The Violin as Archive: Genealogies of Sound and Memory in Holocaust Film

Abstract

The solo violin in Holocaust cinema functions not as a static or sentimental symbol but as a historically contingent sonic mechanism whose meaning evolves across time through specific cinematic and memorial frameworks. Through a comparative analysis of The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), Schindler’s List (1993), and The Song of Names (2019), this study traces the violin’s transformation from sentimental universalism to moral certitude to speculative absence. Synthesizing Michel Foucault’s genealogical method, Michael A. Figueroa’s musical adaptation of it, and Amy Lynn Wlodarski’s theory of musical witnessing, it develops a hybrid framework for analyzing how sound accrues historical authority and organizes ethical orientation in Holocaust cinema, without claiming transparent access to testimony. In addition to offering a genealogy of sonic symbolism, the article proposes a periodization of Holocaust film through sound—the Normative Period, the Era of the Witness, and the Post-Witness Period—each marked by distinct listening practices and memory-making strategies. This model shifts the analytic center from visual tropes to auditory ones, treating sound as a mediated mode through which Holocaust memory is constructed, stabilized, and contested. In the Post-Witness Period especially, the violin emerges not as testimony but as a speculative, prosthetic form of witnessing whose authority derives from its circulation within institutional memory cultures. By positioning the violin as a discursive and affective site of memory work rather than an autonomous agent, the article reorients Holocaust film analysis toward the politics of sound and underscores the urgent relevance of listening as Holocaust memory becomes increasingly mediated.