Persecution and Resistance Resounded: Trajectories of WWII Musical Memorializations in Germany

This special issue of Music & Politics presents some of the major outcomes of a three-year-long collaborative research project between the University of Cologne and the Leuphana University in Lüneburg. The researchers set out to explore the roles of music in past and current memorialization and commemoration practices in Germany. While working on separate case studies, similar issues concerning the memorialization of WWII emerged. Through regular discussions on memory theories, a set of concepts arising from modern memory studies has come to shape our understanding of socially shared memories and the role of music in memorialization processes.

Focusing on memories of persecution by and resistance to the National Socialist regime during WWII, the issue explores a timely matter. As the memories of WWII resistance and persecution have been reinterpreted and recast musically across the decades up until today, they emerge as an arena of critical interrogation and collective mobilization to address a variety of current social issues in Germany, including socioeconomic marginalization and inequalities based on class, ethnicity, religion, and gender; racism against immigrants; and the resurgence of far-right and xenophobic movements.

Brought together by a common overarching interest in the musical expression of politically charged memory, the researchers worked on a number of case studies whose major outcomes are assembled in the articles of this issue. These case studies present a wide spectrum of musical genres and practices ranging from historic Yiddish songs, partisan hymns, and Hungarian dance music to German schlager, rap, hip-hop, punk, and rock music. Despite the variety of musical practices under study, the researchers were able to apply similar theories, concepts, and methods. To varying degrees, ethnographic fieldwork techniques such as participant observation and conducting interviews laid the foundation for the present articles.

While the four authors are all rooted in the disciplines of ethnomusicology and popular music studies, the core theoretical elements presented in this issue are derived from memory studies. This special issue thus explores popular music practices engaged in the memorialization of WWII, with a focus on persecution by the German National Socialist regime, as well as of resistance against them. Taking the vantage point of four selected case studies, the respective articles inspect the ways in which such musical memorializations have sustained social and identity struggles in different periods of European postwar history, and, conversely, how shifting concerns and conflicts at different turns of that history have triggered the rediscovery of the past and of its political and moral legacy. Drawing connections between memory studies and music scholarship, the authors consider socially shared memories in music as mediating between narrated past, lived present, and imagined futures as a vehicle of complex (post-)memorial stratifications of temporal, historical, and political salience.

Trajectories of Memory Studies

To clarify the notion of socially shared memories, a preliminary remark on memory and memory studies may be in order. Scholars tend to divide memory studies into several phases. The foundation of modern-day memory studies is usually traced back to the early twentieth century, particularly in the works of sociologist Maurice Halbwachs and art historian Aby Warburg. Halbwachs’s monumental studies Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925) and La mémoire collective (1939) introduced the idea of socially shared memories and their importance for societies. He emphasized the mutual dependency of individual memory and collective memory (mémoire collective) and the centrality of social frameworks (cadres sociaux) in the constitution of memory.[1] Warburg, in turn, wrote extensively about the memory-making potential of cultural symbols in the visual arts.[2] Fairly recently, a renewed interest in collective memory has emerged in the context of “new cultural memory studies,”[3] which is most prominently identified with Pierre Nora’s work on French lieux de mémoire[4] and Jan and Aleida Assmann’s work on “cultural and collective memory.”[5]

Within the context of current memory studies, perception of memory has significantly shifted towards the idea of memory as a process.[6] This refocusing of memory has found expression in a series of new conceptualizations (some of which are discussed in more detail below) reflecting this processuality of memory. These new conceptualizations include the role of narratives[7] and imagination[8] in the social functioning of memory, as well as its multidirectional character,[9] its reliance on iteration in the form of prosthetic[10] and post-memory,[11] and its relevance for the politics of the present.[12] The majority of these new conceptualizations of socially shared memory have been developed by specifically reflecting on WWII memory and its societal and cultural relevance. The memorialization of WWII and the Holocaust, therefore, had a profound impact on modern memory studies and their perspective on cultural memory itself.

