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As the seat of Hitler's government, Berlin was the most frequently targeted city in Germany for Allied bombing campaigns during World War II. Air raids shelled celebrated monuments, left homes uninhabitable, and reduced much of the city to nothing but rubble. After the war's end, this apocalyptic landscape captured the imagination of artists, filmmakers, and writers, who used the ruins to engage with themes of alienation, disillusionment, and moral ambiguity. In Rubble Music, Abby Anderton explores the classical music culture of postwar Berlin, analyzing archival documents, period sources, and musical scores to identify the sound of civilian suffering after urban catastrophe. Anderton reveal...
The Ruin -- The Socialists' Cemetery -- The Church -- Concentration Camp Memorials -- The Artists' Cemetery.
It was late August 1939. Nature’s glorious colors had begun to gradually alter Europe’s picturesque landscape. For those graced with a window to peer through...the peaceful serenity of autumn was time for many to pause for reflective introspection. But Adolph Hitler was poised to alter that landscape. Tracks of Our Tears, the sequel to From Promise to Peril, continues to follow the fortunes of the glamorous Marta, a world-renowned German violin virtuoso, and her intellectually gifted, lifelong best friend, Anna, whose Jewish family has been destroyed by the Nazi Holocaust. Anna’s prodigious intellect, and her deep connection to Marta’s influential family has won her a false identity ...
In eighteenth-century England, “variety” became a prized aesthetic in musical culture. Not only was variety—of counterpoint, harmony, melody, and orchestration—expected for good composition, but it also manifested in cultural mediums such as songbook anthologies, which compiled miscellaneous songs and styles in single volumes; pasticcio operas, which were cobbled together from excerpts from other operas; and public concerts, which offered a hodgepodge assortment of different types and styles of performance. I call this trend of producing music through the collection, assemblage, and juxtaposition of various smaller pieces as musical miscellany; like a jigsaw puzzle (also invented in ...
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES, NPR • WINNER OF THREE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARDS • Finalist for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction • A stirring account of how music bears witness to history and carries forward the memory of the wartime past • SUNDAY TIMES OF LONDON HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR In 1785, when the great German poet Friedrich Schiller penned his immortal “Ode to Joy,” he crystallized the deepest hopes and dreams of the European Enlightenment for a new era of peace and freedom, a time when millions would be embraced as equals. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony then gave wing to Schiller’s words, but barely a century later these same words were claimed by...
They were not your typical World War II soldiers. Most were not in particularly good physical shape, and many had trouble handling their weapons. They differed widely in their ages, politics, and skills. Many worked in academia, media, and the arts. They were a strange mix of Americans and foreign nationals, immigrants, and refugees, linked by their language skills, knowledge of Europe, and a desire to defeat the Axis. During the war, the U.S. Army trained them in psychological warfare at a secret camp on the Gettysburg battlefield and then sent them to Europe. They became known as “Psycho Boys,” a group of soldiers who have never received their due respect. In this book Beverley Driver ...
The essays in this collection address the German television series Babylon Berlin and explore its unique contribution to contemporary visual culture. Since its inception in 2017 the series, a neo-noir thriller set in Berlin in the final years of the Weimar republic, has reached audiences throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas and has been met with both critical and popular acclaim. As a visual work rife with historical and contemporary citations Babylon Berlin offers its audience a panoramic view of politics, crime, culture, gender, and sexual relations in the German capital. Focusing especially on the intermedial and transhistorical dimensions of the series, across four parts-Babylon Ber...
'Opera After the Zero Hour' argues that newly composed opera in West Germany after World War II was a site for the renegotiation of musical traditions during an era in which tradition had become politically fraught.
This book tells the story of the German Democratic Republic from “the inside out,” using the lens of generational change to deconstruct an intriguing array of social identities that had little to do with the “official GDR” version authoritarian rulers regularly sought to impose on their citizens. The author compares the “identities” of five societal subgroups (GDR writers and intellectuals; pastors and dissidents; women; youth; and working-class men), exploring the policies defining their lives and status before/during/after the 1989 Wende, as well as the diverging “exit, voice and loyalty” dilemmas encountered by each. The “dialectical” components treated in this work ce...