Musical Testimonies of Terezín and the Possibilities of Contrapuntal Listening

Abstract

Taking my cue from the postcolonial cultural analyses of Edward Said, as well as a recent postcolonial turn in Holocaust studies, I define a practice of contrapuntal listening for the copious musical witness that constitutes the extensive Holocaust testimonial archive. Contrapuntal listening recognizes the inherent power dynamics and potential narrative desires present within the capture of testimony, a process that is never ideologically blank and is often driven by the explicit goals of the interviewers (amateurs and experts alike), whose relationship to the traumatized individual before them ranges from the empathetic to the antagonistic. This essay attempts to listen contrapuntally to one documentary source concerned with Viktor Ullmann’s musical activities in Terezín: Goethe och Ghetto (1996), the award-winning film directed by Peter Berggren and Göran Rosenberg. My analysis places the original witness testimonies collected for the project in contrapuntal conversation with the final documentary to illuminate its intentional “voicing” of three survivors as well as the power dynamics inherent in the testimonial exchange. My aim is not to cast aspersions, but to call for increased attention to these varied counterpoints as we expand our understanding of music’s roles in multivocal spaces like Terezín. To do so is to begin to enable a self-critical exchange with musical testimonies that considers their engagement within historical networks of power and authority.