New! Exhibition "Music in the Nazi camps"
Thursday 20 April 2023Sem 25 February 2024
Thursday, April 20, 2023, the Shoah Memorial inaugurated its new exhibition "Music in the Nazi camps".
The music resonated daily in the concentration camps and killing centers of the Nazi regime. Why such a musical presence in spaces where the most fundamental freedoms were flouted?
The main use of music, still little known, was initiated by the camp authorities in 1933: it is a "forced" music, played on order by prison orchestras. It constitutes a full-fledged tool for the processes of alignment and annihilation. Its second use is that made by prisoners spontaneously: tolerated by the leaders of blocks or sometimes totally clandestine, this music participates in strategies of psychological survival and spiritual resistance to the concentration camp system.
The exhibition presents for the first time to the public numerous testimonies, instruments, scores and drawings made by detained women and men; as well as photographs taken by SS. It also deals with a few particular cases, notably the French internment camps that became transit camps or the ghetto-camp of Theresienstadt. And above all, it plays the music that resonated in the Dachau concentration camp system at Buchenwald and, more surprisingly, in the killing centers of Treblinka, Majdanek, Chełmno or in the Auschwitz complex.
Scientific Commission: Élise Small, musicologist, lecturer in the history of music of the 20th and 21st centuries.
General coordination: Sophie Nagiscarde, responsible for cultural activities, and Lucile Lignon, responsible for temporary exhibitions, assisted by Léonie Mallet and Zoé Schocké.
Scenography and museography: Workshop Clémence Farrell – Museomaniac.
Graphics: Workshop JBL
Participate in the cycle of meetings around the exhibition
