In 1947, Arnold Schoenberg, an Austrian-Jewish convert to Protestantism living in Los Angeles, composed a brief piece for orchestra, narrator, and choir based on eyewitness accounts of the Warsaw Ghetto. The English narration of the seven-minute commemoration described its horrors, with German interjections by a sergeant who wonders how many he will send to the gas chambers. The doomed Jews then sing the Sh'ma, the daily Jewish prayer that is also traditionally recited before death. Joy H. Calico fruitfully examines the performance and reception of Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw in order to shed light on postwar European cultural history. Because there is little information on the December 1948 European premiere on French radio, the book begins with the 1950 performance in the Federal Republic of Germany, and then looks chronologically at the national premieres in Austria, Norway, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The author emphasizes three threads: politics, the Jewish question, and musical modernism.

The Cold War provided the political backdrop in all the countries except Norway. In Austria and the Federal Republic, Schoenberg's naturalized American citizenship linked him to the American occupation forces, and critics of the American presence found ways to score political points through their assessment of Schoenberg's composition—such as the West German critic Hans Schnoor, who sparked a national debate with his depiction of A Survivor as a “hymn of hate” and his accusations that the Allied occupation forces were responsible for a “certain remigration” (34). In the Eastern bloc, the thaw following Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 “secret speech” permitted some cultural experimentation with modernist music. Music professionals were thus able to highlight the social engagement of Schoenberg's later American works. In the process, A Survivor acquired antifascist meanings that facilitated its appropriation in the post-Stalinist Soviet bloc.

The status of the Jewish question in each country influenced the reception of A Survivor and was a particularly sensitive issue in the perpetrator countries. Calico skillfully demonstrates the way in which the performance was understood to be a noncorporeal remigration of Schoenberg to Germany, and identifies a link between antisemitism and anti-Americanism in certain negative reactions to the music. A performance of A Survivor in Austria also marked Schoenberg's remigration, but Calico does not fully develop that line of analysis. Instead, she focuses on how the myth of Austria as the first victim of Nazi aggression was maintained. The Austrian performance used a translation of the lyrics that took liberties by suggesting that the sergeant was German and not Austrian, and by removing any mention of the gas chambers. Reviews of the performance did not discuss the identity of the perpetrators and only obliquely referred to the Jewish identity of the victims. As in West Germany, reception often depended on one's political leanings. Democratic parties in Austria were generally favorable to the performance, whereas Soviet occupation authorities and reactionary critics in the western part of occupied Austria were less enamored.

In fact, the Jewish content of A Survivor was virtually ignored in the communist countries. Just as the concentration camp experience had been “desemitized” in favor of a narrative of communist resistance and persecution, so, too, was Schoenberg's composition presented and received as a non-Jewish antifascist piece. The perpetrators were acknowledged as Germans in the GDR, but the victims remained obscure. The title, A Survivor from Warsaw, could be interpreted as a reference to a non-Jewish Polish survivor of the war or of the Warsaw Uprising, even though the Warsaw Uprising was downplayed in the East because Soviet inaction had permitted German destruction of the city. When the Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir premiered the work at the 1958 Warsaw Autumn music festival, the Poles interpreted it as a German act of atonement, and the conflation of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Warsaw Uprising facilitated its reception by making it relevant to all Poles and not just Jewish ones.

Responses to A Survivor also depended on the status of modernist music in a particular national setting. Chapters of the International Society for Contemporary Music, music festivals, and radio symphonies willing to perform new music all provided opportunities for its performance. Political context also influenced attitudes toward modernist music: whereas the Nazis had rejected modernist art as degenerate, communists favored socialist realism, decrying modernism as formalist. Calico correctly points out that antimodernist critiques in Germany and Austria frequently employed National Socialist rhetoric, and she challenges the assumption that the Federal Republic was a postwar haven for modernist music. In the GDR, Schoenberg and dodecaphony remained highly controversial. A Survivor received its East German premiere away from the political spotlight of Berlin in Leipzig, where modernist art music had a following. Polish interest in modernist music and the warm reception A Survivor received in Poland reflected enthusiasm about Khrushchev's thaw.

Calico's afterword offers an insightful discussion of Schoenberg's intent and the aesthetic challenges presented by A Survivor from Warsaw. Schoenberg wanted the piece to serve as a warning to all Jews never to forget what had happened, and, at the same time, as a witness to the miracle of the Jews who, in the face of death, suddenly recalled that they were Jews. Calico points out that the need for intelligibility led Schoenberg to a number of choices that drew on popular Romanticism. This familiar use of “musical monumentality” (166) is what made A Survivor acceptable to officials behind the Iron Curtain and what resonated with audiences, but it is also what exposed the work to charges of kitsch. A Survivor in Warsaw goes against the philosophical traditions that evil must not be made intelligible, that the Holocaust cannot be represented, and that there is nothing redemptive about the Shoah.

Calico has done an impressive job of reconstructing the wider national and transnational contexts for the transmission and reception of Schoenberg's final composition, and her work is based on a wide array of sources. Presenting multiple layers of analysis in a coherent, readable fashion, the book illuminates key aspects of postwar cultural history.