Monthly Archive

Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945-1989. Tina Frühauf. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021.

Reviewed by Martha Sprigge

Transcending Dystopia examines how Jewish communities throughout postwar Germany reconstructed their musical identities in the aftermath of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. Author Tina Frühauf focuses on the individuals who helped to restore musical life in different urban locales. This is a welcome expansion of previous scholarship on Jewish music making in post-World War II Europe, which has been focused largely on individual composers, philosophers, and their works.[1] Though the book’s title uses community in the singular, Frühauf draws attention to the heterogeneity of Germany’s postwar Jewish communities by consistently attending to vectors of difference such as class, generation, regional identity, and religious tradition. Transcending Dystopia paints a complex portrait of Jewish musical life in the postwar period, and demonstrates the importance of attending to local dynamics when crafting historical narratives.

The concept of “cultural mobility” serves as a frame for this extensive study, which Frühauf views as “intrinsic to Jewish music in the postwar Germanys” (p. 7). She adapts the term mobility liberally to explore many angles of Jewish culture in Germany after 1945, from the lives of Jewish musicians forcibly displaced by the Nazi genocide, to the itinerant cantors and musicians who traveled throughout German cities to perform services for congregations lacking key personnel, to the mobility of musical objects, such as scores and performances broadcast on the radio. The result is a capacious volume that traverses the immediate aftermath of World War II to the earliest years of German Reunification, and takes the reader to cities across Germany East and West.