There Will Be Music Despite Everything
Steven E. Aschheim reviews Time’s Echo: The Second World War, The Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance by Jeremy Eichler
We may not always admit it, but judgment of a work is often influenced by extrinsic factors. Jeremy Eichler’s, Time’s Echo: The Second World War, The Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance is a brilliant and highly informative work, and I confess that, for me, it had a kind of rich, even enchanting, existential quality. This is perhaps because I read Time’s Echo at a particularly charged time and under rather special circumstances. This review, then, is inseparable from the experience of reading the book. Indulge me, then, as I relate the salient context which rendered Time’s Echo so powerfully resonant.
The digital age is gradually blunting, eroding, our sense of books. The very screen upon which you are reading the present review is overwhelming the page. The sheer physicality, the sensual pleasure, the texture and tactility of the cover and its pages is being (or already has been) lost. So, when I received Time’s Echo, I experienced an almost Proustian moment. The “feel,” the care taken in the process of production and editing, the exceptional quality of the print, the substantial thickness of the pages, felt uncannily similar to a work that had already excited me as far back as1980: Carl E. Schorske’s, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. Both, I discovered, are meticulously produced Knopf books. To be sure, Eichler’s cover is not embossed in a golden sheen, as was Schorske’s, with an illustration from Ver Sacrum by Gustav Klimt. This was emblematic of a volatile but hopeful, creative time. Given Eichler’s themes of composers and their musical compositions in a later darker world of total war, genocide and totalitarianism, his cover is suitably less rich. It consists of black and white reproductions of notes from Benjamin Britten’s Op.66 War Requiem and a 1940 photo of the Ruins of Coventry Cathedral, the destruction of which the composer had commemorated.
Clearly the pleasurable aesthetics of the book were not the only source of excitement. I read—or rather experienced—the book in both pre- and post-operative stages. Frequently in great pain, I found relief, to some degree, by medically prescribed light opioids. Perhaps this putatively “enchanting” element was a product of being “high,” of reading and listening to music in a state of heightened sensitivity. This is not to say that the insights and sweep of the book were not fascinating and original in themselves, but rather that I encountered them in a kind of sweetened, elevated frame of mind. But—much more gravely—that heightened sensitivity was also a function of reading a work on war, genocide and its remembrance at a time when my own country was (and continues to be) in the midst of a brutal and, in many senses, radically dislocating war.
In a kind of condition in which, as Yeats put it: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” the elisions, perplexities, pain and beauty described in Time’s Echo became more resonant. To be sure, the upheaval continues, and it is too early for Eichler’s main concern, creative cultural remembrance, to apply (although there are already sites of physical remembrance on the kibbutzim that, on October 7, 2023, were so savagely attacked. So too are the smashed houses of Gaza.) Without comparatively invoking Johnathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, the sounds we presently hear are not that of music—however atonal they may be—but rather fighter planes above heading for bombing raids.
So what is Time’s Echo about and wherein lies its magic? Let Eichler speak for himself:
“The role of music…as an ‘unconscious chronicle’ – as a witness to history and as a carrier of memory for a post-Holocaust world – is the subject of this book. It is a book of stories, of sounds, and of places. The principal dramatis personae are four towering twentieth-century composers: Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Benjamin Britten, and Dimitri Shostakovich. During the war years, they stood at four very different windows looking out into the same catastrophe. Each responded to the rupture through intensely charged memorials in sound…Among them are Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw, Strauss’s Metamorphosen, Shostakovich’s “Babi Yar” Symphony, and Britten’s War Requiem.”
The prelude to the book contains general reflections on the intricately layered cultural resonances of music, of music as culture’s memory, vital repositories in which the living past is able to be present. Given that the traumatic experiences of the twentieth century are the subject of this work, it is centered around Adorno’s assumption that the compositions in question—given their incorporation of horror and suffering, and the refusal of false consolation—possess a special authenticity, containing both “truth” and power. This is in addition to music’s overall unique capacity to bridge intellect and emotion, to express “deep yet untranslatable truths that lie beyond the province of language.” In these and other manifold ways, music, Eichler proposes, can pierce “history’s cold storage” and become time’s echo.
But it is not at the level of general or reception theory that the book is most illuminating. It is through the particular stories of people and places that the perplexities, creative imperatives, elisions and levels of remembrance come surprisingly alive. At its deepest level, Time’s Echo is about the painful but also potentially liberating interactions between culture and catastrophe.
