Courage - Music in Resistance Against National Socialism I June 3, 2024

Courage – Music in Resistance Against National Socialism I June 3rd, 2024

The Exilarte Center makes what has been silenced resonate again and makes what has been forgotten visible again.

During the dark times of National Socialism, using music to send a sign of resistance was for many Jewish composers the only way to accuse, rebel or find hope again in desperate situations. Many of them were persecuted, murdered or forced into exile. But their works, which were sometimes created under the most adverse circumstances, still bear witness to unparalleled courage and remind us of the power that music radiates. Music helped to survive and endure what was immediately happening. But the sounds created also made it possible to denounce the injustice of the perpetrators with hidden musical messages. Viktor Ullmann composed his Emperor of Atlantis in the Theresienstadt ghetto, mercilessly holding up a mirror to the terror regime before he was murdered in Auschwitz; Herbert Zipper secretly wrote a resistance song in the Dachau concentration camp and Hans Gál ironically presented the morning wake-up call in the internment camp in Great Britain as a refugee in his Huyton Suite. Some of the still undiscovered works from this program are in the archives of the Exilarte Center of the mdw.