“My Moral Duty”
Mieczysław Weinberg and the Holocaust
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
Composers from the United States and Israel define the Holocaust genre in music. In their works, they express admonishment, indictment, and remembrance through twelve-tone technique, atonality, and expressive rhythm. Jewish melodies do not play a central role. It is different in the Soviet Union: Mieczysław Weinberg and Dmitrii Shostakovich used numerous Jewish musical elements as one of the few possibilities to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and to take up a position against anti-Jewish sentiments in their own country. Weinberg encrypted his own examination of the trauma instead of admonishing and accusing.
(Osteuropa 7/2010, pp. 173–207)