The Oscar-winning film The Pianist (2002) tells a tale about the power of music.Footnote 1 Dramatizing the life of the Polish Jewish musician Władysław Szpilman (1911–2000), the film treats music as a metaphor for continuity across trauma and as a solace from the unbearable surroundings that Szpilman endured, first in the Warsaw Ghetto and later when he hid outside it. This theme is clear from the film’s framing, which gestures towards continuity across the Holocaust: the film begins and ends with Szpilman playing Chopin’s C♯-minor Nocturne in a radio studio, a performance that, the film suggests, was merely interrupted by five years of war. Music’s power to help endure trauma is further developed through the portrayal of Szpilman in hiding. Isolated in a small apartment, he ‘plays’ Chopin’s Grand Polonaise Brillante with his fingers above the keys of a piano, which he cannot touch lest he make a sound that reveals his presence. We hear the orchestra and piano solo in the film’s soundtrack, suggesting that Szpilman is imagining a richness of performance that takes him beyond his grim surroundings. The apogee of the film’s endorsement of music as a redemptive practice occurs when Szpilman plays an impromptu concert for a German officer who has discovered him in hiding — a performance that would seem to have saved his life. Here the film leaves all realism behind: no pianist who had spent months away from a keyboard could flawlessly play Chopin’s G-minor Ballade in a cold, deserted hospital. But as both Lawrence Kramer and Michael Klein elucidate, the breaking of realism in this moment is the point: musical performance transcends even the most dismal circumstances.Footnote 2
Released to critical acclaim, The Pianist was among the most prominent examples of a broader discourse around music and the Holocaust that had taken shape by the turn of the millennium. It grew out of the recognition that the Holocaust was a defining event of twentieth-century western culture, and thus of relevance even to audiences who had not lived in the time and place in which the crime was committed.Footnote 3 The film’s portrayal of music as important to Szpilman’s survival also echoed themes that were found in concert presentations of music of the Nazi era in the US and Western Europe. As scholars including Lily E. Hirsch, Amy Lynn Wlodarski, Barbara Milewski, and James Loeffler have discussed, many who programmed and promoted ‘Holocaust music’ towards the end of the last century fused romantic clichés about concert music, in particular its ability to provide access to an otherworldly realm outside quotidian surroundings, with an interpretation of the Holocaust that focused on themes of resilience and rebirth.Footnote 4 While not all concert presenters relied on such reductive framings, those who did gained public visibility, shaping the narratives of music during the Nazi era in ways that were often at odds with the nuanced, multivocal accounts of musical responses to the Holocaust that have been favoured by many scholars.Footnote 5
In this essay, I remove some of the romantic veneer from the Szpilman story by returning to the context in which the original version of his memoirs was created. Published in 1946 in Poland as Śmierć miasta: Pamiętniki Władysława Szpilmana, 1939–1945 [The Death of a City: The Memoirs of Władysław Szpilman, 1939–1945], the memoirs were written during an early moment in the creation of Holocaust memory. At this time there was considerable interest in documenting Jewish experience, but the conventions for so doing were manifold, meaning that responses to the atrocity were diverse.Footnote 6 Unbeknownst to readers of the reissued English editions or to viewers of The Pianist, however, a key role in crafting Szpilman’s story was played by a non-Jewish music critic, Jerzy Waldorff. Credited as the editor of the 1946 edition, his role was in actuality closer to that of an author or co-author, in that he most likely composed the prose of the memoirs, as I discuss in greater detail below.
Further complicating matters, Waldorff’s views on Jews were not neutral: he was infamous for his antisemitic writings of the late 1930s and was a leading translator of fascist ideology into the Polish cultural sphere at that time. While he disavowed fascism after the war, he did not denounce his pre-war antisemitism, even as he began work on what would eventually be recognized as a seminal Polish Jewish memoir. The result is that one of the most widely distributed accounts of music during the Holocaust was crafted at least in part by a man who only a few years prior had railed against Jewish influence on artistic culture, a fact unknown to most who encounter Szpilman’s story today.Footnote 7
Taking Waldorff’s fraught authorship as my starting point, this article argues that both The Death of a City and The Pianist contain multiple points of view on the ghetto’s musical culture, which have been amalgamated into works whose aesthetic frame and reception have obfuscated their multivocal nature. The compelling immediacy of Waldorff’s prose (and, later, of Polanski’s directing) has enabled scholars and audiences alike to treat the memoirs as if they were a univocal document of Szpilman’s experiences, rather than as the complex, multi-authorial aesthetic object that they in fact are. To help counter this flattening, I build on a body of critical commentary from Polish-speaking scholars such as Henryk Grynberg, Piotr Kuhiwczak, and Jacek Leociak, who have sought to ensure that Waldorff receives recognition for his role in writing the memoirs.Footnote 8 While it unpacks the tortuous history of the book’s republications and translations, such commentary has had less to say about how Waldorff might have shaped the text in the first place. Nor has it broached the key paradox of the book, namely of how a once-vocal antisemite came to write an account of Jewish survival. In this article, I address these issues by highlighting the transformations in Waldorff’s politics during the war, as well as congruences between his pre-war views and the portrayal of Jewish culture within The Death of a City itself.
Through my focus on the people who shape Holocaust testimony, this article joins a growing body of scholarship that asks how first-person autobiographical accounts of the Holocaust have been mediated through interactions between survivors and what Hannah Pollin-Galay describes as ‘ecologies’ of interlocuters, institutions, and historiographical narratives.Footnote 9 In her study of videotaped testimony, Pollin-Galay shows that survivors’ recollections were not only influenced by the priorities of the interviewers (who led them to focus on some topics rather than others), a dialogic quality of testimony that has long been discussed.Footnote 10 She also shows how these interviews have been shaped by the narratives around the Holocaust in survivors’ home countries, through which they had grown accustomed to retelling their lives over the intervening decades. Thus what might appear to be acts of straightforward remembrance, or of bearing witness to personal experience, turn out to be scaffolded by language, place, and broader patterns in local collective memory.Footnote 11
The dialogic nature of testimony is a useful point of departure for reading the Szpilman memoirs, because Pollin-Galay and others remind us of how multiple voices, perspectives, and individuals can shape what might at first appear to be a monovocal autobiography. At the same time, there are also many differences between oral history interviews, from which her idea of ecological analysis derives, and co-authored memoirs. The Szpilman memoirs preserve no real-time documentation of the creators’ interactions, whose tensions, disagreements, and collaboration are instead amalgamated into a first-person narrative. Further, as we will see below, memoirs engage ideas of authorship and ownership (symbolic and real) of creative work that are often in tension with the give-and-take of a collaboration (or an interview).
The value of ecological methods lies in their ability to refocus attention on the social relations that adhere in the creation of first-person, autobiographical statements and on the ‘frameworks’ of collective memory, to borrow a useful concept from Maurice Halbwachs, through which survivors made sense of their lives.Footnote 12 Thus I consider how Szpilman’s memoirs reflect not only the trauma of the ghetto, but also Waldorff’s proclivities as an author and broader discourses about the Warsaw Ghetto and the Holocaust. In this manner, an ecological interpretation of the memoirs entails both an examination of how Waldorff and Szpilman shaped the text and a consideration of the cultural tropes that aided the narrativization of Szpilman’s experiences. Finally, a focus on the ecologies of memory production helps avoid the temptation to be swayed by the strong personalities in the drama I recount. This essay advocates for neither Szpilman nor Waldorff, but rather asks what can be learned about the formation of memory of the Warsaw Ghetto by examining their collaboration.
