Non­fic­tion

Time’s Echo: The Sec­ond World War, the Holo­caust, and the Music of Remembrance

Jere­my Eichler
By
Jonathan Fass
– March 18, 2024

In Time’s Echo, music crit­ic Jere­my Eich­ler has brought togeth­er his deep appre­ci­a­tion for clas­si­cal music and his schol­ar­ship as a cul­tur­al his­to­ri­an to reflect on one of the dark­est peri­ods in world history.

Eich­ler close­ly exam­ines the lives and work of four of Europe’s pre­em­i­nent com­posers: Ben­jamin Brit­ten, Arnold Schoen­berg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Richard Strauss. Their music tells the trag­ic sto­ry of how their lives were dis­rupt­ed by the rise of Nazism. It also touch­es on the vic­tim­iza­tion of the arts and the destruc­tion of Enlight­en­ment ideals and Euro­pean Jew­ry as a whole. Focus­ing specif­i­cal­ly on Britten’s War Requiem, Strauss’s Meta­mor­pho­sen, Schoenberg’s Sur­vivor from War­saw, and Shostakovitch’s ​“Babi Yar” sym­pho­ny, Eichler’s book ​“attempts to open up new per­spec­tives on the wartime past.” At the same time, the author is care­ful to point out that these com­posers are not a means to under­stand­ing the full his­to­ry of the period.

Eichler’s work also asks read­ers to con­sid­er two broad­er ques­tions. First, it demands that we con­sid­er how we might con­nect to his­to­ry in new ways. Sec­ond, it asks how music specif­i­cal­ly may serve as a medi­um through which this his­to­ry comes alive, trans­formed from a record­ing of the past to a moment of remembrance.

While read­ers will ben­e­fit from a famil­iar­i­ty with clas­si­cal music, it is not crit­i­cal to under­stand­ing Eichler’s argu­ment. He sup­ple­ments his analy­sis with sec­ondary sources that deep­en and broad­en his study of the music, the his­tor­i­cal con­text of its com­po­si­tion, and the lives of its com­posers. As a result, Time’s Echo has been rec­og­nized as a ground­break­ing work. It is the recip­i­ent of three Nation­al Jew­ish Book Awards and was select­ed as the win­ner of His­to­ry Book of the Year by The Sun­day Times of Lon­don. Addi­tion­al­ly, The New York­er, The New York Times, and Nation­al Pub­lic Radio have all called it a notable book for 2023. 

Eichler’s unique approach to explor­ing his­to­ry will like­ly com­pel read­ers to lis­ten to these com­po­si­tions for the first time or anew, empow­ered by a more nuanced under­stand­ing of their impor­tance. This par­tic­u­lar music rep­re­sents how com­posers con­tin­ue to use their gifts to com­mu­ni­cate their lives and loss­es, and to cre­ate time­less memo­ri­als to some of history’s worst atrocities.

Jonathan Fass is the Senior Man­ag­ing Direc­tor of RootOne at The Jew­ish Edu­ca­tion Project of New York.
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Discussion Questions

Book of the Year:

In beau­ti­ful, haunt­ing prose, Time’s Echo pays homage to the ways in which some of the twen­ti­eth century’s most cel­e­brat­ed com­posers memo­ri­al­ized the Holo­caust and the Sec­ond World War in their music. The work cen­ters on songs com­posed by Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoen­berg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Ben­jamin Brit­ten, and it uses these com­po­si­tions to shed light on post­war Europe and America. 

