When French filmmaker Alain Resnais decided to make the Holocaust documentary Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), he believed composer Hanns Eisler would be the ideal choice to write the film's score. Despite Resnais's status as a relative unknown, Eisler accepted his offer in a succinct telegram that read simply, ‘Good day. I'm coming. Eisler’ (66). Believing the film's subject matter to be so pressing, the composer signed on without hesitation, eventually completing the score in only two to three weeks.

The reader finds a similar sense of urgency in Amy Lynn Wlodarski's new book, Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation. Her monograph takes on an ambitious yet vital project by redefining the notion of secondary Holocaust musical witness, asking broader questions about cultural reception and representation in the process. Wlodarski makes her parameters apparent from the beginning of the study, selecting compositions by musicians who wrote second-hand musical testimonies to the genocide, not works by survivors themselves. Yet rather than simply explicate scholarship already done on these compositions, Wlodarski imbues them with renewed meaning and contemporary relevance. One of the triumphs of Musical Witness is that it synthesizes the compositional contexts of Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw (1947), Reich's Different Trains (1988), Eisler's score for Nuit et Brouillard, and Jüdische Chronik (1961), a collectively composed Holocaust memorial cantata. These are pieces and projects seemingly quite far apart on the representational spectrum, and yet Wlodarski manages to locate the currents, commonalities, and tensions between them, prompting us to hear and understand them anew.

Wlodarski defines witness as ‘an intellectual concept’ that informs her analysis of these ‘secondary musical representations’ (2). This study raises fascinating questions about the relationships between memory, testimony, and commemoration, incorporating methodologies outside of musicology to provide a nuanced treatment of music's post-Holocaust historiography. By working with such complex and multifaceted sources, Wlodarski provides an indispensible framework for how to analyse trauma in music. As she rightly points out, while other disciplines, including theatre, visual arts, film, literature, and architecture, have debated Holocaust representation for decades, musicology has only recently come to engage with these issues.Footnote ¹ This is the critical gap that Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation ultimately fills.

Two divergent interpretive strands have developed within the field concerning secondary musical witness and Holocaust representation. One vein hears ‘musical witness as an important cultural vehicle for memory and empathy’, while the contra-impulse ‘questions whether musical witness enacts a form of aesthetic trauma against historical memory and the actual victims’ (8). As Wlodarski recognizes, ‘the result is a double-edged sword, a genre that can both engender and promote memory while potentially prompting a certain quality of historical forgetting or revision’ (8). The book takes on this paradox in five chapters and an epilogue by hearing secondary witness through a variety of musical, philosophical, and political actors. Each chapter ends with a brief summary concerning the key points of the preceding section, a welcome and helpful guidepost for the reader.

Chapter 1 makes a case for ‘the composer as witness’ through Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, as Wlodarski argues that the survivor's traumatic memory and Schoenberg's own compositional trajectory are inextricably linked. Schoenberg completed Survivor in 1947 based on ‘reports received directly or indirectly’, and his self-generated libretto concerns a survivor-witness who relives his traumatic experiences under the Nazis. The survivor's testimony concludes with a male chorus singing the Shema Yisroel as they are led to their execution. Wlodarski writes, ‘Schoenberg intended Survivor not only to enact memory but also to produce it’, as the survivor attempts to ‘translate a traumatic experience into language’ (18).

Wlodarski aptly notes that most studies of Survivor have isolated the piece's primary thematic elements – trauma, witness, and memory – from its musical material. Instead, she argues for bringing these elements together, uniting Survivor's theoretical and thematic concerns by explaining how the twelve-tone rows actually ‘encode ideas about traumatic recall’ (13). Exploring the composition's religious overtones and the composer's setting of text and music in the service of traumatic memory, Wlodarski makes a compelling case for the presence of the divine, arguing that the {0,4,8} trichord is the key to Survivor’s meaning: a musical signifier that God is ‘the foundation on which the entire piece rests’ (34).

Following on Chapter 1’s exploration of Schoenberg's Survivor, Chapter 2 investigates ‘the philosopher as witness’ through Theodor W. Adorno's treatment of the piece during the 1950s and 1960s, contextualizing Survivor within early post-war debates about representation and post-Holocaust art criticism. The chapter provides a brilliant reading of Adorno's writings about Survivor and memory, skilfully navigating the theoretical minefield of the philosopher's essays. By examining the controversies surrounding Schoenberg's Survivor in post-war America and Europe, this chapter fills a vital gap in the reception history of one of the most widely performed pieces of Holocaust commemoration, beginning with Survivor’s premiere in Albuquerque, New Mexico and subsequent reception in 1950s West Germany. As the author points out, Adorno was unabashedly positive in his first essays about Survivor, noting that the piece ‘made the impossible possible’, only to later contradict himself in 1962 with harsh criticism of the work, arguing, ‘The victims are turned into works of art, tossed out to be gobbled up by the world that did them in.’Footnote ² Yet Wlodarski does not seek to resolve the contradictions within Adorno's writings, observing that the philosopher's hearing of Survivor is not found ‘in any individual or isolated text but in the hesitations and displacements that occur between the texts themselves’ (52–3).

