MUSIKWISSENSCHAFTLICHE SCHRIFTEN
DER HOCHSCHULE FÜR MUSIK UND THEATER MÜNCHEN

Herausgegeben von Claus Bockmaier

Band 16

Dieser Band wurde finanziert vom Musikwissenschaftlichen Institut der Hochschule für Musik und Theater München, von der Gesellschaft Freunde der Hochschule für Musik und Theater München e. V. und von der Kohlndorfer Stiftung München

Mai 2021
Allitera Verlag
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Redaktion: Dr. Claus Bockmaier und Dr. Tina Frühauf,
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Umschlaggestaltung: Johanna Conrad unter Verwendung einer Fotografie der Alten Münchner
Hauptsynagoge aus dem Jahr 1892 © Stadtarchiv München, Sign. DE-1992-FS-AB-STB-210-01
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Inhalt

Vorwort

Claus Bockmaier

Preface (Translation)

Tina Frühauf

Resonating Places, Mapping Jewish Spaces –
Jews, Music, and Southern Germany

Tina Frühauf

Eine ›abgeschlossene Sache‹? Zu einer Topografie jüdischen Musiklebens
im NS-Staat am Beispiel Münchens

Tobias Reichard

Jakob Schönberg and Jewish Art Music in Southern Germany

Jascha Nemtsov

A Confrontation with Identity:
The German-Jewish Composer Richard Fuchs

Michael Haas

Bamberg 1910 und 1920 / 21: Eine jüdische Gemeinde im Licht
der lokalen Tageszeitung Bamberger Tagblatt

Dorothea Hofmann

Binswangen in Bayerisch-Schwaben: Musikalische Praktiken
in einer Landgemeinde 1830–1938

Felicitas Winter

Mayer Levi (1814–1874): Ein Esslinger Chasan (Kantor) und sein Kompendium
von Synagogengesängen für Kantoren

Geoffrey Goldberg

Beiträge süddeutscher und österreichischer jüdischer Gefangener
zum musikalischen Leben in einem faschistischen Internierungslager

Silvia del Zoppo

Friendship and Exile: The Correspondence between Paul Frankenburger /
Ben-Haim and Otto Crusius, Friedrich Crusius, and Otto Eduard Crusius

Malcolm Miller

Bibliografie

Register

Vorwort

Claus Bockmaier

Dieses Buch erscheint treffend zum Fest- und Themenjahr »321–2021: 1700 Jahre jüdisches Leben in Deutschland«. Der Band will einen Beitrag seitens der Musik dazu leisten. Sein Ausgangspunkt ist indes die wissenschaftliche Konferenz zum Thema »Jüdische Musik im süddeutschen Raum – Geschichte, Exil, Fort-leben«, die am 11.–12. Juli 2019 an der Hochschule für Musik und Theater Mün-chen (HMTM) stattfand. Dabei hat das Hauptgebäude in der Arcisstraße 12 als Tagungsort seine eigene Bedeutung: Hier, im einstigen NS-›Führerbau‹ – wo am 29.–30.  September 1938 das ›Münchner Abkommen‹ zur Zwangseingliederung des tschechoslowakischen Sudetenlands in das Deutsche Reich getroffen worden war –, erfolgte nun ein besonderer Akt der Erinnerungskultur: Die Musik der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten deutschen Juden hat bewusst an dieser Stätte eine lebendige Erforschung und Würdigung erfahren, sodass man hier im größeren thematischen Sinn dieses Bandes auch von einem mapping point, einem Kartierungspunkt sprechen kann. Eine solche lokale Bezugsgröße zeigt im Übrigen auch das Coverbild: die Alte Münchner Hauptsynagoge¹ – eingeweiht 1887, abgerissen im Juni 1938, also schon vor den Novemberpogromen.

Bei der Tagung 2019 haben sich in acht Symposiumssitzungen mit insgesamt 16 Vorträgen Musikhistoriker, Musikethnologen und Judaisten aus Europa, den USA und Israel mit dem vielschichtigen Phänomen ›Jüdische Musik‹ auseinandergesetzt, das in der Historiografie und der jüngeren Diskussion in durchaus wechselnden, Vorstellungshorizonte immer wieder erweiternden Definitionen gefasst worden ist. In der Konferenz ging es um Prozesse und Profile der Musik und deren Bedingungen in jüdischen Kontexten, um Komposition, Interpretation und Rezeption dieser Musik, um das Agieren und Gestalten jüdischer wie auch nicht-jüdischer Musiker in den betreffenden Zusammenhängen. Das Bezugsfeld der Betrachtungen bildete der süddeutsche Raum – von außen gesehen mit den Ländern Bayern und Baden-Württemberg, dem südlichen Rheinland-Pfalz sowie Hessen südlich des Mains – als geografisch, politisch und kulturell zu umrei-ßende, jedoch nicht strikt definierte Größe. Die Leitung der Tagung lag in den Händen von Prof. Dr. Tina Frühauf von der Columbia University New York, die im Sommersemester 2019 eine DAAD-Gastprofessur an dieser Hochschule innehatte, sowie von meiner Person seitens des Musikwissenschaftlichen Instituts als organisatorischem Träger.

