OPPORTUNES (ZU)HÖREN: DIE SÄNGERINNEN DALIAH LAVI UND BELINA

Abstract

The text analyses the ways in which two Jewish singers, Belina and Daliah Lavi were listened to and evaluated by a West-German audience in the 1960s/70s. It follows Eidsheim's notion that any voice is co-constituted by both vocaliser and listener. Belina, a Shoah survivor, was staged as the fragile relict of an annihilated Jewish diaspora, her Yiddish repertoire framed through post-Nazi projections of Jewish victimhood and used diplomatically to signal Germany’s moral renewal. Lavi in turn, born in Palestine, embodied the Zionist Sabra ideal and became a Schlager star whose exoticized image aligned with West German Orientalist fantasies, as well as with Israel’s public relations agenda after 1967. In post-Nazi opportune listening Belina and Daliah Lavi emerge as two Jewish voices that contribute to a linear German historiography that reinforces a redemptive narrative in which the horrors of the Holocaust lead to the establishment of supposedly democratic, just nation states.