Uploaded September 2023 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
Kira Thurman, "Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms"
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501759840/singing-like-germans/
*Winner of the 2022 George L. Mosse American Historical Association Prize: https://mosseprogram.wisc.edu/aha-prize/*
“In Singing Like Germans, Kira Thurman tells the sweeping story of Black musicians in German-speaking Europe over more than a century. Thurman brings to life the incredible musical interactions and transnational collaborations among people of African descent and white Germans and Austrians. Through this compelling history, she explores how people reinforced or challenged racial identities in the concert hall.
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, audiences assumed the categories of Blackness and Germanness were mutually exclusive. Yet on attending a performance of German music by a Black musician, many listeners were surprised to discover that German identity is not a biological marker but something that could be learned, performed, and mastered. While Germans and Austrians located their national identity in music, championing composers such as Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms as national heroes, the performance of their works by Black musicians complicated the public's understanding of who had the right to play them. Audiences wavered between seeing these musicians as the rightful heirs of Austro-German musical culture and dangerous outsiders to it.
Thurman explores the tension between the supposedly transcendental powers of classical music and the global conversations that developed about who could perform it. An interdisciplinary and transatlantic history, Singing Like Germans suggests that listening to music is not a passive experience, but an active process where racial and gendered categories are constantly made and unmade.”
Chaired by Chad S.A. Gibbs (College of Charleston)
Comment by Lauren Stokes (Northwestern University)
14 September 2023
15:00 CST
Sponsored by:
George L. Mosse Program in History
College of Charleston Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies
Center for German & European Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of History
Kira Thurman is an Associate Professor of History, German Studies, and Musicology at the University of Michigan. A classically-trained pianist who grew up in Vienna, Austria, Thurman’s writings on music, the Black diaspora, and German-speaking Europe have been published in academic journals such as the Journal of the American Musicological Society, German Studies Review, and the American Historical Review, and she has also written for The New Yorker and the New York Times. Her book, Singing like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms appeared with Cornell University Press. Named one of the best books of 2021 by NPR, it has won seven prizes, including the Marfield Prize (National Award for Arts Writing) and the George L. Mosse prize from the American Historical Association.
Lauren Stokes is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University, where she teaches courses on German history, migration history, and the history of gender. Her book Fear of the Family: Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany (OUP 2022) investigates the inner workings of the “family migrant” category since the 1970s. She is currently working on research projects on racism and anti-racism in divided Germany, right-wing environmentalism in contemporary Europe, and mobility in the jet age.
Chad S.A. Gibbs serves as Director of the Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies and Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies. He is a historian of the Holocaust, antisemitism, modern Germany, and war and society. Chad’s current project focuses on gender, geography, and social networks in Jewish resistance at Treblinka. Chad has held fellowships from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Yale University Fortunoff Video Archive, the George L. Mosse Program in History, and the USC Shoah Foundation, where he remains an Affiliated Researcher. His extensive work in oral histories at several archives contributes teaching and scholarly interests in the collection and analysis of survivor testimonies as well as the generational transmission of knowledge and trauma.
Kira Thurman, "Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms"
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501759840/singing-like-germans/
*Winner of the 2022 George L. Mosse American Historical Association Prize: https://mosseprogram.wisc.edu/aha-prize/*
“In Singing Like Germans, Kira Thurman tells the sweeping story of Black musicians in German-speaking Europe over more than a century. Thurman brings to life the incredible musical interactions and transnational collaborations among people of African descent and white Germans and Austrians. Through this compelling history, she explores how people reinforced or challenged racial identities in the concert hall.
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, audiences assumed the categories of Blackness and Germanness were mutually exclusive. Yet on attending a performance of German music by a Black musician, many listeners were surprised to discover that German identity is not a biological marker but something that could be learned, performed, and mastered. While Germans and Austrians located their national identity in music, championing composers such as Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms as national heroes, the performance of their works by Black musicians complicated the public's understanding of who had the right to play them. Audiences wavered between seeing these musicians as the rightful heirs of Austro-German musical culture and dangerous outsiders to it.
Thurman explores the tension between the supposedly transcendental powers of classical music and the global conversations that developed about who could perform it. An interdisciplinary and transatlantic history, Singing Like Germans suggests that listening to music is not a passive experience, but an active process where racial and gendered categories are constantly made and unmade.”
Chaired by Chad S.A. Gibbs (College of Charleston)
Comment by Lauren Stokes (Northwestern University)
14 September 2023
15:00 CST
Sponsored by:
George L. Mosse Program in History
College of Charleston Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies
Center for German & European Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of History
Kira Thurman is an Associate Professor of History, German Studies, and Musicology at the University of Michigan. A classically-trained pianist who grew up in Vienna, Austria, Thurman’s writings on music, the Black diaspora, and German-speaking Europe have been published in academic journals such as the Journal of the American Musicological Society, German Studies Review, and the American Historical Review, and she has also written for The New Yorker and the New York Times. Her book, Singing like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms appeared with Cornell University Press. Named one of the best books of 2021 by NPR, it has won seven prizes, including the Marfield Prize (National Award for Arts Writing) and the George L. Mosse prize from the American Historical Association.
Lauren Stokes is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University, where she teaches courses on German history, migration history, and the history of gender. Her book Fear of the Family: Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany (OUP 2022) investigates the inner workings of the “family migrant” category since the 1970s. She is currently working on research projects on racism and anti-racism in divided Germany, right-wing environmentalism in contemporary Europe, and mobility in the jet age.
Chad S.A. Gibbs serves as Director of the Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies and Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies. He is a historian of the Holocaust, antisemitism, modern Germany, and war and society. Chad’s current project focuses on gender, geography, and social networks in Jewish resistance at Treblinka. Chad has held fellowships from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Yale University Fortunoff Video Archive, the George L. Mosse Program in History, and the USC Shoah Foundation, where he remains an Affiliated Researcher. His extensive work in oral histories at several archives contributes teaching and scholarly interests in the collection and analysis of survivor testimonies as well as the generational transmission of knowledge and trauma.
