To bear witness: Holocaust opera and the "unreadable"

Abstract

The purpose of this course is to encourage learners to reflect on our societal and moral responsibility to bear witness to Holocaust trauma, and to examine how music bridges the accessible and inaccessible for audiences in Holocaust presentation. This lesson hinges on two primary works of scholarship: (1) Jessica Lang’s 2017 Textual Silence: Unreadability and the Holocaust, which further refines the academic concepts “readability” and “unreadability” and examines the potential for a fragmentation of the understanding of Holocaust literature; (2) Maria Cizmic’s 2012 Performing Pain which defines music as a bridge between the unreadable and the readable, making accessible the inaccessible. Cizmic determines, “Music can metaphorically perform the psychological effects of trauma – both the disruptive features and those that occur during recovery… [music] bears witness to [trauma’s] effects, conveying to listeners the ways in which trauma can shape memory and temporality.”