The first step in such an ecological reading of the Szpilman story is to review the evidence in favour of Waldorff’s role in creating the text and to show how a work of literary collaboration has become repackaged as a single-authored autobiography. The next two sections of the article, taken together, ask whether traces of Waldorff’s views are to be found in the book. In the first of these sections, I reconstruct his political outlook during the 1930s and 1940s, drawing on his personal papers, held in the Poznań Society for the Advancement of Arts and Sciences (Poznańskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk, PTPN).Footnote 13 In the second, I turn to the text of The Death of a City itself. Here I observe that the memoirs are sympathetic to Szpilman himself while at the same time portraying Jews other than the artist-hero in a more negative light. I examine several antisemitic tropes within the book that rhyme with Waldorff’s pre-war writings, including the purported unmusicality of Jewish listeners, a Jewish obsession with money, claims of a Jewish world conspiracy, and portrayals of Jews as lice. Although it is impossible to establish with philological precision whether Szpilman or Waldorff was responsible for the inclusion of these ideas in the memoirs, the likelihood that they are a continuation of Waldorff’s prejudices into the early post-war period underscores the need for scholars to approach Szpilman’s story with care. Ultimately, a fuller appreciation of the people and discourses that shaped the Szpilman story sheds light on the unstable forms through which ideas about music during the Holocaust were conveyed long before tropes of romantic transcendence and survival came to dominate. I return to this point in the final pages, where I consider the multiple post-Holocaust discourses that shaped the café scene in The Pianist.
Authorial Erasure
Even before the age of ghostwritten celebrity memoirs, there was nothing unusual about collaborative autobiography. Accomplished Polish literati of Szpilman’s generation had co-authors, editors, and amanuenses, including Aleksander Wat (whose memoirs were tape-recorded with Czesław Miłosz) and Adam Bromberg (whose memoirs were assembled and rewritten by Henryk Grynberg after his death).Footnote 14 It is especially common for autobiographies of musicians to be co-authored, whether Igor Stravinsky in conversation with Robert Craft or Questlove with Ben Greenman.Footnote 15 The story of The Death of a City is somewhat more complicated than these examples, because the text is presented today as if it were a single-authored autobiography. In the contemporary English-language edition, Szpilman is identified as the author, so the book would seem to honour what Phillipe Lejeune describes as the ‘autobiographical pact’, the implied understanding that the protagonist of the memoir, its narrator, and its author are one and the same.Footnote 16 This section synthesizes the evidence showing that The Death of a City was most likely a work of authorial collaboration and thus that the ‘autobiographical pact’ does not hold for it; I suggest both historical reasons and ones related to the text itself for why this collaboration has been erased. In making this argument, I do not claim that the memoirs are falsified, nor that they should be ignored in scholarly writing, but rather suggest that they reflect both first-hand knowledge of the Warsaw Ghetto and Waldorff’s literary sensibilities.
The title page of the 1946 version of The Death of a City notes that Jerzy Waldorff opracował Szpilman’s memoirs. Although the Polish verb opracować is often translated as ‘to edit’, it implies a deeper involvement with a project than its English equivalent. It can mean to arrange a musical work, to work out an idea, or even to write up a study on a topic. It is in no sense limited to touching up language or adding clarifying footnotes, as English speakers might imagine the role of a memoir’s ‘editor’. Indeed, the original publisher of The Death of a City, Wiedza, seemed to endorse a degree of co-ownership over the text, listing both Szpilman and Waldorff as its authors, who were jointly paid an honorarium of 30,000 złoty for the text.Footnote 17
In the months before and after the publication of The Death of a City, Waldorff presented a consistent account of how the text had come into being. When the first excerpts from the book were serialized in summer 1946, it was Waldorff — not Szpilman — who was identified as the author: the periodical titled them ‘Szpilman’s Memoirs’, written by Jerzy Waldorff.Footnote 18 In a short explanatory blurb attached to the excerpts, Waldorff claimed that he ‘attempted — as is the only method in such circumstances — to write [Szpilman’s memoirs] in the most straightforward manner, just as he had told me about his Gehenna’.Footnote 19 Waldorff’s preface to The Death of a City, published later that year, reiterated this point:
While working on this book, I made use in part of stories told by Szpilman, and in part of his precise notes. I would like to underscore that there are no facts in the book that have been invented by me. All the facts are authentic, although it might appear that they were composed by a talented scriptwriter and director of sensational films. Writing Szpilman’s odyssey, I attempted only to transmit it to the reader in such a literary form that would also deliver to them most faithfully the emotional content of the story of my friend — the story that I had heard.Footnote 20
Following the publication, and upset that his name had been removed from the book’s cover by the publisher, Waldorff once again documented their working strategies:
As concerns our collaborative technique, we worked together in such a manner that [Szpilman] recounted his experiences to me and gave me chronological notes, and I composed this information into a literary whole, giving it the form of a book in which — I underscore — Szpilman wrote not a word.Footnote 21
Because his name had not appeared on the cover, he quipped, ‘Szpilman was turned into the writer, the author of The Death of a City, when he was not the author of the book but rather its main character’.Footnote 22 These passages all point to oral transmission and close friendship as the core of the book’s genesis — indeed, the two were working together at Polish Radio and in proximity to each other for long stretches of time. They also show that Waldorff was invested in authorial ownership of the text. And indeed, as least as late as 1963, Szpilman implicitly endorsed Waldorff’s authorship of the text by distributing an English-language excerpt of the text that identified Waldorff as the author.Footnote 23
By the time the book was reissued in the late 1990s, the political and cultural landscape surrounding memoirs about genocide had changed immensely. Of course, as David G. Roskies and Naomi Diamant observe, Holocaust literature has existed from the earliest moments of the atrocity itself.Footnote 24 During the war and early post-war years in Eastern Europe, however, a strict genre division between ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’ was not salient, and authors routinely turned to tools of fabulation to convey the exceptional nature of their survival, as Benjamin Paloff has observed.Footnote 25 But this changed as Holocaust memory spread beyond east-central Europe. By the 1990s, the Holocaust had assumed a more central place in Western public culture, and memoirs such as the diary of Anne Frank were used to teach contemporary audiences about the Holocaust.Footnote 26 As the Holocaust itself receded further into the past (and survivors grew old and died), media and representations took on a more central role in the transmission of Holocaust memory.Footnote 27 More broadly, memoirs of human rights violations were by this time routinely recruited to provide what Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson describe as ‘a cross-cultural encounter through which readers are positioned as ethical subjects within the global imaginary of human rights advocacy’.Footnote 28 Given the ‘fact fetishism’ common in anglophone discourse and the high stakes attached to memoirs of genocide, their authors, editors, and publishers were often under pressure to establish the ‘authenticity’ of the texts, especially following several high-stakes incidents of forged memoirs, such as Binjamin Wilkomirski’s 1995 Fragments. Footnote 29 They often did so through paratexts, such as introductions, forewords, and afterwords. These, Smith and Watson observe, provide not only ‘sites for activists and representatives with professional bona fides to attest to the veracity’ of the story, but also allow for the embedding of the ‘individual story in the larger story of a group or movement, linking personal experience to known historical events’.Footnote 30
The reissues of The Death of a City used paratext both to establish the authenticity of the text and to argue for its historical importance. When the book was reissued in German in 1998, now titled Das wunderbare Überleben: Warschauer Erinnerungen, 1939–1945 [The Miraculous Survival: Warsaw Memoirs, 1939–1945], Waldorff’s original four-page preface asserting his authorial ownership of the text had been removed. Instead, in a new preface, Szpilman’s son, Andrzej, claimed that:
My father wrote this book in 1945. The first edition appeared in 1946 in Warsaw, edited and with a foreword by Jerzy Waldorff, defaced by the censor and — since my father was then on a six-month, uninterrupted tour abroad — all without his knowledge.Footnote 31
Although the modern reissue was widely promoted as a restoration of the censored 1946 text, it is nearly identical to the original in terms of its content, as the literary scholar Jacek Leociak has shown. (As we will see below, a major change made by the censor in 1946 was not restored in the reissued edition.) The only substantial correction was to change the nationality of Wilm Hosenfeld, the officer who aided Szpilman, from Austrian to German.Footnote 32 The new preface, added fifty years after the fact, asks readers to believe that Szpilman himself wrote the memoirs in an elegant literary style, despite having no prior experience with (or subsequent interest in) belles-lettres, that Waldorff obtained them, and that he then published them under his own name and invented a story about their collaboration — all without Szpilman knowing. It seems unlikely that a literary scandal of such magnitude could have left no trace in the historical record.
