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A stirring account of how music bears witness to history and carries forward the memory of the wartime past. In 1785, when the great German poet Friedrich Schiller penned his immortal "Ode to Joy," he crystallized the deepest hopes and dreams of the European Enlightenment for a new era of peace and freedom, a time when millions would be embraced as equals. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony then gave wing to Schiller's words, but barely a century later these same words were claimed by Nazi propagandists and twisted by a barbarism so complete that it ruptured, as one philosopher put it, "the deep layer of solidarity among all who wear a human face.". When it comes to how societies remember these increasingly distant dreams and catastrophes, we often think of history books, archives, documentaries, or memorials carved from stone.