Notes

Abby Anderton's slim volume makes a correspondingly concise case for the importance of rubble in the making of postwar listening: "Whether figurative or material, rubble was the common postwar fragmentation to be worked through, representing, in turn, the intellectual quandary of the denazification process, a rebuilding material, an audible sonic element, a performance practice, and a compositional aesthetic" (p. 2). Anderton points out that similar conceptions of some form of debris-based listening have informed studies on post earthquake Haiti (Elizabeth McAlister), postindustrial Detroit (Krysta Ryzewski), South Vietnam (Alexander M. Cannon), and survivors of the Marshall Islands nuclear tests (Jessica Schwartz). Nevertheless, her history is finely focused on Berlin in the months immediately following the Battle of Berlin in April 1945.

Anderton's tight geographical purview on Berlin (as opposed to, say, Nuremberg, a similarly rubbled city) allows her to contrast the supposedly glib opportunism of successful, privileged musicians like Richard Strauss, Carl Orff, and Werner Egk to "the lived experience of the average civilian musician" (p. 2). This recalls the elusive "everyday Nazi musician" that Michael H. Kater strives to discover at the outset of his account, profiling a number of struggling musicians trying to take advantage of the new government before moving on to bigger and better things (The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997], 7–14). Anderton's framing, then, exists as a sort of eschatological cosmopolitanism, one that foregrounds the embodied urban experience of suffering (whether real or imagined) over the detached irony often characteristic in the output of Strauss, Orff, and Egk. The subject within this frame is, in Anderton's words, "what I call rubble music, or the sound of civilian suffering after urban catastrophe" (p. 3). The qualifiers of "civilian" and "urban" here are central to both Anderton's argument and her study's major claim for originality, rising above the nonrubbled histories of more heroic figures detached from the nearly annihilated metropole.

In the process of making her case, Anderton handily dispatches a glut of lazy mythologies that continue to find themselves into textbooks and even specialized monographs: the notion that Nazi Germany was a fundamentally reactionary culture; the notion that the occupying powers had a near-total control over what music could be produced; and, most significantly, the "zero hour" myth that posited a total break with the Nazi era. To be sure, these myths have been handily dispatched by able scholars—Erik Levi and Pamela Maxine Potter, the latter of whom provides an enthusiastic blurb on the book's back cover, are the two most prominent—for at least two decades now, but it is nevertheless heartening that the critical mass continues to grow.

There is also something inspired in positioning this "rubble music" against the more privileged and prominent accounts of Strauss, Orff, and [End Page 593] Wilhelm Furtwängler. (Despite a continuing groundswell of scholarship, Egk sadly remains far less of a household name.) In one sense, it is a modest and obvious route to take. As Anderton points out, rubble aesthetics have been widely theorized in the visual arts—we have Trümmerfilm, but there is no corresponding Trümmermusik. But in another sense, it turns a great deal of assumptions about the immediate postwar period on their head, highlighting a liminal period and liminal figures that emerge from the historical cracks between the fall of the Reichshauptstadt and the retrenchment of the Cold War. Rather fittingly, Egk ends up bracketing Anderton's narrative, beginning with his cushy reception in Nazi Germany and concluding with his new operas receiving the same approbation in West Germany. The rubble didn't last for long, but, Anderton argues convincingly, the self-conscious suffering it represented was decisive for the formation of a coherent postwar German subjecthood, even if the...