Ganz im Sinn der Leitlinie unseres Instituts, kommunikative Verbindungen zwischen den Ebenen der Praxis und der Theorie herzustellen, waren in die Konferenz drei Musikprogramme sowie ein Konzertabend im Großen Saal integriert: Die Aufführungsbeiträge – insbesondere mit Studierenden der Hochschule und Gastsängern unter der Leitung von Hans-Christian Hauser wie auch des Synagogal Ensembles Berlin, geleitet von Regina Yantian und mit Jürgen Geiger an der Orgel – bezogen sich mehrfach auf die wissenschaftlichen Forschungspräsentationen. Beispielsweise spielte Prof. Dr. Jascha Nemtsov im Konzert die Chassidische Suite (1937) von Jakob Schönberg selbst am Klavier, über die er am folgenden Tag unter anderem referierte. Die ganze Veranstaltung ließ sich somit als umfassendes ›Gesprächskonzert‹ auffassen, das nicht nur für Experten zugänglich war, sondern auch für ein breites Publikum – das an beiden Konferenztagen zahlreich ins Haus kam.² Unter den Zuhörern befanden sich Persönlichkeiten aus ganz Deutschland, darunter Vertreter jüdischer Gemeinden und Organisationen wie auch der Münchner Stadtverwaltung.

Dass die Konferenz überhaupt stattfinden und in dieser Form durchgeführt werden konnte, dafür ist zunächst dem Deutschen Akademischen Austauschdienst (DAAD) zu danken, der das Gastsemester von Prof.  Dr. Frühauf durch Mittel des Bundesministeriums für Bildung und Forschung ermöglichte, sowie dem Kollegen am Hause Prof. Markus Bellheim, der den entsprechenden Antrag erfolgreich gestellt hatte. Ferner gilt unser Dank dem Kulturreferat der Landeshauptstadt München für einen beträchtlichen Zuschuss zur Finanzierung.

Die Idee dieser Tagung war außerdem mit der geplanten Gründung des Ben-Haim-Forschungszentrums verbunden – als gemeinsame Initiative der HMTM und der Stadt München –, die in der Zwischenzeit mit Besetzung der betreffenden wissenschaftlichen Stelle durch Dr. Tobias Reichard vollzogen werden konnte: Das Zentrum hat am 1. März 2020 seinen Dienst aufgenommen. Der Namensgeber Paul Ben-Haim, der 1897 in München als Paul Frankenburger geborene und 1933 aufgrund massiver antisemitischer Anfeindung nach Palästina emigrierte Diri-gent, Komponist und frühere Student der Hochschule, steht mit seiner Biografie gleichsam stellvertretend für viele andere vom Nationalsozialismus vertriebene musikschaffende jüdische Personen. Die Forschungseinrichtung hat das Ziel, die Geschichte und die Musik verfolgter Komponistinnen und Komponisten sowie die jüdische Musikkultur in ihrer ganzen Vielfalt vor, während und nach der NS-Zeit, mit Schwerpunkt auf dem süddeutschen Raum, wissenschaftlich zu erschließen und zu dokumentieren. Von daher lag es nahe, auch an Tobias Reichard noch die Bitte um einen eigenen Beitrag zu diesem Schriftenband zu richten, die er dankenswerterweise gerade mit dem Fokus auf München, nämlich einer ›topografischen‹ Darstellung jüdischen Musiklebens während der NS-Diktatur eben in unserer Stadt, erfüllt hat.³

Die anderen hier vorgelegten Beiträge sind schriftliche Ausarbeitungen der Tagungsreferate von 2019. Der Aufsatz über den Kantor Mayer Levi von Geoffrey Goldberg (New York / Jerusalem), auf den sich sein Konferenzvortrag wesentlich bezog, ist allerdings ein Wiederabdruck aus den Esslinger Studien von 2010, herausgegeben vom Stadtarchiv Esslingen am Neckar.⁴ Wir danken dem Autor und überdies dem Schriftleiter der Esslinger Studien, Dr. Joachim J. Halbekann, vielmals für die Erlaubnis, den Beitrag in diese Publikation mit aufnehmen zu dürfen, wie auch Jürgen Weis vom Jan Thorbecke Verlag, Ostfildern, für die Übersen-dung der dazugehörigen Abbildungsdateien. Der Aufsatz wurde formal – sowie in wenigen Einzelheiten auch sprachlich – redigiert und in den Schreibweisen, Belegformen, Transliterationen usw. an die Regeln der Schriftenreihe angepasst; Fehler wurden stillschweigend korrigiert. Die englischsprachigen Beiträge dieses Bandes sind jeweils gemäß dem Chicago Manual of Style (17. Auflage) eingerichtet, die deutschsprachigen folgen wiederum den üblichen Prinzipien der Reihe. In den Fußnoten des Haupttextes wird ab der zweiten Nennung einer Quelle immer der Kurzbeleg verwendet. Bei den nicht wenigen Belegen von Internetseiten liegt das jeweils letzte Abrufdatum im Redaktionszeitraum des Bandes 2020. Die Bibliografie am Ende erfasst alle literarischen Quellen, primäre wie sekundäre, in alphabetischer Folge nach Autoren bzw. Herausgebern, hier durchgehend in der ›deutschen‹ Form; zudem sind in jeweils eigenen Rubriken die für die Beiträge maßgebenden Archive, historischen Zeitungen und Notendrucke verzeichnet. Das Register enthält außer dem Personenteil auch einen Index der im Band genannten Orte.

