The Hatred of Music

Seventh Treatise. THE HATRED OF MUSIC

Of all the arts, music is the only one to have collaborated in the extermination of Jews organized by the Germans between 1933 and 1945. It was the only form of art to be specifically requested by the administration of the Konzentrationlager. To the detriment of this art form, it has to be emphasized that it was the only one capable of adapting to the organization of the camps, the hunger, the destitution, the work, the pain, the humiliation, and the death.

Simon Laks was born on November 1, 1901, in Warsaw. After completing his studies at the Warsaw conservatory, he moved to Vienna in 1926. He made a living accompanying silent films on the piano. He later moved to Paris. He spoke Polish, Russian, German, French, and English. He was a pianist, a violinist, a composer, a conductor. He was arrested in Paris in 1941. He was interned at Beaune, at Drancy, at Auschwitz, at Kaufe-ring, at Dachau. On May 3, 1945, he was liberated. By May 18, he was in Paris. He wanted to evoke the memory and the suffering of those who had been annihilated in the camps, but he also wanted to reflect on the role music had played in the extermination. René Coudy assisted him. In 1948, he published a book with René Coudy at Mercure de France entitled Musiques d’un autre monde, with a preface by Georges Duhamel. The book was not well received and fell into oblivion.

Since what historians call the Second World War, since the extermination camps of the Third Reich, we have entered a time in which melodic sequences have become exasperating. Over the entire surface of the earth, and for the first time since the invention of the first instruments, the use of music has become at the same time pregnant and repugnant. Suddenly infinitely amplified by the invention of electricity and the multiplication of its technology, it has become incessant, aggressing night and day, in the commercial streets of city centers, in shopping centers, in arcades, in department stores, in bookstores, in lobbies of foreign banks where one goes to withdraw money, even in swimming pools, even at the beach, in private apartments, in restaurants, in taxis, in the metro, in airports.

Even in airplanes during takeoff and landing.

Even in death camps.

The expression Hatred of Music is meant to convey to what point music can become an object of hatred to someone who once adored it beyond measure.

Music attracts human bodies.

Once again it is the Siren from Homer’s tale. Ulysses, tied to the mast of his ship, is assailed by a melody that attracts him. Music is a hook that catches souls and pulls them into death.

This was the pain of the deported whose bodies rose up against their will.

We must tremble when we hear this: those naked bodies entered the chamber to the sound of music.

Simon Laks wrote: “Music precipitated the end.”

Primo Levi wrote: “In the Lager, music led into the depths.”

In the camp at Auschwitz, Simon Laks was a violinist, then a permanent music copyist (Notenschreiber), finally a conductor.

The Italian chemist Primo Levi heard the Polish conductor Simon Laks.

Like Simon Laks upon his return, in 1945, Primo Levi wrote Se questo è un uomo. His book was refused by several editors. Finally published in 1947, it was no better received than Musiques d’un autre monde. In Se questo è un uomo, Primo Levi wrote that in Auschwitz, no ordinary prisoner, belonging to an ordinary Kommando, could have survived: “The only ones left were the physicians, the tailors, the cobblers, the musicians, the cooks, the still young and attractive homosexuals, the friends or compatriots of certain camp authorities, plus a number of particularly ruthless, robust, and inhuman individuals, solidly deputized by the SS command as Kapo, Blockältester, or similar functions.”

Pierre Vidal-Naquet wrote: “Menuhin could have survived Auschwitz, not Picasso.”

Simon Laks’s reflections can be divided into two questions:

How could music become “involved in the execution of millions of human beings”?

Why did it play a “more than active part”?

Music violates the human body. It makes one stand up. Musical rhythms enthrall bodily rhythms. When exposed to music, the ear cannot close itself. Music, as a power, thus joins all forms of power. The essence of music is nonegalitarian. Hearing and obedience are related. Conductor, performers, followers, such is the structure put in place by its execution. Wherever there is a conductor and performers, there is music. Plato, in his philosophical writings, never imagined distinguishing between discipline and music, war and music, social hierarchy and music. Even the stars: they are Sirens, according to Plato, acoustic suns producing order and universe. Cadence and measure. Marching is cadenced, truncheon blows are cadenced, salutes are cadenced. The primary function, or at least the most quotidian, assigned to the music of the Lagerkapelle, was to provide a rhythm for the departure and return of the Kommandos.