Studies of socially shared memories have predominantly concentrated on film and literature,[13] journalism,[14] photography,[15] theater, dance, and architecture,[16] as well as the Internet.[17] While in these instances the focus lies on visual culture and media, music and sound have been largely overlooked in memory studies. This has led to a gap in both research and theory building regarding the field of music and memory. Bijsterveld and van Dijck contend that “auditory factors are both underestimated and under-theorized as constitutive of remembrance.”[18] However, the field of music scholarship has witnessed an increasing number of publications dealing with processes of memorialization, often construing music making not only as a site for reading out history but also as a tool for constructing history narratives through performative experience.[19]

It has already been thoroughly established that music not only reflects and communicates existing societal values but may also actively contribute to building and consolidating challenging social structures, identities, behaviors, as well as discursive and interpretive paradigms.[20] Furthermore, a vast number of studies have explored musical performances and musical signification as a primary experiential site.[21] Paramount here is the affective power of music and its ability to articulate socially and existentially cogent meanings through emotion, communicative immediacy, and lived experience.[22] Musical practice, or as Christopher Small put it, “musicking,”[23] interweaves these various layers and provides a unique vantage point from which the articles in this special issue investigate memorial practices and the ways in which individuals and groups continuously negotiate and reconfigure the boundaries between remembrance and oblivion of the past.

The intersection of music scholarship and memory studies, and particularly the transfer of theoretical concepts and issues across the two disciplinary domains, is a fairly new and yet to be fully explored territory of research, to whose growth the present collection aims to contribute. “Sounding memories” as an instrument of memory studies provides a framework to tap into this new territory.

Sounding Memories

This special issue considers a complex spectrum of musical conjugations of memory, ranging from the recuperation and reworking of historic songs into new compositions to the composition of new songs with historical references. The articles demonstrate how memories of WWII are evoked through various procedures of musical signification and how the presented musical resources speak to collective sensibilities mobilized in the process. Musical memorializations also include music that does not explicitly deal with the memory of resistance to and persecution by the Nazi regime but is situated in memorializing contexts, such as official commemorative events or other politically laden contexts.

The special issue looks at musical memorializations as agents of active memory. Stressing the affective dimension of music, Simon Frith argues that music has the power to conjure up imagined worlds—past ones as well as present and future ones.[24] We contend that the performance of memory through music represents a form of direct engagement with the lifeworld in the present and a way to envision possible futures. The articles treat musical practices as a window onto the different and changing modes of memorialization of resistance to and persecution by the Nazi regime. We acknowledge that memory has the potential to be a “powerful agent of change.”[25] Special attention is thus paid to how memory of persecution and resistance as sounded in music offers a critical arena to address current social issues. From these conceptual considerations shared among the authors emerged the notion of “sounding memories” as a way to place the musical dimension of memory and memory making at the center of inquiry and to facilitate the dialogue between musicology and memory studies.[26]

The articles thus provide an entry into key areas of sounding memory research. Firstly, they inquire into memories that take musical forms, such as musical pieces or sound snippets. Secondly, the articles explore intermedial connections between music and other expressive forms, such as literature and material culture. Lastly, the notion lends itself to an exploration of the processual character of memory making through music with a keen eye to the social mediations of sounding memories and their political valence. Sounding memories pays attention to the actualizing of the past and the connection of different temporal layers through music and musical practices. While the special issue addresses the musical mediation of existing memories, it also highlights that a (re)sounding of memories has the ability to activate affective bonds between individual and collective subjectivities and past/historical events.

The Case Studies

Monika E. Schoop’s article addresses the musical performances of the collaborative project between Esther and her son Joram Bejerano and the rappers Kutlu Yurtseven and Rossi Pennino from Microphone Mafia. The multigenerational project mixes old resistance songs with hip-hop elements and readings from Holocaust survivor Esther Bejerano’s memoirs. Schoop traces and unravels the various sounding memories enmeshed in the project’s performances. She shows how both the legacies of Holocaust survivors and of the Gastarbeiter are used to speak up against racism, discrimination, and xenophobia in Germany.

