The Representation of Holocaust Trauma in The Song of Terezin by Franz Waxman: A Psychoanalytic Listening

Abstract: The article discusses music as a cultural processor of a social trauma within the Holocaust. According to psychoanalytic music research, music is especially capable of representing trauma via its nonverbal, affective, and bodily-based means of expression. As an analytical example, the study focuses on the vocal and orchestral work The Song of Terezin (1965), composed by the German-American, Jewish composer Franz Waxman (1906–1967) and based on poems written by children in the concentration and transit camp of Terezín (There-sienstadt in German). By drawing on psychoanalytic music analysis, cultural trauma studies, Holocaust studies, and the concept of transitional space, the article outlines the sonic mechanism by which the composition Song of Terezin constructs a discourse of trauma and mourning. By this, the aim is to illuminate the workings of music as a communal vehicle for dealing with collective trauma, and hence as a site for the social healing process. As an art form based on listening, music may create an ethical space for encountering the Other, which is resonant with the psychoanalytic method of attentive listening.