SEMER LABEL RELOADED: music of pre-war Jewish life and the sound of contemporary Berlin

• In Event: Constructing Identity Through the Performative Languages of Music and Theater

Abstract

This paper concerns musical texts whose physical location has remained unchanged, whilst history has moved decisively around them. On the night of November 9th, 1938, Hirsch Lewin's Hebrew Bookstore was destroyed. Lewin had opened his business eight years earlier in Berlin's Scheunenviertel district, at that time the center of eastern European Jewish cultural life in the city. In 1932 he augmented the stock of religious and historical books, children's literature, candles and prayer shawls with the creation of his own record label, 'Semer'. Over the next five years, Semer's catalogue grew to incorporate popular Yiddish hits, folk songs, cantorial repertoire, operatic arias and nationalist standards, performed in Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Russian and Italian – its variety testifying to the diversity of Jewish cultural life in the wider city. Released from Sachsenhausen in 1939 but with the Semer masters and inventory demolished, Lewin reached Palestine before the end of the war, where his Hed Arzi label (founded in 1947) became the oldest and largest producer of new Israeli music.  In 2012, however, Berlin-based singer and museologist Fabian Schnedler began a project that unearths the rich recorded legacy of the Semer label and re-presents it for a contemporary concert audience, dramatically relocating the music's implicit discourse of display and memorialization within the modern city's ongoing musical/social processes. Performed by a mixed ensemble of American and European Jews and non-Jewish Germans, SEMER LABEL RELOADED is both a window on pre-Holocaust Berlin and a problematizing of the act of listening through historical headphones. My paper will explore the effects and resonances of this modern reinterpretation, examining ways in which the Reloaded project taps into the fluid multiculturalism that continues to be a celebrated part of post-reunification Berlin identity, whilst standing simultaneously as social testament, performance resource and site of shifting cultural meanings. In its transition from pre-war recordings to twenty-first century embodiment, the Semer repertoire has moved from vernacular community life to a heterogeneous 'world' musical landscape. At the same time, its contemporary framing offers both synchronic and diachronic perspectives upon historical German-Jewish identities and dialogues.

Author

• Phil Alexander, University of Glasgow