The extent of the unimaginable horrors of the totalitarian regime and its calculated, mechanical “extermination industry” became increasingly apparent as the war progressed. The Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that across the territories of the Third Reich and the occupied regions, around 17 million people were murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices in the camps. To this day, Auschwitz concentration camp remains a symbol of the mass extermination of human life and of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered.
The question of how this rupture of civilisation was allowed to happen can be partly explained by the role of music and its instrumentalisation by the Nazis. Music formed part of a strategy of debasement and violence employed in state propaganda broadcasts aimed at establishing and consolidating the political system. As the art form with perhaps the greatest power to evoke strong emotions, music could be used as an emotional bridge between the Nazi leadership and the population. Its purpose was to arouse interest in Nazi ideology and to align people with its worldview — rooted in megalomania, denigration and marginalisation — and discourage critical reflection.
Music’s role in this context stems from its power to transcend: its ability to obscure present reality, to reframe it, or to present it as an “alternative” reality altogether. The Volksgemeinschaft was not forged through rational thought or understanding, but through the creation of emotional bonds and a sense of community, for example through mass singing. Even eighty years on, music has lost none of its power to manipulate and to persuade when employed with such intent. Not least, it is partly through the political instrumentalisation and appropriation of music and culture in recent years that right-wing extremist movements have experienced a resurgence.
One effective way of countering this is to look back on the history of the 20th century, ensuring that the boundaries of peaceful coexistence — now visibly shifting — are not further eroded, but instead strengthened through democratic thinking and action. If this idea is to remain alive, we must also turn our attention to its opposite, both past and present, and closely examine those dark corners in which cruelty and hatred once drove human actions and human dignity was no longer regarded as inviolable.
One such dark place is the concentration camps, and it is almost unimaginable that music found a place there at all. Yet both sides turned to music: the guards used it for entertainment and as a means of torturing the prisoners, while the prisoners themselves used it as a survival strategy — a way of preserving their identity, a source of comfort, and a means of keeping memories of happier times alive.
In the years after 1945, numerous works were composed in which these events and experiences were processed through music and thus preserved in memory. Among musicians and composers, the highest number of victims perished in Auschwitz. One of them was Viktor Ullmann (b. 1898 in Teschen, Austrian Silesia), who was murdered in the gas chambers two days after his arrival there in October 1944. Prior to this, following his forced deportation to the Theresienstadt ghetto, he had completed his opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis oder Die Todverweigerung.
The Polish composer Simon Laks (1901–1983) survived imprisonment in Auschwitz and preserved his memories in a very different way in his chamber opera L’Hirondelle inattendue. His work was not completed until 1965 and received its first staged performance in Bregenz in 2014.
Ullmann’s and Laks’ operas shed light on a dark period in history and invite us to draw parallels with the present, particularly with regard to the marginalisation of the “other” and the protection and elevation of what is considered one’s “own”. With the aim of examining these issues from multiple perspectives, the Mozarteum University launched a collaborative project involving the Departments of Opera, Voice, Musicology (research focus Music and Power), Scenography and Keyboard Instruments: LAUT:SPRECHER (Loud:Speaker), named after a character in Der Kaiser von Atlantis.
The week-long programme (6–12 December 2025) was designed to reach a broad audience both within and beyond the university and approached the topic through a combination of artistic and academic formats. The opera class (Florentine Klepper / Kai Röhrig) presented four performances — including one for schools — of the operas by Ullmann and Laks. The programme was complemented by a piano recital featuring Ullmann’s sonatas (Eric Chumachenco), a Liederabend performed by students of Pauliina Tukiainen, and a performance of Ullmann’s Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (Gundula Goecke, Reina Arai, Minsun Kim and Haruka Ugaji; coached by Eung-Gu Kim).
Academic contributions included lectures on Ullmann’s and Laks’ Lied compositions (Albrecht Dümling), on Viktor Ullmann’s dystopian operas Der Sturz des Antichrist (1934–1936) and Der Kaiser von Atlantis (1943–1944) (Jascha Nemtsov), as well as a comprehensive overview of music in ghettos and concentration camps (Yvonne Wasserloos). In his talk, Frank Harders-Wuthenow addressed the question of how new operatic works could emerge in the aftermath of Auschwitz. The documentary film Fremde Passagiere (Foreign Passengers) offered insights into the final years of Ullmann’s life, spent in exile, in the ghetto and ultimately in the concentration camp. In addition, a public seminar on Music and Antisemitism – Music in Concentration Camps, led by Yvonne Wasserloos, rounded off the programme.
It hardly needs to be emphasised that the continued engagement with, and critical re-examination of, the historical realities of the Nazi dictatorship remains essential for shaping a peaceful present. In order to sustain this memory through scholarly and artistic means, the event “Erinnerungsorte” (Places of Remembrance) will take place for the third time on 27 January 2026 — International Holocaust Remembrance Day — marking the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. First conceived in 2024 as a lecture-recital format, the event is developed and presented annually by students and faculty from multiple departments and institutes at the Mozarteum University.
In 2026, Erinnerungsorte III will be expanded to include an afternoon musicology symposium entitled Music and Antisemitism – Music in Concentration Camps. In cooperation with Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, the Research Focus Music and Power has secured funding from the EU programme Music, Memory and European Values for an international project addressing proscribed music. The project was launched on 9 November 2025 in Mainz, the anniversary of Kristallnacht — the state-organised pogrom against Jewish citizens in 1938, unprecedented in its scale at the time. This act of violence accelerated political decisions driven by escalating antisemitic agitation, ultimately culminating in the Holocaust.
As a contemporary witness, Simon Laks described a surreal existence governed by arbitrary rules, in which others determined his fate: “Auschwitz was a kind of ‘negative’ of the world from which we had been abducted. White became black, black became white. Values were turned upside down.” The memory of this inversion of humanity remains timeless. The crimes of the Nazi regime must never be forgotten.
(Published (in German) in the Uni-Nachrichten / Salzburger Nachrichten on 13.12.2025)