When the German version appeared in 1998, Waldorff telephoned Szpilman in a fury. Eventually, he ceded his rights to the book for 12,000 German marks, which would seem to confirm that his claims of authorship had some basis.Footnote 33 In a public account of the incident published that same year, Waldorff railed against his former friend. His comments marked Szpilman as Jewish, describing the republication of the memoirs without his consent as an act of ‘chutzpah’. He further insinuated that Szpilman had collaborated with Poland’s erstwhile enemy: Szpilman had ‘decided, along with his friends — Germans — to soil the last chapter of his own life’.Footnote 34
The English-language translation, The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man’s Survival in Warsaw, 1939–1945 (1999), has sown further confusion. It excises the brief mention of Waldorff that had appeared in the German preface, and the title has been shifted to emphasize the individual, the ‘one man’. By comparison, The Death of a City highlights a larger collective, suggesting that Warsaw itself was the protagonist of the memoir and Szpilman a guide through this urban destruction. He was the rare witness who had seen it all, from the initial bombardment of the city in 1939 to its final destruction, when, cleared of people following the defeat of the Warsaw Uprising in October 1944, its buildings were systematically levelled by the Germans.Footnote 35
In addition, the English version was not created from the original Polish; rather, it is a translation by Anthea Bell of the German translation, in which the style of the 1946 Polish version has been attenuated.Footnote 36 Long, serpentine sentences in the original version have been replaced by short, choppy ones in the English. Key words and phrases are sometimes inaccurately rendered: ‘monuments of the culture of my people’ [zabytki kultury mego narodu] becomes in English ‘the culture of my people’, removing altogether the concrete reference to destroyed monuments.Footnote 37 The ‘German round-ups’ [niemieckie łapanki], which in Warsaw targeted Poles and Jews, have become ‘German race raids’, which implies they only targeted Jews.Footnote 38 Commands spoken by German officers, which in the original Polish version were given in German, have been changed to English, which de-emphasizes the linguistic foreignness of the occupation.Footnote 39
As Piotr Kuhiwczak has pointed out, the English-language edition also makes changes to the chapter order. By moving the sixth chapter, ‘The Hour of Children and the Mad’, to the start, the chronology of the book is disrupted. Whereas The Death of a City begins on the eve of the war in 1939, the English version plunges the reader into a description of the ghetto in the book’s first pages.Footnote 40 The title of the final chapter, ‘Nocturne in C minor’, has been changed to ‘Nocturne in C♯ minor’, thus obscuring that Szpilman played either the Chopin Nocturne in C minor, op. 48 no. 1, for Hosenfeld, or possibly the posthumously published Nocturne no. 21, a less technically demanding composition. Thus not only are English-language readers presented with a significantly altered text, but they are provided few clues that the origins — or cultural politics — of the book might be more complicated than first meets the eye.
Because of these issues of translation, I have based this article on the original, 1946, version of The Death of a City [Śmierć miasta], and I have translated from this text throughout. Since the reissued Polish-language edition of 2001, Pianista: Warszawskie wspomnienia, 1939–1945, contains numerous stylistic changes from the 1946 version, and because the earlier version is now an antiquarian rarity, I have reproduced the original of the 1946 version in the text and notes. For the convenience of readers who do not know Polish, I also reference the English translation, The Pianist. In instances where the English translation is accurate, I have cited it alone. An overview of the various versions of the Szpilman story discussed in this article is provided in the Appendix.
The ease with which Waldorff could be removed from the later editions of the text also points to the instability of his claims of authorship in the first place. It is useful in this regard to conceptualize authorship not merely as the act of writing, but rather as a social claim to ownership of a text that erects a boundary around the fluid movements of influence (and enables the economic exploitation of the text).Footnote 41 Tellingly, it was only in the paratext (the introduction, title page, and critical polemics) that Waldorff asserted authorship in this sense; he did not insert himself into the story in any obvious manner. There is no commentary within the chapters or obvious editorializing. There are no textualized conversations, as between Craft and Stravinsky. In this sense, authorial erasure might be understood as, paradoxically, an accomplishment of the autobiographical text itself: because Waldorff was able to create a narrative that read like first-person testimony, his own skill as a storyteller fades into the background. Indeed, one of the earliest reviews of the publication highlighted Waldorff’s authorship and praised him for his invisibility: ‘Since we hear only Szpilman, I am certain that few readers after finishing the book will realize that they have heard a story written by someone else.’Footnote 42
If this account of Waldorff’s authorship is correct, then we must reject the common assertion that the purportedly detached, straightforward language of the memoirs was an inevitable outcome of Szpilman writing in the aftermath of trauma. The reading of the memoirs as blunt expressions of post-Holocaust trauma might say more about the proclivities of late twentieth-century translators and readers than it does about Szpilman himself. As Carolyn J. Dean has argued, readers and scholars are often biased towards victim accounts that limit emotional excess, since it is assumed that bare-bones, unelaborated accounts are more appropriate responses to the horror of genocide than emotionally excessive ones. This is an aesthetic preference for what she terms ‘minimalism’.Footnote 43 Valorizations of the memoir’s purported minimalism are common: the German songwriter Wolf Biermann, in the epilogue to the reissue, stated that the book’s
language is surprisingly cool. Władysław Szpilman describes his recent sufferings with an almost melancholy detachment. It seems to me as if he had not really come back to his senses yet after his journey through all the various circles of the inferno.Footnote 44
Lisa Appignanesi, writing in the Observer in 1999, echoed this idea, by describing how
the immediacy of Szpilman’s account goes hand in hand with a rare tone of innocence. History has not yet been written, certainly not digested. We are drawn in to share his surprise and then disbelief at the horrifying progress of events. His shock and ensuing numbness become ours.Footnote 45
A more likely explanation for the book’s sometimes cool language is that Waldorff believed it was the appropriate tone for books about the war. In this regard, he was not alone: early post-war Polish literati debated the merits of ‘realism’, especially in works about the war, a style that was to convey an unembroidered account of the immediacy of loss still fresh in the minds of virtually all readers at the time.Footnote 46 His next major book to be published, the 1948 novel Godzina policyjna [Curfew], was caught up in similar debates, albeit now inflected by Stalinist dogmas.Footnote 47
More importantly, many passages in the original Polish-language version of The Death of a City are not minimalist. The book contains florid extended metaphors thanks to which Szpilman’s experiences are brought to life: the arbitrary terror of the bombing of Warsaw in 1939 is conveyed through an extended simile that compares the bombs to roulette balls bouncing across their tray.Footnote 48 The ever-present ‘subconscious fear’ felt by those in the ghetto is compared to the anxiety that precedes an appendix removal, a surgery that Waldorff had in 1931.Footnote 49 The chaos prevailing during the beginning of the liquidation of the ghetto is compared to the fervent activity of an anthill under attack.Footnote 50 These examples, among many others, remind us that even if we accept Waldorff’s assertion that he did not fabricate any facts, the memoirs are much more than a recounting of fact. Their factual content cannot be separated from the language, anecdotes, and metaphors that make The Death of a City a ‘literary whole’.
