Music, Bürgerlichkeit, and the Social Hierarchies of the Theresienstadt Ghetto

Music in the Holocaust has often been reduced to maudlin interpretations of “spiritual resistance” and “triumph of human spirit.”  These accounts are problematic because they situate the victims outside of the context of music, history, and the social setting of the persecution. In closely examining everyday life in Theresienstadt, I present a new interpretation on the role of music in connecting and making old and new classes in prisoner society.

In the Theresienstadt ghetto inmates produced a wide range of musical events, from choirs to chamber music, operas, jazz band, and piano concerts. Within the cultural activities in the ghetto, music had an exceptional position: while all cultural productions were seen as important and valuable, music was able to communicate across languages. But while music was of great emotional meaning to nearly all inmates it also carried various functions for different groups of inmates.

For older German Jews, who sat at the bottom of the ghetto hierarchy - where they opposed the new social elite of young Czech Jews - classical music became a means to manifest their belonging to German educated bourgeoisie. Knowing and attending the right kind of musical events was a way to prove their value; for these people, who experienced years of persecution and deportation from home, one of the key experiences of persecution was that they as German Jews were no longer German. In listening to and talking about Beethoven, Bach, and Schubert in Theresienstadt, German Jews found an infallible way of being German, and German of the right kind of class. Thus the musical practices of the German Jews in Theresienstadt denotes how important the category of class is to our understanding of music and the Holocaust, but also how crucial class belonging was to people of this generation in life at the extreme.