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Music workshop

There was often music to be heard in the Buchenwald concentration camp: as an act of humiliation or self-assertion, as an expression of joy or suffering. The workshop offers various perspectives on the significance of music in the concentration camp.

A young woman looks at blackboards and a whiteboard with labeled slips of paper.
Music workshop, 2022. Photo: Fabiola Benninger. ©Buchenwald Memorial

In this workshop, the participants explore the history of the camp along the path of music, taking their own perspectives on what music means for their lives as a point of departure.

With the aid of selected pieces of music, they look for and find answers to questions about music in a concentration camp, considering different perspectives in the process:

  • What significance did music have in the concentration camp, for the members of the SS, for the inmates? Was it forbidden or allowed?
  • Who could make music? Who could or had to listen to it?
  • Where in the camp was music made?
  • What was the role of the camp band and the Buchenwald Song?
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