Jeremy Eichler. Times Echo: The Second World War, The Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance. Knopf, 2024. pp. 400. $19 (paperback)
The book opens with a striking example of this: the history of Goethe’s legendary oak in the Ettersberg forest. When in 1937 a group of prisoners were sent to set up their own prison in that forest (just six miles from Weimar, the very embodiment of European humanism), the guards ordered that—what they determined to be— Goethe’s mythic oak not be felled. As an accompanying photo in Eichler’s text demonstrates, the anointed tree was left standing as the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp rose around it on all sides. Upon the American bombing of the camp on August 24, 1944, amidst the great destruction, the oak tree was scorched. One long-time communist prisoner, Bruno Alpitz, smuggled a block of the tree’s heartwood. From that (also illustrated) he carved a death mask, entitled “The Last Face,” which commemorates the death of Buchenwald’s inmates and which Eichler dubs as among the earliest memorials to World War II and the Shoah. “The grief that lines this last face,” Eichler rather speculatively posits, was “also perhaps for what the oak represented—that is, the grand European promise of a high culture of poetry, music, and literature, and the very idea of a humanism that might one day unite all people as equals.”
Eichler’s other monuments and stories of remembrance are all musical. Some of them contain deliciously ironic, even semi-comic, elements. Few are likely to know that the code name of the German carpet bombing of Coventry on November 14, 1940, was “Moonlight Sonata,” or that the first 1948 performance of Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw—perhaps the earliest high-modernist expression of post-war memorial music that daringly depicted the Holocaust in explicitly shocking terms—was performed in a gymnasium in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with a participating chorus of cowboys! But, of course, Eichler’s music of remembrance is of the most serious kind, each example integrating horror and suffering and rejecting false consolation into the marrow of its music. Yet the circumstances and places of each were strikingly different and Eichler carefully delineates these and the wider social context and dynamics of remembrance that they embodied. Only a bare-boned account of the book’s detailed, insightful accounts of the complex lives, places, connections and musical achievements of his chosen composers (the technical nature of which lie well beyond my own competence), will have to suffice here. Space too excludes the possibility of including a host of other accompanying colorful characters that inhabit the book’s pages.
Both Schoenberg and Strauss came from the German-speaking world, both wrote daring, experimental music (Eichler terms Strauss’s wide-encompassing works “Nietzschean”), yet their experiences, behavior and musical monuments of remembrance could not be more different. Schoenberg, born in 1874, the Jewish son of a shoe-shop owner, symbolized the dazzling emergence and apotheosis of a still breath-taking German-Jewish creativity, enabled by the release from the crippling restrictions of the ghetto and the liberating creed of Bildung. Here was a late enlightenment ideal in which emancipation was achieved through culture, independent of religion and nationality. Of course, many have questioned the reality of this emancipation and a co-constitutively created culture. But Eichler correctly rejects the thesis that from the outset the German-Jewish dialogue was doomed. Even though ultimately it did indeed culminate in outrageous shock and disaster, this back-shadowing view, he writes, “fails to honor the complexity, the lived experience, the dreams and the actual attainments achieved across the many decades of Jewish life in central Europe.”
Thus, the converted Jewish composer, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, was not only lionized but was credited through his revival of Bach with the very idea of a specifically German music. Awareness of his Jewish background did not prevent his funeral on November 7, 1847, from becoming a major national civic event. Like Mendelssohn, Schoenberg, through his revolutionary discovery of atonal music, also saw himself as emancipating a specifically German music of the future. At the time, he did this not as a Jew but as a somewhat militant German who had converted to Protestantism. But Schoenberg experienced the traumatic transition from an enabling symbiotic liberalism to the violent fascism of the 1930s. When this occurred, “supersaturated with electricity” (as one observer described the atmosphere around this powerful personality) the composer returned to a similarly militant Judaism and activist Zionism. Musically it was symbolized by his astonishing memorial piece “Survivor from Warsaw,” which ended with Jewish prisoners in an extermination camp intoning the traditional Jewish prayer, Shema Yisrael, prior to presumably being killed. His despair at the failed German-Jewish symbiosis was reflected in his uncompleted twelve-tone opera “Moses and Aron,” unfinished because, as Eichler points out, by the time of Schoenberg’s 1951 death, the notion of “a unified culture co-created by Germans and Jews, had by that point been negated by history.” (The charged March 1937 performance of Mendelsohn’s majestic oratorio, Elijah, in Berlin’s Neue Synagoge, possessed a similar somber resonance. The packed audience somehow already sensed that German Jewry had reached the end of its historic journey. As a kind of sad consolation, one musicologist proclaimed, “Felix Mendelssohn had finally come home.”)