‘Our Native Totalitarian’
Why in 1946 did Waldorff wish to author the story of Szpilman’s survival? This might seem a perplexing question indeed to readers familiar with Polish cultural politics on the eve of World War II, by which point Waldorff had established a reputation as a forceful exponent of nationalism, totalitarianism, and antisemitism. In the mid-1930s, when Waldorff made his debut as a writer, praise of authoritarian and anti-democratic ideologies was common across Europe. He developed his political and aesthetic allegiances by tapping into the international networks that sought to create right-wing alternatives to liberal internationalism.Footnote 51 In 1936, after travelling to France, the Netherlands, and Belgium, he published an interview with Léon Degrelle, a right-wing Belgian politician who would later become a Nazi collaborator and Holocaust denier.Footnote 52 In summer 1937, he went to Italy for two months, where he met with the Italian Minister of Propaganda and interviewed several Italian artists, including the composer Alfredo Casella. His glowing reports from the trip were serialized in Prosto z Mostu [Straight from the Bridge], a right-wing cultural periodical, and published in his 1939 book Sztuka pod dyktaturą [Art under Dictatorship].Footnote 53
He framed the latter around his own nationalist sentiments. ‘I am an individualist, and value myself highly, but first and foremost I am a Pole and wish to be one’, he wrote in the book’s introduction.Footnote 54 ‘Poland is as indispensable to my life as are breathing and eating.’Footnote 55 The growing power of the ‘mighty, totalitarian’ states on Poland’s borders — Nazi Germany to the west and the Soviet Union to the east — meant, he asserted, that Poland will ‘soon be forced to choose between transforming itself into a totalitarian system of government or losing its independence. Then for certain we Polish artists will not hesitate to devote our individual freedoms to rescuing our country.’Footnote 56 This transformation of Poland into a totalitarian state, he contended, was why he felt compelled to describe the roles of the arts in such societies. ‘That is why I think that, instead of cawing, it is better in advance to get to work thinking over the role that art must play in this strong, nationalist Poland of the future.’Footnote 57
To paint fascism as desirable to Polish readers, he claimed that Italy operated as a patron state, providing deep financial and institutional support for the arts while rarely dictating the content thereof. He believed fascism enabled the flourishing of artistic avant-gardes because it treated aesthetic modernity as a tool for burnishing the nation’s prowess.Footnote 58 He thus wished to draw a sharp distinction between the state patronage of Italian fascism, which he believed embraced modernism, and Nazi Germany, which he critiqued not for its racist policies but rather because it forced conservative aesthetic values onto Germany’s creative communities.Footnote 59 Several commentators pointed out how naive ‘our native totalitarian’ was to repeat Italian propaganda.Footnote 60 Waldorff’s endorsement of a strong, centralized state was, however, within the mainstream of contemporary Polish musical thought, in which calls for the ‘rationalization’ of musical life were routine, and musical intellectuals looked approvingly at state-supported arts programmes in Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union.Footnote 61 In distinction from other participants in these debates, who tended to argue on the level of generalities, Waldorff framed his arguments around observations of fascist rule in practice. His writings were characterized by an explicit identification with the terms and leaders of fascism — a fact that would become a liability after the war.
Although antisemitism was a growing force in Polish cultural and musical circles throughout the 1930s, Waldorff was notable among modernist-aligned music intellectuals for the explicit and public nature of his views.Footnote 62 His loudest antisemitic pronouncements were published in June 1939, in an article titled ‘The Obsession of the Nurslings: Judeophobia’. In it, he asserted that there is ‘no Jewish creative output in art’ because of the ‘complete creative impotence at the very foundations of the Jewish psyche’, which he attributed to the Jews’ purported lack of a national homeland.Footnote 63 This supposed creative lack has led Jews, he asserted, to create ‘a number of substitutes for creative genius and talent, in order to have the power to bring to fruition the dream shared by the impotent: the power to rule over artistic work and to adjudicate it’.Footnote 64 In this sense, he echoed long-standing antisemitic ideas about the derivative nature of Jewish creativity, an idea with roots in Christian theology but that by the late nineteenth century had spread far more widely.Footnote 65 He further connected this purported aesthetic ‘impotence’ to tropes of Jewish commercialism. In his view, non-Jewish Poles who ‘object to the verdicts of the Jewish artistic tsadikks are subjected to a ritual beating’, he asserted, with ‘all available means, which the chronically rich Jews have in abundance’.Footnote 66 In conclusion, he encouraged the ‘nurslings’ of the article’s title — that is, young non-Jewish Poles — to abandon their fear of Jewish opinion-makers. To reiterate the point, he turns to one last metaphor: ‘We should not smash the market stalls that sell Jewish rubbish, but rather stand next to them and advertise the Polish stalls that are supplied with true artistic merchandise.’Footnote 67
Waldorff’s antisemitic and fascist views gained him a visibility within Polish literary circles that was unusual for a young music critic, especially since he had only begun writing professionally in 1935. After he spoke at a congress of Polish writers in Trans-Olza, a territory annexed by Poland from Czechoslovakia in 1938, Jerzy Putrament and Teodor Bujnicki questioned whether someone with such a prominent nose was as ‘Aryan’ as Waldorff claimed to be. ‘His moustache à la Hitler attempts in vain to cover up the wonderfully melamedic curvature of his nose’, quipped Putrament.Footnote 68 Such low blows had a serious undertone, since they pointed out the absurdity of interwar ‘race science’, which ascribed immense significance to such physical features.Footnote 69 Others pointed to Waldorff’s Prussian and German roots; the poet Antoni Słonimski polemicized that
Waldorff is not a Polish surname. So if he makes accusations against someone on the basis of his heritage, it is easy for someone poorly raised to also point out his heritage. […] The use of racial criteria is a very slippery slope.Footnote 70
Perhaps Mieczysław Braun cut closest to the quick when he wrote: ‘And who would Mr Waldorff be without antisemitism? Perhaps we would have never learned of his existence in the field of literary criticism without it.’Footnote 71 Braun had a point: Waldorff had yet to publish any literary works, and his only book to date was his collection of reportage on fascist Italy. If he had quickly gained notoriety, it was no doubt due to his aggressive politics.
After the war, his advocacy for fascism became a liability. Poles experienced the brutality of Nazi rule first-hand, and the occupation had dispelled any illusions that there could be a positive role for Poland in Axis-ruled Europe. What is more, the communist state established from the ruins of the war tied its legitimacy to stamping out remnants of ‘fascism’, which the country’s leaders recast as an inherent outcome of capitalist societies and thus an enduring threat to communist Poland.Footnote 72 The creation of a monolithic yet persistent fascist threat helped further erase differences between Italian fascism and Nazism, a distinction already weakened by the Italian–German alliance. This distinction was essential to Waldorff’s world view of the 1930s, but by 1945 his preference for Mussolini over Hitler offered a slim alibi. Nor did it matter that his calls for strong, nationalist state patronage for the arts were becoming reality in post-war Poland, albeit now championed by the left rather than the right.Footnote 73 While many of his colleagues in musical-intellectual circles updated their calls for state involvement in musical life to fit the language of communist politics, Waldorff’s explicit identification with fascism required a more thorough disavowal.
