Sounding Jewish in Berlin

This chapter devotes specific consideration to the complex relationship between contemporary Jewish identity and klezmer music in the city—as seen in two case studies that both directly address Berlin Jewish history through music. The first of these is a project that unearths the rich recorded legacy of two prewar Berlin Jewish record labels (Semer and Lukraphon) and re-presents their music for a modern concert audience. Despite the pre-Holocaust provenance of this music, a post-Holocaust framing is unavoidable, making these materials both a way of hearing the past and also a commentary on the present (including changing German-Jewish relations). In the process, Semer Ensemble raises important questions about the relationship of bounded historical materials to contemporary performance practice. The chapter also critiques the project, arguing that while it powerfully illustrates the wealth of talent and creativity in Berlin’s Jewish music scene, it also bends certain historical narratives to better suit its own artistic aims. Secondly, the chapter discusses the life story and work of singer Tania Alon, one of the few Berlin-born Jews on today’s klezmer and Yiddish scene. Tania’s deeply felt testimony as the granddaughter of Holocaust victims stands as a powerful contrast to the easy fluidity of the contemporary milieu and reminds us of the very personal resonances that this music also contains. In particular, Tania’s singing at Stolpersteine ceremonies is explored, through her own words, as a way of sounding the silenced voices of her family and simultaneously an aural part of the urban fabric.

Why Berlin? Why Klezmer?

This book begins with an invocation of the sounds and significations that make up the complex of meanings of klezmer music in Berlin, as seen through a new jam session that began in the city in 2013. It underlines the importance of locating the music both historically and in its contemporary urban context—giving a brief but important sense of the past and present geographies of klezmer music, and also signaling exactly where and how the debate has significantly moved on from the anxieties of “virtual Judaism” and cultural appropriation. The chapter lays out the author’s methodology, as well as signposting certain theoretical frameworks that structure the narrative: the urban spatial critique of Lefebvre and de Certeau; British cultural studies work by Stuart Hall and others; the applied sociology of Adam Krims and Mark Granovetter; and the ethnomusicological framing of Mark Slobin and Martin Stokes. The chapter finishes with an appealing ethnographic snapshot of an evening of community music making, “the Night of the Singing Balconies”—an event that sums up several of the themes structuring this book. This collective concert is analyzed as a lively embodiment of contemporary Berlin performative culture: grassroots inclusivity; a firm belief in the power of enthusiasm over the necessity of talent; and a structural and ideological integration into the fabric of the city itself. The engaging observational style with which the Singing Balconies are described not only brings the night to life but also makes clear the book’s overall approach of ethnographic detail underpinned by solid theoretical framing.

Placing Berlin in the Music

This chapter presents the third element fundamental to an overall picture: the music itself, with specific focus on the relationship between music, text, and the city. The chapter begins with a wider discussion of music’s role in sounding urban geographies. This is then set against the indeterminacy and ambiguities of “placing” klezmer music—a result of mid-twentieth-century rupture, subsequent postwar cultural submergence, and the transnationalism of its contemporary revival. The main body of the chapter is devoted to the specific ways that the city of Berlin is articulated through its klezmer music. In order to do this, the chapter takes as its starting point sociologist Adam Krims’s flexible concept of “urban ethos,” applying this for the first time to the processes of traditional music. Through detailed analysis of a series of musical examples, it shows the important ways in which the city of Berlin is made meaningful in its klezmer music—how exactly, through both music and text, the city functions as a significant musical-semantic unit. The musicians discussed include ?Shmaltz!, Daniel Kahn, and Knoblauch Klezmer Band, and the analysis is supported by detailed transcriptions and interview material. Throughout the chapter and through the work of these different artists, certain themes reappear—themes particularly pertinent to Berlin and Jewish musical production. These include notions of escape, borders, and transgression and the dialogue between visible and hidden histories. The chapter also uses David Kaminsky’s theorization of the “New Old Europe Sound” to question and problematize some of the urban expressions discussed.

The Music in Berlin: Spaces and Places

In a complement to the networks and styles of the previous chapter, this chapter offers a detailed analysis of the spaces that frame the Berlin klezmer scene. It draws on the influence of British cultural studies to locate this scene within the characteristic fluidity and bricolage aesthetics of the city’s wider street-level musical culture—brought to life here through description and analysis of the sonic profusion of Mauerpark’s weekly “mini-festival.” The chapter then moves on to explore in depth ways in which we might understand “Jewish space,” including the important role of music in the mediation of German-Jewish space. The majority of the chapter then looks in detail at the official/unofficial spatial spectrum that frames several characteristic klezmer venues in the city: a long-running and appealingly shabby club/bar; a contemporary arthouse theater program; a well-established, friendly yet surprisingly formal dance night; and the lively space of a West Berlin kosher cafe. It then discusses in depth the three klezmer jam sessions that take place in the city, considering each of these sessions as its own version of a wider “scene,” with reference to the work of Will Straw and others. The last part of the chapter discusses how several unofficial spaces that have developed recently point to a possible paradigm shift in the presentation and reception of Yiddish musical culture in the city, seen in the ground-level complex of Yiddish cultural activities established over the last six years in the Neukölln district. Once again, the solid theoretical underpinning is brought to life by strong ethnographic description and interviews.