Als Herausgeber bedanken Tina Frühauf und ich uns zuallererst bei den Referentinnen und Referenten der Münchner Konferenz, die das fachliche Gespräch angestoßen und bereichert haben, und besonders denjenigen, die im Nachgang ihre Beiträge in schriftliche Form gebracht und damit nun diese Buchpublikation möglich gemacht haben: Silvia del Zoppo (Mailand), Michael Haas (Wien), Dorothea Hofmann (München), Jascha Nemtsov (Weimar), Malcolm Miller (London) und Felicitas Winter (Augsburg). Unser besonderer Dank geht des Weiteren an die Doktoranden Markus Göppel und Tobias Reil der HMTM, die als Mitarbeiter am Musikwissenschaftlichen Institut mit hohem Engagement die aufwendige Arbeit der Vorredaktion und Formatierung der Texte sowie die Erstellung der komplexen Bibliografie und der Register bewältigt haben. Pryor Dodge (New York) sei herzlich Dank für die optimale Nachbearbeitung der Bilddateien gesagt. Und nicht zuletzt danken wir der Lektorin Dietlind Pedarnig und dem Verlagsleiter Alexander Strathern von Allitera für die wiederum segensreiche Zusammenarbeit bei der editorischen Betreuung des Bandes, für die Layout-Anfertigung und Drucklegung.

Nachdem Band 6 dieser Schriftenreihe, Facetten I (2014, herausgegeben von Joachim Brügge), mit einigen Beiträgen zum Liederkomponisten Max Kowalski und Band 15 (2020, herausgegeben von Birger Petersen) zum 125. Geburtstag des Komponisten und Münchner Musikhochschullehrers Wolfgang Jacobi bereits das Feld der ›Jüdischen Musik‹ berührt haben, macht also Band 16 dieses Themenfeld nunmehr explizit. Mit Blick sodann auf das Ben-Haim-Forschungszentrum – und zumal auch seit dem Sommersemester 2020 Prof. Dr. Friedrich Geiger mit seinem besonderen Forschungsschwerpunkt der Musik in Diktaturen und im Exil an unserem Institut wirkt – steht zu erwarten, dass an der Münchner Musikhochschule weitere Publikationen auf diesem Gebiet folgen werden.

Im November 2020,

Claus Bockmaier

¹Stadtarchiv München: Sign. DE-1992-FS-AB-STB-210-01.

²Das gesamte Konferenzprogramm des 11.–12.  Juli 2019 ist im Repositorium der HMTMBibliothek einsehbar (https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bvb:m29-0000007390).

³Näheres zum Ben-Haim-Forschungszentrum und zur Person von Tobias Reichard ist auf der Internetseite des Musikwissenschaftlichen Instituts zu finden (https://mw.musikhochschule-muenchen.de/index.php/ben-haim-forschungszentrum).

⁴Geoffrey Goldberg, Mayer Levi (1813–1874): Ein Esslinger Chasan (Kantor) und sein Kompendium von Synagogengesängen für Kantoren, in: Esslinger Studien 47 (2009 / 10), S. 111–148.

Preface

This collection of essays joins this year’s anniversary celebration of 321–2021: 1700 Years of Jewish Life in Germany and seeks to contribute to it by focusing on the musical practices of the Jews in southern Germany. As such, it is rooted in the scholarly conference Jewish Music in Southern Germany  – History, Exile, Continuance, which took place on July 11–12, 2019, at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München (HMTM), Arcisstraße 12. As a conference venue, this building exudes historic significance. Formerly home to the Nazi Führerbau, it was the site where the so-called Munich Agreement was signed on September 29–30, 1938, giving way to the forced cession of Czechoslovakia’s Sudeten German territory to the German Reich. As such, the conference constituted a unique act of commemorative culture, in that the music of the German Jews, persecuted under National Socialism, was purposefully explored and appreciated at exactly this site and in counterpoint to it. Thus one may conceive of this conference as a mapping point, following the overarching theme of this book. Incidentally, the cover image also shows a local reference, the Old Main Synagogue in Munich—inaugurated in 1887, demolished in June 1938, just months before the November pogroms.¹

In the 2019 symposium’s eight sessions, sixteen historical musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and Jewish studies scholars from Europe, the United States, and Israel approached the complex phenomenon of »Jewish music,« which in historiography and more recent discussions has been defined in a variety of ways, thus constantly broadening conceptual horizons. The papers focused on processes and profiles of this music and its conditions in Jewish cultural contexts; on the composition, interpretation, and reception of the music; and on the activities and creations of Jewish and non-Jewish musicians in the respective contexts. An area of reference for these approaches was southern Germany, which encompasses the states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, the southern Rhineland-Palatinate, and Hesse south of the Main, though as a geographical, political, and cultural entity it can hardly be firmly defined. The conference was chaired by Dr. Tina Frühauf, Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University in New York, who held a DAAD Visiting Professorship at the HMTM in the summer semester of 2019, and by myself as the chair of the Institute of Musicology, its organizing sponsor.

