Book excerpt: "Transcending Dystopia features pioneering research on the role music played in its various connections to and contexts of Jewish communal life and cultural activity in Germany from 1945 to 1989. As the first history of the Jewish communities' musical practices during the postwar and Cold War eras, it tells the story of how the traumatic experience of the Holocaust led to transitions and transformations, and the significance of music in these processes. As such, it relies on music to draw together three areas of inquiry: the Jewish community, the postwar Germanys and their politics after the Holocaust (occupied Germany, the Federal Republic, the Democratic Republic, and divided Berlin), and on the concept of cultural mobility. Indeed, the musical practices of the Jewish communities in the postwar Germanys cannot be divorced from politics as can be observed in their relations to Israel and United States. On the grounds of these conceptual concerns, selective communities serve as case studies to provide a kaleidoscopic panorama of musical practices in worship and in social life. Within these pillars, the chapters in this volume cover a wide spectrum of topics from music during commemorations, on the radio and in Jewish newspapers to synagogue concerts and community events; from the absence and presence of cantor and organ to the resurgence of choral music. What binds these topics tightly together is the specific theoretical inquiry of mobility. Interdisciplinary in scope and method, the book builds on recent scholarship in Cold War studies, cultural history, German studies, Holocaust studies, and Jewish studies"--