The article by Martin Ringsmut offers insights into musical commemorations of the Sinti minority in Germany. The article follows the musician Markus Reinhardt and Maro Drom, a minority-led grassroots organization in Cologne, in their efforts to organize and host several music festivals in Germany. Ringsmut argues that the festival serves as a transferential space in which family memories, identities and positionalities are mediated and negotiated. In doing so, Maro Drom’s sounding memories advocate against racism and discrimination. Ringsmut explores how victims’ and survivors’ experiences are represented and shared through music and how memories are reenacted, reclaimed, and reinterpreted by second- and third-generation German Sinti.

Thomas Köhn’s article features the Berlin-based Jewish-German rapper Ben Salomo, who in his music as well as his autobiography deals with collective memories and family memories of the Holocaust and World War II. These memories interweave with various historical, political, and religious discourses with references to ancient times, Jewish liturgy, and contemporary processes of othering. Focusing on the 2016 track “Identität” (identity), Köhn’s article examines how memory narratives are negotiated variously in the track, in the autobiography, and in an interview conducted in 2019.

Sidney König’s contribution examines the relationship of 1970s German “Agit-Rock” band Ton Steine Scherben with the memory of WWII, leading to a more general consideration of the role of WWII memory in pre-unification West German society and the contribution of popular music to an interrogation of the political status of memory. Throughout their career, the “Scherben” made continual implicit and explicit references in songs, interviews, and other media to the horrors of WWII and their legacy in the German postwar political and cultural landscape. The article considers why and how the Scherben used the memory of WWII to further their leftist countercultural agenda, and elaborates on the war’s presence (or absence) and relevance in 1970s German society and its implications for the conflicts between war and postwar generations.

Trajectories of Sounding WWII Memorialization

In engaging with a variety of foci and approaches, the authors explore memory within the context of their various subjects but also pursue a set of common themes that traverse and help further define the notion of sounding memories. For example, a common thread spanning the articles is their post-generational setting and their focus on second-hand or—as Marianne Hirsch puts it—postmemory. Hirsch refers to the relationship that successive generations have with the trauma of a preceding generation, describing a “structure of inter- and transgenerational return of traumatic knowledge and embodied experience.”[27] Due to the powerful impact of this traumatic memory, subsequent generations conceive of them as memories in their own right, because “[p]ostmemory’s connection to the past is thus actually mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation.”[28] With the end of the “era of witness”[29] the focus shifts from the first-hand memories of those who have lived through the experiences of persecution and resistance during WWII to successive generations. This is especially visible in the articles by Ringsmut and Köhn, where they show how the descendants of German Sinti and Jews mediate the wartime memories of their parents and grandparents. At the same time, the end of the era of witness sees a heightened positioning of the last remaining survivors and first-hand witnesses. Schoop’s article on the collaboration between Esther Bejerano and Microphone Mafia provides insights into a multi-generational setting by exploring the various temporal and contextual mnemonic layers that arise through their collaboration. While the intergenerational ties in these three articles are primarily formed through family descendancy and direct collaboration, the article by König broadens the scope, exploring sounding memories in a more general postwar context in Germany. König’s article on memory reverberations in the music of Ton Steine Scherben (from the late 1960s to the 1980s) deals with the unease of German youth living in a climate of denial and silence in which memorialization is denied.

