Amid the rupture of World War II and its direct aftermath, three Austro-German composers surprisingly turned to Franz Kafka (who famously described himself as unmusical) to confront the crisis of communication to which music seemed to have succumbed. Ernst Krenek set five of Kafka’s aphorisms as a 1938 song cycle, Fünf Lieder nach Worten von Franz Kafka; Hans Werner Henze transmitted the short story Ein Landarzt as a 1951 radio opera; and Gottfried von Einem adapted Kafka’s novel Der Prozeß into a 1953 staged opera. This dissertation argues that Kafka’s work acts as an entry point into three different questions of musical communication raised by these compositions: whether or not music can, and should, convey a message of political engagement; what violence is done to a musical message in the process of performance; and how music’s interpretive polyvalence can be deployed as an expedient communications strategy. Framing the compositions within the Austro-German landscape in which they were written, the project engages with each question of musical communication through close textual readings and musical analyses. It mobilizes media theory in order to consider the compositions as different media in which music and text are integrated, arguing that the questions raised in each case study are specific to the genre qua medium in which they are presented: German song (Lied), radio opera, and literary opera. Finally, the project includes original discoveries from archival research in Austria. While questions of music’s expressive power have long plagued the field of melopoetics, this dissertation enters the musico-literary conversation by way of the crisis of communication emerging from the experience of collective trauma. Speaking to larger anxieties regarding the role of art in the wake of atrocity, these case studies ask: what can music possibly say in the face of global conflict, mounting death tolls, rising tides of fascism, and racial violence? While contributing to Krenek, Henze, Einem, and Kafka studies, this dissertation offers a new consideration of the means by which music can, and cannot, communicate real-world concerns.