In keeping with the institute’s guidelines of establishing communicative connections between theory and practice, the conference integrated three short music programs and a concert in Arcisstraße’s Großer Saal: The performances, notably with students of the Hochschule and guests under the direction of Hans-Christian Hauser as well as the Synagogal Ensemble Berlin under the baton of Regina Yantian, and with Jürgen Geiger from the HMTM at the organ, largely corresponded with or complemented the research papers presented at the conference. During the concert, for example, Prof. Dr. Jascha Nemtsov performed Jakob Schönberg’s Chassidische Suite for piano (1937), followed by a lecture on the piece the subsequent day, among other topics. The entire event, therefore, might be seen as an elaborate lecture-recital, not only accessible to scholars but also to the broad and diverse audience who attended both days of the conference and in large numbers.² Personalities from all parts of Germany were in attendance, including representatives of Jewish communities and organizations as well as the Munich city administration.

That the conference could take place and be conducted in such format is due, first of all, to the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), which made Prof. Dr. Frühauf’s guest semester possible with funds from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and to our colleague at the HMTM, Prof. Markus Bell-heim, who had successfully submitted the corresponding application. We would also like to thank the Culture Department of the City of Munich for a substantial grant that helped underwrite the conference. The event’s concept also tied into the anticipated foundation of the Ben-Haim Research Center. This joint initiative of the HMTM and the City of Munich has been realized with the appointment of Dr. Tobias Reichard as research fellow on March 1, 2020. The center’s namesake, Paul Ben-Haim, was born in Munich in 1897 as Paul Frankenburger; the conductor, composer, and former student of the HMTM emigrated to Palestine in 1933 in light of rising anti-Semitism. With his trajectory, Ben-Haim represents many musicians, born Jewish, who were driven out of Germany by the National Socialists. The center’s goal is to research and document the history and music of persecuted composers and Jewish musical culture in all its diversity before, during, and after the Nazi era, with a focus on southern Germany. Therefore it seemed only natural to extend an invitation to Tobias Reichard to contribute to this volume, which he followed with a chapter on the topographical representation of Jewish musical life during the Nazi dictatorship with focus on Munich.³

The other contributions are written elaborations of the 2019 conference papers, save for the previously published essay on Cantor Mayer Levi by Geoffrey Goldberg (New York / Jerusalem).⁴ We are very grateful to the author and editor of the Esslinger Studien, Dr.  Joachim J. Halbekann, for permission to include the 2010 article in this publication, as well as to Jürgen Weis of the Jan Thorbecke Verlag, Ostfildern, for sending us the corresponding image files. The essay has been formally edited and adapted in line with the rules of the publication series in terms of spelling, citation, transliteration, etc. Errors were tacitly corrected. The English-language contributions in this volume follow the Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed.), the German-language chapters, in turn, follow the guiding principles of the series. The bibliography lists all literary sources in alphabetical order by author or editor, following German style conventions. Footnotes use a short reference from the second mention of a source onwards. In the case of citations of web-sites, the access date is late 2020, when this volume was edited. The bibliography lists all literary sources, primary and secondary, in alphabetical order by author or editor, uniformly following German styling; archives, historical newspapers, and printed music relevant to the contributions are listed in separate sections. In addition to the name index, the volume also offers an index of all places mentioned in the volume.

As editors of this volume, Tina Frühauf and I would like to thank all speakers who inspired and enriched discussions at the Munich conference, and especially those who subsequently offered their contributions in writing, thus making this publication possible: Silvia del Zoppo (Milan), Michael Haas (Vienna), Dorothea Hofmann (Munich), Jascha Nemtsov (Weimar), Malcolm Miller (London), and Felicitas Winter (Augsburg). Our special thanks go to the doctoral students Markus Göppel and Tobias Reil of the HMTM, who, as staff members of the Musicological Institute, have assumed the time-consuming work of pre-editing and formatting the texts as well as creating the comprehensive bibliography and indices with great commitment and diligence. We would also like to extend our gratitude to Pryor Dodge (New York) for photo-editing the image files. And last but not least, we would like to thank editor Dietlind Pedarnig and publishing director Alexander Strathern of Allitera for another fruitful collaboration with much appreciated guidance of the volume, as well as for the layout and printing.

After volume 6 of this series, Facetten I (2014, edited by Joachim Brügge), with several contributions on the lied composer Max Kowalski, and volume 15 (2020, edited by Birger Petersen), dedicated to the composer and pedagogue Wolfgang Jacobi of Munich on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of his birth—both of which tangentially touch on the field of Jewish music studies—volume 16 now explicitly addresses this subject area. In view of the Ben-Haim Research Center and especially since Prof. Dr. Friedrich Geiger has been working at our institute since the summer semester of 2020, bringing with him his research focus on music in dictatorships and exile, it is our hope that further publications on this subject area will emerge from the HMTM.

November 2020,
Claus Bockmaier

Translation:
Tina Frühauf

¹Stadtarchiv München: Sign. DE-1992-FS-AB-STB-210-01.

²For the complete program of the conference of July 11–12, 2019, see the repository of the HMTM’s library (https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bvb:m29-0000007390).

³For further information about the Ben-Haim Research Center and Tobias Reichard’s projects, see the website of the HMTM’s Musicological Institute (https://mw.musikhochschulemuenchen.de/index.php/ben-haim-forschungszentrum).

⁴See Geoffrey Goldberg, »Mayer Levi (1813–1874): Ein Esslinger Chasan (Kantor) und sein Kompendium von Synagogengesängen für Kantoren,« Esslinger Studien 47 (2009 / 10): 111– 148.

