Music in the Face of the Holocaust: A Critical Reflection on Culture and the Experience of Concentration Camps

Abstract

The subject of this article is a reflection on the relationship between music and the experience of the Holocaust, with particular emphasis on the context of concentration camps. The point of departure is the assumption that the meaning of music is not an immanent property of the work itself, but is constituted through the conditions of its use and the power relations in which it is embedded. From this perspective, Auschwitz constitutes a limit experience that radically problematizes traditional concepts of aesthetics, the autonomy of art, and humanism. The author draws on Theodor W. Adorno’s critical theory of culture as its theoretical framework, confronting it with the empirical experience of music functioning within concentration camps. This approach reveals music as a cultural practice susceptible to instrumentalization, while simultaneously burdened with a profound ambivalence of meanings. Music present in the camp context remains an internally ambivalent phenomenon and cannot be unequivocally assessed either as a space of resistance or solely as a tool of violence. The conclusions point to the necessity of critically rethinking the boundaries between aesthetics and ethics after the Holocaust and to the lasting historical responsibility borne by music.