Hitler's Twilight of the Gods: Music and the Orchestration of War and Genocide in Europe (German and European Studies) - Hardcover

Birch, Alexandra

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1487549199 ISBN 13: 9781487549190

Publisher: University of Toronto Press, 2025

Synopsis

Music was an integral part of statecraft and identity formation in the Third Reich. Structured thematically and semiotically around the Wagnerian tetralogy of the Ring cycle, Hitler’s Twilight of the Gods provides a sonic read of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Alexandra Birch sheds light on the specific type of music promoted under Nazism, linked to larger Teutonic mythologies and histories espoused in rhetoric and personal styling. The book explores the musical fixation of the command as it was extended to the ordinary troops of the Wehrmacht and SS in instances of musical sadism and destruction during the Holocaust. It reveals how, in constructing what was “German,” this process also intentionally fashioned a subaltern other with an assigned set of music and aesthetics.
The book draws on analysis of testimony and perpetrator documents to reveal the execution of this binary identity and the inclusion of music even in extreme genocidal conditions. From drinking games in the interwar period, to musical sadism in the Holocaust, to the final delusions of the command in collapse, Hitler’s Twilight of the Gods illuminates how music was a component of camaraderie, identity, masculinity, and warfare.

About this title

About the Author

Alexandra Birch is the Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1487549199
• ISBN 13: 9781487549190
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 232