Resonating Places, Mapping Jewish Spaces – Jews, Music, and Southern Germany

Tina Frühauf

During the past decade Jewish studies have seen the emergence of research projects that investigate issues of space, addressing questions about the effect and meaning of uprooting and dislocation, the significance of belonging to a place or to various places, the emergence of new Diasporas, and similar.¹ This turn towards spatiality has created a new understanding of issues that Jewish studies had been devoted to for a long time in order to overcome the longstanding binarism of Diaspora versus nationalism or Zionism. Even earlier, the so-called »spatial turn,« theorized by Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, and others beginning in the late 1960s, and filtering into literature, art history, and related discourses in the humanities as early as the 1970s, had gripped musicology.² But while musicology and other disciplines of cultural research had long been attentive to territorial practices, it was not until the spatial turn that music’s distinctive relation with place and space was recognized as a conceptual framework. As such this relation received renewed attention by the musicologies at large (that is, historical musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, and their respective fields). Musicologist Robert Fink ascribes the increasing body of paradigm-shifting work to younger scholars in popular music studies around the turn of the century, emphasizing the importance of a spatial turn in the discipline.³ But in 2014 Alenka Barber-Kersovan, Robin Kuchar, and Volker Kirchberg still remark that they perceive little interest by musicologists in the socio-spatial effects of music, especially in urban spaces, in spite of the developments in cultural studies.⁴ For music theory, Gerhard Luchterhandt goes so far as to question whether it actually needed a spatial turn, asserting that sonic space had been thoroughly studied.⁵ Jewish music studies, a field in which Jewish studies and musicology converge, has just begun to lean on this turn as an inroad to interrogate cultural developments.⁶

Acknowledging the directions Jewish studies and musicology have taken, this volume presents eight essays within the framework of space as an analytical and conceptual category. It does so by focusing on a distinct place, that of southern Germany, and interrogates the meaning of various spaces therein within the temporal frame of the nineteenth through early twentieth centuries, a crucial time, since during its course Jews began to react to vast changes and developments that took hold of Central Europe: the Haskalah, emancipation and acculturation, the Reform movement, Zionism and a cultural process which the philosopher Martin Buber in 1903 had termed a »Jewish renaissance« (perhaps an equivalent to Jewish modernism), and rising anti-Semitism and Nazism—all of which exerted significant influence on musical practices and expressions.

As Hebrew literature scholar Barbara Mann asserts, »space and place depend on one another for definition;«⁷ and engagement with them hinges upon understanding these concepts, which have varied over time and in different academic communities. Acknowledging them to be interrelated (and in some instances also interchangeable), the discipline of cultural studies generally sees »place« to designate a particular location, to be actual, a physical environment through which people move; while »space« is multi-dimensional. As an experience of place, space can also be symbolic or abstract or metaphorical, a representation as it were.⁸ The meaning of place can go farther as evident in its Hebrew designation, ha-maḳom, which carries multiple connotations: the relationship to a place, the implied treatment of a place, the act of taking possession thereof, the settlement and development of a place, and even the absence of such relationships to a place. These various meanings resonate in this volume’s essays.

As such, this book focuses on Jewish culture and music in both place and within various spaces and it does so, not by way of tracing which implies a linear process, but by way of mapping which recognizes the palimpsest of layers and allows to point to relationships. Utilized both in a literal sense and as a metaphor, the map can be understood as an allegory of space and time and its focus, Jewish music, as the intersection between and contraction of Jewish studies and music.⁹ Embracing mapping as metaphor can uncover the interests behind other seemingly self-evident and inviolable cultural topographies, as well as representations.¹⁰

Mapping, in the sense of describing Jewish music cultures spatially within southern Germany, is a complicated endeavor as the borders of this region are not easy to capture. Geographically, southern Germany is the lower part of the central German mountain threshold comprising the states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg as well as the southern Rhineland-Palatinate and Hesse south of the Main river. Politically and culturally however, southern Hesse, Rhinehesse, and the Palatinate can only be counted as southern Germany to a limited extent. For the sake of respecting national boundaries and political borders, Austria and South Tyrol are excluded, but influences and interrelations will become obvious in this introductory chapter and in some of the essays.

As such, Jewish culture in southern Germany can be mapped as a historical space, dating back to at least 906 C. E. when the first known Jewish settlement formed, as documented in the toll regulation of Passau, the city of three rivers which was conveniently situated for those using trade routes to Hungary, southern Russia, and northeastern Germany. By then, the history of Jews in what the Romans called Germania Superior, Germania Inferior, and Magna Germania began to see an evolution of religious and social customs, especially the development of the Yiddish language and an identity as Ashkenazic Jews, albeit marred by anti-Semitism and persecutions. While the earliest history is often linked to the communities along the Rhine—among them Cologne, Mainz, and Worms— southern Germany began to emerge as an important region for Jewish settlement in the course of the Middle Ages, with Regensburg becoming a vital center after first arrivals in 1020, until its Jewish population faced expulsion in 1519.¹¹ By the eleventh century Jews had also settled in Bamberg, later in Würzburg, Nuremberg, Aschaffenburg, and by the thirteenth century in other parts of southern Germany, both rural and urban.¹² But it was not until the end of the seventeenth century that Jewish communities formed that had a lasting presence in the region, among them Fürth and Ansbach, both known for their musical practices.

