Grasping at Hours of Freedom: Musical Life in the Terezin Concentration Camp
This study focuses on the primary documents from the Terezin concentration camp that discuss the musical and cultural life that occurred there between 1941 and 1945. The documents discussed include music critiques and an essay by composer Viktor Ullmann, an essay by composer Gideon Klein, diaries of Philipp Manes, Willy Mahler, Pavel Weiner, Gonda Redlich, and Ruth Brösslerová, poems and magazine articles by children in Terezin, and a letter by inmate Otto Brod.Founded by Emperor Joseph II as a fortress in 1780 and later turned into a military garrison town, Terezin became a concentration camp in 1940 after Nazi officials removed its Aryan residents. Designed as a holding camp to transport Jews from the Czech lands and prominent Jews from the Third Reich to the death camps in Poland, Terezin’s inmate population included musicians, actors, academics, and visual artists. Despite the horrors surrounding them, the inmates of Terezin created a cultural life that rivaled any major European city during World War II. Academic lectures, plays, operas, cabarets, and recitals all contributed to an active and varied cultural society within the camp. The majority of research on Terezin’s musical life up to this point has focused on specific composers (such as Viktor Ullmann and Gideon Klein) or on musical compositions written about Terezin within the last twenty to thirty years. Published material on Terezin includes history texts and survivor memoirs, but little in-depth scholarly analysis has been conducted on Terezin’s musical life. While survivor memoirs from after the war provide valuable information, certain issues arise with these materials; some of the memoirs written long after the war contain incorrect information and others interpret occurrences during the war in light of current information. Examining these documents will give the musicological and historical fields a better understanding of Terezin’s musical life and how it affected the lives of the inmates. It will also shed light on an aspect of music in the Third Reich that has been severely neglected.
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