An Archive of Emotions. Amateur Songs and Singing in German-Jewish Migration

• In Event: Age, Emotion, Representation: Revisiting Jewish Migration History

Abstract

Migration is an overwhelming emotional experience: it disrupts migrants’ lives, forces them to cope with unsettling experiences, and challenges their sense of belonging, identity, and home. How they cope emotionally with this process is critical in shaping the outcome of their migration. A crucial way of coping with a radically changed reality and the accompanying emotions is through collective musical practice. Between 1933 and 1941, almost half a million Jews fled Central Europe to escape the Nazi regime. They found refuge in countries across the globe: in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Oceania. For these refugees, coming together informally with compatriots and families in emigration to sing was a popular activity. Ordinary migrants (often without artistic training) wrote countless songs about their experiences and performed these within the migrant communities in their new homelands. Thus, in dozens of countries of refuge across the globe, they created an internal space for coming to terms with their challenging present, difficult emotions, and ambivalent memories.

This paper focuses on the hitherto unexplored corpus of German-language songs, ditties, verses, and occasional poems written worldwide by refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe. This unconventional genre of sources constitutes a significant yet untapped historical source group for the Jewish experience of migration, refuge, and flight against the background of Nazism and the Holocaust. Conceptually, this project understands writing and performing songs as a significant, conscious, and purposeful practice of the rank-and-file immigrants. It operates from the hypothesis that writing and singing these songs was a widespread activity among the migrants and had a profound meaning: it both commented on and informed their emotional, social, and communal life. It proceeds from the assumption that this widespread musical practice - writing the songs and jointly singing them - constitutes a prime locus for exploring emotions, memory, and communication of migrants and refugees. In reading these sources in such a way, this paper aims to uncover how Jewish refugees coped with radical change through developing musical practices, how they used these as social, psychological, and cultural resources, and how singing was relevant for rebuilding social and cultural activities.

Author

• Viola Alianov- Rautenberg, German Historical Institute/ UC Berkeley