This early history can also be mapped in and through music, by way of transmitted artifacts that connect past and present spaces in southern Germany. One such artifact is a manuscript that contains a musical setting of the piyyuṭ »Tsur mishelo«, a Sabbath table song that introduces grace after meals in many Jewish communities (figure 1). The manuscript is part of a Hebrew exercise book compiled and copied by Johannes Renhart (Reinhart), a Christian Hebraist from the circle of the great humanist Caspar Amman. It dates to 1510 / 1511 and originated in Esslingen, which in the early sixteenth century had admitted Jews for short periods at high rents and taxes until their expulsion in 1543. As such it has been well documented.¹³ The manuscript is unique in several respects: It is one of the few surviving examples of notated music associated with the Jewish community from pre-1600 with complete settings of Hebrew text (unlike psalm settings from the same period). The melody probably existed before it was transcribed and it cannot be said with certainty whether the music was conceived by a Jew.¹⁴ Still, it represents one of the earliest known notations of the music sung by Jews on German soil as well as the adoption of the musical language in the surrounding culture for Jewish religious songs.¹⁵ It also represents a rare pre-seventeenth century instance where every stanza of a strophic song is set to a different yet closely-related melody, with a final heralding strophe. (In other contemporaneous settings, only the first stanza is set, while all further strophes are transmitted in text only).

Figure 1
Musical notation of the »Tsur mishelo«, Esslingen 1510 / 1511, 4° Cod. ms. 757, fol. 95r, lower page. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, library, Munich. (Public domain.)

The manuscript, held at the library of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, is in good company.¹⁶ Early Jewish history can also be mapped in music across the street, at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, which holds sixteenth-century manuscripts containing notations of signs of biblical cantillation (the te’amim) often called zarqa tables. These have been compiled and owned by Caspar Amman (ca. 1450–1524) of Liège who resided in Lauingen, a town in Bavarian Swabia with a small Jewish community. He served as the provincial of the Augustinians in Swabia and Rhineland, and was an accomplished Hebraist. The musical notation stems from Christian humanist Johannes Böschenstein (1472–1540) and dates from 1505–1511.¹⁷ It served as a model for the version printed by the founder of Christian Hebrew studies, Johannes Reuchlin, in his De accentibus et orthographia linguae hebraicae (1518).¹⁸ This version is unique in that it contains not only the te’amim themselves, but also a complete four-part harmonization of these tropes by one of Reuchlin’s students, Christoph Schilling of Lucerne, set in the German choral style of the period. Schilling’s arrangement of the individual accents has been mentioned in passing by numerous scholars, but it has never been published in a modern edition, nor applied to the actual practice of chanting biblical texts.¹⁹

As such, southern Germany can be mapped as a space that produces, inhabits, and preserves early Jewish music history by way of music manuscripts. But these manuscripts represent another facet of the region’s map of Jewish music culture: that of shared space between Jews and non-Jews, one that at its best resulted in a culture of confluence. One example of such confluence is eternalized in Immanuel Faißt’s volume of liturgical music for mixed choir, cantor, and organ, which he completed in 1861, in time for the inauguration of Stuttgart’s new synagogue. At the time Faißt was one of the most influential persons in the musical life of the city. Fifty years later, in 1911, Obercantor Jakob Tennenbaum published these compositions under the title Stuttgarter Synagogengesänge and stated in his preface that these settings are a further development of Salomon Sulzer, Hirsch Weintraub, and Samuel Naumbourg’s efforts to »beautify and refine synagogue song.«²⁰ He thereby not only placed Faißt into a lineage of innovative cantor-composers, but more so, Faißt was a Christian and Tennenbaum did not seem to differentiate between heritage and faith, following the example of Salomon Sulzer of Vienna who in the early nineteenth century had commissioned Franz Schubert, Wenzel Würfel, and others to contribute to his collection Schir Zion.²¹ This is all the more significant as Tennenbaum himself had published in 1909 a collection of his music for the synagogue (figure 2). But Tennenbaum’s preface also attests to the non-isolation of Jewish communities outside the cosmopolitan centers, their orientation towards Vienna, but also eastward to Paris, were the Bavarian-born Samuel Naumbourg worked later in his life. Musical interfaith and interrelatedness defined the Jewish community of Stuttgart and it was not alone. Jewish culture as a space for confluence strengthened in later modernity, in spite of the earlier expulsions and persecutions, and this also surfaces in selected essays of this volume.²² Indeed, spaces embody relationships.

Figure 2
Titlepage of Jakob Tennenbaum’s edition of synagogue songs for male choir, cantor, and choir in unison, Stuttgart 1909. (Public domain.)