The central importance of sounding memories in voicing different narratives is echoed in every article to some extent. Narratives serve as the very foundation upon which memorialization of any kind is built, and sounding memories are no exception. Memory studies scholar Ann Rigney has extensively discussed the relationship between narrative and memory. In essence, she argues that memories can only function in society because they necessarily need to become stories to fulfill any kind of communicative function at all. She points out that “recollections are stored and transmitted primarily through stories, even when these take the condensed form of a photograph.”[30] Echoing memory studies scholar Astrid Erll’s notion of premediation,[31] Rigney argues that older memory narratives may serve as a template for more recent ones. Her argument is based on the idea “that ‘narrativity’ is a cognitive scheme rather than a property of events; accordingly, that experiences are not in themselves stories, but become narrativized through the application of models of storytelling which help turn events into meaningful structures.”[32] In both Ringsmut’s and Köhn’s articles, narratives take on specific structures in the form of victim narratives on the one hand and survivor narratives on the other, reflecting a conflict between external attributions of victimhood versus an emphasis on survival and personal agency. Another type of narrative, that of the perpetrator or deflection narrative (as well as the resistance towards it), is reflected in König’s article. The curious dynamics of large-scale obfuscation, deflection, and outright denial in a society longing to forget are contrasted with the inextinguishable echoes and traces of memory and guilt found in its very own fringes.

Sounding memories, as the articles in this special issue illustrate, are multidirectional, and often combine memories of persecution and resistance with other mnemonic forms and narratives. It is one of the key themes of this issue, because the blending of memories of different provenances is a phenomenon that is to a certain extent present in every article. The term multidirectional memory itself is supplied by Michael Rothberg; it conceptually overlaps to some degree with Hirsch’s postmemory. Rothberg understands multidirectional memory as a concept opposed to the idea that memory is a struggle over resources in which individual memories compete. Instead, he views it as multidirectional: “as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing, as productive and not private.”[33] Multidirectional memory allows the understanding of the phenomenon of different memories connecting in various ways. It “considers a series of interventions through which social actors bring multiple traumatic pasts into a heterogeneous and changing post-World War II present.”[34] These metaphorical and analogical appropriations are the main process by which connections between different histories and memories are established. Martin Ringsmut’s article shows how the Reinhardt family in Cologne shares their family memories with a greater, non-minority public by not only mediating wartime memories but also those of the postwar era, pointing out the continuities in marginalization and discrimination of Sinti survivors. Monika Schoop illustrates this quite clearly in her article. The performances of Esther and Joram Bejerano and Kutlu Yurtseven and Rossi Pennino of Microphone Mafia interweave the personal memories of the Holocaust survivor Bejerano with memories of Turkish and Italian Gastarbeiter and the right-wing terrorist attacks in 1990’s Germany.

As the articles in this issue show, sounding memories is often used to express marginalized memories or to provide alternatives and counter-narratives to more established or institutionalized forms of the memorialization of WWII. The ethnographic materials presented in the articles indicate that memory making through sounding memories is a highly affective, embodied, and experiential phenomenon through which actors forge and articulate social relations by establishing “living connections” with non-biographical memories in the form of post- and prosthetic memories. This is prominently exemplified in Ringsmut’s article, where music festivals and concerts are shown to provide an experiential site in which people form personal and meaningful bonds to a past they themselves did not live through. The articles by König and Köhn further highlight this relationship by examining the specific musical poetics that artists employ to create these affective bonds.

The immediate postwar era, marked by a coalition of silence[35] (see especially König’s article) on the one hand, and the continuity of racial discrimination against various persecuted groups on the other (see Ringsmut’s article on the case of the German Sinti), constitutes the first layer of temporality of our investigations. The formation of grassroots organizations committed to the historical reevaluation of WWII and the increasingly distinct expressions of subcultural critique in the 1970s and 1980s provide a further temporal layer for our collection. In fact, many of the musicians and memory activists discussed in this special issue belong to a post-generation that took on the challenge to keep the memories alive and expound their relevance to a changing German society.

As we progress towards the present, the articles show how formerly marginalized or voiceless memories gradually emerge in the arena of public memorialization, and newer memories such as those of the right-wing terrorist attacks in the 1990s are woven into the fabric of WWII mnemonic narratives. The global rise of the far right, including in Germany, has become a catalyst for new memorializations of WWII. The political causes that are frequently served by the memorialization of WWII include above all the opposition to the far right and racism, including anti-Semitism and antiziganism. But memorializations are also used in the context of reconciliation efforts between minority and majority members as well as in the transcultural mediation of heritage.