Chapter 3 examines Eisler's film score for Resnais's documentary Nuit et Brouillard, named for opponents of the Nazi regime who vanished seemingly overnight to Nazi concentration camps. Resnais sought to establish witness authority by selecting the appropriate collaborators, inviting Eisler, a German-Jewish exile who fled Nazi Germany, to write the music, and asking Jean Cayrol, a Mathausen survivor and himself a former Night and Fog prisoner, to write the film's text. As historian James Monaco has noted, Resnais was careful to make a film about ‘our memories of the camps’ rather than about the camps themselves.Footnote ³

The chasms and tensions between the score and film reflect Eisler's struggle to provide musical testimony not at the expense of representation. As Wlodarski notes, Eisler's score was a fascinating compilation of Brechtian-inspired influences and surprising moments of melodrama, prompting scholars and critics alike to ponder, criticize, and grapple with the composer's choices in Nuit et Brouillard since its release. Though many scholars, including Albrecht Dümling, Royal Brown, and Maria Cizmic, have heard Eisler's score as a form of musical resistance to Nazism, Wlodarski also acknowledges more critical responses to Eisler's choices, such as Berthold Hoeckner's scepticism about whether ‘any appropriate music for such footage [exists] at all’.Footnote ⁴ Acknowledging the contradictory nature of this critique, Wlodarski offers yet another way to hear Nuit et Brouillard, instead asking of Eisler's task, ‘how might one contribute critically to the emotional shock of the audience, while also avoiding its total cognitive shutdown?’ (60). She provides the first account to consider the often complementary, sometimes antagonistic aims Resnais and Eisler had when crafting their respective contributions for the film. Arguing that Eisler pursued ‘a practical strategy of empathic unsettlement’ (69) in order to depict Holocaust trauma without losing critical and crucial distance from it, Wlodarski selects three pivotal scenes from Nuit et Brouillard, each one representing a different facet of musical witness. Eisler and Resnais dismantled Leni Riefenstahl's notions of Wagnerian totality, she argues, concluding that ‘For Eisler and Resnais, breaking the totality of Riefenstahl's documentary was an act not only of aesthetic resistance, but also of political activism’ (76).

Accordingly, Nuit et Brouillard was not a film without controversy. In 1956, Wlodarski recounts, the West German delegation tried to have it barred from the Cannes Film Festival, arguing that the documentary would bolster anti-German sentiment. After much back-and-forth between the French, German, and Soviet delegations, the film premiered on 29 April 1956 to a sold-out crowd. It would soon be widely screened in Germany, where it won favour with the public for its ‘historical yet empathetic presentation’ (88) and its refusal to simply lean on the notion of collective guilt. As Wlodarski argues, the film's uneven reception stemmed from the ‘difficult negotiation of early testimonial language: the impetus to speak out, the recognition that one's usual language is inadequate, and then the first utterance’ (91).

Chapter 4 analyses the reception history of Jüdische Chronik, a Holocaust memorial cantata created by composers from East and West Germany between 1959 and 1961. The cantata was the brainchild of Paul Dessau, a German-Jewish composer who escaped Nazi persecution in the 1930s by fleeing first to Paris and then to the United States. Dessau wanted Jüdische Chronik to serve as a kind of post-memorial to Jewish suffering during the Holocaust, bringing attention to more recent outbursts of anti-Semitism in late 1950s East and West Germany.

While living in East Berlin, Dessau asked fellow East German composer Rudolf Wagner-Régeny, as well as West German musicians Boris Blacher, Hans Werner Henze, and Karl Amadeus Hartmann, to contribute movements to Jüdische Chronik, which featured a libretto by Jens Gerlach. Dessau sought to legitimate the cantata by selecting composers from different generations who had vastly different experiences under the Nazi regime, ranging from collaboration to exile. To ensure some degree of uniformity between the movements, Dessau most likely gave his collaborators the same twelve-tone row with which to work. As Joy Calico notes, Jüdische Chronik represented a rare ‘pan-German third space for commemoration’, to borrow Homi Bhabha's phrase, between the fledgling East and West.Footnote ⁵ Wlodarski complements the existing work done on Jüdische Chronik by placing it in the larger context of anti-Semitism in the post-war Germanys, and by unpacking the fraught relationships the five composers had with the work and with one another.