Using the narrative space of correspondence as a point of inquiry, Malcolm Miller interrogates the close relationship between Paul Frankenburger and the Crusius family during the critical time of the composer’s life, that is, during his formative years and in the early days of his exile in Palestine. This friendship is not uncomplicated given that Rudolf Heß, a leading member of the Nazi Party who in 1933 would become Hitler’s deputy, was a close relative of the Crusius family. Similarly, Dorothea Hofmann takes as a point of departure for her study a narrative space, that of the local newspaper Bamberger Tagblatt . Announcements, reports, and reviews document the Jewish cultural life in Bamberg between 1910 and 1921, revealing further details of coexistence and shared spaces such as cultural events organized by the Jewish community as well as the synagogue choir, which intermittently had non-Jewish singers. The choir as a shared space is also extant in small rural communities such as Binswangen, which Felicitas Winter surveys in her essay. Aside from the local singing society, events for carnival saw Jewish participation there as well. Such shared spaces did not completely cease with the rise of Nazism. As Tobias Reichard unravels in his essay on the topography of Jewish musical life in Munich in the 1930s, the concert hall in the Palais Portia, also known as »Museum,« became a cultural venue which both Jews and non-Jews inhabited albeit the risks this posed for either population at the time, a space of coexistence in parallel worlds as it were.

Indeed, in southern Germany the persecution of musicians and composers born Jewish took on a renewed severity in the early twentieth century. As such, Jewish music can be mapped as a space of exclusion. Jascha Nemtsov’s essay on the Fürth-born musicologist and composer Jakob Schönberg is a case in point. First celebrated as an emerging composer of modern music, his dissertation on synagogue songs in Germany, self-published in 1926, was hardly noticed. With the racial laws of 1933 he had few other options than fully turning to his Jewish heritage, which then strongly began to inform his work as a composer. Michael Haas maps a similar trajectory in the work of composer Richard Fuchs.

As a critical response to traditional understandings of Jewish music and in order to foster new ways of thinking thereof, this volume brings together a selection of studies that provide different inroads into the musical culture of southern Germany during a transformative century in the Jewish history of later modernity. Using various approaches pertinent to musicologists, including musical analysis, textual analysis, and hermeneutics, the chapters also contribute to recent scholarship in cultural studies, urban studies as well as to German and Jewish studies. What binds them tightly together is the theoretical frame which reflects upon the meanings of space within a distinct region and across its borders, thereby veering away from established binarisms, such as sacred versus secular, internal versus external, and so on.

As such, the first three essays map the performance of art music during a critical period, the early twentieth century, when composers and musicians experienced integration followed by severe restrictions enforced by the Nazi regime, in a fluid space between inclusion and exclusion. In his study »Eine ›abgeschlossene Sache‹? Zu einer Topografie jüdischen Musiklebens im NS-Staat am Beispiel Münchens,« Tobias Reichard focuses on performance venues used by the Jewish Culture League, a segregated performing arts organization established by and for Jews in collaboration with the Nazis, against the background of their spatial conditions. Focusing on three distinct places in Munich—the main synagogue at Herzog-Max-Straße, the concert hall of the Palais Portia, and the Musikhaus Sigmund Koch—Reichard questions to what extent spaces and spatial experiences influenced the course and perception of musical events; conversely, which actors and which practices were involved in the emergence, change, or disappearance of places or spaces with significance for Jewish musical life in the Nazi state, specifically in the years 1933 through 1938. His focus on the places and spaces of Jewish musical life during this time and the sources of their reconstruction thus not only bring to light previously neglected perspectives, they also challenge the question of perspective itself. The subsequent essays by Jascha Nemtsov and Michael Haas fill these cultural topographies with content by way of profiles of composers who were first active in and part of mainstream concert life, but in 1933 had to shift their presence to the realm of the Jewish Culture League, only to experience another space thereafter, that of exile.

In »Jakob Schönberg and Jewish Art Music in Southern Germany,« Jascha Nemtsov first situates Schönberg within a broader assessment of Jewish art music in early-twentieth-century southern Germany to then profile him quite closely. A versatile musician who was first active in his hometown of Fürth and in neighboring Nuremberg as a composer, conductor, pianist, and music critic, Schönberg was also the first musicologist to focus on synagogue music, examining the liturgical music of Jews in Germany. (All of the aspiring Jewish musicologists at the time and even before had devoted themselves to Western classical music.) Nemtsov maps a distinct shift in Schönberg’s output as a composer, which occurred with a change of place following the restrictions imposed by the Nazis—his move from Fürth to Berlin in 1933. With a change of locale came a shift towards works that absorbed the emerging Jewish folklore of Palestine, which he integrated with great success. Along with this came a spatial shift from mainstream venues which Schönberg previously had inhabited (including the airwaves of the Bavarian Radio) to exclusively »Jewish venues« under the auspices of the Jewish Culture League, such as the home of Gertrud Weil, which turned a private space into a public space for Jews during times of severe performance restrictions.

With the rise of Nazism, the shift of performance spaces proved even more critical for Karlsruhe-born Richard Fuchs, as Michael Haas asserts in »A Confrontation with Identity: The German-Jewish Composer Richard Fuchs.« If his musical compositions received regular local performances, favorable reviews, and commendations from conductors such as Wilhelm Furtwängler and Felix Weingartner, another facet of his musical significance emerged with the establishment of the Jewish Culture League branch in Baden-Württemberg in 1933, which he co-founded. With receipt of the league’s composition prize, a performance of his defiant Vom jüdischen Schicksal seemed all but guaranteed, but a decree from Hans Hinkel, the Nazi supervisor of all league activities, halted the performance at short notice and it moved into a non-space, sans lieu. No official reason was offered. Fuchs’s musical language was devoid of Jewish modal writing and conspicuous in its Brucknerian provenance—indeed, »too German«—but more so, its text heavily leaned on poems by Karl Wolfskehl that obliquely referred to persecution and thereby critiqued the Nazi regime. A dual reason for cancelation as it were. Be it as it may, compositions provided a space for Jewish self-esteem against the polemics and attacks during the Nazi era and both Schönberg and Fuchs’s trajectories are paradigmatic for that of many others, from Hugo Chaim Adler to Heinrich Schalit, from Paul Frankenburger to Max Sinzheimer.