Hearing and shame are twins. In the Bible, in the myth of Creation, anthropomorphic nudity appears together with the “sound of His footsteps.”

Having eaten the fruit of the tree that reveals nakedness, the first man and the first woman, at the same time, hear the sound of Yahweh-Elohim walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze and see that they are naked and take refuge behind the leaves of the clothing tree in order to hide their bodies.

Lying in wait of sound and sexual shame make their appearance in Eden together.

Sight and nudity, hearing and shame are the same.

Seeing and hearing are one and the same instant and this instant is immediately the end of Paradise.

The reality of the Lager and the myth of Eden tell similar stories because the first man and the last man are the same. They unearth the ontology of the same world. They expose the same nudity. They lend an ear to the same call that demands obedience. The voice of lightning is the furious night that the storm brings in its thunder.

The sound of one’s own footsteps; such is the first stratum of silence.

What is God? That we were born.

That we were born of others than ourselves. That we were born in an act in which we did not participate. That we were born in the course of an embrace in which two other bodies than our own were naked: that we wish to see.

It happens that, in the movement of the one toward the other, they moan.

We are the fruit of a shock between two pelvises, naked, incomplete, ashamed before one another, whose union was noisy, rhythmic, moaning.

Hearing and obeying.

The first time Primo Levi heard the band play Rosamunda at the entrance of the camp he could barely suppress the nervous laughter that seized him. Then he saw the battalions returning to the camp with a strange gait: advancing in rows of five, almost rigid, their necks strained, their arms against their bodies, like men made out of wood, the music lifting their legs and tens of thousands of wooden clogs, contracting their bodies like those of automata.

The men were so weakened that their leg muscles against their will obeyed the power of the rhythms that the music of the camp imposed and that Simon Laks conducted.

Primo Levi called music “infernal.”

Although not given to imagery, Primo Levi wrote: “Their souls are dead and it’s the music that pushes them forward as the wind does dry leaves, and takes the place of their will.”

Then he underlines the esthetic pleasure the Germans felt before such matutinal and vespertine choreographies of misfortune.

It was not in order to assuage their pain, nor was it to win the favor of their victims, that the German soldiers provided music in the death camps.

1. It was in order to increase their obedience and to bind them together in the impersonal, nonprivate fusion that all music engenders.

2. It was for pleasure, esthetic pleasure and sadistic enjoyment, felt upon hearing beloved songs and seeing a ballet of humiliation performed by a troupe of those who bore the sins of those who humiliated them.

It was a ritual music.

Primo Levi laid bare the oldest function assigned to music. Music, he writes, was felt to be a “malediction.” It was a “hypnosis of continuous rhythm that annihilates thought and numbs pain.”

I will add what the second and fifth treatises have perhaps shown: music, founded on obedience, derives from the death call.¹

Music is already fully present in the whistle blow of the SS. It is an effective force; it provokes an immediate attitude. Like the camp bell causes everyone to wake up, interrupts the oneiric nightmare to give way to the nightmare of reality. Every time, sound says: “stand up.”

The secret function of music is convocative.

It is the cock’s crow that makes Saint Peter suddenly dissolve into tears.

In Virgil, Alecto climbs onto the roof of a barn and sings (canit) into the curved horn (cornu recurvo) the signal (signum), which assembles the shepherds. Virgil says that this sound is an “infernal voice” (Tartaream vocem).

All the farmers arm themselves and come running.

How can one hear music, any music, without obeying?

How can one hear music from the outside of music?

How can one hear music with closed ears?

Simon Laks, who conducted the orchestra, was not himself any more “exterior” to music just because he conducted it.

Primo Levi continues: “One had to hear it without obeying, without being subjected to it, to understand what it represented, for what premeditated reasons the Germans had instituted such a monstrous rite, and why even today, when one of these innocent little songs comes back to us in memory, we feel the blood turn to ice in our veins.”

