Placing Berlin in the Music

Abstract This chapter presents the third element fundamental to an overall picture: the music itself, with specific focus on the relationship between music, text, and the city. The chapter begins with a wider discussion of music’s role in sounding urban geographies. This is then set against the indeterminacy and ambiguities of “placing” klezmer music—a result of mid-twentieth-century rupture, subsequent postwar cultural submergence, and the transnationalism of its contemporary revival. The main body of the chapter is devoted to the specific ways that the city of Berlin is articulated through its klezmer music. In order to do this, the chapter takes as its starting point sociologist Adam Krims’s flexible concept of “urban ethos,” applying this for the first time to the processes of traditional music. Through detailed analysis of a series of musical examples, it shows the important ways in which the city of Berlin is made meaningful in its klezmer music—how exactly, through both music and text, the city functions as a significant musical-semantic unit. The musicians discussed include ?Shmaltz!, Daniel Kahn, and Knoblauch Klezmer Band, and the analysis is supported by detailed transcriptions and interview material. Throughout the chapter and through the work of these different artists, certain themes reappear—themes particularly pertinent to Berlin and Jewish musical production. These include notions of escape, borders, and transgression and the dialogue between visible and hidden histories. The chapter also uses David Kaminsky’s theorization of the “New Old Europe Sound” to question and problematize some of the urban expressions discussed.