Irony and Identity

The Collections Department of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum retains many arrangements of popular songs that were performed by the men's orchestra of Auschwitz I. These songs often bear highly ironic but tragically relevant titles: "Letters That Never Arrived," "Hours That One Can Never Forget," "Sing a Song When You're Sad." A number of these songs are in the form of manuscript parts, written with great care in black ink on Beethoven Papier brand music paper. In this essay, I examine the manuscript parts for one of these songs, "Die schnste Zeit des Lebens" (The Most Beautiful Time of Life), to learn more about the identity of the prisoner copyists and how these songs might have functioned in a concentration camp. 1 I would like to thank the Collections Department of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum for giving me access to these materials during my numerous trips to Oswiecim. I especially

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Irony · Literature · Visual arts · Computer Science · Diverse Musicological Studies · Musicology and Musical Analysis