It is within this context that in April 1945 Waldorff was attacked in Głos Ludu [Voice of the People], the organ of the Polish Workers’ Party, for his pre-war politics.Footnote 74 ‘He evidently believes’, wrote the anonymous author, ‘that his many years of experience gained by propagating fascist art — and not only art — entitle him to speak in matters of art, to shape opinion in a reborn, anti-fascist, and democratic Poland.’Footnote 75 He successfully defended himself against such accusations, which he took to the collegial court of the Union of Polish Musicians. In his defence he asserted that he had been young and impressionable when he wrote Art under Dictatorship, suggesting that he had been an unwitting victim of the authoritarian propaganda of the era. He also asserted that the war had been ‘a deep moral shock […] that opened his eyes onto an entirely new reality’.Footnote 76 Perhaps most significantly, the Union investigation found that he had behaved honourably during the occupation and that he had taken an active role in underground musical activities. While he might have held noxious political beliefs in the 1930s, he was definitively not a Nazi collaborator — and that is what ultimately mattered. In September 1945, Głos Ludu issued an apology for the ‘moral harm’ the earlier article had caused.Footnote 77 By the end of the year, Waldorff was the editor of a cultural periodical, Przekrój [Cross-Section], and well on his way to becoming a significant tastemaker of the Polish People’s Republic.Footnote 78 Over the following decades he became a radio and television personality and authored over a dozen books, many on classical music.
Thus The Death of a City was created while Waldorff was attempting to jettison his pre-war fascist baggage. According to Halina Szpilman, Władysław’s wife, this was no accident. She recalled that Roman Jasiński, then the director of Polish Radio, had suggested that it could benefit Waldorff to create a literary version of Szpilman’s experiences as he worked to place his fascist politics in the past.Footnote 79 Whether or not this is true, it is clear from Waldorff’s 1946 preface to The Death of a City that he wished to frame the memoirs in ways that would confirm his political transformation. By recounting in the preface how he and Szpilman socialized in a spa town in the summers of 1938 and 1939, he distracted from the fact that during these same years he was penning antisemitic and fascist articles. He also mentioned his positive actions during the occupation, highlighting his participation in the ‘conspiratorial work of the then-secret Musicians Union’ in occupied Warsaw, alluding to his work with the underground musical organization, led by Piotr Perkowski, that helped to hide Szpilman after he had escaped from the ghetto.Footnote 80 Finally, he framed the Szpilman story as an indictment of Nazism and thus, subtly, as a clarification of his pre-war sympathies:
It seemed to me, and it still seems to me, that in the experiences of this one person, one finds all the types of cruelty with which the Germans abused the nations they had defeated. That describing Szpilman’s trials will offer a cross-section of the different forms of German guilt, and this is why the memoirs had to be written.Footnote 81
From a present-day perspective, ‘fascism’ and ‘antisemitism’ might seem to be inextricably linked. This was not how these ideologies were understood in wartime and early post-war Poland, however. It was possible for Poles to unequivocally condemn fascism (or, more directly, the Nazi occupation) while still describing Jews in hostile, negative terms. During the war, the most famous example of such contradictions was Zofia Kossak, who helped to save thousands of Jews through her work with the underground Council for Aid to the Jews, while at the same time writing that she considered Jews as the ‘political, economic, and ideological enemies of Poland’.Footnote 82 Likewise after the war, demands for disavowal of ‘fascism’ did not extend to antisemitism. Rather the opposite: the early post-war years saw a renewed scourge of anti-Jewish violence and rhetoric in Poland, just as The Death of a City was being brought to press.Footnote 83
That ‘antisemitism’ and ‘fascism’ were two distinct concepts that had become closely allied during the 1930s and unfused after the war has two important implications for understanding Waldorff’s authorship of The Death of a City. Firstly, while it may appear paradoxical to today’s readers that an antisemite chose to write a book about a Jewish Holocaust survivor, this fact was less of a contradiction for Waldorff’s initial audiences. They could have understood the text primarily as a condemnation of fascism in broad strokes, rather than as the testimony of a distinctly Jewish voice whose story served to remind readers of the antisemitism at the roots of Nazism. Secondly, and most importantly, the fact that Waldorff rejected fascism publicly does not mean that he also rejected antisemitism. He could have believed that his pre-war attacks on Jewish artistic influence were not analogous to, much less complicit with, the Nazi ‘cruelty’ that he documented in The Death of a City.
Anti-Jewish Subtexts in The Death of a City
So far, I have argued that Waldorff helped create the Szpilman memoirs and that his views on the main themes of the memoirs — Jewish experience under Nazi rule and the perils of fascism — were not neutral. These facts of authorship raise further questions about the memoirs themselves. Did Waldorff’s antisemitism and his desire to distance himself from fascism shape how he portrayed Nazism and the Jews suffering under it, even as he largely followed the factual and chronological armature provided by Szpilman? And does knowledge that the descriptions of the Warsaw Ghetto have been mediated through his words change how readers interpret the book? With these questions, I am considering what an ecological reading of the memoirs might entail, one that asks how this account of Szpilman’s experiences was shaped by the political environment of early post-war Poland. While the question of continuities from Waldorff’s pre-war beliefs into the memoirs can be assessed empirically, the second question — of interpretation — requires a turn towards more open-ended, hermeneutic methods.
In many ways The Death of a City is a story about how individuals acted ethically or failed to do so in terrible circumstances. It largely avoids recourse to ethnic or national stereotypes. There are upright Jews, such as the Jewish police officer who saved Szpilman, and corrupt ones, including most of the rest of the police force in the ghetto. There are Poles who act with humanity, including several, identified by their full names, who hid Szpilman outside the ghetto, and immoral Poles, most notably Szałas, who stole the money he collected for Szpilman’s food, leaving him to starve. There is even one ‘good’ German, Wilm Hosenfeld, in addition to many sadistic ones such as Zig-Zag (or Thwick-Thwack, in the English translation).Footnote 84 The main exception to this national even-handedness concerns Ukrainians and Lithuanians, whose collaboration with the Nazis is cast as a result of their purported national weakness.Footnote 85 It is not difficult to imagine how the memoir’s focus on the ethical behaviour of individuals was congruent with Waldorff’s attempts to rewrite his past. The book suggests that even individuals who had been far more implicated than Waldorff in fascism, such as Hosenfeld, could act morally when the circumstances demanded it.
The foregrounding of the individual as ethical agent, however, unfolds above a recurring subtext in which Jews other than Szpilman are cast in an unsympathetic light. At first, these passages might elude the reader’s attention. Taken together, they comprise a significant portion of the book’s descriptions of Jews (other than Szpilman) and Jewish publics. Consider the first instance in the memoirs that someone is identified as Jewish. In the second chapter, as war looms, Szpilman is digging defences around Warsaw:
On the first day an old Jew in a kaftan and yarmulka was shovelling soil beside me. He dug with Biblical fervour, flinging himself on his spade as if it were a mortal enemy, foaming at the mouth, his pale face streaming with sweat, his whole body shaking, his muscles contracting. He ground his teeth as he worked, a black whirlwind of kaftan and beard. His dogged labour, far beyond his normal capacities, produced vanishingly small results. […] Every few moments he leaned back against the wall of earth, racked with coughing. Pale as a dying man, he sipped the peppermint brew made to refresh the workers.Footnote 86
When Szpilman attempted to persuade him to stop, the man ‘looked up at the sky […] and an expression of inspiration came into his eyes, as if Jehovah in all his majesty had appeared in the sky. “I have a shop!”, he whispered.’Footnote 87 The insinuation that Jews were motivated to defend the city not out of an intrinsic sense of patriotism but rather to protect their commercial interests would not have been lost on a Polish-speaking readership, who understood the defence of Warsaw to be a central national duty.
