Beyond Victimhood: Reimagining Holocaust Music in Contemporary Classical Programming

With all of the fraught issues surrounding a hegemonic canon of classical music, how should we use classical music in memorial spaces, and are there avenues for performers to create alternative memorial spaces of music? How has music been used already to create alternate memorial spaces to physical edifices and museums?

Alternative memorialization of the Holocaust has increased in popularity and applicability since the 1980s. With increasing attentiveness to non-Jewish victim groups, the incorporation of Soviet narratives, considerations of post-war suppression of identity and Jewishness, and a desire to reincorporate living memorials into Europe, new frontiers in memorialization have emerged. Decentralized memorials include Stolpersteine commanded and erected by local municipalities and democratizing digital memorials available in a variety of languages instantaneously. Sonic memorials, if music can indeed be considered as such, allow for private and public commemoration, an avoidance of state censorship through the creation of Aesopian musical artefacts, and the inclusion of a living art into otherwise static memorials while interactive and multimedia memorialization allows for contemporary engagement with past genocide and more dynamic education with past atrocity.

James Loeffler^[1] and Alexandra Birch argue for Holocaust scores to be introduced, even on to specifically memorial programs, as a sort of musical Stolpersteine to aid their reintegration. Composers like Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas, or Erwin Schulhoff were musicians first, the most important part of their identity, and should be commemorated as musicians, not solely remembered for their victimization under National Socialism. Holocaust programs rarely present a diversity of experiences or even victim groups when representing other types of hegemony, for example male composers, in commemorative concerts. The experiences most frequently excluded are those which challenge and complicate victimhood. Sephardic and Ashkenaz programs are almost always separate and distinct; if merged it is to gain a longer program. Jewish victimhood is rarely combined with music from Roma composers, or other groups like Soviet POWs, gay composers, or evacuated and exiled composers. It is therefore extremely important to avoid reductive assumptions about all victim groups, and when selecting sample programs to include a multiplicity of victim experiences.

Attention should also be paid to the type of commemoration and for whom. For example, at the International Day of Remembrance for the Sinti and Roma Victims of the Holocaust in August, the date reminds us specifically about the liquidation of the family camps of Roma (Zigunerlager) at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It would be inappropriate to perform works by Ullmann or other Theresienstadt composers at related events, as the intention is to highlight the atrocities against the Sinti and Roma community. Similarly, Yom Hashoah in April/May is a contrast to the more universalizing International Day of Holocaust Remembrance (January) wherein Yom Hashoah specifically focuses on Jewish victimization. It is also important to distinguish between piece types, and intentionally choose selections from each category, or exclusively from one category: pieces by composers exiled, pieces by composers interned and/or murdered, commemorative works by survivors, and commemorative works by non-survivors. Reconciling what is commemorative, and what is a “Holocaust composer” is also difficult, with music recovered from the camps themselves, music written by survivors and their families commemoratively, and music written about the Holocaust, but not by directly affected people.

Music is a living and reproducible art. For the Jewish community, inclusion of sacred music and text within non-liturgical works represents living knowledge - for example, cantorial songs are still actively used today and shouldn't be treated merely as historical artefacts to be preserved in museums. For the Sinti and Roma communities similarly, music is a vibrant, living part of their culture. The reassertion of Roma identity distinct from an often fetishist “Zigeuner” European classical identity in memorial spaces is living preservation of their community and art, something which revoices the dead. Continued performance of these musical works doesn’t put them as dead objects in a museum, but keeps the culture, a culture intentionally exterminated and weaponized alive. Every performance is a rearticulation of valuable, intentionally targeted, living knowledge.

Unfortunately, Holocaust programs within classical music often fall into the trap of other “ethnic” music programming. Like many efforts to diversify the classical canon, concerts often fall into tokenism^[2] – a phenomenon more commonly addressed in the music education scholarship than in public humanities or public musicology discourse for major programming decisions. Concerts of exclusively Holocaust music are similarly compiled for their victimhood – at best an amalgam of stylistically dissimilar works linked by all the composers having been victimized in similar situations, and at worst as pastiche of Jewish music from Bloch to Mahler, with a “Holocaust composer” sprinkled in and occasionally “Hatikvah” or some unrelated liturgical music. Because Holocaust scores are often unusual pieces for the classical music listener, a degree of training in public humanities is also necessary – to speak to audiences, or involve digital platforming with the concert, provide interactive program notes, or hold audience question and answer sessions after concerts. Simply presenting a new and difficult program is not sufficient, but engagement with audiences is fulfilling and offers critical engagement with something beyond the music – the very atrocity centred by an affective experience like performance.

The German canon of classical music is incomplete without contributions from Jews and Roma. Where orchestras and music were instrumentalised by the Third Reich for political means, and music was used as sadistic torture both as graveside entertainment for shooters and as formal orchestras and bands in concentration camps for SS enjoyment. Performing canonical works like those by Beethoven or Richard Strauss alongside Holocaust scores reclaims space in the classical musical realm. Performing Ullmann with Strauss, or Soviet Partisan song alongside Prokofiev creates a musical reminder in contemporary programming, granting legitimacy to forgotten composers outside of their victimization. When we find and reincorporate lost and suppressed composers and reincorporate them into a classical canon for their musical genius rather than their victimhood, that is intellectual restitution. Perhaps most significantly, this framework can transfer to a multitude of marginalized peoples within the classical canon, not only to denazify the frameworks, but also to challenge other given hegemonies including race, gender, and the very notion of what it means for a piece to be “classical”. 

Alexandra Birch

[1] Alejandro L. Madrid,  "Diversity, tokenism, non-canonical musics, and the crisis of the humanities in US academia," Journal of Music History Pedagogy 7, no. 2 (2017): 124-130.

[2] Loeffler, J., Why the New ‘Holocaust Music’ Is an Insult to Music—and to Victims of the Shoah, Tablet Magazine, 11 July 2013 (accessed Jan 2025)