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Herbert Kegel and the Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir also gave the Polish premiere of A Survivor from Warsaw when they performed it at the Warsaw Autumn Festival on September 28, 1958. Thus we have the extraordinary case in which Germans came to Warsaw to perform a work about the German destruction of that city's Jews just fifteen years earlier. This performance is situated within the context of very difficult cultural and political relations between East Germany and Poland, as Poland embraced the Thaw, while East Germany resisted it. While many critics noted the Jewish theme of the work, the ruling political party in each country omitted that detail and described the performance as an act of atonement. This ambiguity allowed the “atonement” to be interpreted as repentance for destroying the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 or for destroying the city of Warsaw in 1944. This chapter recounts the negotiations between the cultural agencies in both countries and studies Polish reviews. They are overwhelmingly positive about A Survivor and equally negative about the other pieces on the program, by East Germans Paul Dessau and Johann Cilenšek.

The introduction places A Survivor from Warsaw in the culture of early American Holocaust memorials and then situates its subsequent performance and reception history in postwar Europe using Marita Krauss's theory of remigrating ideas and Stephen Greenblatt's notion of cultural mobility while acknowledging the human agency of dedicated performers and other advocates. It also provides a basic overview of the text and music and briefly recounts premieres in the United States (Albuquerque, under Kurt Frederick) and Europe (Paris, under René Leibowtiz). It lays out the basic lines of inquiry for each case study, which include the identities assigned to Schoenberg in the discourse that accompanied A Survivor (variously American, Austrian, Viennese, German, Jewish, antifascist, modernist); the apparatuses of political power; and the roles of modernist music and of Jewishness before, during, and after the war in each context. Radio and the circuit of international festivals of new music are the primary means of circulation for the piece.

A Survivor from Warsaw came late to Czechoslovakia, because the Thaw came late, and, as elsewhere in the Soviet bloc, its arrival was a bellwether of relative liberalization. Four of the five narrators who performed the title role did so in Czech translation. Two of those narrators, Josef Červinka and Karel Berman, were also Czech Jews. Berman also made the only known commercial recording of the piece in which the narration is performed in Czech. He had survived a number of labor and concentration camps, including a stint at Terezín, before resuming his career as an opera singer after the war. These performances are situated within the history of Jews in the region, including Schoenberg's family; the general invisibility of Jews and Jewishness in communist Czechoslovakia; and cultural politics, which had shifted so much by the 1960s that musicologist Jiří Vysloužil could even advocate for the American Schoenberg. The performances of A Survivor, and particularly Berman's recording, took place in a brief window of opportunity leading up to and including the Prague Spring, in which Jewishness and modernist music could both circulate relatively unimpeded in public discourse. This came to an abrupt end in August 1968 with the Soviet-led invasion.

A Survivor officially breached the iron curtain on April 15, 1958, when Herbert Kegel and the Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra performed the work in concert. The performance is situated within the context of state expectations for radio; concerns about fending off the American cultural invasion, as well as its nuclear threat; the contested role of dodecaphony—and Schoenberg in particular—in East German cultural politics; the relationship of the East German state to its Jewish citizens; and the bureaucratic process by which A Survivor was approved for performance and recording. Despite being performed in its entirety and in its original version, discourse about the work was subject to de-Semitization by the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) so that it could serve an antifascist agenda. The historical event of the Warsaw ghetto uprising was appropriated similarly across the Soviet bloc. The chapter explores Kegel's connection to Paul Dessau, as well as the role of Werner Sander, cantor for the Leipzig community. Finally, the chapter compares the treatment of Jewishness and antifascism in reviews from newspapers representing the different political parties.

The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, or West Germany) figures prominently in most American musicological narratives of Western Europe during the Cold War, both because of its distinctive relationship with the United States and because of its unrivaled support for new music. That support included dedicated international events, most famously Darmstadt's Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (IFNM), working in tandem with radio stations to commission, record, disseminate, and promote new repertoire. Schoenberg was the centerpiece of those early efforts. Less well documented in American musicology is the fact that this agenda also met with considerable resistance. The subject of this chapter is the West German resistance to A Survivor. This chapter treats the piece's West German premiere, which took place under Hermann Scherchen at Darmstadt on August 20, 1950, as well as a 1956 incident in which the music critic and former Nazi Hans Schnoor was involved in a scandal, culminating in a series of lawsuits involving Fred Prieberg over his use of “the language of National Socialist journalism” to describe Schoenberg and A Survivor. The scandal was big news—Walter Dirks made sure the story received broad coverage in the general press, and Heinrich Strobel covered it in Melos.

