How Can Music Be Torturous?: Music in Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camps

Abstract

Birkenau extermination camp, recounted an incident he witnessed in the infirmary there: The beating of the big drums and the cymbals reach us continuously and monotonously, but in this weft the musical phrases weave a pattern only intermittently, according to the caprices of the wind. The tunes are few, a dozen, and the same ones every day, morning and evening: marches and popular songs dear to every German. They lie engraven on our minds and will be the last thing in the Lager that we shall forget: they are the voice of the Lager, the perceptible expression of its geometrical madness, of the resolution of others to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more slowly afterwards. 1 Levi forcefully describes how music purposefully attacked prisoners' identities, certainties, selfconceptions, and sense of humanity. The fact that music played an important role in the Holocaust is neither a new discovery nor is it surprising. We know, based on survivors' memoirs, that music was part of daily life in National Socialist concentration and extermination camps. Survivors' accounts clearly convey how concentration camp prisoners could draw on music as a resource to aid in their survival, but music served equally as the most striking symbol of the inherent lunacy of the camp. Levi completes his description of the incident in the infirmary: "We all look at each other from our beds, because we all feel that this music is infernal." 2 Levi uses the term "infernal" deliberately and links the music in the camps to Dante's Inferno. By emphasizing the danger inherent in music that was-in this context-demonic and nightmarish, Levi attributes to music a rather specific impact. "Can music be considered as a form of torture?" was the question recently posed by musicologists in a special edition of the journal Torture. 3 The guest editors were two of the academics responsible for the creation of the Free Floater Research Group, Music, Conflict and the State, situated at the University of Göttingen. Over the course of six years, group members contributed to an investigation of the relationship between music and violence in contexts marked by uneven power dynamics. 4 Drawing on Article 5 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they defined torture as "cruel, inhuman and degrading I would like to thank

Music as symbolic action

“…In researching the uses of music in Nazi concentration camps, Brauer (2016) makes the following conclusions in respect of music and meaning, contact and context:Music itself has no inherent meaning or emotional content. This is what makes the contact zone necessary and productive.…”

“…Furthermore, the impact of music is not entirely determined by the individual listener; it is dependent on broader, shared social factors and is subject to change over time. (Brauer, 2016: 9)…”

“…So music is seen as a safe , trivial, and even hilarious means to conduct torture, at least from the distant homelands of the countries committing it, despite the fact that weaponised music has produced any amount of psychological and physical harm, up to and including deafness and death from exhaustion (cf. Hirsch, 2022: 172; Brauer, 2016).…”

The Neoliberal State and the Citizen in I, Daniel Blake

“…One of Loach's trademark techniques, the use of popular music, is noticeable here, as Daniel Blake is kept on hold while the call centre plays Vivaldi's -Spring‖ on a loop. A piece of music played on a loop to a distressed person qualifies as an example of -music sadism‖, which, as Brauer (2016) shows, was utilized in Nazi concentration and extermination camps. While such association may not be obvious to everyone, it is arguably intended as Loach's comment on the sadistic treatment citizens receive at the hands of the punitive social services.…”

“Tiny Little Screw Cap” (“Xiao Xiao Luosimao”): Children’s Songs from the Chinese Cultural Revolution

“…For this reason, a focus on the body and emotions, both of which are targeted by torture, can go a considerable way toward offering an explanation of the potentially torturous nature of music." 38 Brauer's emphasis on the body and emotions provides a mechanism for unpacking the distinction between the transformation of function and content in children's songs of the Cultural Revolution. As Brauer explains:…”