The Organ and Its Music in German-Jewish Culture examines the powerful presence of the organ in synagogue music and in the general musical life of German-speaking Jewish communities in the 19th and 20th centuries. It explores the development of a new organ music repertoire as a paradigm for the changing identity of modern Jewry.
The first volume of its kind, Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, and Postwar German Culture draws together three significant areas of inquiry: Jewish music, German culture, and the legacy of the Holocaust. Jewish music - a highly debated topic - encompasses a multiplicity of musics and cultures, reflecting an inherent and evolving hybridity and transnationalism. German culture refers to an equally diverse concept that, in this volume, includes the various cultures of prewar Germany, occupied Germany, the divided and reunified Germany, and even "German (Jewish) memory," which is not necessarily physically bound to Germany. In the context of these perspectives, the volume makes powerful arguments on about the impact of the Holocaust and its aftermath in changing contexts of musical performance and composition. In doing so, the essays in Dislocated Memories cover a wide spectrum of topics from the immediate postwar period with music in the Displaced Persons camps to the later twentieth century with compositions conceived in response to the Holocaust and the klezmer revival at the turn of this century. Dislocated Memories builds on a wide range of recent and critical scholarship in Cold War studies, cultural history, German studies, Holocaust studies, Jewish studies, and memory studies. What binds these distinct fields tightly together are the contributors' specific theoretical inquiries that reflect separate yet interrelated themes such as displacement and memory. While these concepts link the multi-faceted essays on a micro-level, they are also largely connected in their conceptual query by focus, on the macro-level, on the presence and the absence of Jewish music in Germany after 1945. Filled with original research by scholars at the forefront of music, history, and Jewish studies, Dislocated Memories will prove an essential text for scholars and students alike.
This book explores and reveals the intricacies of Jewish heritage in contemporary Germany, the role it plays as a "moral heritage" in the symbolic representation of Jews and Judaism in the national landscape, and its relevance for the cultural sustainability of local Jewish communities. The practice of synagogue music in the past and present is a central case study in the discussions. This ethnographic study examines how Jewish liturgical music as the cultural heritage of minorities has been constructed, treated, discussed, appropriated, and passed on to different actors in different forms and for different purposes over time. It also examines the resulting moral and ethical questions and power imbalances. The author discusses how both Jewish and non-Jewish stakeholders utilize the music of 19th- and early 20th-century Reform Judaism and the Minhag Ashkenaz for a symbolic reconstruction of German Jewry. Furthermore, they repatriate it in local Jewish communities today. This is usually done for individual, sometimes commercial, rather than religious reasons. The Jewish-musical cultural heritage process is characterized by moral imperatives and complex negotiations about power and representation. It reveals problematic aspects of German-Jewish relations, cross-generational rifts, and denominational differences between the Jewish communities in post-war Germany.
How was the re-emerging Jewish religious practice after 1945 shaped by traditions before the Shoah? To what extent was it influenced by new inspirations through migration and new cultural contacts? By analysing objects like prayer books, musical instruments, Torah scrolls, audio documents and prayer rooms, this volume shows how the post-war communities created new Jewish musical, architectural and artistic forms while abiding by the tradition. This peer-reviewed volume presents contributions to the conference „Jewish communities in Germany in Transition", held in July 2021, as well as the results of a related research project carried out by two university institutions and two museums: the Bet Tfila – Research Unit for Jewish Architecture (Technische Universität Braunschweig), the European Center for Jewish Music (Hanover University for Music, Drama and Media), the Braunschweigisches Landesmuseum, and the Jewish Museum Augsburg Swabia. For the first time, post war synagogues in Germany and their objects were researched on a broad and interdisciplinary basis – regarding history of architecture, art history of their furniture and ritual objects as well as liturgy and musicology. The project was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) during the years 2018 to 2021 in its funding line „The Language of Objects".
Bohlman investigates several aspects of Jewish music within the context of the period beginning with the emancipation of German-Jewish culture during the eighteenth century and culminating in the destruction of that same culture under the Nazis.
Focused on 'The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide', Remembering for the Future brings together the work of nearly 200 scholars from more than 30 countries and features cutting-edge scholarship across a range of disciplines, amounting to the most extensive and powerful reassessment of the Holocaust ever undertaken. In addition to its international scope, the project emphasizes that varied disciplinary perspectives are needed to analyze and to check the genocidal forces that have made the Twentieth century so deadly. Historians and ethicists, psychologists and literary scholars, political scientists and theologians, sociologists and philosophers - all of these, and more, bring their expertise to bear on the Holocaust and genocide. Their contributions show the new discoveries that are being made and the distinctive approaches that are being developed in the study of genocide, focusing both on archival and oral evidence, and on the religious and cultural representation of the Holocaust.
What can music say about group specifics, especially the specifics of ethnic minorities? In this volume, the focus is on one distinctive aspect of minority culture – collective memory. This is not an imprint of the past: it arises as an image, created from the motives of the past, but shaped by the needs and interests of the present, and various actors participate in its creation. If the medium of remembrance is music – a powerful medium which, thanks to its polysemantic character, makes it possible to connect the individual and the collective, to represent communities, and to rewrite group boundaries – who are the actors and what images do they create? The book Music – Memory – Minorities: Between Archive and Activism focuses on the musical remembrance of Roma and Jews. In addition to exploring individual cases, the text presents and follows a remarkable arc that allows us to observe the role of music in the ethno-emancipatory process of minorities.
Zionism, the German Empire, and Africa explores the impact on the self-perception and culture of early Zionism of contemporary constructions of racial difference and of the experience of colonialism in imperial Germany. More specifically, interrogating in a comparative analysis material ranging from mainstream satirical magazines and cartoons to literary, aesthetic, and journalistic texts, advertisements, postcards and photographs, monuments and campaign medals, ethnographic exhibitions and publications, popular entertainment, political speeches, and parliamentary reports, the book situates the short-lived but influential Zionist satirical magazine Schlemiel (1903–07) in an extensive network of nodal clusters of varying and shifting significance and with differently developed strains of cohesion or juncture that roughly encompasses the three decades from 1890 to 1920.
