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A detailed and moving account of the life of Anneliese Landau, who,
in Nazi Germany and later in emigre California, fought against
prejudice to do notable work in music. This book introduces readers
to a woman who truly persisted. Anneliese Landau pushed past bias
to earn a PhD in musicology in 1930. She then lectured on early
German radio, breaking new ground in a developing medium. After the
Nazis forced the firing of all Jews in broadcasting in early 1933,
Landau worked for a time in the Berlin Jewish Culture League
(Judischer Kulturbund), a closed cultural organization created by
and for Jews in negotiation with Hitler's regime. But, in 1939, she
would emigrate alone, the fate of her family members tied
separately to the Kindertransport and to the Terezin concentration
camp. Landau eventually settled in Los Angeles, assuming duties as
music director of the Jewish Centers Association in 1944. In this
role, she knew and worked with many significant historical figures,
among them the composer Arnold Schoenberg, conductor Bruno Walter,
and the renowned rabbi andphilosopher Leo Baeck. Anneliese Landau's
Life in Music offers fresh perspective on the Nazi period in
Germany as well as on music in southern California, impacted as it
was by the many notable emigres from German-speaking lands who
settled in the area. But the book, the first to study Landau's life
in full, is also a unique story of survival: an account of one
woman's confrontation with other people's expectations of her, as a
woman anda Jew. Lily E. Hirsch is the author of A Jewish Orchestra
in Nazi Germany: Musical Politics and the Berlin Jewish Culture
League.
The first volume of its kind, Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, and
Postwar German Culture draws together three significant areas of
inquiry: Jewish music, German culture, and the legacy of the
Holocaust. Jewish music-a highly debated topic-encompasses a
multiplicity of musics and cultures, reflecting an inherent and
evolving hybridity and transnationalism. German culture refers to
an equally diverse concept that, in this volume, includes the
various cultures of prewar Germany, occupied Germany, the divided
and reunified Germany, and even "German (Jewish) memory," which is
not necessarily physically bound to Germany. In the context of
these perspectives, the volume makes powerful arguments on about
the impact of the Holocaust and its aftermath in changing contexts
of musical performance and composition. In doing so, the essays in
Dislocated Memories cover a wide spectrum of topics from the
immediate postwar period with music in the Displaced Persons camps
to the later twentieth century with compositions conceived in
response to the Holocaust and the klezmer revival at the turn of
this century. Dislocated Memories builds on a wide range of recent
and critical scholarship in Cold War studies, cultural history,
German studies, Holocaust studies, Jewish studies, and memory
studies. What binds these distinct fields tightly together are the
contributors' specific theoretical inquiries that reflect separate
yet interrelated themes such as displacement and memory. While
these concepts link the multi-faceted essays on a micro-level, they
are also largely connected in their conceptual query by focus, on
the macro-level, on the presence and the absence of Jewish music in
Germany after 1945. Filled with original research by scholars at
the forefront of music, history, and Jewish studies, Dislocated
Memories will prove an essential text for scholars and students
alike.
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