The End of Dystopia?

Abstract

While the year 1945 marked a turning point in the sense of a new beginning for Jewish communities, the immediate postwar period was by no means a clear break with the past. Ruptures—in the sense of historical and cultural breaks—affecting the course of Jewish culture had, in fact, occurred earlier. As such, the postwar period saw a unique dialectic between changes in the aftermath of the Holocaust and a cultural persistence, which drew on historical musical models and practices that gave way to cultural mobility. As such, musical life in the Jewish communities appears as a brief epilogue to a glorious pre-Nazi past. The peculiar dialectic between cultural change and persistence is an indicator of the complexities the Jewish community faced in reestablishing itself after the Holocaust and for a provisional new beginning.