Wlodarski's fourth chapter is as much about the divergent cultural contexts in the burgeoning German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) as it is about Jüdische Chronik. The GDR's failure to acknowledge its own anti-Semitism meant that by 1961 only around 1,800 members of the seven East German Jewish communities remained. At the same time, the construction of the Berlin Wall led Blacher, Henze, and Hartmann to withdraw their support from Jüdische Chronik, fearing their collaboration with East Germans would be heard as a critique of the Federal Republic. The piece finally premiered only five years later in Cologne; the GDR premiere took place shortly thereafter in Leipzig. Yet, as Wlodarski argues, Jüdische Chronik received a mixed reception, especially in the West, where Adorno's more probing stance concerning Holocaust art had already taken hold. Critics in the East, in turn, seized upon the West's criticism as proof of the FRG's continuing anti-Semitism. By the late 1960s, the GDR had found new ways to incorporate the Holocaust in their educational curriculum, as Jüdische Chronik was used to emphasize the GDR's anti-Fascist credentials and to reassert the FRG's anti-Semitism. Wlodarski places the piece within larger trends in GDR-approved Holocaust education, exploring the cantata's performance as part of the East's fiftieth anniversary commemorations of Kristallnacht. Ultimately, she exposes the GDR's exploitation of Jüdische Chronik for the country's contemporary political causes, noting that the piece commemorates neither the Holocaust nor anti-Semitism; rather, ‘it testifies to East Germany's long-term and problematic political relationship with its own traumatic past’ (125).

Chapter 5 provides a thoughtful re-hearing of Steve Reich's Different Trains, a work inspired by the composer's renewed interest in his own Judaism and his cross-country train trips as a child. Reich recognized that as a young Jewish boy between 1939 and 1942, he would have been on a very different train had he been living in Europe. Through the survivor voices of Paul, Rachel, and Rachella (testimonies held at the Yale Fortunoff Archive), as well as interpolations from Reich's former governess and a retired train porter, the composer blurs his childhood travel experiences with the trauma and horror of the Holocaust. In choosing to feature Paul, Rachel, and Rachella, Reich selected survivors of his own generation who had radically different experiences with riding trains during the war. For Paul, his memories include the childhood excitement of getting to ride on a train (albeit as he is smuggled from Slovakia to Hungary), while for Rachel, the train marks the start of her ordeal in hiding. Rachella, the only one of the three to have spent time in a camp, was crammed into a cattle car and brought to Auschwitz. The train car was also the site of her liberation in 1945.

Rather than reinforce the prevailing monumentalization of Reich's composition as the reigning piece of postmodern Holocaust commemoration, Wlodarski instead argues that ‘Different Trains is itself a problematic secondary witness, one susceptible to the same fracture of subjectivity endemic to the accounts of primary witness’ (130). The author examines Reich's compositional process and the role of selection, suture, and substitution by comparing the composer's libretto with the original recordings of the survivors’ testimony, performing the kind of close reading that unlocks and challenges many of the work's implicit meanings. Wlodarski reveals that Reich significantly misheard several key phrases, changing Rachella's words from ‘And they laughed to listen to the singing, the Germans’ to the much kinder ‘And they loved to listen to the singing, the Germans’, and thus transforming the encounter from one of ridicule to a moment of playful acceptance. As Wlodarski notes, Reich's error meant that the composer presented ‘both the survivors’ testimonies and a rewriting of the primary witness in his own musical voice’ (163), and she argues that Different Trains ‘demonstrates that to remember the Holocaust in any medium is an exercise of imagination and artistry’ (163).

Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation concludes with a brief epilogue concerning secondary witness and its larger transformations in the twenty-first century by looking at Chaya Czernowin's chamber opera Pnima…ins Innere (2000). As the grandchild of a survivor, Czernowin is careful to avoid earlier representational traps by eschewing direct reference to the Holocaust, taking David Grossman's book See Under: Love (1989) as her primary influence. In a three-act opera lacking a libretto and singers, Czernowin unfolds the experience of a child meeting his grandfather as the little boy attempts to understand the Holocaust in his own, youthful terms. In situating Pnima alongside other intergenerational Holocaust representations, Wlodarski provides a thorough summary of more recent work on post-Holocaust testimony and commemoration. The book does not contain any photographs or images, and figures and illustrations are strictly musical examples.

Amy Lynn Wlodarski's Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation is an accessible, indispensible, and gripping text, providing a paradigmatic example of how to write and think about music and trauma. The study's breadth and accessible language mean it will be a canonical text for courses on music and the Holocaust, as well as an indispensible resource for scholars in other fields who wish to gain insights into current debates in musicology. The book's thorough treatment of reception history as well as its exploration of theoretical and philosophical topics will serve academics in history, comparative literature, Jewish studies, German studies, and other disciplines equally well as those in musicology. This exceptional study probes the limits of Holocaust representation in music, providing a wealth of information concerning questions of memory, commemoration, and testimony, and hearing secondary witness as no other work about musical responses and the Holocaust has yet done.