Magdalena Waligórska
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199995790
- eISBN:
- 9780199346424
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199995790.003.0006
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
Since the inception of the klezmer revival, the genre has been present in public rituals of memory both in Germany and in Poland. This chapter addresses the politicization of klezmer music and the ...
More
Since the inception of the klezmer revival, the genre has been present in public rituals of memory both in Germany and in Poland. This chapter addresses the politicization of klezmer music and the use of the genre in Holocaust commemoration events. Presenting the contexts in which klezmer music is publically performed as the musical representation of Jewishness, it discusses not only the instrumentalization of klezmer for different political agendas, but also the opposition that klezmer music triggers in right-wing circles. Finally, demonstrating the role the klezmer revival plays in Polish and German public discourse, the chapter also shows how the genre has been used by the media and authorities as a proof of successful multicultural policies and interethnic dialogue.Less
Since the inception of the klezmer revival, the genre has been present in public rituals of memory both in Germany and in Poland. This chapter addresses the politicization of klezmer music and the use of the genre in Holocaust commemoration events. Presenting the contexts in which klezmer music is publically performed as the musical representation of Jewishness, it discusses not only the instrumentalization of klezmer for different political agendas, but also the opposition that klezmer music triggers in right-wing circles. Finally, demonstrating the role the klezmer revival plays in Polish and German public discourse, the chapter also shows how the genre has been used by the media and authorities as a proof of successful multicultural policies and interethnic dialogue.
Sabine Feisst
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- December 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199367481
- eISBN:
- 9780199367504
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199367481.003.0011
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music, History, Western
This chapter focuses on three works to illustrate mediations of the Holocaust in contemporary compositions: Georg Katzer’s Aide-mémoir (1982), a tape music piece featuring a quasi-testimonial ...
More
This chapter focuses on three works to illustrate mediations of the Holocaust in contemporary compositions: Georg Katzer’s Aide-mémoir (1982), a tape music piece featuring a quasi-testimonial approach; Aribert Reimann’s Kumi Ori (1999), settings of poems by Paul Celan and Psalm texts for baritone and orchestra; and Peter Ruzicka’s Rercherche (ins Innere) (1999), a minimally text-based work for chorus and orchestra pointing to oblique types of Holocaust commemoration. These works, all by composers who do not identify themselves as Jewish, provide insight into different facets of Holocaust memorialisation. There are a variety of motivations, compositional practices, and representations of Jewishness and the Holocaust in such memorial efforts.Less
This chapter focuses on three works to illustrate mediations of the Holocaust in contemporary compositions: Georg Katzer’s Aide-mémoir (1982), a tape music piece featuring a quasi-testimonial approach; Aribert Reimann’s Kumi Ori (1999), settings of poems by Paul Celan and Psalm texts for baritone and orchestra; and Peter Ruzicka’s Rercherche (ins Innere) (1999), a minimally text-based work for chorus and orchestra pointing to oblique types of Holocaust commemoration. These works, all by composers who do not identify themselves as Jewish, provide insight into different facets of Holocaust memorialisation. There are a variety of motivations, compositional practices, and representations of Jewishness and the Holocaust in such memorial efforts.
Lily E. Hirsch
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- December 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199367481
- eISBN:
- 9780199367504
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199367481.003.0012
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music, History, Western
This chapter examines German efforts in the late 1980s and early 1990s to commemorate the Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Culture League), an organization by and for Jews intended to facilitate Jewish ...
More
This chapter examines German efforts in the late 1980s and early 1990s to commemorate the Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Culture League), an organization by and for Jews intended to facilitate Jewish cultural activities, with Nazi approval, from 1933 until 1941. These commemorations transformed perceptions of the league, compounding existing debate about the organization in the postwar era. But, as the chapter argues, they also reflect more recent responses to Jewish culture, both in a still divided and just reunified Germany. Indeed, based on analysis of West Germany’s “Gedenkzeichen für das Theater des Jüdischen Kulturbundes in der Kommandantenstraβe 57” and the Akademie der Künste’s 1992 exhibition “Geschlossene Vorstellung, commemorations of the Kulturbund in Germany offer insight into post-Holocaust agendas surrounding the Jew and Jewish culture in Germany: changing post—World War II ideas of Jewish resistance and the Jew as “victim.”Less
This chapter examines German efforts in the late 1980s and early 1990s to commemorate the Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Culture League), an organization by and for Jews intended to facilitate Jewish cultural activities, with Nazi approval, from 1933 until 1941. These commemorations transformed perceptions of the league, compounding existing debate about the organization in the postwar era. But, as the chapter argues, they also reflect more recent responses to Jewish culture, both in a still divided and just reunified Germany. Indeed, based on analysis of West Germany’s “Gedenkzeichen für das Theater des Jüdischen Kulturbundes in der Kommandantenstraβe 57” and the Akademie der Künste’s 1992 exhibition “Geschlossene Vorstellung, commemorations of the Kulturbund in Germany offer insight into post-Holocaust agendas surrounding the Jew and Jewish culture in Germany: changing post—World War II ideas of Jewish resistance and the Jew as “victim.”
