Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945–1989

Abstract

What happens after war? When whole communities of citizens are decimated, where does that leave those left, and where does that leave their culture? In the case of World War II and the Holocaust, countless volumes have been written about Jewish life prior to the war, of the cultural abundance that the Jewish community provided to Europe, of the composers and music that permeated towns and villages. Yet there has been little examination of how musical culture survived in these places directly after the war, and how it fell to the survivors of the Holocaust to salvage what was left of their cultural heritage. Tina Frühauf’s book looks at exactly this issue within the confines of Germany itself; it not only focuses on music in Jewish communities right after the war, but also on how cultural transfer, exchange, and the mobility of musicians changed the face of German Jewish musical life in and out of the synagogue. To do so, Frühauf makes use of previously unseen documentation and archives, along with oral interviews of those who lived and worked in the communities examined in this volume.