2023-07-18 10:00:00
“They are etched in our minds […] because they are the voice of Lager [le terme allemand qui désigne les camps, NDLR]the sensitive expression of his geometric madness. […] Even today, when one of these innocent songs comes back to us in memory, we feel our blood freeze in our veins and we realize that to have returned from Auschwitz is a miracle”, wrote Primo Levi in the story he drew in 1947 from his concentration camp experience (If it’s a man – If this is a man in original version). An exhibition* organized at the Shoah Memorial in Paris provides an understanding of the meaning of this passage.
Far from the image that we sometimes wanted to see him play as an “instrument of resistance” in the camps, music was, in fact, put to use in the Nazi annihilation enterprise as an instrument of torture. A dozen melodies repeated every day, morning, noon and evening (military marches and popular songs) punctuated the life of the deportees. Played hauntingly, these tunes were inseparably intertwined with the worst moments in the prisoners’ lives.
Absolute evil
The evil of the Nazi torturers was immense. If some of them, such as the “doctors” Johann Paul Kremer and Josef Mengele, pretended to cry while listening to Wagner or Schumann, they nevertheless accompanied their bloody experiments with music. And the SS often asked the Jews to sing psalms and liturgical tunes shortly before shooting them.
Music had several roles in the camps. “It first ensured a function of coordination, aimed at synchronizing steps and movements. The military airs were pregnant there, imposing a hammered pulse at key times of the day. The music was also intrusive: each block had loudspeakers which broadcast hymns aimed at “re-educating” the deportees but also at depriving them of sleep”, explains Élise Petit, curator of the exhibition.
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At the heart of the concentration camp system were the folk songs : tunes that the prisoners were obliged to sing on pain of punishment. Among these, battle songs (battle songs like “Alte Kameraden” / “Old comrade”) and marching songs (like “Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden” / “I had a comrade”). At Buchenwald, a work commando dubbed the “Singing Horses” was made up exclusively of Jewish inmates, forced to pull a cart full of stones while singing at the top of their voices.
The place of music surprised the prisoners as soon as they arrived. It was to the sound of popular airs or excerpts from chamber music that the deportees of certain convoys descended from the freight trains in which they had been crammed for several days to reach the camps. Prisoners in the labor camps were forced to sing them while working, but also to hum them while being beaten. “The SS called it ‘chicanery’. »continues Élise Petit, who teaches history and musicology at the University of Grenoble.
A catchy soundtrack
Punishments and executions were systematically accompanied by catchy ditties. For the killings, tunes from popular films and sentimental songs diverted from their original meaning were played. The lyrics then ironically echoed the atrocious reality of the moment. The Nazis would often sing “I’ll wait for your return” to celebrate the capture of an escapee and “Es geht alles voüber, es geht alles vorbei” / “Everything passes, everything goes away” when platoons formed of execution. The Communists, for their part, had to sing the‘Internationale when they were digging their own graves. As reported by several testimonies from the Sonnenburg camp.
READ ALSOMusician and Auschwitz survivor Esther Bejarano diesEach camp had an orchestra. The first musical formations had emerged, in the spring of 1933, in places of detention intended for political opponents.. “The German authorities then began to identify musicians to form ensembles,” explains historian Tal Bruttman, who co-signs the exhibition catalogue. Recruitment was done upon arrival when prisoners had to declare their profession at the time of the first interrogation. In Buchenwald, Major Karl Otto Koch, as much a music lover as he was sadistic, wanted the hymn composed for his camp to be sung perfectly in tune by the prisoners. He therefore organized rehearsal hours which took place after roll call and which stretched throughout the day. Within the framework of these sessions, the music had become completely destructive: the violence of the exercise aimed at the depersonalization of the individuals singing in unison.
Fanfares to fool visitors
The musicians had a specific uniform. In Dachau, Hans Loritz, its first commander, had thus distributed to the members of the orchestra jackets recovered from Allied soldiers who had fallen at the front. “Same thing in Buchenwald and Auschwitz, where brass bands had to parade at each official visit, just to fool them about the true purpose of these extermination camps,” says Élise Petit.
If enrollment in orchestras was, at the time, seen as a chance for survival, it nevertheless had serious consequences for the musicians who were part of them. « They had had the impression of having collaborated in the death machine. And that could have left lasting consequences for them, ”explains Juliane Brauer. Several former musicians from the camps testify to their guilt at having survived the horrors of the Nazis in a series of videos shown in the exhibition. In fact, several particularly bloody episodes of the genocidal process are inseparable from certain tunes that can be listened to through headphones in the Memorial. Like in Maidanek, where waltzes by Johann Strauss were streamed on November 3, 1943 to drown out the cries of the 18,000 Jews murdered that day.
Music was still practiced in the barracks by the deportees to pray or try to forget their daily lives. As evidenced by makeshift instruments or sheet music found after the war, but also the chilling testimony of Chil Rajchman, a synagogue cantor, who describes the ambivalence of the feelings he felt while singing the Passover tunes in the heart of the Treblinka death factory.
*Music in the Nazi Campsexposure to Holocaust Memorial until February 24, 2024. Open Sunday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., 17 rue Geoffroy l’Asnier, Paris 4th.
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