Hitler’s Twilight of the Gods: Music and the Orchestration of War and Genocide in Europe. Alexandra Birch. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2025.

Reviewed by Kathryn Huether

Alexandra Birch’s Hitler’s Twilight of the Gods: Music and the Orchestration of War and Genocide in Europe presents the reader with a dramatic conceit: a Wagnerian scaffolding that traces the role of music and sound in the Nazi project from its rise (“Das Reichgold”) to its collapse (“Trauermusik”). “This is not exclusively a study of Jewish victimhood or of German perpetration,” Birch writes, “but a more nuanced understanding of expanded victim categories, shades of perpetration, the complicated role of bystanders, the archive itself, masculinities, and the Holocaust, and the soundscape of genocide” (9).

The Wagnerian frame is memorable, but its analytic payoff is uncertain. Myth provides an allegorical structure, yet Birch never clarifies how Wagner’s dramaturgy functions methodologically. We may hear the echoes of Siegfried’s Funeral March in the death marches from the concentration camps but the link remains metaphorical. The book leaves unresolved its core contribution, whether it be Wagnerian scaffolding, “musical sadism,” or dialogue with sound and postcolonial theory. Each option holds promise, but the book never explains how they cohere, sidestepping influential frameworks in Holocaust and genocide studies, most notably Michael Rothberg’s multidirectional memory and his colonial turn. Rothberg’s work has reshaped debates about victimhood, violence, and the politics of memory [1]. By invoking “expanded victim categories” without engaging this scholarship, Birch offers breadth without depth.

Birch introduces the concept of “musical sadism” as a distinctive intervention, but only gestures toward its lineage in prior scholarship without making the connection explicit. While she cites Suzanne Cusick’s work—a foundational intervention in theorizing music as torture—she leaves aside the substantial body of research that has since expanded this line of inquiry. Lily Hirsch’s scholarship is notably absent; her studies of the Berlin Culture League situate music under Nazism with historical precision, while her later work on music in crime and punishment directly addresses the nexus of sound and cruelty in non-Holocaust contexts [2]. Beyond these, Pieslak’s Sound Targets and Papaeti’s analyses of music and torture under the Greek junta show how music functions as coercion and violence across regimes [3]. Precisely because Birch argues that outside theories should be applied to Holocaust studies via sound, her omission of these comparative frameworks undercuts that claim. In the absence of such engagement, “musical sadism” becomes a suggestive flourish rather than a sustained analytic framework: evocative but underdeveloped.

The book’s framing of Romanticism and fascism also gives the impression of novelty, though this inquiry has a substantial history, from Adorno’s In Search of Wagner to Mann’s Doctor Faustus, Mosse’s genealogy of völkischideology, and later musicological work by Applegate, Potter, and Steinberg [4]. Birch does not take up Adorno, whose analysis remains foundational, nor later work that extends his critiques. Instead, she leans on Alex Ross’s Wagnerism, a cultural history that, while engaging, cannot substitute for Adorno’s analytical framework or for studies such as Joy Calico’s Arnold Schoenberg’s “A Survivor from Warsaw” in Postwar Europe, which demonstrates how music, performance, and memory politics became intertwined after 1945 [5]. In Birch’s hands, Wagner, myth, and ideology surface less as historically grounded cultural forms than as suggestive signposts.

The book is strongest in its vivid descriptions of song’s role in Nazi culture and violence, yet here too it leaves methodological questions open. Birch’s discussions of troop singing highlight how music reinforced camaraderie and identity. These observations resonate with Thomas Turino’s ethnomusicological framework on music as social life [6]. Yet Turino is absent from the analysis, leaving an established comparative insight unexplored. Similarly, Birch emphasizes testimony as a key source but does not consistently reflect on the varying quality and complexity of these accounts. Foundational work by Laub, Greenspan, and Shenker underscores the ethical challenges of testimony, while Pollin-Galay shows how it is shaped by language and place [7]. Without such grounding, the book’s reliance on testimony stretches sources, forcing them to bear more interpretive weight than they can sustain. Absent, too, is Amy Lynn Wlodarski, whose Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation (2015) remains the field’s touchstone for theorizing how testimony and aesthetics intersect in Holocaust music studies. Her analyses of Adorno, Schoenberg, Reich, Eisler, and postwar reception have defined how scholars approach precisely the issues Birch raises but does not frame [8].

Birch devotes significant attention to Treblinka, drawing on Rachel Auerbach’s Oyneg Shabes account. Yet Auerbach’s testimony, while invaluable, was not based on personal experience of the camp itself, a distinction that matters for interpretation. To capture Treblinka’s sonic environment, Birch proposes the term Gesamtgewalttätigklang, “complete violent sound.” The phrase is striking, but ultimately aestheticizes without evidence to support claims of totality. Birch also moves between Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau without clarifying their different functions. A more explicit framework for situating auditory testimony within space—for instance, Jacob Flaws’s work reconstructing Treblinka through overlapping witness perspectives—might have anchored this discussion [9].

