Music as unconscious chronicle
An interview with Times Echo author Jeremy Eichler
Courtesy Penguin Random House
I grew up not knowing about the Holocaust. I am from New Delhi, India. The topic was absent—maybe deliberately, maybe unconsciously—from the curriculum. I learned about it only after coming to the USA, in 2002. I’m also in no way an expert on classical music. So I’ve been thinking about why TAP editor in chief Austin Ratner asked me to do this interview with Jeremy Eichler about his book Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance (Knopf, 2023). My speculation is that it’s because of my experience as a migrant and as a minority in the world of American psychoanalysis. In any event, I took the assignment and immersed myself in the book, which examines how the rise of Nazism impacted four great European composers and the special role of music in historical memory. I also began listening nonstop to the pieces discussed in it, and not just the four main pieces covered (Britten’s War Requiem, Strauss’s Metamorphosen, Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw, and Shostakovich’s “Babi Yar” Symphony). I was not left unmoved by the music, by Eichler’s keen storytelling, or by his generous discussion with me.
A writer and historian, Jeremy Eichler teaches at Tufts University and served for almost two decades as the chief classical music critic of The Boston Globe. Time’s Echo, which was named “History Book of the Year” by The Sunday Times of London, is available in paperback September 24, 2024.
Himanshu Agrawal: Does the title of the book, Time’s Echo, have a story?
Jeremy Eichler: The research and writing of this book was a journey of around 10 years of my life, and the broader sensibility that the book tries to distill—about how we can or might relate to art as a kind of bridge to the past—goes back even further. Essentially, the book brings together my journey as a professional listener with my training and research as a historian of modern Europe. So the title came about as the most concise and, I hope, poetic way of capturing a phenomenon that’s at the very heart of the book, which is to think of music as the echo of lost time, music as the language of time’s nonlinearity. If I had to distill the book’s central insight into a single sentence, it would be that it’s not just we who remember music, but music that remembers us as a society.
HA: Were there other titles?
JE: One I liked was After Silence. In a beautiful essay, Aldous Huxley says that “after silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
Actually, in the case of the early postwar period, the question of whether to be silent or to create art takes on an ethical charge. One of the figures at the heart of the book is the music critic, philosopher, and sociologist Theodor Adorno. People often associate him with a single line that gets quoted a lot, which is that after Auschwitz, to write poetry would be barbaric—this notion that the Holocaust is the death of beauty or the death of artistic expression. But what I clarify in the introduction is that this was not in fact his final word on the subject. He actually revised his opinion in later years to honor art’s power of witness. And I quote a very powerful comment he made, which is that “because the world has lived its own demise, it needs art as its unconscious chronicle.” It’s this idea of art, and music in particular, as an unconscious chronicle—a witness to history and a carrier of memory for a world that had outlived its own demise—that becomes the book’s central theme.
Himanshu Agrawal: As someone far removed from your world of research, music criticism, and European studies, when I started reading it, I was a little worried. But you are such a great storyteller. How did you approach writing this book?
Jeremy Eichler: That’s really meaningful for me to hear. One of the goals I had in writing this book was, without compromising the depth and rigor of the research, to present it as a kind of tapestry of stories. The big ideas of the book about sound and memory and art and history get explored through the stories. This subject could have received a very typically academic treatment, but I worked hard on the craft of the writing because I cared too much about the issues reaching a broader audience. I wanted the same book to speak to people already working in these disciplinary silos of music, history, Holocaust studies, and memory studies, but I also really wanted it to speak beyond those fields.
HA: You may know that in psychoanalysis, kind of like in music, there’s this school and that school. But one thing that everyone can agree on is that childhood matters. So I was hoping that you could tell me a little bit about your childhood.
JE: [laughs] I’m appreciating the ways in which this interview is already nothing like other ones that I’ve done.
HA: Mission accomplished.
JE: You know, the literature on Holocaust memory talks about survivors as witnesses. Then there’s also the notion of a second-generation or third-generation witness. None of those terms apply to me because I don’t have survivors in my own direct family. But I have come to know the term witness by adoption, which feels like it applies in my case in the sense that my own interests over the years have come back to this period again and again. I think there are some rational reasons or explanations one can hazard for why that is, but I’m also open to slightly mystical explanations. A German writer I quote often in Time’s Echo, W. G. Sebald, says that just like we have appointments in the future where we are obligated to show up at a particular time and place, maybe some of us, at least, have appointments in the past, places that we have to go looking for, lives that came before us that we have to go searching for. And I do feel like over the years, seeing the consistency with which my own interests have returned again and again to some of these themes, there is a sense of having many such “appointments.”