The theme of commercialism reappears in the brief discussion of the café performances in the Warsaw Ghetto. As I have discussed elsewhere at length, cafés were significant venues for musical performance in the Warsaw Ghetto.Footnote 88 By the estimate of the historians Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, there were nearly one hundred cafés in the ghetto.Footnote 89 Most were small venues with just a couple of rooms, which had been created from apartments or offices.Footnote 90 Some café patrons drew on savings to afford cakes and coffee, but others had become newly rich in the ghetto, often through smuggling and extortion. Cafés were commercial venues, and to compete for patrons, café proprietors employed musicians, some of whom would perform background music while others offered recitals and concerts.Footnote 91 Indeed, in one of the most detailed reports on the ghetto cafés, created by a prisoner there sometime in 1941, the author describes music in each of the cafés he visited. He also highlights the social and cultural diversity of the cafés, as spaces in which various subgroups of the Warsaw Ghetto congregated:
The ghetto cafés play a very significant role, not only in the ghetto’s social life, but also in its public life, due to the lack of clubs, unions, associations, markets, parks, cinemas, fields, dancing halls, and so forth. The café thus replaces the theatre, the cabaret, the variety show, the cinema — but not only those — because alongside cabaret and music, the café is also a grocery store and a restaurant, illicit trade occurs here, smugglers meet here to discuss their business, exchanges take place, goods are offered and searched for, there are rooms for lovers, and trade in living wares also finds protection here, not to mention that prostitution — as always — is rife in bars.Footnote 92
The dizzying nature of the prose here captures the diversity of the cafés, which were a catch-all public space that served ends both laudable and base. Unsurprisingly given the importance of the cafés in the Warsaw Ghetto, The Death of a City’s discussion of music within the ghetto focuses exclusively on these venues.
There is, however, a peculiarity in the three pages on the cafés in the memoirs: namely, that the café Szpilman liked the least — Nowoczesna — is treated at the greatest length, in the most detail, and through the most memorable anecdotes. The memoirs describe the Jewish patrons at Nowoczesna as ‘the rich who went there hung about with gold jewellery and dripping with diamonds’.Footnote 93 Beggars were driven away with cudgels, and the audience was uninterested in the plight of the impoverished, according to The Death of a City. The idea presented here, that the ghetto cafés were sites of exclusivity, also appears in descriptions by other authors.Footnote 94 What makes The Death of a City noteworthy are the anecdotes through which this elitism is conveyed. To relay the topics of conversation at Nowoczesna, the memoirs describe an overheard discussion in which patrons complained of ‘a lack of solidarity from American Jews’:
‘Here, people are dying, they don’t have anything to put in their mouths, appalling things are happening, but the American press says nothing, and the Jewish bankers on the other side of the ocean do nothing to make America declare war on Germany, although if they liked to, they could command such a course of action at any time.’Footnote 95
This final clause of this quotation poses issues of translation, and there is some ambiguity in English as to whether these bankers had failed to ‘command’ or merely ‘recommend’ intervention.Footnote 96 Nonetheless, the suggestion of behind-the-scenes Jewish influence is clear, regardless of how the key term, polecić, is rendered. The notion of a Jewish conspiracy influencing international finance and politics is a foundational myth of modern antisemitism and was ubiquitous in right-wing circles during the first half of the twentieth century.Footnote 97 The voicing of such ideas by Jews themselves within The Death of a City would seem not only to suggest the validity of such conspiracies, but also to paint Jews as uninterested in aiding each other despite their purported control of vast international resources.
To further describe Nowoczesna’s inattentive audience, the memoirs state:
On one occasion a guest even sent a waiter over to tell me [Szpilman] to stop playing for a moment, because I was preventing him from testing the purity of sound of the gold twenty-dollar coins he had just acquired from a guest at his table. He knocked the coins gently on the marble surface of the table, picking them up in his fingertips and raising them to his ear, as he listened attentively to their ring — the only music capable of interesting him.Footnote 98
Here the audience’s concern with money forecloses the musicality of the café in a more obvious sense: the evaluation of the gold stops the performance. In the final clause, the memoirs bring this anecdote to a more abstract, and more antisemitic, level, suggesting that the commercialism of the Jewish audience member makes him incapable of ‘true’ musicality. Even if one were to believe that the café audience was inattentive to Szpilman’s performance — which of course is possible — their inattentiveness is illustrated through tropes rooted in the antisemitic imagination.
The memoirs state that Szpilman found more enthusiastic audiences later, at other cafés, but the descriptions of these venues in the memoirs undermine this point. The second café at which he performed, on Sienna Street, is described as a place where the ‘Jewish intelligentsia’ came to hear him. The memoirs say little about this audience, instead treating the café as a jumping-off point to discuss the painter Roman Kramsztyk and the educator Janusz Korczak. The scant attention given to the final café, Sztuka, is the most arresting. This café was frequented by Polish-speaking intellectuals interned in the ghetto, and was home to artists who had cut their teeth in the Warsaw cabaret, a genre that valued social critique, in scenarios written by eminent poets blended with music drawn from popular dance genres.Footnote 99 The artists at Sztuka did not abandon these values in the ghetto. One audience member, Mary Berg, described in her diary that at Sztuka, ‘one can hear songs and satires on the police, the ambulance service, the rickshaws, and even the Gestapo in a veiled fashion’.Footnote 100 These performances occurred in concert-like settings and were not mere background to conversation. Szpilman was directly involved in such performances. One of his most significant compositions from this period, the song ‘Jej pierwszy bal’ [‘Her First Ball’], was created for Sztuka, where it was performed with the singer Wiera Gran. Not only does it draw on genres such as the tango and rumba, but it also alludes to Chopin as a symbol of national survival.Footnote 101 Readers of The Death of a City learn little about these performances in Sztuka, however: the provocative critiques of daily life in the ghetto receive a mere clause in the memoirs. Indeed, this café receives the shortest treatment of all three in The Death of a City, despite it having provided a more receptive artistic platform to Szpilman. (In later interviews Szpilman discussed it while overlooking Nowoczesna altogether.Footnote 102) Notably, there is no description of the audience at Sztuka and no anecdotes about its modes of attention. There is little to balance out the more memorable yet negative portrayal of the listeners in Nowoczesna.
