Transcending Dystopia
Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945-1989
Tina Frühauf
(Author)
21,000+ Reviews
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Description
By the end of the Second World War, Germany was in ruins and its Jewish population so gravely diminished that a rich cultural life seemed unthinkable. And yet, as surviving Jews returned from hiding, the camps, and their exiles abroad, so did their music. Transcending Dystopia tells the story of the remarkable revival of Jewish musical activity that developed in postwar Germany against all odds. Author Tina Frühauf provides a kaleidoscopic panorama of musical practices in worship and social life across the country to illuminate how music contributed to transitions and transformations within and beyond Jewish communities in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Drawing on newly unearthed sources from archives and private collections, this book covers a wide spectrum of musical activity-from its role in commemorations and community events to synagogue concerts and its presence on the radio-across the divided Germany until the Fall of the Wall in 1989. Frühauf's use of mobility as a conceptual framework reveals the myriad ways in which the reemergence of Jewish music in Germany was shaped by cultural transfer and exchange that often relied on the circulation of musicians, their ideas, and practices within and between communities. By illuminating the centrality of mobility to Jewish experiences and highlighting how postwar Jewish musical practices in Germany were defined by politics that reached across national borders to the United States and Israel, this pioneering study makes a major contribution to our understanding of Jewish life and culture in a transnational context.
Product Details
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
| Publish Date | January 18, 2021 |
| Pages | 644 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Hardback |
| EAN/UPC | 9780197532973 |
| Dimensions | 9.3 X 6.2 X 1.8 inches | 2.3 pounds |
About the Author
Tina Frühauf is Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University and serves on the doctoral faculty of The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the editor of the award-winning Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, and Postwar German Culture (OUP, 2014) and has published widely on German Jewish music culture and twentieth-century music.
Reviews
"Transcending Dystopia is a detailed historiography of Jewish music history based on extensive research into sources and, more recently, on interviews, particularly with regard to the aspects of mobility (in the spatial and cultural sense and that of cultural self-image) and identity. The book also touches on what could be called a musical histoire des mentalitÃ(c)s." -- Joachim LÃ1/4dtke, Forum Musikbibliothek"Transcending Dystopia is a meticulously researched and articulately written work that analyzes music as a modality of transition for Jewish communities in postwar Germany." -- Religious Studies Review "Frühauf gives a picture of a community grappling with how to transition in a post-Holocaust world, and the role music plays in this transition. It is a masterful interdisciplinary work on a little-studied time period in Jewish musical history, and provides an important framework for looking at the musical life of other postwar Jewish communities in the future." -- Karen Uslin, The Defiant Requiem Foundation"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." -- Martha Sprigge, University of California, Santa Barbara"Tina Frühauf is a leading scholar of German-Jewish music culture, its composers and performers, its institutions, instruments, and practices. Her latest monograph, Transcending Dystopia: Music Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945-1989, is a tour-de-force of research and reconstruction. Her archival virtuosity has yielded mountains of detail about the people who reconstituted Jewish musical practices in Germany after the Holocaust." -- Celia Applegate, Vanderbilt University, H-Soz-Kult"Encyclopedic in scope and rich with facsimiles of photographs and performance posters, the apparatus includes extensive scholarly notes, a bibliography of the most relevant sources, and a helpful index. The first ever scholarly compendium of Jewish musical events in Germany from 1945 to 1989, this volume will be valuable for students of music, postwar European history, and Judaic studies worldwide." -- D. Hutchins, CHOICE"By examining the musical world of Holocaust survivors in Germany, Tina Frühauf has found an original way to look at Jewish life in Europe after the war...Frühauf's research is comprehensive, down to the level of describing individual concerts with their performers, the pieces that were heard, the location, and the date. She includes details about radio broadcasts and newspaper reviews, career moves of individual cantors and other musicians, and the musical fate of local congregations. There is no other book on this subject, with or without this level of detail. It's an astonishing achievement and an essential addition to the history of Jewish music." -- Beth Dwoskin, Jewish Book Council"Frühauf builds a detailed picture of the issues facing this confusing era and music's vital role in it." -- Jessica Duchen, BBC Music Magazine"An astonishing achievement and an essential addition to the history of Jewish music." -- Beth Dwoskin, Jewish Book Council"By analyzing the development of Jewish life in Germany through its music, Frühauf gives us a fresh perspective on the cultures of East and West Germany after the Holocaust." -- Mikhail Krutikov, The Forward"Comprehensive, authoritative, highly readable, insightful, and ground-breaking, Tina Frühauf's book enriches our understanding of the varied fate of postwar German Jews -- east and west -- through music, a powerful expression of Jewish resilience, identity, and belief." -- Mark Slobin, Winslow-Kaplan Professor of Music Emeritus, Wesleyan University"As deftly traced by Tina Frühauf, the post-World War Two renewal of German Jewry's uniquely creative liturgical musical tradition is a testimony to the spiritual resilience of the surviving remnant of the Shoah." -- Paul Mendes-Flohr, Professor Emeritus of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Professor Emeritus of the University of Chicago"Transcending Dystopia is a meticulously researched and articulately written work that analyzes music as a modality of transition for Jewish communities in postwar Germany." -- Jade Weimer, Religious Studies Review Vol 48.4"It is a masterful interdisciplinary work on a little-studied time period in Jewish musical history, and provides an important framework for looking at the musical life of other postwar Jewish communities in the future." -- Karen Uslin, German History
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