With the Holocaust receding ever further from memory, Jeremy Eichler finds its most lasting monuments in the music of four composers—Benjamin Britten, Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, and Dmitri Shostakovich. This book shows how Jewish Germans' hopes for full integration into European society were extinguished in the flames of Auschwitz, and how poets, essayists, and artists grappled with the failure of high culture to stem the savagery. Ranging from the massacre at Babi Yar to the Battle of Leningrad, this is a timely and essential work of public witness.