The present issue is particularly attentive to how musical memorialization intersects with politics, thereby referencing investigations that have emphasized the role of music in social movements, collective mobilization, resistance, protest, and activism, as well as in the consolidation of political and ideological power structures.[36] In memory studies, it has been repeatedly stated that cultural memories (and by extension sounding memories) are not just objective representations of the past, but are instead produced, applied, and shared by people for their own purposes and political agendas.[37] The articles in this volume suggest that sounding memories play a significant role in bringing people together to pursue similar goals and mediating political agendas, which are linked to but also go beyond mere remembrance.

Acknowledgements

The editors and authors of this issue would like to thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DfG) for financing the research project Sounding Memories, which provided the data for the articles contained in this special issue. Furthermore, we thank all participants who took part in our ethnographic fieldwork, many of whom often shared additional advice and suggestions for our research. We would also like to thank Federico Spinetti, Professor for Ethnomusicology at the University of Cologne, Germany, for his work in realizing this research project and for his continued support of our efforts. Finally, our thanks goes to Music & Politics editors Christi-Anne Castro and Gabriela Cruz for having accommodated and helped us during the production of this issue.

Bibliography

• Abels, Birgit. “Music, Affect and Atmospheres: Meaning and Meaningfulness in Palauan omengeredakl.” The International Journal of Traditional Arts 2 (2018): 1–17.
• Assmann, Aleida. “Kultur als Lebenswelt und Monument”. In Kultur als Lebenswelt und Monument, edited by Aleida Assmann and Dietrich Harth, 11–25. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1991.
• Assmann, Aleida. Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009.
• Assmann, Aleida, and Linda Shortt. Memory and Political Change. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354241.
• Assmann, Jan. “Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität..” In Kultur und Gedächtnis, edited by Jan Assmann and Tonio Hölscher, 9–19. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988.
• Berger, Harris M. “Call and Response: Music, Power, and the Ethnomusicological Study of Politics and Culture.” Ethnomusicology 58, no. 2 (2014): 315–20. https://doi.org/10.5406/ethnomusicology.58.2.0315.
• Biddle, Ian, and Vanessa Knights, eds. Music, National Identity and the Politics of Location: Between the Global and the Local. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007.
• Bijsterveld, Karin, ed. Soundscapes of the Urban Past: Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013. https://doi.org/10.14361/transcript.9783839421796
• Bijsterveld, Karin, and José van Dijck, eds. Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. https://doi.org/10.5117/9789089641328.
• Bithell, Caroline. “The Past in Music: Introduction.” Ethnomusicology Forum 15, no. 1 (2006): 3–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/17411910600634213.
• Brabec de Mori, Bernd, and Anthony Seeger. “Introduction: Considering Music, Humans, and Non-humans.” Ethnomusicology Forum 22, no. 3 (2013): 269–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2013.844527.
• Confino, Alon. “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method.” The American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (1997): 1386–403. https://doi.org/10.2307/2171069.
• DeNora, Tia. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511489433.
• Erll, Astrid. Film und kulturelle Erinnerung. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008.
• Erll, Astrid. “Remembering across Time, Space, and Cultures: Premediation, Remediation and the ‘Indian Mutiny.’” In Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, edited by Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney, 109–38. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110217384.2.109.
• Erll, Astrid. Memory in Culture. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230321670.