Petra Rau
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748668649
- eISBN:
- 9780748689149
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748668649.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
In the post-war imaginary of the West, ‘the Nazis’ became a cultural trope that served as a justification for defending democracy through military intervention. But in films and in fiction, the Nazis ...
More
In the post-war imaginary of the West, ‘the Nazis’ became a cultural trope that served as a justification for defending democracy through military intervention. But in films and in fiction, the Nazis were also camped up, laughed at, eroticised and demonised as evil monsters. In fact, the representational rules of engagement with historical fascism have always been remarkably uncertain. This book examines why and how the penomenon of ‘fascinating Fascism’ has re-emerged once more after the end of the Cold War. What is its cultural function now, in a global era of Holocaust commemoration? How can any representation avoid the impasse of either re-evoking fascism’s original seduction or merely recycling previous fictional and cinematic clichés? This study discusses alternative history (Robert Harris’s Fatherland and Quenting Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds), the noir thrillers of Philip Kerr, perpetrator fiction (Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones) and resistance (Synger’s Valkyrie and Cartwright’s The Song Before It Is Sung). Crucially it suggests that contemporary culture has instrumentalised the Nazi trope for its own agandas: ‘the Nazis’ have become ‘our Nazis’. The book also points to some of the risks and responsibilities attendant on this appropriation as one of the peculiar, late legacies of the Second World War.Less
In the post-war imaginary of the West, ‘the Nazis’ became a cultural trope that served as a justification for defending democracy through military intervention. But in films and in fiction, the Nazis were also camped up, laughed at, eroticised and demonised as evil monsters. In fact, the representational rules of engagement with historical fascism have always been remarkably uncertain. This book examines why and how the penomenon of ‘fascinating Fascism’ has re-emerged once more after the end of the Cold War. What is its cultural function now, in a global era of Holocaust commemoration? How can any representation avoid the impasse of either re-evoking fascism’s original seduction or merely recycling previous fictional and cinematic clichés? This study discusses alternative history (Robert Harris’s Fatherland and Quenting Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds), the noir thrillers of Philip Kerr, perpetrator fiction (Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones) and resistance (Synger’s Valkyrie and Cartwright’s The Song Before It Is Sung). Crucially it suggests that contemporary culture has instrumentalised the Nazi trope for its own agandas: ‘the Nazis’ have become ‘our Nazis’. The book also points to some of the risks and responsibilities attendant on this appropriation as one of the peculiar, late legacies of the Second World War.
Risa Sodi
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823233588
- eISBN:
- 9780823241811
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823233588.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter focuses on three extraliterary facets of Primo Levi: his public associations with Auschwitz and Holocaust commemoration, his leadership role in the Jewish community of Turin, and his ...
More
This chapter focuses on three extraliterary facets of Primo Levi: his public associations with Auschwitz and Holocaust commemoration, his leadership role in the Jewish community of Turin, and his contribution to the intellectual debates over the Arab-Israeli conflict. Many of Levi's nonliterary pronouncements appeared in low-circulation publications, on Italian radio and television, in unexpected venues or about subjects—like the crisis in the Middle East—with which Levi is not usually associated. This chapter recalls a facet of Levi that is little known abroad, namely his ties to organized religion in Turin, and one that was well known in Italy but perhaps obfuscated by the passage of time: his long and public involvement, as a progressive thinker, an intellectual, and a Jew, with the political direction and future of the State of Israel and, by extension with Jewry in Israel and beyond.Less
This chapter focuses on three extraliterary facets of Primo Levi: his public associations with Auschwitz and Holocaust commemoration, his leadership role in the Jewish community of Turin, and his contribution to the intellectual debates over the Arab-Israeli conflict. Many of Levi's nonliterary pronouncements appeared in low-circulation publications, on Italian radio and television, in unexpected venues or about subjects—like the crisis in the Middle East—with which Levi is not usually associated. This chapter recalls a facet of Levi that is little known abroad, namely his ties to organized religion in Turin, and one that was well known in Italy but perhaps obfuscated by the passage of time: his long and public involvement, as a progressive thinker, an intellectual, and a Jew, with the political direction and future of the State of Israel and, by extension with Jewry in Israel and beyond.