The most troubling passage in The Death of a City was one that never made it into print. The files of post-war Poland’s main censorship body, the Główny Urząd Kontroli Prasy, Publikacji i Widowisk (Main Office for the Control of Press, Publications, and Shows), contain a memo dated 31 August 1946 concerning the memoirs. Summer 1946 was an early moment in the history of censorship in post-war Poland, and the apparatus for censoring literary texts was still ad hoc, at least compared to what would emerge in the Stalinist period beginning in 1948.Footnote 103 This page lists the original, uncensored version and next to it the approved text, which exactly matches the published version. The passage in question concerns the beginning of the so-called Grossaktion, when hundreds of thousands of Jews in the ghetto were deported to Treblinka and murdered in the summer of 1942. Describing the panic and fear that descended on the ghetto as its residents learned of the looming deportations, the original, uncensored passage reads:
There is only one comparison that can provide a faithful image of our life in those terrible moments: lice. If in some sordid apartment there is a nest of these insects and one starts to sprinkle them with a poisonous powder, the lice disperse in all directions and spin about faster and faster while looking for a way of escape. But whether because of the stupefied nakedness of the attack or the dizziness caused by the poison, they turn in a circle instead of crawling straight ahead to escape beyond the range of the poison. They return to the same paths, which are incapable of leading them outside the range of the deadly poison — and die. Just like this, we also turned about from morning to night, helpless, stupefied, falling from one round-up to the next, knocking against the walls and returning to the depth of the ghetto. All of us were searching for escape from death, which was unavoidable.Footnote 104
Here The Death of a City comes close to echoing Nazi propaganda, which routinely described Jews as parasites and transmitters of disease; the pretext for creating and sealing the Warsaw Ghetto was to contain a typhus outbreak, a disease spread by lice. The passage also draws a parallel between the Germans’ murdering of the Jews and an apartment tenant eradicating pests: the implication of the metaphor is that the ‘Final Solution’ was a salubrious cleaning of the house. The censor ultimately removed these passages, likely because of their parallels to Nazi propaganda: in the censored version, the ghetto resembles a ‘threatened anthill’ (and thereby a productive home), which is being attacked by the ‘brutal heel of an unthinking oaf’, a more acceptable image for the Germans. The censor did allow the metaphor of Jews as insects — albeit now ants instead of lice — to remain in the final copy.Footnote 105
What the reader makes of these passages depends on whether one imagines them to have been authored by a Jewish musician or by a non-Jewish music critic. If one were to assume that Szpilman exercised something like full creative control over the text of the memoirs, then these passages might be read as a Jewish author being critical of Jewish society under the impossible conditions of Nazi rule. Similar critiques were not uncommon. As Jules Riegel observes, some intellectuals in the Warsaw Ghetto harshly reviewed musical performances within it, since they approached these through pre-war ideas about moral improvement and musical quality.Footnote 106 After the Holocaust, the ghetto cafés were criticized by Jewish commentators for a variety of reasons, including their reliance on ghetto elites and their supposed cultivation of indifference among Jewish patrons.Footnote 107 Sztuka in particular received much negative attention in the first years after the war, when its surviving owners and artists were called to testify in the trials of Wiera Gran, one of its star performers, who had been accused of collaborating with the Nazis.Footnote 108 In this reading, the critiques of the cafés (and of the ghetto more broadly) in The Death of a City would be part of an early post-Holocaust moment of retrospective reassessment of Jewish performance culture in the ghetto. That the text advances these critiques through antisemitic metaphors could be interpreted as a coincidence, suggesting little more than that antisemitic discourse was prevalent in Poland in the 1940s.
The difficulty with this interpretation is that it cannot be assumed that Szpilman had full creative control over the text of The Death of a City, since Waldorff claims to have written it. Unlike with recorded testimony, where the interplay of difference is preserved in real time, we cannot splinter The Death of a City into Szpilman’s and Waldorff’s voices. What is nonetheless noteworthy is that the unsympathetic insinuations about Jews appear at moments when facts are given a metaphorical veneer in the text, when the recounting of events is recruited into broader interpretations about Jewish life in the ghetto: to assert that the Jews of the ghetto ran about terrified of deportations is one thing; to describe them as pests in need of eradication is a very different one. The antisemitic subtexts in The Death of a City unfold in the domain where Waldorff claimed to have exercised a decisive authorial role: when making Szpilman’s memories into a ‘literary whole’.
There thus arises a second interpretative possibility. In this reading, The Death of a City contains a spectral trace of Waldorff’s pre-war views, which inflect the portrayal of Jewish audiences and publics even as the book primarily celebrates the story of one Jewish musician. In favour of this interpretation is the fact that the passages I have discussed resemble the key tropes of Waldorff’s pre-war antisemitic writings. The sections that question Jewish listening and attentiveness to music echo his claims in the 1930s that Jewish artists were incapable of appreciating ‘true’ art but only engaged with its derivative forms. The theme of the baleful influence of Jewish commercial activity on art likewise spans from Waldorff’s pre-war writings into The Death of a City: it was purported Jewish wealth that allowed Jews to control Polish artistic culture, he had asserted before the war. Notably, when the memoirs describe Jews and Jewish publics, the theme of money is never far from the surface of the text, whether we think of the Jew in the ‘kaftan and yarmulka’ who defends Warsaw to save his business, the Jewish American bankers who refuse to come to the aid of their Varsovian brethren, or the gold coins that halt Szpilman’s performance. Perhaps most arrestingly, the dehumanizing disdain for Jews that characterizes Waldorff’s pre-war polemics grows even more intense in The Death of a City, when the text compares Jews terrified of annihilation to lice.
At this juncture, the reader may well wonder which of these interpretations I endorse. Throughout this essay, I have asked that we resist being pulled into this story. Here too, I do not believe it is possible to decide that one or the other of these interpretations is correct. More important is that both readings restore the memoirs to the ecology of witnessing among the Polish-speaking intelligentsia of 1946, even as they highlight different aspects of this early post-war context. Both highlight realities of life in an early post-Holocaust moment, including the prevalence of Jewish critiques of the ghetto’s cultural life and the persistence of antisemitism in post-war Poland. In any case, the feasibility of both ought to lead scholars to be cautious about relying on the memoirs when studying music in the Warsaw Ghetto. To treat the text as an accurate account of audience behaviour and listening practices is to risk mistaking an antisemite’s imagination of Jewish publics for a survivor’s accounting thereof. At the same time, I am not suggesting that this remarkable book be ignored, as if it had been tainted by Waldorff’s pen. Rather the opposite: it is a foundational source for understanding the metaphors, ideas, and discourses through which memory of music in the Warsaw Ghetto began to be constructed in the pivotal yet volatile years following World War II.
A further step in treating the memoirs ecologically — one beyond the scope of this article — would be to place the book in dialogue with other first-person accounts of music in the Warsaw Ghetto. All of these lack the visibility of Szpilman’s story, and many of them contradict the quick, generally negative portrayal of ghetto audiences found in Szpilman’s memoirs. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who was a music critic in the Warsaw Ghetto, highlighted the attentiveness of audiences and the ‘counter-world’ that classical music performances provided for those in ghetto.Footnote 109 Szpilman’s performance partners at Sztuka, including Gran and the surviving staff of the café, also painted a complicated picture of the venue, highlighting both their reliance on elite listeners and the community-forming nature of their performances.Footnote 110 Important work on music criticism by Leociak, Engelking, and Riegel likewise reveals the deep attentiveness to musical performance among audiences in the ghetto.Footnote 111 Or consider Jonas Turkow, an actor and theatrical impresario who organized thousands of performances in ghetto courtyards and soup kitchens: through this work, ‘audiences had finally found a place where they could gather in a warm, cultured atmosphere and listen to artistic performances of recitations, songs, and music’, he asserted.Footnote 112 Those who teach and study music in the Warsaw Ghetto ought to ensure that the Waldorff–Szpilman account does not receive undue weight in historical narratives because it has acquired the most renown in the present.
