As a visual marker or literary metaphor, rubble has become a common shorthand for a general sense of the devastation left everywhere in Germany at the end of the Second World War. While rubble was primarily a way of categorizing genres of film and literature until now, Abby Anderton argues that we should hear rubble music as a similar genre. Rubble in this book is not something to be swept aside but rather picked through and carefully examined as a means to discover how music “shaped a narrative of postwar national suffering” (4) and characterized the fragmented and messy musical world of Berlin. Anderton employs the concept of rubble to examine how occupying power and Berliners worked together, and at cross-purposes, to rebuild the institutional musical culture of the city and to use music as a way to process the shock of defeat.

In the first of five chapters, which focus on the postwar zones of occupation, Anderton chronicles the chaotic process of denazification created by all the occupying powers. As each power discovered in its own way, “sorting” working musicians according to their complicity with the previous regime was tricky. The Soviets relied on the local population to denounce other Berliners, a superficial but quick practice. A major Soviet interest was in German-Russian cultural collaboration, and their Cultural League for the Democratic Renewal of Germany created places for German intellectuals to mingle with Soviet cultural officers, with extra ration coupons as a lure (20). The Americans, by contrast, relied on questionnaires to locate politically unreliable individuals while struggling to “promote democracy through censorship and government control” (23). British and French efforts proved equally difficult. This lack of a coordinated system between the occupying powers meant that musicians banned in one sector could work in another. Moreover, all occupying powers quickly realized that no musical ensemble could function without including compromised players. Denazifying music was even harder; as Anderton points out, there had hardly been a monolithic understanding of a Nazi canon during the Third Reich, making the project of undoing such a construct an impossibility.

The next three chapters deal with the central institutional elements of Berlin's musical life: the Berlin Philharmonic, under the jurisdiction of the Americans; the Staatsoper and Städtische Oper, controlled by the Soviets and the British, respectively; and radio. In the Philharmonic, the United States controlled an orchestra with a formidable and well-deserved international reputation, but also one that had been most favored by the National Socialist regime. Anderton showcases the difficulties of reconstituting the orchestra and its repertoire. One problem was finding enough “ordinary laborers” (48), as the rank-and-file players were classified by the Americans. More complex was finding a reliable conductor; the exigencies of top-notch music making trumped the larger imperative of denazification. Anderton's writing is at its best here with sharp depictions of individual actors who were in the thick of things. Among those who stand out in this narrative are three conductors: Leo Borchard, who might have been the perfect leader for the Philharmonic had the Americans not accidentally shot him; Rudolph Dunbar, the African American conductor and journalist who led the Philharmonic in a concert featuring their first (and only) performance of William Grant Still's Afro-American Symphony in 1945; and John Bitter, the US military supervisor of the orchestra, who took his chance to conduct the ensemble thirty times.

After a succession of other conductors, the orchestra eventually was led again by the semi-rehabilitated Wilhelm Furtwängler, who had conducted the orchestra from 1922 until the last months of the war. In 1956, Herbert von Karajan, a two-time joiner of the Nazi Party, became principal conductor, a position he held until 1989.

The Staatsoper and Städische Oper were both faced with the destruction of their performance spaces, the dispersion of their sets and costumes, and complications about the political affiliations of their personnel. Both establishments took the opportunity to use the ideas of rubble, destruction, and suffering in their staging and choice of repertoire. For example, both houses staged Beethoven's opera Fidelio in this period, an opera that celebrates a woman's rescue of her husband. The Staatsoper also staged Christoph Willibald Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice, in which the hero (albeit sung by a woman) is unable to protect his wife from the unwanted attentions of Hades. Anderton links these repertory choices and the more prominent position of women within the two houses to the gendered nature of violence experienced by many Berlin women at the hands of the Soviet army. The linkage resonates with other cultural genres; at least two films that dealt with similar themes were shown in all sectors in the same years. Also persuasive is the suggestion that the high popularity of Madame Butterfly and the high rate of suicide in Berlin both spoke to local levels of suffering, but the underpinning evidence tying these elements together is, from the standpoint of a historian, a tad flimsy.

The repertoire of each opera house was designed to appeal both to locals and the Allies in their particular occupation zones, thus Peter Grimes was performed in the western Städtische Oper and Eugene Onegin in the eastern Staatsoper. Anderton's larger point regarding the repertoire choices again shows the tremendous difficulty in creating a new sort of postwar and denazified soundscape in Berlin. Beethoven and Wagner, staples of the concert and opera stages during the Third Reich, were never absent in the post-1945 period. Each composer's works could, as Anderton points out, help German audiences process their immediate emotional situation given the correct staging.

It is in the discussion of radio that the coming contours of the Cold War are most clearly delineated. Both the American and the Soviet radio concerns commissioned new works from German composers as well as filling their playlists with more traditional parts of the canon. This chapter also discusses how live and filmed concerts used ruined buildings, including synagogues, for their performance spaces. These “ruin concerts” (123), Anderton argues, offered an opportunity for non-Jewish Germans to explore their own suffering even as those performances in Jewish spaces could offer an opportunity to celebrate survival.

The final chapter again takes on the issue of continuity in Berlin's musical life by looking at the composition of new Lieder. Anderton uses compositions by Eberhard Schmidt, Max Butting, Paul Höffer, and Heinz Tiessen to show how the experience of the destruction of Berlin was embedded in “expressions of German victimhood” (131). The songs reference both the romantic Lied—the sine qua non of nineteenth-century German art music—and the cabaret song, and, in Anderton's view, created a new ruin music that celebrated elements of the German musical past predating the Nazis while being embedded squarely in the reality of the destruction and suffering the Nazis had caused.

Clearing and sorting rubble is a messy business. Anderton takes advantage of all opportunities this central operating metaphor offers, but the book also falls prey to some pitfalls. Although it may seem unavoidable in a book this brief, where the focus is on the fragmentary, there is no real resolution, and the conclusions sometimes feel insufficiently supported or developed. The argument that the unresolved problems of denazification and piecemeal reconstruction of cultural institutions helped to “build cultural fault lines” (17) that hardened in the process of the Cold War does not follow easily from the evidence offered. The problem of continuity or discontinuity with respect to 1945 and German music would have been strengthened by some reference to the work that Celia Applegate has done on the larger question of how music and Germanness fit together. Anderton has been meticulous in differentiating between the suffering of Jews and non-Jews in Berlin, but the way the scholarship on non-Jewish German suffering links with rubble music, although compelling, feels under-supported. Despite these flaws, Rubble Music successfully makes the case that Berlin's Trümmer and trauma, and indeed any history of the first years after the Nazi defeat, must include music.