. After the events, perpetrators and victims will have had very different memories and inevitably, offered different interpretations.

Wymarsz komand do praxy – Marching to Work from the cycle “Day of the Prisoner” by former prisoner Miesczslaw Koscielniak Note the orchestra in the background

Gilbert’s book is interesting because she breaks up her extensive research into two Polish ghettos (Vilnius and Warsaw); Sachsenhausen, a camp mostly intended for political prisoners and Auschwitz, which as a death camp, was populated by Jews, Roma and Sinti. Ghettos, like death factories were also “racially” configured, whereas Sachsenhausen as a prison camp was where different rules applied to different grades of prisoners. Jews who were confined to such camps were largely left with the least access to music, whereas music was often an active element within the lives of non-Jewish, political prisoners.

Ghettos, regardless of Warsaw, Vilnius or Theresienstadt were slightly different in as much as they retained Potemkin-like structures that remained recognisable within any town setting: theatres, coffee houses and even recreational events.  These were administered and headed by fellow occupants of the ghettos, who answered to Nazi authorities. Here music and a false reality of “normal” life was maintained. I’ve already written a good deal about Terezín or Theresienstadt in both of my books, Forbidden Music – the Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis and Music of Exile.  As this truly was a Potemkin village, and used for Nazi propaganda to the outside world, there was greater scope for genuine creativity and a good deal more was composed that can legitimately enter the canon of the last century. It was there that masterpieces were produced, using limited means under undoubtedly impossible conditions.  But…Theresienstadt was the exception rather than the rule and the redemptive quality of works composed by Gideon Klein, Pavel Haas, Viktor Ullmann and others can be understood as unwitting results stemming from a Nazi propaganda machine. It does not discredit their value, but it does provide context.

Subsequent research has shown that every camp and/or ghetto was a microcosm and ran on the priorities set by its individual management.  For this reason, even Gilbert’s excellent accounts of Vilnius, Warsaw, Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz should not be taken as templates for other camps and ghettos.  There were simply too many and too varied with each camp having its own type of inmate.  These could range from institutions for rapist, robbers and murders, to labour camps for social “deviants” such as homosexuals and/or political prisoners. There were prisoner of war camps and camps that were vast genocidal factories. This does not even include the internment camps set up by the British, French, Americans and Swiss for so-called “enemy aliens”.

Hans Gál made the point in his memoirs Music Behind Barbed Wire (Toccata Press, 2014) that music written in the British internment camps of Huyton and the Isle of Man was intended as a means of mental escape rather than spiritual redemption. His own compositions from this period were lightweight and meant to entertain rather than enlighten. That too has something important to say about the nature of creativity under stressful circumstances. Listening to Robert Dauber’s Serenade for violin and piano composed in Theresienstadt before his deportation and death in Dachau at the age of 22, one has the same impression. It was music as an evasion from reality.

But music to accompany torture and murder? Enforced singing while marching or working? Music as a privilege and music as something that could provoke the worst in human nature as people tried to access it as a means of survival? Perhaps most insidious is the idea of music used by the Nazis as a means of deflection, distracting prisoners from the reality of their situation. All of this leads me to the very subjective conclusion that the nature of such an environment could not produce the musical equivalent of the Mona Lisa.  That anything at all artistic was produced was its own miracle and often carried a back-story that might, under more careful examination, destroy whatever beauty and nobility it initially appeared to offer.

As I mention, this is subjective.  My interest has always been the musical biotope that was destroyed by Hitler. And I specifically focus on the Nazis since they produced an enormous diaspora of musicians that was unique.  Soviet Communism never came close to producing the same flood of creative exiles. If anything, the revolution of 1917 brought Russian culture to Western Europe and America more than those who left after Stalin. Equivalency is a dangerous subject to embark on, but I don’t think it can be argued that the Soviet Union lost its most important composers and writers to exile. Stalin managed to murder a good number of them before they could get that far, but the artistic diaspora created by Hitler was sui generis and influenced the rest of the world in ways we still encounter. For me personally, it was like discovering a musical Pompeii: a world of great works that were deliberately purged, not just from performance, but from history. They were works by composers who would have altered the post-war creative trajectory if there had been no Hitler. Music would have gone through transformation rather than disruption and upheaval.

These were the issues that mattered to me personally and why I have never gone down the rabbit hole of music in the camps. And, it truly is a rabbit hole and as with Alice in Wonderland it resulted in topsy-turvy values that turned great art on its head, trivialised serious creativity and at most, (in my view) offered a time line of destruction and degradation rather than proof of man’s ability to rise above adversity. At best, it proved man’s ability to cope with adversity.  

I am full of admiration for those who have taken on this field. It’s a dense and enormously complex maze with no way out as one searches for the redemptive power of music, while encountering only man’s inhumanity to man. This may sound cynical and perhaps it is. My one and only visit to a concentration camp left me unable to work for days afterwards. Music in the camps was in the very purest sense “Gebrauchsmusik” – music as a utility, as something that offered the hope of survival, but on closer inspection was merely thin soup with a few bits of barley.

As I have written in the past, the true masterpieces that came out of the Shoah were written by those who lived it.  Some survived, such as Arnold Schoenberg with his Survivor from Warsaw, and some did not such as Viktor Ullmann and his Kaiser von Atlantis.  For me, a fascinating work was Mieczysław Weinberg’s opera The Passenger. It is a work that questions our perceptions of who is capable of good and evil.  The perpetrator becomes a victim and the victim becomes a perpetrator. I imagine that life in the camps reflected  this reality.  There were deeper and darker reasons why former inmates refused to discuss these things with family and friends. Survival was precious and came at a cost to others.  That’s something nobody wants to think about, and no amount of music or great art that may have come from the camps can alter that reality. If there is a Mona Lisa hidden in a camp archive, it can only be found after working through a mountain of mediocrity: an operetta tune orchestrated for a jazz band, or Schlager – hit songs – written by some unknown hand for perhaps the amusement of the guards, the camp commanders or perhaps the inmates.  Who can know?