The following trio of essays widens the spatial scope to provide insight into the Jewish musical presence of three locations from large to small: town, village, and the city-synagogue. To begin, Dorothea Hofmann, in »Bamberg 1910 und 1920 / 21: Eine jüdische Gemeinde im Licht der lokalen Tageszeitung Bamberger Tagblatt— Drei kleine Fallstudien« documents the cultural life of the Jewish community in the Upper Franconian town of Bamberg in the early twentieth century through three vignettes—the inauguration of the new synagogue, the cultural and educational activities of the Jewish youth association, and the synagogue choir’s celebration of Louis Lewandowski’s one hundredth anniversary of birth. Jewish town culture reveals itself as integrated and inter-active, diverse within itself, and open to interfaith and collaboration as evident in public cultural events. As such the community, a mini-minority as it were, presented itself with self-confidence, fully aware of its artistic achievements, and proud of its prominent guests. It continued to be active and self-assured in the face of rising anti-Semitism which had lurked about in the first decade of the twentieth century and began to gain strength by the second.

Similarly, in her essay »Binswangen in Bayerisch-Schwaben: Musikalische Praktiken in einer Landgemeinde 1830–1938,« Felicitas Winter approaches the Jewish community from the exterior, placing it into its larger environment to shed light on cultural interactions with the same. As such, she focuses on Jewish culture in Binswangen, a village in the district of Dillingen in Bavarian Swabia, thus tackling an under-researched chapter in German-Jewish history, that of rural culture. A Jewish presence there can be traced back to the sixteenth century, which developed over time into a small but active presence, as underlined by a yeshiva, which existed during the nineteenth century. The erection of a new synagogue in 1837, the synagogue choir, and cultural events attest to a peaceful and integrative coexistence of Jews and the village at large. From the 1860s on, Jews were also active in the local associations, for instance, they participated in the singing society as previously mentioned. Just as Jewish communities in towns and cities, Binswangen saw the effects of emancipation and acculturation, which impacted Jewish worship practices as is evident in the use of an organ and organized congregational singing.

Music in Jewish worship is the subject of Geoffrey Goldberg’s contribution on »Mayer Levi (1814–1874): Ein Esslinger Chasan (Kantor) und sein Kompendium von Synagogengesängen für Kantoren,« which leads the reader to Esslingen, a city in the Stuttgart region of Baden-Württemberg. Approaching the space of the Jewish congregation from within, Goldberg analyzes the chant tradition of the synagogue services as notated by the local cantor and teacher Mayer Levi. The unpublished manuscript volumes of Levi’s compendium constitute perhaps the most significant repository to date of southern German hazanuth and the regional musical tradition, expanding and putting into new perspective the data and analysis provided by Abraham Zvi Idelsohn in his anthology of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century synagogue songs of the Jews of southern Germany.²³ Melodies that Levi transcribed in the earlier volumes reflect the musical style of pre-emancipation, while melodies transcribed later for the same liturgical texts, by virtue of their simplifications, tonal modifications, abbreviations, and sometime even substitutions, reflect adaptations to modernity and a more self-conscious awareness of what is acceptable in the post-emancipation synagogue.

The following two contributions focus on translocalities, that is, spaces and places in which mobile musicians are locally based. Silvia del Zoppo’s essay »Beiträge süddeutscher und österreichischer jüdischer Gefangener zum musikalischen Leben in einem faschistischen Internierungslager: Die Fallstudie von Ferramonti di Tarsia« moves beyond the borders of southern Germany to take a close look at the concentration camp in Ferramonti di Tarsia, the largest fascist concentration camp in Italy both in terms of its size and the number of internees. Its existence and trajectory—from its foundation just before Italy’s entry into World War II in the summer of 1940, liberation on September 13, 1943, to its closure in 1945 after being under British administration—are an almost forgotten chapter in European history. The musical activities that took place there were unique. Due to the presence of exclusively foreign prisoners, many of whom were Jews from southern Germany, Ferramonti served as a coincidental meeting place of cultures, lan guages, traditions, and religions in the inaccessible Calabrian malaria-stricken Hinterland. The overt cultural diversity was reflected in the camp’s musical production. Like many Nazi concentration camps, Ferramonti saw an intensive musical activity within many contexts such as concerts and vaudeville programs which took place in barracks-turned-theaters; the establishment of a choir for worship services which accompanied Jewish, as well as Catholic and Greek Orthodox services; and musical and general education for children and youth who attended the camp school. The way in which imprisonment and coexistence within the camp was organized by people of various origins, who were forced to interact with one another, was indeed a decisive factor, not only for the musical production, but also for the survival and future of most of the inmates. In this Zoppo uncovers the specific relationships between a non-lieu (de mémoire), a memory-less site that indicates a lost place or dislocation, such as Ferramonti and the musical and human experience especially of Jews from southern Germany.