Brauer, Jualiane. How Can Music be Torturous?

Juliane Brauer analyzes how Nazis utilized music as a torture weapon in concentration and extermination camps. Bauer’s approach is based mainly on three conceptual standpoints: Primo Levi’s metaphor of ‘infernal’ music present in the camps in the form of repetitive acoustic practices associated with the feeling of danger (1); Monique Scheer’s notion of the ‘knowing body’ linked to the physical body that is reshaped by sociocultural training into the social body enabling it to respond to cultural stimuli affectively (8); and Wolfgang Sofsky’s concept of ‘absolute power’ based on the prisoner’s uncertainty and dependence on the will of the Nazis (9). Combining these conceptions, Brauer coins the concept of the ‘contact zone’ that describes the relationship between music, whose making and listening to she understands as emotional practices, and emotions, defined as a learned bodily practice, which is not only the knowing body’s response to external factors, but can also reshape the body internally (8). 

According to Brauer, music in concentration camps, for example in the form of forced singing, had a triple usage. Firstly, singing served as a disciplinary practice aimed at increasing prisoners’ productivity by keeping “a disciplined rhythm [that] seemed to shorten the distance between work sites and the camp” (11). It was also supposed to make a good impression on possible onlookers from outside the camp. Secondly, forced singing accompanied situations of physical torture and extended its impact: the prisoners were forced to sing in humiliating bodily positions or bad weather (14). Thirdly, it was used to humiliate specifically the German-Jewish prisoners by forcing them “to sing or play the violin while they were being tortured” (15). 

In extermination camps, Brauer identifies both playing and hearing the music performed by the camp’s orchestra as an experience of violence. She indicates two reasons why the prisoners working in the Musikkommando were particularly exposed to “mental and physical exhaustion” (19). Firstly, the involvement in the camp’s orchestra entailed a privileged position in relation to other inmates; thus, it was a form of complicity. Secondly, playing music in the circumstances of the extermination camp “destabilized memories from the musicians’ former lives” (20), disassociating the music from its positive and humane features and depriving the musicians of the possibility “to draw on their cultural identities, skills, and knowledge as a means to help them survive” (ibid.). Additionally, Brauer notes that the command to play music served as a separate act of violence prior to the forced performance itself. 

Therefore, Brauer’s analysis establishes a systematic typology of music’s various applications in concentration and extermination camps. Moreover, the article engages with an extensive multilingual body of primary sources that otherwise would remain inaccessible to researchers unfamiliar with, i.e., German or Polish.

Author of this entry: Mateusz Miesiac.

Brauer, Juliane. “How Can Music Be Torturous? Music in Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camps.” Music and Politics Winter 2016: 1-34.