If Schoenberg refused to compromise, to blur the edges, this could not be said of another German musical genius, Richard Strauss, who also had challenged what he regarded as the complacencies of a self-satisfied classical musical tradition. Yet, unlike Eichler’s other composers and their works of war and genocidal remembrance, Strauss’s Metamorphosen is an elegiac musical monument—“a spiraling work of mournful grandeur”—whose object is not clear. As he was composing this work in August 1944, Strauss noted a line from a Goethe poem: “No one will ever know himself.” His actions during the Third Reich did indeed reveal severe limits of self-knowledge, ethical standards and unresolved ambiguities.
Unlike many other artists, Strauss remained in Germany, accepted the Presidency of the Reich Music Chamber, replaced Bruno Walter at the Berlin Philharmonic and Toscanini in Bayreuth, and painfully witnessed the suffering of his Jewish daughter-in-law and grandchildren. In a spectacular schizophrenic, long-lasting moment of myopic self-interest, he maintained his relationship with his exiled, Bildung-intoxicated, politically naïve, Jewish librettist Stefan Zweig. The composer, Eichler writes, authorized “an ethically convenient if patently false separation between political maneuvering and the creation of true art. Strauss appeared to feel no compunction whatsoever about pursuing both simultaneously.” To be sure, he never officially joined the Party, opposed its policies of racial hatred and refused to sign decrees expelling Jewish member of the chamber of music. These ambiguities seem to be wrapped up in his Metamorphosen, which, while laden with emotions and lamenting the German cultural tradition, Eichler suggests, seemed intent on “sealing its secrets behind the music’s veil of wordless beauty.”
Time’s Echo is also a very personal book. With curious camera in hand, Eichler visited the places where his subjects lived and the sites of horror they sought to represent. In doing so, he illuminates the secrets, elisions and dynamics of memory in subtle and complicated ways. Take, as just one instance, his intriguing exposure of the hidden modes of commemoration in Strauss’s quiet, Bavarian hometown of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, host to the 1936 Nazi Winter Olympics. There are no national monuments exalting the Wehrmacht in Germany, but—with some effort— one can find in this town two impeccably maintained memorial shrines (in a chapel and a monastery), characterized—unlike the massive impersonal nature of national war monuments—by intimate, moving individual portraits of Garmisch’s killed sons. But here, Eichler notes, “the impulse towards a kind of imaginative empathy ran headlong into the colder light of historical fact.” Missing entirely was any mention of the by-now well documented role of the Wehrmacht in the genocide against the Jews; in that sense, Eichler observes, the war and the Holocaust cannot be fully separated. Whereas on the national level, Germany has rendered the Shoah central to its political and moral consciousness, the local level tells a different story. On November 10, 1938, the town’s Jewish residents were forced to assemble in the town center, spat on by a mob and expelled from the city. It was only in 2010 that a small, modest memorial consisting of 44 vertical bars, each one representing its expelled Jewish residents (8 did not survive) was erected. A Munich newspaper asked the town why it took 72 years to officially remember its 1938 atrocity. Moreover, while Strauss’s family home remains a cultivated stately villa, for many years the grave of Garmisch-Partenkirchen’s other famous musical son—the eminent German-Jewish conductor Hermann Levi—lay entirely neglected. (Previously the Nazis had vandalized his grave. This was rather ironic. Levi was a fervent Wagnerian, and in many ways a complicated and self-hating Jew.)
While Eichler’s other three composers lived lives that were upended by personal experiences of exile, Nazi Germany and Stalinist totalitarianism, Benjamin Britten had the luxury of consciously living a settled English life. This ethic of rootedness, Eichler argues, made even his most modernist music broadly accessible. Yet his pacifism and homosexuality also rendered him a kind of outsider, ethically attuned to suffering induced by human cruelty and exclusion. He never forgot the searing experience of the concert he performed together with Yehudi Menuhin on July 27, 1945, at the Belsen DP camp to an initially hollowed-out mass of humanity. Playing the symbolically potent combination of Bach and Mendelssohn, their magic had a transforming effect, likened, as Menuhin put it, to “the first food, the first friend, the first kind presence…[given] to a scorched human being.” Britten’s 1962 War Requiem was the great creative culmination of that lifelong sensitivity. Eichler points to the continuing dominance in British cultural memory not of World War 2 but of the 1914-1918 Great War. Employing the text of Wilfred Owen, that great humanist World War 1 poet, the composition follows the traditional Requiem form in honoring the dead, yet also “refuses to naturalize their deaths, to airbrush the brutality of war, or falsely separate institutional religion from the patriarchal power structures that made war possible.”
