Ein musikalisches Denkmal gegen das Vergessen

With his Requiem for Auschwitz, Roger Moreno Rathgeb has crafted a "musical memorial" for the victims of National Socialism. By bringing together approaches and concepts from musicology (especially ethnomusicology), media and memory studies, this article investigates three central aspects of the multimedia memorial comprised of "music, film, images and words" (Rathgeb 2019). The article first analyses the circulation and transfer of memory, tracing the "travels'' (Erll 2011) and "remediations" (Bolter/Grusin 1999) of memories of the Holocaust, as well as examining musics affective potential to create spaces of memory transfer (Landsberg 2004). Second, by asking who is remembered, the article surveys the manifold readings afforded by music, its musical agents, its embedding of media, and its performance contexts. Third, the article focuses on the political purpose of the musical memorial, unveiling that the Requiem is not only employed to make visible the marginalized memories of the Sinti and Roma genocide by the Nazis, but that it is used to draw attention to current struggles of the minority across Europe. The Requiem further serves as a general statement against racism, actively attempting to shape the present and futy

Art · Humanities · Musicology and Musical Analysis