German Studies Review

The cantata A Survivor from Warsaw, Arnold Schoenberg’s emblematic work commemorating the Holocaust, offers up innumerable challenges to performers and historians, not to mention audiences. Only seven minutes in duration, it poses programming problems for being too short to stand on its own either before or after an intermission, but its somber subject and dramatic effects make it difficult to pair with suitable works. Praised by some critics for its powerful message and derided by others for kitschy devices, it can have the effect of confusing audiences with its [End Page 219] academic compositional conception (Schoenberg’s renowned “twelve-tone” method), its jarring sonorities, and the eerie vocal delivery employing Schoenberg’s signature “speech-song” (Sprechstimme) style. Adding to its musical complexities are the oddly juxtaposed narrated texts, which mingle the English-language Jewish testimony, the Berlin-accented German orders barked at inmates, and the concluding Hebrew prayers. Music historians have long struggled to situate the work within Schoenberg’s self-imagination as a Jew, an American, a Zionist, and an heir to the imposing legacy of German music.

Joy Calico’s confrontation with this perplexing work takes a completely new approach, using its postwar performance history in Europe as a cultural barometer of the Cold War. Calico situates her study within the subarea of Exilforschung that concerns itself with remigrants, but she treats the work, rather than the composer, as the object experiencing remigration (Schoenberg lived out his days in the United States). She positions the work as sharing features with the millions who migrated across Europe in the years following World War II, proposing that through its many performances across the continent it accumulated its own experiences and “baggage,” such that its successive stagings had to reckon with its previous incarnations. Moving chronologically through its performance history, this analysis of A Survivor’s “cultural mobility” further highlights the importance of artistic exchanges during the Cold War, showing how cultural artifacts managed to penetrate what has been described as the “Nylon Curtain.”

Chapter by chapter, we are taken to six different European performance sites between 1950 and 1968: West Germany, Austria, Norway, East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Calico structures each chapter by presenting a thorough and incisive overview of the cultural-political environment in each of the locations and periods, tracking the genesis of the performance by scrutinizing the archival and oral history of the preconcert arrangements, and documenting the fate of the work in the critical responses found in newspapers and journals. In West Germany, the site of the work’s European premiere in August 1950, the reactions escalated into a cause célèbre when Hans Schnoor, a music critic with a Nazi past, castigated the work as hate mongering and offensive to the German people, couching his attack within his longstanding record of opposing modern music broadcasts on West German radio. His tactless vilification erupted into a public scandal but also revealed the seething resentments among West Germans toward the Allied occupation and the small number of remigrants. Calico casts the subsequent performance in Vienna (in April 1951) as a more direct “remigration,” since this was where the Viennese native Schoenberg had endured systemic antisemitism through the 1920s and, after the war, tried to block any performances of his works in this city where he had suffered so much discrimination and personal attack. The Vienna performance was also the only one for which, much to Schoenberg’s dismay, the English text was translated [End Page 220] into German, and the term “gas chamber” was conspicuously excised. Yet unlike in West Germany, the critical response was surprisingly tame. Because of Austria’s official status as a victim of National Socialism, A Survivor did not ignite the feelings of collective guilt that were so volatile in West Germany.

Thereafter any European performances of A Survivor fell short of inciting the types of heated debates surrounding its West German premiere, understandable in each case given the neutrality of the venues and the accumulated passage of time since the end of the war. The Norwegian performance took place in March 1954 in an overtly Jewish context, performed on a program alongside a Jewish liturgical work, and Norwegian audiences were at most slightly uncomfortable with the experience given their own treatment of their Jewish neighbors during the war. The East German premiere had to wait until 1958 and the renunciation of Stalin in order for Schoenberg’s twelve-tone “formalist” composition to find a level of acceptance during the Thaw. A Survivor shared the program with a symphony by Shostakovich, and Calico shows how the critical response reflected antisemitic undercurrents dictated from Moscow. While they considered the performance to be an important event in East German musical life, critics focused more on the victimization of antifascists in Poland than on the overtly Jewish perspective of the work, and their cool reception of the compositional style was reminiscent of the same type of critiques of Schoenberg expressed during the Third Reich. Yet owing to the later dates of performance, the musical score’s high modernism could conform to a policy that officially promoted audience accessibility but had become somewhat more tolerant toward experimentation and more engaged with gaining familiarity with Schoenberg and his school. The Polish and Czech performances revealed more of the cultural competition among the Eastern Bloc nations than any Cold War rivalries. The Warsaw performance, coming shortly after the East German premiere and presented by the East German ensemble, occurred at the peak of cultural tensions between the two countries, with East Germans assuming the role of shielding their socialist brethren from the lure of capitalist culture. The overly enthusiastic Polish reception was more a statement of their resistance to towing this socialist line than to a genuine appreciation of the work.

Calico’s highly readable and engaging prose couches each episode in a very useful account of the political and cultural contexts of each performance site, setting up a framework within which to understand her interpretation of the critical responses to the work. Only in the afterword does she offer a more aesthetically oriented assessment of the work and its impact on audiences, offering a stunning comparison to Nathan Rapaport’s Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, unveiled in Warsaw in 1948. While Calico sets out to employ a methodology that treats the work as that of a remigrant, one emerges from reading her study with a much more textured understanding of A Survivor as a prism of postwar political, ethical, and social tensions. Sometimes A Survivor serves as a catalyst for airing grievances or suppressed prejudices, and [End Page 221] sometimes not. One of the greatest values of this text is that it offers us a panoramic view of the cultural politics in Cold War Europe and a much-needed corrective to various assumptions about Cold War cultural competition as well as cultural solidarity on either side of the Iron Curtain.