• Erll, Astrid. “Travelling Memory.” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 4–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2011.605570.
• Feld, Steven. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.
• Frith, Simon. “Music and Identity.” In Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, 108–50. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446221907.n7.
• Giesen, Bernhard. “The Trauma of Perpetrators: The Holocaust as the Traumatic Reference of German National Identity.” In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, 112–54. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520936768.
• Halbwachs, Maurice. Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1925.
• Halbwachs, Maurice. La mémoire collective. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950 [1939].
• Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
• Hofman, Ana. “The Affective Turn in Ethnomusicology.” Музикологија / Musicology 1, no. 18 (2015): 35–54. https://doi.org/10.2298/MUZ1518035H.
• Hoskins, Andrew. “Digital Network Memory.” In Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, edited by Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney, 91–106. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009.
• Keightley, Emily, and Michael Pickering. The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Practice. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137271549.
• Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
• Neiger, Motti, Oren Meyers, and Eyal Zandberg. On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230307070.
• Nora, Pierre, ed. Les lieux de mémoire. Paris: Gallimard, 1984–92.
• Plate, Liedeke, and Anneke Smelik, eds. Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 2013. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203070291.
• Rigney, Ann. “Cultural Memory Studies: Mediation, Narrative, and the Aesthetic.” In Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies, edited by Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen, 65–76. London: Routledge, 2016.
• Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.
• Ruchatz, Jens. “Zeit des Theaters, Zeit der Fotografie.” In Theater und Medien / Theatre and the Media. Grundlagen - Analysen - Perspektiven. Eine Bestandsaufnahme, edited by Henri Schoenmakers, Stefan Bläske, Kay Kirchmann, and Jens Ruchatz, 109–16. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008. https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839410646-008.
• Schoop, Monika E. “‘A Living Memorial for the Edelweißpiraten’: Musical Memories of Cologne’s Anti-Hitler Youth.” Popular Music and Society 44, no. 2 (2021): 193–211. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2020.1820784.
• Shelemay, Kay Kaufman. Let Jasmine Rain Down: Songs and Remembrance among Syrian Jews. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998.
• Small, Christopher. Music, Society, Education. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996.
• Spinetti, Federico. “Punk Rock on the Gothic Line: Resounding the World War II Antifascist Resistenza in Contemporary Italy.” In Popular Music and Society 44, no. 2 (2021): 212–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2020.1820785.
• Spinetti, Federico, Monika E. Schoop, and Ana Hofman. “Introduction to Music and the Politics of Memory: Resounding Antifascism across Borders.” In Popular Music and Society 44, no. 2 (2021): 119–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2020.1820780.
• Street, John. Music and Politics. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012.
• Turino, Thomas. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
• Turino, Thomas. “Peircean Thought as Core Theory for A Phenomenological Ethnomusicology.” In Ethnomusicology 58, no. 2 (2014): 185–221. https://doi.org/10.5406/ethnomusicology.58.2.0185.
• van Dijck, José. Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.
• Warburg, Aby. Gesammelte Schriften. Leipzig: Teubner, 1932.
• Wieviorka, Annette. The Era of the Witness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.
• Zelizer, Barbie, ed. Explorations in Communication and History: Shaping Inquiry in Culture, Communication and Media Studies. London: Routledge, 2008. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203888605.

