‘Our city of love and of slaughter’: Berlin klezmer and the politics of place

Phil Alexander

doi:10.1080/17411912.2018.1460616

Abstract

ABSTRACTAlthough it claims little historical connection to klezmer music or Yiddish culture, the city of Berlin has hosted one of the most dynamic klezmer scenes of the past 20 years. This article analyses ways that place has been made to function as a meaningful unit in the music and lyrics of several artists living and working in Berlin, localising the transnational klezmer revival discourse by rooting the city in their music. Building on Adam Krims’ theory of ‘urban ethos’, I explore how the contemporary city is emplaced in its klezmer music, arguing that these processes of signification allow us to hear contrasting articulations of Berlin. The native Berliners ?Shmaltz! frame their city as an escapist gateway, the American songwriter Daniel Kahn sees a site of painfully unresolved history and the internationalist Knoblauch Klezmer band locate Berlin as an embodiment of playfully multilingual performativity.

Highlights

You know we had this klezmer revival about 20 years ago and that was quite traditional
Building on Adam Krims’ theory of ‘urban ethos’, I explore how the contemporary city is emplaced in its klezmer music, arguing that these processes of signification allow us to hear contrasting articulations of Berlin
Like ?Shmaltz!, Kahn and The Painted Bird draw from a broad musical palette, migrating freely between historical klezmer repertoire, Weimar cabaret, the Yiddish song canon and a mid-twentieth-century American folksinger ethos, all informed by a radical socialist politics

Summary

Introduction

You know we had this klezmer revival about 20 years ago and that was quite traditional. The pieces discussed here exist comfortably alongside the band’s malleable klezmer influences, even whilst they evidence a self-consciously diverse artistic imagination Set against this background, ?Shmaltz!’s music is an acknowledged yet coherent invention, rooted in a loosely imagined central European soundworld, as outlined here by bassist and singer Carsten Wegener: It has to be a link to the modern times, because I’m living in this century, not another [...] one of my favourite songs is ‘Yolanda’, which starts with a slide guitar for the ocean—it’s a song about a female pirate—and comes a klezmer Greek theme, but with a more laidback beat, it’s not traditional, and comes the words, which sounds like Brecht/Weill. Like ?Shmaltz!, Kahn and The Painted Bird draw from a broad musical palette, migrating freely between historical klezmer repertoire, Weimar cabaret, the Yiddish song canon and a mid-twentieth-century American folksinger ethos, all informed by a radical socialist politics. Somewhere between Yiddish song tradition and radical singer-songwriter politics, Berlin is emphatically (re)framed as a borderland: ‘a constant state of transition [where] the prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants’ (Anzaldúa 1987: 3–4)

Conclusion

Notes on contributor