The exhibition brings together around “300 documents and objects from memorials and archives around the world”.
This is the first major exhibition on this theme. The Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris explores all the facets of the use of music in the Nazi camps, an instrument for keeping pace or a breath of resistance.
“We have about 300 documents and objects that come from memorials and archives around the world, which is unique because usually each memorial makes its exhibition with its own sources”confides to AFP Elise Petit, curator of the exhibition which opens Thursday, April 20.
Music-themed clichés preserved by the Nazis
Some instruments are visible until February 24, 2024, such as a double bass built by prisoners in the Mauthausen camp, but also clandestine illustrated notebooks of prisoners or souvenir photographs taken by SS men around the music in the camps.
“The SS hid their activities in the camps but oddly kept scrapbooks in attics, which weren’t shown by children, nor grandchildren, but now great-grandchildren donate them to museums” , details the lecturer in History of Music in Grenoble.
Audio headsets deliver “recordings by survivors, songs from the era, and a few creations, such as reconstituted military marches or a little resistance song”, continues the specialist in music under the Third Reich and in the Nazi concentration camp system.
Music “to mask the cries of the victims”
The exhibition revolves around places like “concentration camps, killing centers and antechamber camps, transitional”, explains Elise Petit. The music “constraint” can start from a camp commander “music lover”as at Buchenwald, or a “prestige issue compared to his colleagues”: “show that we have the best orchestra of prisoners”.
Elise Petit also recounts these “welcome ceremonies for new prisoners to very ironic, cynical music” and the “departures and returns” hard labor to the sound of a “very utilitarian music, to synchronize the steps”. Or “this music played to accompany cruel treatment and punishment for the sadistic pleasure of the SS”. “Music was not played in the gas chambers, but around to mask the cries of the victims.”
And then there is also this “Music of psychological resistance of the prisoners, these moments of freedom in the sordid latrines where the SS do not set foot, these parody songs to try to cheer themselves up”concludes Elise Petit.