2023-07-02 22:06:03
Exposition
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The Paris memorial unveils a gripping and challenging exhibition on the Nazis’ use of music in the concentration and extermination camps.
What absurd dissonance: music echoed everywhere in the Nazi camps. Reception of new prisoners, departures and returns of forced labor kommandos, punishments, executions. We had to pace, count, control. Sometimes cover the cries of the victims, prevent contact. And galvanize the executioners. So much so that informal hearings took place shortly following the arrival of the convoys of deportees, to swell the ranks of the prisoner orchestras. “The marches and popular songs, will write Primo Levi, will be the last thing of the Lager that we will forget; because they are the voice of the Lager, the sensitive expression of its geometric madness, of the determination with which men undertook to annihilate us, to destroy us as men before making us die slowly.
The quotation opens the route of the fascinating (and, it must be admitted, a little trying) exhibition “Music in the Nazi camps”, at the Shoah memorial in Paris, the first devoted to this theme, which details the manners functionalists, perverse and inhuman whose life and death this one was able to accompany in the camps.
From the opening of the concentration camps in 1933, Lagerkapellen of prisoners came into being, under the influence of the military past of the SS commanders. These formations often have only three or four instruments, but from 1938 they expand, reaching by 1942 nearly 120 musicians.
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#Shoah #memorial #music #rhythm #horror #Liberation