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

Abstract

Primo Levi, in what is one of the most prominent written accounts of life in the Auschwitz-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

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