Kira Thurman at the New York Times:
In 1947, the Black German musician Fasia Jansen stood on a street in Hamburg and began to sing the music of Brecht in her thick Low German accent to anyone passing by. Perhaps she’d learned the songs from prisoners and internees at Neuengamme, the concentration camp where she’d been forced to work four years earlier. Perhaps she’d learned them in the early days after the war, when she’d performed with Holocaust survivors at a hospital in 1945. One thing was clear: As Jansen wrestled with her trauma, song was at the center of her experience.
Jansen does not appear in Jeremy Eichler’s new book, “Time’s Echo,” but the impulse to turn to music during and after the Holocaust is at the heart of it. Eichler, The Boston Globe’s chief classical music critic, suggests that music can help us remember what we’ve lost. “Time’s Echo” is an engrossing recovery project that reveals the depths of Europe’s ability — and inability — to mourn those losses.
more here.