Alexandra Birch is both a world-class concert violinist and a leading historian of genocide. On Monday, Nov. 17, Birch will visit UD to speak about her book, which demonstrates the integral role music played in Nazi statecraft and ideology, from the personal obsessions of the Nazi leadership to the harrowing use of musical sadism in the Holocaust. Music was an integral part of statecraft and identity formation in the Third Reich.

Structured thematically and semiotically around the Wagnerian tetralogy of the Ring cycle, Hitler’s Twilight of the Gods provides a sonic read of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Birch sheds light on the specific type of music promoted under Nazism, linked to larger Teutonic mythologies and histories espoused in rhetoric and personal styling.

Her book explores the musical fixation of the command as it was extended to the ordinary troops of the Wehrmacht and SS in instances of musical sadism and destruction during the Holocaust. It reveals how, in constructing what was “German,” this process also intentionally fashioned a subaltern “other” with an assigned set of music and aesthetics. The book draws on analysis of testimony and perpetrator documents to reveal the execution of this binary identity and the inclusion of music even in extreme genocidal conditions. From drinking games in the interwar period, to musical sadism in the Holocaust, to the final delusions of the command in collapse, Hitler’s Twilight of the Gods illuminates how music was a component of camaraderie, identity, masculinity and warfare.

Nov. 17, 2025, 3 p.m.
103 Gore Hall

For further information, please visit: https://harriman.columbia.edu/postdoc-spotlight-alexandra-birch/