Primo Levi continues by saying that these marches and these songs were burned into the body: “They will be the last thing from the Lager we will forget, for they are the voice of the Lager.” It is the instant when the resurgent hum assumes the form of the tarabust. The melos tarabusts the bodily rhythm, merging with the personal acoustic molecule; at that point, Primo Levi writes, music annihilates. Music becomes the “sensory expression” of the determination with which humans proceeded to exterminate humans.

The bond between mother and child, the recognition of one by the other followed by the acquisition of the mother tongue, are forged in a very rhythmic acoustic incubation that predates the moment of birth and continues thereafter, recognizable by cries and voice exercises, then by ditties and nursery rhymes, names and nicknames, recurring and restraining phrases that become orders.

Intrauterine hearing is described by naturalists as remote since the placenta distances the noise of the heart and the intestines, the water reduces the intensity of the sounds, making them deeper, transporting them in large waves massaging the body. Deep in the uterus thus reigns a low and constant background noise, which acousticians compare to a “muffled whisper.” The noise of the outside world itself is perceived as a “muffled, soft, low drone” above which rises the melos of the mother’s voice, repeating the tonic accent, the prosody, the phrasing that she adds to the language she speaks. This is the individual basis of the hum.

Plotinus, Enneads V, 8, 30.

Plotinus says that “sensory music is engendered by a music that is anterior to the sensory.” Music is related to the other world.

In the mother’s womb, the heart of the embryo allows the child to endure the noise of the mother’s heart and to transform it into its own rhythm.

Music is irresistible to the soul. Therefore it suffers irresistibly.

An inevitable acoustic assault premeditates life itself. Man’s respiration is not human. Before the emergence of Pangaea, the pre-biological rhythm of waves anticipated cardiac rhythm and the rhythm of pulmonary respiration.

The rhythm of the tides, related to the nychthemeral rhythm, splits us in two. Everything splits us in two.

Prenatal hearing prepares for the postnatal recognition of the mother. Familiar sounds outline the visual epiphany of the mother’s unknown body, which the newborn abandons like a dead skin.

As the mother softly sings, her arms immediately reach out toward the cry of the infant. Without rest these arms rock the child like an object that is still floating.

From the first hour, sounds in the air cause the newborn to wince, modify the respiratory rhythm (the breath, that is, the psychè, that is, the animatio, that is, the soul), transform the cardiac rhythm, make the eyes blink and the limbs move in an uncoordinated way.

From the first hour, hearing the cries of other newborns sets off his own agitation and makes him shed his own tears.

Sound gathers us, governs us, organizes us. But we open sound within us. If we focus our attention on identical sounds that are repeated at equal intervals, we do not hear them one by one. We spontaneously organize them into groups of two or four sounds. Sometimes three; rarely five; never more. And it is no longer the sounds that seem to be repeated but the groups that appear to follow one another.

Time itself is thus aggregated and segregated.

Henri Bergson took the example of the mechanical clock. But we always group by two the sounds of the seconds, as if electric clocks had conserved within themselves the ghost of a pendulum’s dance.

People who live in France call this sound group tic-tac. And it sincerely and almost indisputably appears to us as if the time between tic and tac is shorter than between the tac, which seems to terminate the double beat, and the tic, which seems to begin the following group.

Neither the rhythmic grouping nor the temporal segregation is a physical fact.

Why then does the spontaneous grouping seem to correspond to a pulsation of attention? Why such a tyrannical pulse of the soul? Why are humans present to this world in a way that is not instantaneous but that relies on a minimum of simultaneity and succession?

Why does the human present leave the place for language implicit?

Humans immediately hear phrases. To them a string of sounds immediately forms a melody. Humans are the contemporaries of slightly more than the instant. And this is how language takes form in them and enslaves them to music. One cannot help but think that they move toward their prey on something else than the succession of a single foot. And it is by this “more than a single foot” that they run without falling and come to mimic and accentuate and constrain predation in dance.

If asked, man has an incredibly difficult time achieving arrhythmia. It is impossible for him to pull off the most irregular possible succession of claps.

Or at least it is impossible for him to hear it.

In an article published in 1903, R. McDougall proposed to call “dead interval” the very particular silence that, to the human ear, separates two successive rhythmic groups. The silence that separates these groups is a paradoxical duration that starts with the “end” and is interrupted by the “beginning.”

