Brown University
Healing and Harmony between War and Genocide: Dr. Kurt Singer’s Musical Healing and The Doctors’ Chorus of Berlin,1913-1938
The problem considered by this dissertation is whether aesthetic experience may reshape and reform social, political and medical behavior. Utilizing the case study of the Berlin Doctors Chorus, this investigation considers a case where medical professionals served neglected social outsiders using humanistic means, largely choral music, rather than serving nationalist or state agendas that sought to clear the social margins. As a study in cultural history, this project addresses the cultural and intellectual agenda of ensemble founder Dr. Kurt Singer, though it does need seek to present a prosopography of individual members. Based on an array of published and non-published archival documents, this dissertation is a thematic micro-history, with each chapter devoted to a different thematic dimension of the history of this chorus.
A bold attempt to extend the professional exposure and training of physicians into music and to widen the reach of doctors into society via music, the chorus pursued performance in unconventional venues of jails and hospitals. Founded for those left diminished by the First World War, the Doctors Choir served war orphans and widows, and the jailed and the infirm. The Choir spent its final years serving those devastated by the Nazi “ war against the Jews. ” A guiding claim of this dissertation is that the Jüdischer Kulturbund could not have emerged historically or be understood historiographically without reference and study of the Doctors Chorus. And it is the history of this latter institution which uncovers and reveals the largely hidden Social Democratic character to German Jewish cultural leadership during the Nazi period. Indeed the form and cultural values of the Kulturbund constitute a constitute an application of principles taken from the Social Democratic movement rather than reflecting Judaic religious or Jewish intra-communal politics. I further identify this Social Democracy as aligned with the Marxian reforms elaborated by Eduard Bernstein as informed by the socially oriented psychoanalysis of Alfred Adler.
Made up largely of Jewish (and female) doctors, the choir participants dedicated most of their attention to a Christian sacred choral music repertoire, in particular, to the Protestant Cantatas of Bach and the Catholic masses of Bruckner. Dr. Singer reinterpreted these musical classics of European culture, specifically Bach and Bruckner as texts of social healing. This syncretic and post-secular spiritualism constitutes an essential but overlooked part of the Modern Jewish experience in Europe and presents a coda to the earliest intellectual impulses of Moses Mendelssohn and Jewish Reform. This was a pursuit of sacred authenticity parallel to but at odds with the more well known, within German Jewish history, Weimar Renaissance of Jewish Culture. This spiritualized musical healing constitutes a stark Jewish counterpoint to the better-known phenomenon of “Nazi Doctors ” and the parallel ideological exploitation of music under fascism. Alas, the link of music to sacred experience and social service was meant to counter an exclusivist technocratic focus that saw doctors as subordinate to eugenic programs of the post-liberal state.
The conclusion of the study is that the chorus provided a pioneering form of palliative care for populations whose very existence was under threat. Indeed, during the period of the Holocaust itself, Dr. Singer brought his work into the confines of “domestic performance ” using the tradition of the “ salon ” to rethink and reimagine the domestic interior as a category and form of agency and crisis response. This study also provides a renewed focus for European and European Jewish and Holocaust history, namely, upon the role of doctors as agents and diagnosticians of social change in pre-war Europe, often overlooked by historians. Overall, this study provies a new narrative of responses by Jews within European cultural forms to a period of crisis and catastrophe.
Adam J Sacks holds an MA, and PhD from the Brown University Department of History, an MS in Second Language Acquisition/Education from the City College of the City of New York, High Honors, and a College Scholar Bachelor of Arts from Cornell University, Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa. Trained in Modern cultural history and the instruction of language acquisition, Adam’s areas of interest encompass the politics of aesthetics, the displacement of religious energies, cultural difference, and cultural crisis. A classical guitarist, bassist, arts reviewer and dedicated polyglot, Adam writes regularly on topics such as the politics of memory, public history, cultural interpretation and criticism.