Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw seemed designed to irritate every exposed nerve in postwar Europe. A twelve-tone piece in three languages about the Holocaust, it was written for an American audience by a Jewish composer whose oeuvre had been the Nazis’ prime exemplar of entartete (degenerate) music. Both admired and reviled as a pioneer of dodecaphony, Schoenberg had immigrated to the United States and become an American citizen. At approximately seven minutes, A Survivor is too short to occupy half of a concert, yet it is too fraught to easily share the bill with anything else. A c ... More

Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw seemed designed to irritate every exposed nerve in postwar Europe. A twelve-tone piece in three languages about the Holocaust, it was written for an American audience by a Jewish composer whose oeuvre had been the Nazis’ prime exemplar of entartete (degenerate) music. Both admired and reviled as a pioneer of dodecaphony, Schoenberg had immigrated to the United States and become an American citizen. At approximately seven minutes, A Survivor is too short to occupy half of a concert, yet it is too fraught to easily share the bill with anything else. A cultural history of postwar Europe on both sides of the Cold War divide comes into focus when viewed through the lens of A Survivor. This book investigates the meanings attached to the work as it circulated through Europe between 1948 and 1968 in a kind of symbolic musical remigration, focusing on six case studies: West Germany, Austria, Norway, East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The details are specific to each, but common themes emerge in anxieties about musical modernism, Holocaust memory and culpability, the coexistence of Jews and former Nazis, anti-Semitism, dislocation, and the presence of occupying forces.