Conclusion: Rewriting the Ghetto Cafés
In the years following the publication of The Death of a City, Szpilman embarked on a musical career that was nothing short of meteoric.Footnote 113 From 1945 until 1963, he led the popular (‘entertainment’) music section of Polish Radio, which was perhaps the most influential post in popular music in Poland. Concurrently he composed hundreds of songs that formed a core part of the Polish estrada repertoire, many of which are still hummed by Poles today.Footnote 114 In 1961 he founded the Sopot International Song Festival, which was modelled on the music competitions growing in popularity elsewhere in Europe.Footnote 115 When in 1963 he was forced out of the radio station, he shifted his focus to performing classical repertoire with the Warsaw Quintet, which toured to dozens of countries into the 1980s.Footnote 116 The Death of a City did not disappear during his long and productive career, but it was rarely the focus of his public activities.Footnote 117 His wife, Halina, recalled that after its publication, he did not wish to revisit his wartime experiences.Footnote 118 Their son, Andrzej, has described how he only discovered the memoirs by accident — and with them his own Jewish past.Footnote 119 Even so, in 1963 Szpilman sent an excerpt of the book, which had been translated into English, to Nela Rubinstein (wife of the famed virtuoso Artur) in the hope that it might find an English-language publisher, suggesting that the memoirs were still of great importance to him.Footnote 120
During the last years of his life, Szpilman displayed an ambivalence, at least in public, about the growing fame of his wartime story and the possibility that the worst years of his life would define his legacy. Asked in 1996 why The Death of a City had not been republished, he responded that he ‘doubted whether those events from over fifty years ago would be of interest to the present-day generation’.Footnote 121 Even as growing international attention was directed to his story, he remained reluctant to revisit that past. In an interview with his son and a German journalist that was conducted when the memoirs were reissued, he demanded of his son, ‘Why do we have to talk about [the Warsaw Ghetto]? Is it that important?’ He claimed not to have reread his memoirs either: ‘I don’t want to experience that hell again! You cannot force me to do so! I want to forget that I survived that.’Footnote 122 Indeed, it was Andrzej who led the efforts to see the memoirs republished.Footnote 123 Although Władysław Szpilman met with Polanski and gave him permission to use (and alter) his story, he also told an interviewer shortly before his death in 2000 that the possibility of a film based on his memoirs left him ‘embarrassed that now people see me as a film character and not as a pianist’.Footnote 124
The release of The Pianist in 2002 added another layer of quasi-autobiographical co-authorship to the Szpilman story. Many scholars have speculated about the relation between the film and Polanski’s own childhood, spent in the Cracow Ghetto.Footnote 125 Polanski for his part distanced himself from an autobiographical interpretation of the film, while also claiming that details in it were drawn from his memories of the ghetto.Footnote 126 He and the screenwriter Ronald Harwood tried to immerse themselves in the world of the Warsaw Ghetto; in preparation for creating the film, they spent three days in Warsaw reviewing archival footage and images of it.Footnote 127 Perhaps most saliently, Polanski found the seemingly distanced, unemotional nature of the Szpilman memoirs appealing, a quality that he and Harwood sought to capture in the film.Footnote 128 The ‘minimalism’ of the memoirs offered an acceptable model for approaching the terror of the Holocaust and an indirect way of revisiting his own memories of the Cracow Ghetto, which he did not wish to film:
You have to be sober, humble, and just tell the story as it was. This I could do, because I was one of the witnesses of the horror. I remember. I know. […] Why should I decorate it? Why should I [sneeringly] embellish?Footnote 129
Although a full discussion of the adaptation is outside the scope of this article, it suffices to observe that the film’s emphasis on the power of music is largely absent from the source material. The framing of the film around musical continuity, through the performance of the Chopin C♯-minor Nocturne that bookends the film, does not appear in the memoirs, and seems instead to derive from Wolf Biermann’s afterword to the reissued edition from the late 1990s.Footnote 130 Likewise, the description that would become the basis for Szpilman’s imagined performances while in hiding is cast in utilitarian, rather than transcendental, terms in the book: ‘This mental refresher course turned out to have been useful: when I went back to work I still knew my repertoire and had almost all of it in my head, as if I had been practising all through the war.’Footnote 131 So too for the climactic concert for the German officer: the memoirs focus on a more feasible performance (of Chopin’s C-minor Nocturne instead of the G-minor Ballade) and undercut any grand narratives of the performance’s meaning: ‘When I had finished, the silence of the city seemed by contrast even more deafening and ghastly than before. From some distant street a cat’s meow, a shot below in front of the building — a hoarse German cry.’Footnote 132
These changes aside, Polanski and Harwood’s commitment to an aesthetics of minimalist testimony led them to transpose key components of the original memoirs into the film. In this regard, its café scene is a cultural palimpsest in which new ideas of musical transcendence are superimposed over older ones about the unmusical nature of the Jewish public in the ghetto. It is based on The Death of a City’s portrayal of the ghetto café Nowoczesna (Sztuka, where Szpilman found a more amenable audience, does not appear). The musical choices in the film heighten the distance between Szpilman and his audiences, amplifying the negative portrayal of the café found in the memoirs. At the beginning of the scene, he plays Henryk Wars’s ‘Umówiłem się z nią na dziewiątą’ [‘I Have a Date with her at Nine’], a popular song of the pre-war era, but soon the music transforms into a quotation from the solo line of Chopin’s E-minor Piano Concerto.Footnote 133 Almost no one is listening to the pianist perform, and Szpilman is then interrupted by the waiter, who asks him to stop playing so that the patrons can test the purity of the gold coins (the lines about the Jewish American bankers are given to Szpilman’s father in a later scene). Within the symbolic world of the film, this quotation is significant, because later, recollections of Chopin (namely, of the Grand Polonaise Brillante and the G-minor Ballade) provide Szpilman with the fortitude needed to endure. In the café, he is also remembering and replaying the music of Chopin, much as he will later in hiding. In contrast to subsequent scenes that valorize Chopin, his music is here trapped in the mundanity of background listening. The scene suggests that the Jewish patrons in the café are unable to access the power this music holds, even when it is directly played for them.
Throughout this article, I have considered how the portrayal of Szpilman’s experiences in such moments has been shaped by a broader ecology of memory production during the post-Holocaust era. The core idea of this scene, that Jewish café audiences were unable or unwilling to truly listen, had a long, multivalent history. One layer of this portrayal dates to the time of the ghetto itself, when observers were concerned about the heterogenous nature of the cafés and the wealth of their patrons. Other layers derived from the early post-war era, when the extensive cultural life of the ghetto was re-evaluated with retrospective knowledge about the annihilation of the Jewish community. Other layers concern the friendship and collaboration that were at the centre of the book’s genesis and the possibility that the dismissal of Jewish listening and the emphasis on commercialism were at least in part products of Waldorff’s disdain for Jewish creativity. Among the most recent layers are the updating of this scene to fit late twentieth-century ideas about ‘Holocaust music’ as a genre of transcendence and survival. In these few moments of Szpilman’s performance, these layers flow together: the dichotomy that runs throughout The Death of a City, between the sympathetic portrayal of an individual Jewish artist and the often unsympathetic portrayal of Jewish publics, re-emerges, sharpened by the greater power that music occupies in the film in comparison to the book. Will audiences view this and similar moments in The Pianist differently, knowing about their sources and their transmission across several decades? This is, of course, not for me to decide. What is beyond doubt is that to forget the origins and serial reworkings of such representations is to diminish the power that musical performances in the Warsaw Ghetto have exerted on the imaginations of musicians, writers, and filmmakers ever since the ghetto was created.
APPENDIX: VERSIONS OF THE DEATH OF A CITY
1946: Śmierć miasta: Pamiętniki Władysława Szpilmana, 1939–1945 [The Death of a City: The Memoirs of Władysław Szpilman, 1939–1945]. Includes a foreword by Jerzy Waldorff in which he claims to have composed the prose of the memoirs.
1998: Das wunderbare Überleben: Warschauer Erinnerungen, 1939–1945 [The Miraculous Survival: Warsaw Memoirs, 1939–1945]. Translated from the Polish by Karin Wolff, one of the most accomplished translators of Polish literature into German. In this reissued edition, Waldorff’s 1946 preface and claims to authorship have been removed. A new preface by Andrzej Szpilman has been added, as has an epilogue by German singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann and an extract from the diary of Wilm Hosenfeld.
1999: The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man’s Survival in Warsaw, 1939–1945. Translated from the German by Anthea Bell. All mentions of Waldorff have been removed.
2000: Ronald Harwood begins work on the screenplay for Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, which is based on the English text of the memoirs.
2001: Pianista: Warszawskie wspomnienia, 1939–1945 [The Pianist: Warsaw Memoirs, 1939–1945]. Reissued Polish-language edition that is, however, not a reprint of Śmierć miasta (1946). Numerous changes to the language of the text have been made.
2002: The film The Pianist, directed by Roman Polanski, is released. It wins three Oscars, for best director, best actor, and best adapted screenplay.
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