Crackling Bones, a Roaring Excavator, and Gold’s Parodic Band: Der Gesamtgewalttätigklang and Sonically Reconstructing the Treblinka Death Camp

• In Event: Music and Memory I: War and Media

Abstract

Little remains of the Treblinka death camp in Poland near the Belarussian border. The camp was initially hastily dismantled in July of 1944, sowing lupine flowers over enormous immolation pits, and further destroyed by the Red Army in 1945. Contemporary memorialization hints at the terror the site – railroad ties guiding visitors through the forest tracing the former path of doomed inmates from trains to gas chambers. However, the destruction of the physical site combined with obfuscating, brutalist Soviet memorialization does not adequately convey the horrors of Treblinka where nearly a million Jews and Roma were murdered between July 1942 and September 1943. A sonic read of limited testimony from the camp reveals how sound can give us a better understanding of the space, how the pervasive, violent sound (a Gesamtgewalttätigklang) created another dimension of terror and subjugation. Incorporating the musical landscape of the camp demonstrates how musical sadism was codified in the concentration camp system from clandestine and uncoordinated violence of the Einsatzgruppen to institutionalized, parodic use of music to torment and mock Jews in camps. In both a sonic reconstruction of space and a study of musical sadism, the mediating effects of sound were not sufficient to mask the genocidal purpose of the camp and instead sound and music heightened terror. The duplicitous compulsion of celebratory music as perpetrator entertainment also returns to the concept of physical space in the camp where gas chambers were painted like cheery synagogues complete with a ceremonial curtain over the door like that over a Torah scroll. Music and sound provide us an honest if grotesque understanding of Treblinka beyond existing solemn memorialization. Sound and musical humiliation of Jews came to a brutal nexus in the concentration camp system. Treblinka is merely one example of the ways that sound created violent environments for victims, reinforced alterity for perpetrators, and was a component of perpetrator rituals. As the concentration camp system began to collapse with the approach of the Red Army and turn of the war, music and sonic violence didn’t disappear, continuing through the final days of the death marches and the brutal liquidation of the camps.

Author

• Alexandra Birch, Columbia U