ABSTRACT
This chapter complicates conventional salvific understandings of the musical experience as situated within the Holocaust and illuminates the weaponization of music to produce sonic experiences that, depending on intention and perception, traveled the emotional gamut between uplift and shame, elevation and trauma. Contradicting conventional beliefs that regard music-making as inspiring hope and resistance, deploying music as an instrument of violence during the Holocaust served as a potent means of instilling fear, shame, degradation, and mental and physical torture. To understand the musical experience as violent and hence, traumatic, the author analyzes primary sources that include the memoirs and letters of three individuals who represent three geographic locations within the Holocaust: (a) Władysław Szpilman (survivor), the Warsaw Ghetto; (b) Primo Levi (survivor), Auschwitz-Birkenau; and (c) Jaap Vleeschhouwer, executed near Amersfoort, the Netherlands. Conclusions indicate that music and musical experiences in the Holocaust and, by extension, other genocides are more nuanced, more discordant, and more traumatic than typically understood.
