Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, and Postwar German Culture

Winner of the 2015 Ruth A. Solie Award from the American Musicological Society

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 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.

Dr. Tina Frühauf is teaching at Columbia University and is Content Acquisitions Director atépertoire International de Littérature Musicalein New York. She has received numerous fellowships and grants, most recently from the American Musicological Society, the Leo Baeck Institute, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. Dr. Frühauf has published articles inThe Musical Quarterly, Musica Judaica, andTDR: The Drama Review, and contributed numerous book chapters on the German Jewish music culture. She is the author ofThe Organ and Its Music in German-Jewish Cultureeditor ofAn Anthology of German-Jewish Organ Music. Dr. Frühauf is currently completing research for a monograph on music in the Jewish communities of Germany after 1945.

Dr. Lily E. Hirsch is an independent scholar. She was previously Assistant Professor of Music at Cleveland State University. She is author of the booksA Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany: Musical Politics and the Berlin Jewish Culture LeagueMusic in American Crime Prevention and Punishment. Her research has also appeared in Rethinking Schumann,Musical Quarterly,Philomusica, theJournal of Popular Music Studies,American Music, andPopular Music & Society.