This silence that humanity hears does not exist.

R. McDougall called it “dead.”

There are not two “sides” of music.

This “death” corresponds to the production of music as well as to the perception of music. Simon Laks does not see things differently from Primo Levi. Acoustic perception is not opposed to acoustic emission.

There are no damned, facing malediction.

There is a force that simultaneously turns back on itself and similarly transforms those who produce it by plunging them into the same rhythmic, acoustic, and bodily obedience. Simon Laks died in Paris on December 11, 1983. Primo Levi took his own life on April 11, 1987. Simon Laks wrote very clearly: “There is no lack of publications that declare, not without a certain pomposity, that music kept the emaciated prisoners alive and gave them the strength to resist. Others maintain that the same music had the opposite effect, that it demoralized the wretched and precipitated their end. I for one share the latter opinion.”

In Musiques d’un autre monde, Simon Laks tells the following story.

In 1943, in the camp at Auschwitz, for the Christmas vigil, Major Schwartzhuber ordered the musicians of the Lager to play German and Polish Christmas carols for the sick at the women’s hospital.

Simon Laks and his musicians went to the women’s hospital.

At first, all the women were overcome by tears, in particular the Polish women, to the point where their sobbing drowned out the music.

Later, cries replaced the tears. The sick cried: “Stop! Stop! Get out! Leave! Let us die in peace!”

It happened that Simon Laks was the only musician who understood the meaning of the Polish words that the sick women shrieked. The musicians looked at Simon Laks, who gestured to them. And they withdrew.

Simon Laks said that he had never thought until then that music could do such harm.

Music harms.

Polybius wrote: “One must not believe Ephorus when he says that music was given to man as the trickery of a charlatan.” Ephorus did not speak in such terms. He wrote: “Music was made to charm and bewitch.” What Polybius calls “charlatanry of music” refers to its initiatory, zoomorphic, ritual, cavernous, shamanic, drunk, delirious, omophagic, enthusiastic origin.

Gabriel Fauré said of music that writing it as well as hearing it led to the “desire for inexistent things.”

Music is the reign of the “dead interval.”

It is the irreversible that visits. It is the past that “repasses.” It is nowhere that comes here. It is the return of that which is without return. It is death in daylight. It is the aseme in language.

In Plato, The Republic III, 401 d.

Music penetrates to the interior of the body and takes hold of the soul. The flute induces a dance movement in the limbs of humans, followed by an irresistible salacious squirming. Music’s prey is the human body. Music is invasion and capture of this body. It plunges those it tyrannizes into obedience by snaring them in the trap of its song. The Sirens become the odos of Odysseus (ode in Greek means both path and song). Orpheus, the father of songs, softens stones and tames lions and harnesses them to plows. Music captures, it captivates in the place where it resounds and where humanity tramples toward its rhythm, it hypnotizes and causes man to abandon the expressible. In hearing, man is held captive.

I am surprised that people are surprised that those among them who love the most refined and complex music, who are capable of crying while listening to it, are at the same time capable of ferocity. Art is not the opposite of barbarity. Reason is not the contradiction of violence. One cannot oppose the arbitrary and the State, peace and war, bloodshed and structured thought, because arbitrariness, death, violence, blood, thought are not free from a logic that remains a logic even when it defies reason.

Societies are not free from the chaotic entropy that was their origin: it will be their destiny.

The sideration of hearing leads to death.

The song-birdcall allows for shooting and killing. This function persists in the most sophisticated music.

During the extermination of millions of Jews, the administration of the camps deliberately had recourse to such a function. Wagner, Brahms, Schubert were its Sirens. Vladimir Jankélévitch’s reaction, abstaining from listening to and interpreting German music, was national.

Perhaps it is not the nationality of the works that should be sanctioned in music, but the origin of music itself. Originary music itself.

Formerly, philologists claimed that bell² could be derived from bellum—that the resounding and petrifying bell derived from war.

R. Murray Shafer reports that during the Second World War the Germans confiscated thirty-three thousand bells in Europe and melted them down in order to make cannons. Once peace was restored, temples, cathedrals, and churches reclaimed their property; the cannons of defeat were delivered to them. Pastors and priests melted them down to make them bells again.