Eichler is perhaps a little unfairly critical of Britten’s employment of World War I as his memorial template, arguing that “it narrows the work’s ethical scope,” for it omits later twentieth century barbarism, the killings of masses of civilians, the bombings of Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Dealing directly with the Holocaust, with the novel state-sponsored phenomenon of genocide, he argues, would have strained the purity of Britten’s pacifism. Yet Eichler also reports that the Belsen episode left such a deep scar “that the experience had colored everything he had written subsequently,” including presumably, his later War Requiem.
Be that as it may, in 1962, the same year that the Requiem was performed, Dimitri Shostakovich (who had a very close bond with Britten) plunged directly into the heart of darkness. His explosive Symphony No.13 touched a raw Soviet nerve when he featured Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s subversively challenging poem on the tabooed subject of “Babi Yar.” In the by-now famous September 29-30, 1941, Kyiv massacre that took place in the Babi Yar Forest, 33,771 Jews—many of them children and babies—were savagely robbed, stripped, beaten and shot by Nazi killers and their Ukrainian accomplices. (Later, the same site was used to kill thousands of more Jews as well as Roma.) Shostakovich’s musical invocation of Jewish subjects and themes at a time of intensified antisemitism (both by the Nazis and later by Stalin) has been labeled as “a hidden language of resistance.” While his torments and winding fortunes have been well documented, less is known about the memorial elisions and site of Babi Yar itself. Given Ukrainian participation, the KGB struggled mightily to erase all memory of the massacre, even to the point in 1950 of erecting a dam to destroy the entire ravine. In a kind of Freudian return of the repressed, the dam collapsed, and hundreds of people were killed. When in 1961 Yevtushenko visited the entirely neglected, unmarked site, Eichler reports, he was both shocked and moved. The identificatory, anti-Soviet, poetic account of the forgotten massacre (and a catalog of Jewish suffering) that followed, received both an ecstatic and hostile response. Upon hearing his words rendered in Shostakovich’s own voice, the excited poet sensed that the music “seemed to tap into unarticulated melodies that ran beneath the surface of his own language.”
Let me conclude with a perhaps unexpected critical reservation. Eichler insists upon what he calls deep active listening, accompanied by a certain moralistic lesson. Attending to the past, the pain and trauma inscribed in these musical memorials, he remarks, “may sharpen our sensitivities, quicken our attention to suffering in the present, deepen our critical thinking about links between then and now.” The music of Beethoven, he writes, “should not sound the same before and after Auschwitz.” Even so-called “timeless masterpieces,” Eichler insists, cannot remain unscathed; they change their salience through time.
But ultimately this may be placing too heavy a preachy load on contemporary listeners. Indeed, he acknowledges that “music does flout the laws of time in mysterious and near miraculous ways.” It does, in other words, also carry its own transcendence. There is something almost snooty being told that without deep receptive listening “we have the disconnected sounds of a Schubert symphony streaming into an empty room. We have ‘classics for relaxing’.” Is this not a caricature of the inner dynamics and reception of the classical tradition? The music of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert is hardly “relaxing”; like modernist music it too is filled with pain and tragedy as well as ravishing beauty. Despite changing times and audiences, its transcendence has endured “in near miraculous ways.” My admiration for this book is almost boundless and the present critique should be considered more a matter of temperamental preference than intellectual substance. But, at a time of war, the breakdown of Enlightenment values, and the disintegration of the liberal order, I would answer Eichler’s question: “Should genocide really be the stuff of a night out at Carnegie Hall?’’, with only a very half-hearted affirmative. More than ever, we need the humanizing classical tradition. Consolation in dark times is not always a bad thing.
To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil...
We must admit there will be music despite everything. Jack Gilbert from "A Brief for the Defense"
Steven E. Aschheim is emeritus professor of history at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, where he taught cultural and intellectual history and held the Vigevani Chair of European Studies. The former director of the Franz Rosenzweig Research Center for German Literature and Cultural History, he is the author of numerous books, including Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (1982), The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990 (1992), Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises (1996), Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (2007), and Fragile Spaces: Forays into Jewish Memory, European History and Complex Identities (2018). His latest book is Zwischen Kultur und Katastrophe. Konfrontation, Krise und Kreativität als deutsch-jüdische Erfahrung (German Edition). Apart from academic journals, he has written for The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times, The Jewish Review of Books, and Haaretz.