Birch invokes voice and postcolonial studies, but more as keywords than frameworks. Barthes’s “grain of the voice” is cited, but its implications are left aside [10]. Similarly, Birch references Nina Sun Eidsheim and Ana María Ochoa Gautier under the banner of postcolonial theory, yet without engaging the contexts that give their work its force: African American vocality in Eidsheim’s case, colonial Latin America in Ochoa’s. To invoke these scholars without that grounding reduces “postcolonial theory” to a catchword rather than a method. Further, returning to an earlier omission, Wlodarski’s more recent work on contrapuntal witnessing explicitly mobilizes Edward Said to bring Holocaust memory and testimony into dialogue with colonial histories. This work could have offered a model for how to enact the very comparative framework Birch gestures toward [11].

Equally striking is the absence of Ruth HaCohen’s The Music Libel Against the Jews, a foundational study that demonstrates how accusations of Jewish sonic disorder were central to the construction of antisemitism from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century [12]. HaCohen shows that sound itself—whether noisy, dissonant, or marked as “foreign”—became a medium through which Jewish difference was imagined and policed. Her work provides the very genealogy of the “Musical Jew,” and without it, Birch’s discussion of the figure remains unmoored from the long tradition that has shaped the trope. By overlooking HaCohen, Birch forgoes the methodological grounding that would have connected her analysis of sonic othering to the deeper history of antisemitism.

At several points the book turns to questions of canon and cultural loss. Birch describes the “incalculable loss” of “sound, genius, and virtuosity” in the Holocaust, citing composers such as Schoenberg, Korngold, Ullmann, Klein, and Schulhoff as heirs to a “rich German classical tradition” (7). The intention is elegiac, but the framing echoes the canonizing logic National Socialism exploited. It also leads to factual oversimplifications; Klein was Czech, and Schoenberg’s relationship to German tradition was both profound and fraught. He saw himself as heir to an Austro-German musical lineage, but exile compelled him to re-embrace his Jewish faith. A more nuanced framing might have avoided conflating diverse identities under one tradition.

The epilogue circles back to questions of canon and exclusion but does so unevenly. Birch asserts that works by Beethoven and Brahms cannot be eliminated from the repertoire because of their use in Nazi propaganda (154), a point that addresses a debate few have raised. She also acknowledges Romani exclusion and points to exoticism in staples such as Brahms’s Hungarian Dances. Yet this observation is not pursued, leaving the link between repertoire, exoticism, and Holocaust memory underdeveloped. Recent work by Siv B. Lie and Ioanida Costache on Romani performance and appropriation could have given this claim sharper grounding, as could Philip Ewell’s critique of race and music theory [13]. Here again the book overextends; it raises questions of inclusion and diversity but stops short of situating them within the specific politics of Holocaust memory.

The book’s limitations are most apparent in its framing. Claims to novelty are undercut by limited engagement with the scholarship that has defined this terrain. Concepts are evocative but often unmoored, Wagnerian metaphors come across as dramatic but analytically thin. In a moment when Holocaust, sound, and memory studies urgently need dialogue across subfields, such omissions are more than bibliographic; they are missed opportunities for dialogue.

Birch’s central premise is clear: Wagnerian myth, Romantic aesthetics, and the cruelty of “musical sadism” shaped the Nazi project from its rise to its collapse. Yet the book highlights a broader challenge for the field: in tracing the cultural mechanics of violence and memory, scholarship advances not through isolated interventions but through sustained dialogue. It is precisely this conversation—with Wlodarski, Rothberg, Hirsch, Calico, Birdsall, Pollin-Galay, Greenspan, HaCohen, and others—that remains largely absent here.

Kathryn Agnes Huether, PhD, is the Postdoctoral Scholar in Antisemitism Studies at UCLA’s Leve Center for Jewish Studies and the Initiative to Study Hate. Working within Sound Studies, her research examines trauma, Holocaust representation, antisemitism, and hate, drawing on political economy, voice studies, media theory, and memory studies. She has published on voice-centered approaches to Holocaust testimony and on technological mediation in Holocaust memory, with forthcoming work on the sonic infrastructures of hate and on pre-mediated memorial practices in the platform age.

[1] Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).

[2] Shirli Gilbert, A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany: Musical Politics and the Berlin Jewish Culture League (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); and Music in the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Lily E. Hirsch, Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012). 

[3] Jonathan Pieslak, Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); and Anna Papaeti, “Music, Torture, Testimony: Reopening the Case of the Greek Junta (1967–1974),” The World Music 2, no. 1 (2019): 67-89. 

[4] Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner (London: Verso, 1981); Alex Ross, Wagnerism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020); Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus (New York: Knopf, 1948); George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964); Michael P. Steinberg, Listening to Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

[5] Joy Calico, Arnold Schoenberg’s “A Survivor from Warsaw” in Postwar Europe (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014).

[6] Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

[7] Hannah Pollin-Galay, Ecologies of Witnessing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).

[8] Amy Lynn Wlodarski, Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2015).  

[9]Jacob Flaws, “Sensory Witnessing at Treblinka,” The Journal of Holocaust Research 35, no. 1 (2021): 41–65.

[10] Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977).

[11] Amy Lynn Wlodarski, “Musical Testimonies of Terezín and the Possibilities of Contrapuntal Listening,” Music & Politics 16, no. 2 (2022): 1, https://doi.org/10.3998/mp.3108.

[12] Ruth HaCohen, The Music Libel Against the Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).

[13] Siv B. Lie, Django Generations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021); Ioanida Costache, “Sounding Romanes,” Ethnomusicology 65, no. 2 (2021); Philip Ewell, “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame,” Music Theory Online 26, no. 2 (2020).