The bell is derived from the animal. The English word bell comes from bellam, to bellow. The bell is the bellowing of man.

Goethe, at the age of seventy-five, wrote: “Military music unfolds me like an opening fist.”

In the cloister of San Marco in Florence there is an intrusive bell.

It is a bronze bell with a broken black and red wooden beam, placed on the ground before the door of the chapterhouse, in the quiet courtyard of the monastery.

It is called the Piagnona. It was the bell that summoned the crowd, which stormed the convent to take Savonarola away.

As a sign of atonement, the bell was exiled to San Salvatore al Monte and thrashed the entire length of its journey.

The Nuremberg tribunal should have ordered Richard Wagner to be beaten in effigy once a year in the streets of every German town.

Patriotic music is an infantile imprint; it sweeps one away like an overpowering jolt, a shiver bristling up and down the spine, filling with emotion, with a surprising adhesion.

Kasimierz Gwizdka wrote: “When the prisoners of the Konzentrationslager at Auschwitz, exhausted from their day of labor, stumbling along in marching columns, heard in the distance the orchestra playing at the gates, they quickly found their feet again. The music gave them extraordinary courage and strength to survive.”

Romana Duraczowa said: “We’re returning from work. The camp is approaching. The Birkenau camp orchestra is playing popular foxtrots. The orchestra infuriates us. How we hate that music! How we hate those musicians! Those dolls are seated, clad in navy blue dresses with a little white collar. Not only are they seated but they are allowed chairs! The music is supposed to rejuvenate us. It mobilizes us like the sound of a trumpet during a battle. The music even stimulates the dying nags who move their hoofs to the rhythm of the dance being played.”

Pindar, Pythian, I, 1.

“Golden lyre that the step obeys.”

Simon Laks wrote that it seemed to him that hearing music exerted a depressing effect on extreme misfortune. When he conducted it, it seemed to him that it added the passivity that it induced to the physical and moral prostration to which hunger and the smell of death destined the bodies of the other prisoners. He adds: “Certainly, during the Sunday concerts some of the spectators around us enjoyed listening to us. But it was a passive pleasure, without participation, without reaction. There were also some who cursed us, who insulted us, who looked down on us, who considered us as intruders who did not share their fate.”

Thucydides, echoing the opening of Pindar’s first Pythian, identified marching in step as a function of music: “Music is not destined to inspire a trance in humans but to allow them to march in step and to stay in close formation. Without music, a battle line runs the risk of being disrupted as it advances for the charge.” Elias Canetti repeated that the origin of rhythm was walking on two feet, giving rise to the metric of ancient poems. Human walking on two feet, pursuing the trampling of the prey and of the herds of reindeer, then of bison, then of horses. He saw the tracks of animals as the first text to be deciphered by the humans who followed them. Tracks are the rhythmic notation of noise. Trampling the ground in large numbers is the first dance, and it did not originate with humans.

Still in our days: it is the entrance of the human mass, trampling en masse the floor of a concert or ballet hall. Then, they all fall silent and come together by denying themselves all bodily noises. Then, they all clap their hands rhythmically, shouting, creating a great ritual clamor and finally, all rising together, once again as a mass they trample the floor of the hall where the music was performed.

Music is related to the pack of death. Heeling: that is what Primo Levi discovered when he first discovered the music played in the Lager.

Tolstoy remarks: “Where one wants to have slaves, one must have as much music as possible.” These words struck Maxim Gorky. They are quoted in Conversations at Yasnaya Polyana.

The unity of the funeral pack is in its trampling. Dancing cannot be distinguished from music. The effective cry, the whistle — residues of the birdcall — accompany the murderous heeling. Music gathers the packs like orders make them stand up. Silence breaks up packs. I prefer silence to music. Language and music belong to a genealogy that still persists and that can turn one’s stomach.

Orders are the oldest roots of language: dogs obey orders, as do humans. An order is a death sentence that the victims understand to the point of obedience. Domesticating and ordering are the same thing. Human children are first and foremost harassed by orders; which is to say that they are harassed by cries of death dressed in language.

Slaves are never objects but always animals. Dogs are no longer altogether animals but already servants because they are obedient: they hear, they respond to the voice-birdcall, they seem to understand the meaning even though it serves only to subject them to the melos.