Jere­my Eich­ler, the chief clas­si­cal music crit­ic of The Boston Globe, shows how the expe­ri­ences of the war — and par­tic­u­lar­ly Jew­ish expe­ri­ences of it — shaped clas­si­cal music in the imme­di­ate post­war era. Eich­ler, who also holds a Ph.D. in Euro­pean his­to­ry, intri­cate­ly weaves his­to­ry with music crit­i­cism and draws inspi­ra­tion from sources as diverse as music the­o­ry, mem­o­ry stud­ies, Euro­pean his­to­ri­og­ra­phy, and the writ­ings of W. G. Sebald. The meld­ing of Ger­man and Jew­ish cul­ture, epit­o­mized by Felix Mendelssohn, and the pro­found break brought about by Nazism, become dis­turbing­ly audi­ble in Eichler’s account. His insight into the strug­gle of Jews and non-Jews alike to come to terms with the pain and trau­ma of cat­a­stro­phe will encour­age read­ers to ​“lis­ten to the past through music’s ears.”

His­to­ry:

In beau­ti­ful, haunt­ing prose, Time’s Echo pays homage to the ways in which some of the twen­ti­eth century’s most cel­e­brat­ed com­posers memo­ri­al­ized the Holo­caust and the Sec­ond World War in their music. The work cen­ters on songs com­posed by Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoen­berg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Ben­jamin Brit­ten, and it uses these com­po­si­tions to shed light on post­war Europe and America. 

Jere­my Eich­ler, the chief clas­si­cal music crit­ic of The Boston Globe, shows how the expe­ri­ences of the war — and par­tic­u­lar­ly Jew­ish expe­ri­ences of it — shaped clas­si­cal music in the imme­di­ate post­war era. Eich­ler, who also holds a Ph.D. in Euro­pean his­to­ry, intri­cate­ly weaves his­to­ry with music crit­i­cism and draws inspi­ra­tion from sources as diverse as music the­o­ry, mem­o­ry stud­ies, Euro­pean his­to­ri­og­ra­phy, and the writ­ings of W. G. Sebald. The meld­ing of Ger­man and Jew­ish cul­ture, epit­o­mized by Felix Mendelssohn, and the pro­found break brought about by Nazism, become dis­turbing­ly audi­ble in Eichler’s account. His insight into the strug­gle of Jews and non-Jews alike to come to terms with the pain and trau­ma of cat­a­stro­phe will encour­age read­ers to ​“lis­ten to the past through music’s ears.”

Holo­caust:

Jere­my Eichler’s riv­et­ing and mag­is­te­r­i­al new book, Time’s Echo, details how the Holo­caust has been memo­ri­al­ized in mon­u­ments, muse­ums, art, archi­tec­ture, nation­al nar­ra­tives, and even fic­tion and poet­ry — and it’s cru­cial for under­stand­ing both the events of the Holo­caust and how we make sense of them today. Until now, no one had plumbed the depths of what Eich­ler calls ​“the music of remem­brance.” Nor had any­one dis­cussed how music pre­served Holo­caust mem­o­ry in ways that no oth­er artis­tic medi­um could. Based on impec­ca­ble his­tor­i­cal and musi­co­log­i­cal research, Eich­ler tells the ori­gin sto­ries of tow­er­ing works by Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoen­berg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Ben­jamin Brit­ten, all of which reflect these com­posers’ lived expe­ri­ences dur­ing World War II and the Holo­caust. They are what Eich­ler calls ​“vital repos­i­to­ries of cul­tur­al mem­o­ry, [where] the liv­ing past still resides.”

In lyri­cal, clear-eyed prose, Eich­ler guides us deep into the times, spaces, and per­for­mances of Shostakovich’s ​“Babi Yar Sym­pho­ny,” Schoenberg’s ​“A Sur­vivor from War­saw,” Strauss’s ​“In Memo­ri­am,” and Britten’s ​“War Requiem.” With ​“the ears of a crit­ic and the tools of a his­to­ri­an,” Eich­ler pro­pos­es a pro­found­ly new and orig­i­nal way of ​“hear­ing his­to­ry” — that is, by ​“lis­ten­ing with an under­stand­ing of music as time’s echo.” This is cul­tur­al his­to­ry at its most pro­found and mov­ing. Like the music at its heart, this book also ​“flows from the mys­te­ri­ous capac­i­ty to bridge emo­tion and intel­lect.” It is a ground­break­ing achieve­ment in memo­r­i­al history.