HA: What a beautiful concept.
JE: In a slightly less mystical vein, the theorist of memory Aleida Assmann talks about two categories of memory. She calls one of them “storage memory,” which is all the memory in archives, all the memory in history monographs, all the information not necessarily known to a public at large. And then she calls the second type “functional memory,” which is the storied past, the memory that’s in the public square, memory that’s more broadly available to members of a society as they try to figure out ways to narrate their own identities
In one sense, what I try to do in Times Echo is to transform knowledge or memory from storage into function—that is, bringing it into the public square, to make it available for storytelling about where we come from, reflections on the meaning of the past, humanity’s hopes, dreams, and nightmares. I think there’s something that can be powerful in that transfer of knowledge.
It’s not just we who remember music, but music that remembers us as a society.
In explaining these different concepts, Assmann actually compares it to psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. When a patient comes into an analyst’s office, there is the factual record of their own history, the moment-by-moment accrual of events that happened to them, and then there are the stories they’ve learned to tell about their own past.
The survivor Jean Améry also has this powerful phrase that stuck with me. Living in the 1960s and 70s, he attacked the historians of his day for writing about the Holocaust, almost as if to allow it to be forgotten, he said. He said these books take this morally unexpiated, unassimilable past and put it in, in his phrase, the cold storage of history. So music, this book contends, has a really underappreciated power and ability to burn through history’s cold storage.
HA: My supervisor recently said to me that interpretations are gifts of love. She’s talking about psychoanalytic interpretations. I received this book as a gift of love. There’s a spiritual quality to this book.
JE: That’s very touching to hear. It was deeply personal for me. You know, Kafka said that maybe a book will be the axe for the frozen sea within us. It would be a thrill to think in any small way that this book could work in that way for someone. But another way of describing it is that, actually, music is the axe, memory is the axe, and that this is a book about making those come alive and unlocking a fuller dimension of their power.
HA: It’s interesting that you use that the analogy of the axe. Many of these pieces that you talk about, they carry with them a rage, an anger. It’s a beautiful way to sublimate that, with cacophony or discordant notes. Looking to the present, have you given much thought about how to tell the stories of contemporary Jews, both in America and in the current conflict in the Middle East?
One of the most disturbing things about the contemporary political moment is that it seems like whichever camp one falls into, it’s as if there is a ban on empathy for the suffering on the other side. I would hope that stories like the ones in the book become sites of empathy, become invitations to deepen our own listening to the past, and also to each other. It’s an extremely complex history, and memory, without a recognition of that complexity, threatens to calcify into myth. And I think myths can be very dangerous in this context.
I find myself going back to this story of Isaac Stern, the great violinist who died just a few years ago. Across the final decade of his life, young musicians from all over the world would come to play for him. He would listen to them respectfully and then, afterwards, he would say, “I’d like you to play that same piece again for me now, but this time, please show me not how you play the music, but why.”
It’s always struck me that this question of why is not asked enough about listening itself. We have a whole literature that explores the how of listening, which we could call music appreciation, but this is really a book about the why of listening, the why of art in our lives today. One answer I’m inviting readers to think about is art’s powerful way of deepening our connections to these earlier eras, these earlier lives, these earlier landscapes. And perhaps in some small sense, even asking the question of why vis-à-vis this impossibly painful history can itself be an ethically meaningful act.
Apropos this very topic, after one book presentation, a listener reminded me of the famous line from Primo Levi’s book Survival in Auschwitz, where the author describes being incredibly thirsty in the camp and reaching for an icicle, only to find himself stopped by a guard. When Levi asks the guard why, the guard responds Hier ist kein warum—“Here there is no why.” The Holocaust, in this sense, was a kind of annihilation of meaning, an annihilation of reason, an annihilation of why. Perhaps by putting that historical event back into the world of art and memory and storytelling, we open up the possibility of a small gesture of repair.
I’d also just like to clarify that Time’s Echo is not exclusively about remembering these horrific ruptures and traumas. It’s also an attempt to recall an older vision of Enlightenment humanism that came before and was swept away. I think we need those sparks of hope that have been buried in the rubble. We need them more than ever today. In the coda of the book, I quote Ernst Bloch, the German philosopher, who has this phrase das Noch-Nicht-Sein, the state of not yet being. This is also a book about music’s ability to carry forward the Noch-Nicht-Sein of the past, the still-glowing embers of possibility, the hope for alternative futures.
This interview has been edited and condensed. Published August 2024