Music enchants the soul and accentuates actions like the signals that Pavlov addressed to his dogs.

The conductor’s baton silences the cacophony of the instruments; it installs a silence that awaits music; against this background of deathly silence it suddenly causes the eruption of the first measure.

A pack of humans or animals, or even dogs, is always wild.

It is only domesticated when it responds to orders, rises at the sound of the whistle, and crowds together in halls and pays.

Children and dogs jump up and down when they find themselves at the edge of the waves. They spontaneously shout and yelp because of the noise and the movement of the sea.

Dogs turn their head in the direction of unusual sounds.

They prick their ears.

They hold still, their nose, their gaze, their ears directed toward the strange sound.

The conductor is the entire spectacle of that which the audience obeys. The audience gathers to see a man standing alone, elevated, who at will makes an obedient herd speak and be silent.

The conductor makes rain and clear skies with his baton. He has a golden branch at the tip of his fingers.

An obedient herd means a pack of domesticated animals. A pack of domesticated animals defines human society, that is, an army founded on the death of the other.

They march to the baton.

A human pack gathers to see a domesticated pack. Among the Bororos, the best singer becomes the leader of the group. Orders and effective song are indistinguishable. The master of the social body is nature’s Kappellmeister. Every conductor is a tamer, a Führer. Everyone who applauds brings his hands in front of his face, then heels, then shouts.

In Theresienstadt, H. G. Adler could not bear to hear opera arias sung in the camp.

In Theresienstadt, Hedda Grab-Kernmayr said: “I can’t understand how, in the camp, Gideon Klein could compose a Wiegenlied (a lullaby).”

Shortly after arriving at the Theresienstadt camp, on March 21, 1942, Hedda Grab-Kernmayr began to sing Dvořák’s Biblical Songs. On April 4 it was the Pürglitzer farewell program. On May 3 she sang Carlo Taube’s Ghetto Lullaby, then again on June 5, and again on June 11 in the courtyard of the Hamburg barracks. She participated in the premiere of The Lost Fiancée on November 28. Then it was The Kiss in 1943, Carmen in 1944. On April 24, 1945, a typhus epidemic broke out. On May 5 the SS retreated. On the 10th, the Red Army entered the camp and the quarantine began. During the months of June and July 1945 the prisoners were allowed to leave Theresienstadt.

Once she had left the camp, she never sang again. She emigrated to the western United States. She no longer wanted to speak about music. With Marianne Zadikow-May, with Eva Glaser, with Doctor Kurt Wehle in New York, with Doctor Adler in London, with the violinist Joža Karas, she refused to speak about music.

One of the most difficult, the most profound, the most disorienting things to have been expressed about the music that was composed and played in the death camps, was said by the violinist Karel Fröhlich, who survived Auschwitz, in an interview recorded in New York by Joža Karas on December 2, 1973. Karel Fröhlich suddenly says that the ghetto-camp of Theresienstadt brought together “ideal conditions” for composing and interpreting music.

Insecurity was absolute, tomorrow was given to death, art was the same as survival, the test of time was the test of the passage of the most interminable and empty time. To all these conditions, Karel Fröhlich added another “essential factor,” impossible in normal societies:

“We didn’t really play for a public, because it was continually disappearing.”

The musicians played for audiences that were dying and that they themselves would imminently join by boarding the train. Karel Fröhlich said:

“This at the same time ideal and abnormal aspect was insane.”

Viktor Ullmann agreed with Karel Fröhlich, adding for his part the mental concision in which the modern composer is placed by the impossibility to write down on paper the sounds that haunt the mind. Viktor Ullmann died in Auschwitz, upon his arrival at the camp on October 17, 1944.

The last work composed by Viktor Ullmann in the camp is entitled Seventh Sonata. He dedicated it to his children Max, Jean, and Felice. He dated it August 22, 1944. Then, continuing the reflections of Karel Fröhlich, Viktor Ullmann scribbled a sarcastic copyright at the bottom of the first page. There is an ultimate humor. Ultimate humor is language at the moment it passes its own limit.

“Execution rights are reserved by the composer until his death.”