Gen-mus list June 2000
Thanks to
William Meridith for his information about Newman's new book. I
thought I would
mention that there is a fourth book on the subject which is in
German:
Gabriele Knapp, _Das Maedchen Orchester in Auschwitz_ (Hamburg: von Bockel
1996)
Written as her
doctoral dissertation, the book is sober, cautious and
scientific. The entire volume details the women's
orchestra in Auschwitz. She
interviewed
seven members of the orchestra and drew from four other interviews
available in
Israel. These sources are almost the
only foundation for
reconstructing
the history of the orchestra. The
people she interviewed were
generally quite
critical of Fenelon's (accent over first e) recounting of
events.
Knapp has also published
a biographical sketch of Alma Rose (accent over e) in
the last two
issues of _VivaVoce_, the journal of the Internationale
Arbeitskreis Frau und Musik here in Germany.
William asked
why these histories of the women's orchestras in Auschwitz have
been written,
while none have been written about the men's.
One obvious but
important
reason might be that men occupy almost the entirety of music and thus
have more
pleasant histories to write about. If
women shared the same status
in music as
men, they would probably also ignore Auschwitz.
What interests
me is why there were orchestras in Auschwitz at all. What
specifically
did the SS see in these orchestras?
Some of the orchestra's
functions were
obvious, but it seems there were more subtle motivations for
their creation
that lead to very troubling thoughts.
William Osborne
100260.243@compuserve.com
An: Gender List,
INTERNET:gen-mus@virginia.edu
Von: William Osborne, 100260,243
Datum: 24.05.00, 17:41
Empf: More about Maedchen Orchester
in Auschwitz
Thanks to Eva
Rieger for her comments. As we all
know, Eva is one of the
world's most
distinguished scholars of women in music so it is always nice to
hear from her.
In answer to the
question of why orchestras were founded in the Nazi
concentration
camps, Eva provides a brief summary of five of the seven points
made in Chapter
6 of Gabriele Knapp's book _Das Mädchen Orchester in
Auschwitz_,
which is entitled "Funktionen befohlener Musik" ("Functions of
the
Dictated
Music".)
To fully
understand this chapter, it is important to know it addresses seven
official
functions of the orchestra as understood by the perpetrators and their
victims. These functions, however, were often grotesquely
ridiculous, and do
not adequately
explain the real motives for the orchestra's creation by the SS.
Knapp notes, for example, that the orchestra
played in the infirmary to drown
out the moans
and sighs of the dying. Of course, this
was absurd. The SS had
more effective
ways of keeping people quiet. If a
prisoner became burdensome
in even the
smallest way, he or she was brutalized into silence or summarily
murdered.
And if there
had been a concern to prettify the death factories with such
things as
orchestras, the SS would not have left huge mounds of naked corpses
around being
nibbled on by rats, and there for most all to see.
It is also open
to question what musical effectiveness an ensemble could have
possibly had
with its members in a soul-numbing state of terror, diseased and
starved to
skeletal exhaustion. Often the ensemble
did not have any music,
used many
amateurs, and played mostly German marches in unison by ear. Knapp
notes that the SS
often placed little value on musical quality.
[_VivaVoce_
(Nr. 51
December 1999) p. 6.]
It is thus
important that we understand Knapp's intentions. The full title of
her
dissertation is:
Musikalische Zwangsarbeit in Auschwitz: Bewältigungsversuche von
Musikerinnen und die Bedeutung von Musik in ihrem Leben.
[The Women's
Orchestra In Auschwitz: The Attempts of the Musicians to Cope With the Past and
the Meaning of Music In Their Lives.]
(The published title is
slightly
different.)
The central
focus of her book is to study the meaning music had in seven of the
victim's lives,
especially during and after their ordeal.
"Bewältigungsversuche"
has no English equivalent. Roughly, it
means "an
attempt to cope
with the past," and that is how we have to read the interviews.
They are personal attempts to cope with
unspeakable trauma that can hardly be
situated in the
context of reality. To create an
element of historical
factuality,
Knapp meticulously cross-references their responses to create a
_Gesamtbild_,
an overview of how the victims related to music during and after
their
imprisonment. In the process she also
creates the best history of the
orchestra that
exists.
Neither the
book nor the interviews, however, reveal much about the SS's
-actual-
conscious and subconscious motivations for creating the orchestra.
Opening that
dark corridor might tell us more about music than we want to know.
William Osborne