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks

This chapter is a detailed discussion of the sophisticated network relations at play in Berlin’s klezmer and Yiddish music scene. Drawing on the work of Howard Becker and Mark Granovetter, it lays out the connections that bring different musicians together, including an analysis of important network hubs and significant weak ties that enable creative links across different musical and social territories. The historical context for these networks is also discussed in detail, including the earlier roles of venues, organizations, and personalities in uniting musicians, audiences, and enthusiasts. The second half of the chapter then offers a detailed breakdown of current musical styles, positing four overlapping stylistic (and in some senses social) categories that help the reader to navigate different expressions and groupings of Berlin klezmer: pioneers, modernists, fantasists, and transformers. Each one of the taxonomies is analyzed in terms of musical approach, repertoire, and relation to other groups. These are enriched in each case by a wealth of ethnographic detail, thick descriptions of particular performances (including the author’s own reactions and responses), and informative musical examples and transcriptions. The chapter concludes by placing the city of Berlin’s klezmer musical networks within the wider international scene of which they are a distinct but related part.

Performing Berlin

This chapter offers a personal response to some of Berlin’s silent Jewish memorial spaces. It is a self-consciously symbolic and reflexive contrast to the sense of joyful noise that dominates the rest of the book. Beyond an aural version of erasure, unspeakability, or the space for reflection upon it, the chapter argues that these silent spaces must always be heard as part of their surrounding urban environment, refracting wider spatial practices and dis/order. When conventions are reversed—when the present is silent—the past can resound in surprising and provocative ways, collapsing spatial and temporal borders and escaping the ritualized boundaries of formal commemoration. This is explored through two different memorial situations: the disturbing resonances and transgressive processes of a collective silent walk and Gleis 17 railway memorial’s opening up of heterotopic “gaps” in time. Each of these examples, in different ways, frames a slippage between urban sound and memorial silence, creating a parallel symbolic space that the past and the present can inhabit simultaneously. In its unpredictable fluidity, silence becomes a mobile and subversive force, producing an imaginative space that is ambiguous, affective, and deeply meaningful. The chapter argues that the contemporary urban soundscape that slips through these silent cracks problematizes the narrative hegemony of memorial itself.

Conclusion

This section ties up the central argument of the book, namely, that Berlin’s klezmer music should be understood as music of/from a city, and that it is the perpetual dialogue with the city that makes the music relevant to its audiences, meaningful to its participants, and worthy of ongoing study. Drawing back from Berlin itself, the chapter reiterates the central claim of the book, which is that for traditional music to survive and flourish in a contemporary urban environment, it must stake its claim as an engaged part of the modern urban soundscape. Klezmer in Berlin connects itself to the histories and geographies of the city; in the process, it moves decisively away from moribund debates of guilt or cultural appropriation, toward a dynamic and provocative lived engagement with tradition, cosmopolitanism, Jewishness, and the contemporary city.

Curating the Tradition

This chapter steps a little away from the city itself to look at some of the processes of education, repertoire formation, and dissemination that underpin the transmission of klezmer and Yiddish music within Germany, including how these processes link to the wider transnational scene. It begins with a discussion of the nature of “tradition” in this context, especially pertinent considering the postwar development of this particular tradition in Germany (and its revitalization around much of the world) and klezmer’s continual problematic dialogue with nostalgia and cliché. The chapter then critiques the German workshop hegemony of the 1990s that underpins the current scene, including the perceived split between the universalist tendencies of Argentinian-Israeli clarinetist Giora Feidman and the historically rooted work of American musicians such as Alan Bern. The second half of the chapter is a lively case study of the German scene’s (and Europe’s) most important transmission hub, Yiddish Summer Weimar. This influential and well-established annual series is analyzed through several theoretical filters—filters that unite musical and social principles through the praxis of the Weimar workshops themselves. Once again, these theoretical frameworks are both supported and made accessible through a sustained emphasis on first-person ethnographic detail, drawn in this instance from the author’s attendance at the advanced instrumental workshop week in 2014 and from interviews with participants in subsequent years. This ethnography is also strongly supported by deeply articulate and provocative interview material with Yiddish Summer Weimar’s artistic director, Alan Bern.