1. Maurice Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1925); and Halbwachs, La mémoire collective (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950 [1939]).

2. Aby Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig: Teubner, 1932).

3. Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 13, https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230321670.

4. Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–92).

5. Jan Assmann, “Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität,” in Kultur und Gedächtnis, ed. Jan Assmann and Tonio Hölscher (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), 9–19; and Aleida Assmann, “Kultur als Lebenswelt und Monument,” in Kultur als Lebenswelt und Monument, ed. Aleida Assmann and Dietrich Harth (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1991), 11–25.

6. Astrid Erll, “Travelling Memory,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 4–18, https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2011.605570.

7. Ann Rigney, “Cultural Memory Studies: Mediation, Narrative, and the Aesthetic,” in Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies, ed. Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen (London: Routledge, 2016).

8. Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering, The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Practice (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137271549.

9. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

10. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

11. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

12. Alon Confino, “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,” The American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (1997): 1366, https://doi.org/10.2307/2171069.

13. Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009); and Astrid Erll, Film und kulturelle Erinnerung (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008).

14. Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers, and Eyal Zandberg, On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and Barbie Zelizer, Explorations in Communication and History (London: Routledge, 2008), https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230307070.

15. Jens Ruchatz, “Zeit des Theaters, Zeit der Fotografie,” in Theater und Medien / Theatre and the Media. Grundlagen - Analysen - Perspektiven. Eine Bestandsaufnahme, ed. Henri Schoenmakers, Stefan Bläske, Kay Kirchmann, and Jens Ruchatz (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008), 109–16, https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839410646-008.

16. Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik, Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2013), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203070291.

17. Andrew Hoskins, “Digital Network Memory,” in Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, ed. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 91–106; and José van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2007).

18. Karin Bijsterveld and José van Dijck, Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 12, https://doi.org/10.5117/9789089641328.

19. Karin Bijsterveld, Soundscapes of the Urban Past: Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013), https://doi.org/10.14361/transcript.9783839421796; Caroline Bithell, “The Past in Music: Introduction,” Ethnomusicology Forum 15, no. 1 (2006), 3–16, https://doi.org/10.1080/17411910600634213; Monika E. Schoop, “‘A Living Memorial for the Edelweißpiraten’: Musical Memories of Cologne’s Anti-Hitler Youth,” Popular Music and Society 44, no. 2 (2021): 193–211, https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2020.1820784; and Federico Spinetti, “Punk Rock on the Gothic Line: Resounding the World War II Antifascist Resistenza in Contemporary Italy,” Popular Music and Society 44, no. 2 (2021): 212–32, https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2020.1820785.

20. Ian Biddle and Vanessa Knights, Music, National Identity and the Politics of Location: Between the Global and the Local (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Bernd Brabec de Mori and Anthony Seeger, “Introduction: Considering Music, Humans, and Non-humans,” Ethnomusicology Forum 22, no. 3 (2013): 269–86, https://doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2013.844527; and Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

21. Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment. Birds, Weeping, Poetics and Song in Kaluli Expression (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982); Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Let Jasmine Rain Down: Songs and Remembrance among Syrian Jews (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998); and Thomas Turino, “Peircean Thought as Core Theory for A Phenomenological Ethnomusicology,” Ethnomusicology 58, no. 2 (2014): 185–221, https://doi.org/10.5406/ethnomusicology.58.2.0185.

22. Birgit Abels, “Music, Affect and Atmospheres: Meaning and Meaningfulness in Palauan omengeredakl,” The International Journal of Traditional Arts 2 (2018): 1–17; Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511489433; Ana Hofman, “The Affective Turn in Ethnomusicology,” Музикологија / Musicology 1, no. 18 (2015): 35–54, https://doi.org/10.2298/MUZ1518035H.

23. Christopher Small, Music, Society, Education (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996).

24. Simon Frith, “Music and Identity,” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 108–50, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446221907.n7.

25. Aleida Assmann and Linda Shortt, Memory and Political Change (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 13, https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354241.

26. See Federico Spinetti, Monika E. Schoop, and Ana Hofman, “Introduction to Music and the Politics of Memory: Resounding Antifascism across Borders,” Popular Music and Society 44, no. 2 (2021): 119–38, https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2020.1820780, for an excellent application.

27. Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 6.

28. Ibid., 5.

29. Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

30. Rigney, “Cultural Memory Studies,” 70.

31. Astrid Erll, “Remembering across Time, Space, and Cultures: Premediation, Remediation and the ‘Indian Mutiny,’” in Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, ed. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 111, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110217384.2.109.

32. Rigney, “Cultural Memory Studies,” 70.

33. Rothberg, “Multidirectional Memory,” 3.

34. Ibid., 4.

35. Bernhard Giesen, “The Trauma of Perpetrators: The Holocaust as the Traumatic Reference of German National Identity,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520936768.

36. Harris M. Berger, “Call and Response: Music, Power, and the Ethnomusicological Study of Politics and Culture,” Ethnomusicology 58, no. 2 (2014): 315–20, https://doi.org/10.5406/ethnomusicology.58.2.0315; and John Street, Music and Politics (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012).

37. Assmann and Shortt, Memory and Political Change; Erll, Memory in Culture; and Rothberg, “Multidirectional Memory.”