Petra Rau
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748668649
- eISBN:
- 9780748689149
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748668649.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter focuses on Robert Harris’s alternative history thriller Fatherland and Ian McEwan’s novel Black Dogs. It discusses the novels’ paranoia about contintental evil in the context of ...
More
This chapter focuses on Robert Harris’s alternative history thriller Fatherland and Ian McEwan’s novel Black Dogs. It discusses the novels’ paranoia about contintental evil in the context of Holocaust commemoration and axieties about contemporary European integration. While both novels claim to be horrified by European history they also manage to be fascinated by fascist aesthetics (such as the SS uniform) and by the the Holocaust as an industrialised extermination project with concomitant bureaucracy. Both novels feature visions of concentration camps - in the form of bureaucratic paper trails, ruins or visitable memorial sites or in the form of fantasies of absolute dominance. The chapter analyses the grammar of these fantasies as symptoms of a cultural ambivalence towards fascism that manifests itself as literary and commemorative dark tourism.Less
This chapter focuses on Robert Harris’s alternative history thriller Fatherland and Ian McEwan’s novel Black Dogs. It discusses the novels’ paranoia about contintental evil in the context of Holocaust commemoration and axieties about contemporary European integration. While both novels claim to be horrified by European history they also manage to be fascinated by fascist aesthetics (such as the SS uniform) and by the the Holocaust as an industrialised extermination project with concomitant bureaucracy. Both novels feature visions of concentration camps - in the form of bureaucratic paper trails, ruins or visitable memorial sites or in the form of fantasies of absolute dominance. The chapter analyses the grammar of these fantasies as symptoms of a cultural ambivalence towards fascism that manifests itself as literary and commemorative dark tourism.
Petra Rau
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748668649
- eISBN:
- 9780748689149
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748668649.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter outlines the history of ‘fascinating Fascism’ in film and popular culture from the 1960s to the present day. It contextualises this phenomenon within the critical debate over fascist ...
More
This chapter outlines the history of ‘fascinating Fascism’ in film and popular culture from the 1960s to the present day. It contextualises this phenomenon within the critical debate over fascist iconography and its legacy, referring to the arguments of Susan Sontag, Klaus Theweleit and Alvin Rosenfeld. It suggests that the Anglo-Saxon interest in Nazism is less motivated by historical inquiry but fuelled by a desire to inhabit a fascist universe in a safe fashion: the audience engages in a form of fascist flânerie. This strategy allows for the projection, and simultaneous disavowal, of fascist longings. Such dark tourism uncomfortably alongside recent attempts to re-instate affect in the engagement with traumatic history, notably in Saul Friedländer’s notion of disbelief in Holocaust historiography and Alison Landsberg’s emphasis on empathy. The re-emergence of fascinating fascism suggests that in a consumer culture in which violence is reduced to aesthetics and entertainment, neither Holocaust piety nor the mandatory mobilisation of affect towards the victims of fascism through commemoration have succeeded in shifting interest from the perpetrator to the victim. On the contrary, the taboo of representing the perpetrator perspective has enabled the fascination with fascism to flourish into historical voyeurism and cultural pornography.Less
This chapter outlines the history of ‘fascinating Fascism’ in film and popular culture from the 1960s to the present day. It contextualises this phenomenon within the critical debate over fascist iconography and its legacy, referring to the arguments of Susan Sontag, Klaus Theweleit and Alvin Rosenfeld. It suggests that the Anglo-Saxon interest in Nazism is less motivated by historical inquiry but fuelled by a desire to inhabit a fascist universe in a safe fashion: the audience engages in a form of fascist flânerie. This strategy allows for the projection, and simultaneous disavowal, of fascist longings. Such dark tourism uncomfortably alongside recent attempts to re-instate affect in the engagement with traumatic history, notably in Saul Friedländer’s notion of disbelief in Holocaust historiography and Alison Landsberg’s emphasis on empathy. The re-emergence of fascinating fascism suggests that in a consumer culture in which violence is reduced to aesthetics and entertainment, neither Holocaust piety nor the mandatory mobilisation of affect towards the victims of fascism through commemoration have succeeded in shifting interest from the perpetrator to the victim. On the contrary, the taboo of representing the perpetrator perspective has enabled the fascination with fascism to flourish into historical voyeurism and cultural pornography.