The composer and critic Pauline Hall appears to have been the driving force behind the Norwegian premiere of A Survivor, which took place in Oslo on March 21, 1954, and was conducted by Heinz Freudenthal. Hall was chair of the national section of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), known as Ny Musik, and had heard Scherchen conduct the work in Vienna in 1951. The only other piece on the concert was Darius Milhaud's Sacred Service, with Swedish cantor Leo Rosenbluth as soloist. The concert program is read as an attempt to bring the Norwegian Holocaust into a public discourse about the war that had become defined by the national narrative of the country's resistance movement against the Nazis. The small number of Jewish casualties (776) made it easy to ignore the fact that that number nevertheless amounted to half of of Norway's Jews, as well as the fact that harm had been inflicted by Norwegians, as well as Germans. Numerous concert reviews are analyzed.

Hermann Scherchen conducted the Austrian premiere of A Survivor from Warsaw on April 10, 1951, at the Fourth International Music Fest in Vienna. The performance is situated in the context of Austria's Allied occupation, as well as Austria's embrace of Allied-conferred “first-victim status,” which held that Austria was Hitler's first victim and not accountable for wartime events, including the Holocaust. Schoenberg was ambivalent about reengaging with Viennese musical life, as is evident in correspondence between the composer and his former student H. E. Apostel, the administrator Egon Seefehlner, and Scherchen. The Viennese performance is notable because the English-language narration was translated into and performed in German in a version by Hanns von Winter, a former Nazi. The reviews reflect the partisanship of their sponsoring political entities, Allied or otherwise, and make reference to Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus and to Gustav Mahler.

Composer Arnold Schoenberg left Europe for the United States in 1933 and never returned, but his symbolic presence in Germany in the form of his music was significant. This is especially visible in the East German premiere of A Survivor from Warsaw in 1958, by the Leipzig Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester and Rundfunkchor under the direction of Herbert Kegel. Broadcast throughout the country, reviews and notes acknowledge the Jewish identity of the composer and the work, but that was not the focus of the marketing campaign; it was presented as a component of GDR’s antifascist agenda. The reception of this performance offers insight into the place of Jewish culture within politics in the GDR. Schoenberg’s work in this context served a purpose beyond the composer’s intention. Indeed, East Germany’s political and cultural agenda shaped A Survivor from Warsaw (and vice versa), adding layers of meaning no composer could foresee.

A Survivor from Warsaw, one of Arnold Schoenberg's most dramatic and controversial works, is based on a narrative Schoenberg heard directly and indirectly from survivors of a Nazi concentration camp. Completed in 1946, the composition employs drums and trumpets to create the atmosphere of a military setting. Pitches are transformed to fit with the words by means of arpeggios, broken chords, trills and tremolos. This chapter explores how Schoenberg expands serial technique to dramatise the narrative elements of A Survivor from Warsaw and how he manipulates pitch, rhythm and other parameters to complement the text. After highlighting the key techniques in Schoenberg's compositional approach, the chapter considers the work from a semiological perspective.

The afterword compares A Survivor from Warsaw to Nathan Rapoport's Warsaw Ghetto Monument, two Holocaust memorials created in the late 1940s that place a high premium on intelligibility and representation. They have each been criticized for reasons both aesthetic and ethical. This brief afterword argues that the reason A Survivor has been interpreted as both catastrophic and redemptive, both kitschy and profound, and as susceptible to all of the interpretations noted in this book is because some of the musical means Schoenberg used to ensure intelligibility deploy the rhetoric of nineteenth-century musical monumentality. As Alexander Rehding has shown, the big gestures and grand effects of musical monumentality can cut both ways, evoking mixed feelings in the listener.