Totalitarian Lies and Musical Truth-Telling: Two Generations of Diasporic Testimony

This talk explores music’s possibilities as a mode of truth-telling after forced migration and genocide, with a focus on a specific German-Jewish refugee family narrative. Following Hannah Arendt, truth-telling may be understood as a “disclosure” that helps to restore the texture of reality following situations of domination through organized lying in totalitarianism. Among other things, music can counter this obfuscation by attuning listeners to shared responsibilities in a world of vivid, multisensory experience. I bring this line of thought into dialogue with the music and words of Stefan Wolpe, a German-Jewish refugee composer (and acquaintance of Arendt) who conceived his music as a “testament” to counteract “the corpse-smell, the hocus-pocus, the deception” of his time. Having moved from Berlin (1902-1933) to Jerusalem (1934-1938) to New York (1938-1972), Wolpe affiliated himself with communities ranging from the Bauhaus, Berlin agitprop and the kibbutz movement to bebop, Abstract Expressionism and Black Mountain College. The great unspoken trauma of his own uprooting lay in his 1934 separation from his daughter Katharina Wolpe after his marriage crumbled in refugee flight. Katharina Wolpe survived the war in orphanages and refugee camps and subsequently established a career as an acclaimed concert pianist, only to reunite with her father intermittently after the war. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews, this talk concludes by interpreting Katharina Wolpe’s late-life documentary film collaborations with British film-maker Jayne Parker, which I argue renew a family tradition of musical truth-seeking and truth–telling after the traumas of totalitarianism.