by Guy Stern
Even our undergraduates caught the Lessing bug. Jan Unna, one of our majors, returned from a trip to Europe, and on his first day on campus he headed straight for my office, holding a mysterious package. He ceremoniously peeled off the covers and unveiled a plaster cast of a famous statue of Lessing. He had spotted it in an antique store. A photograph of his discovery graced the cover of the first twenty or so Yearbooks.
I was in Munich that summer of 1968 and decided to visit Ernst Hueber, the second-generation owner of the Max Hueber Publishing House, and an old friend. Ernst combined in his character a kaleidoscope of contradictory traits. He was a devout Catholic and also a staunch supporter of the Social Democratic Party and other liberal causes. He made all major decisions on his own, but was one of the first businessmen to build a worker’s health facility at company headquarters. He cultivated all the “right” people while building his rather small firm into one of Germany’s largest textbook houses. Nevertheless he would readily invite a struggling young instructor from Poland or an ancient refugee intellectual who had returned to Germany to his informal dinner parties. He hated all wars. Small wonder that he loved Lessing.
Aaron Salomon Gumperz said of Lessing that he brought clarity to every branch of knowledge. That illumination, I believe, benefited all those who have tried to preserve Lessing’s legacy, from the early progenitors to those who are his current champions at the Lessing Yearbook and Society. The spirit of Lessing left its mark on all of us.
Scarcely surprising, that over time my second field of specialization was to become the study of exile and of exile literature. My time in uniform and my unplanned relocation to New York in search of a post with the New York Times had been my passport to a different world, a world in the making pastiched with “unfinished stories,” to quote the title of an exilic drama by the playwright Sybil Pearson. Through my assignment to Ritchie, I had met Stefan Heym, a German author in exile; through my friend Karl Frucht, I had met a whole bevy of artists and writers, such as the painter George Gross and the writer Walter Mehring. And then I looked in the mirror and asked myself, wasn’t I one of them, my fate with a double dose of hubris, perhaps by potential?
Unfortunately, I must recall that the hubris was deftly extinguished by a one-sentence book dedication by my friend Hertha Pauli. Having risen to the heights of feature editor of the Hofstra University Chronicle, I had been feeling my oats. Hubris beckoned and I started to write poetry and had the temerity to show the results to Hertha. She did not comment, but went to a bookshelf for a copy of one of her publications. She scribbled a dedication for me: “To a very gifted editor.” I got the message.
I did not fare much better when she allowed me to escort her to a concert featuring her uncle, the legendary pianist Artur Schnabel at Carnegie Hall. I had lobbied her to introduce me to Schnabel; I wanted to include remarks by him in a term paper for my music appreciation class. Before the concert I researched Schnabel to a fare-thee-well. Finally, I stood with Hertha, before greatness. I felt I had to ingratiate myself. “If I may,” I said in German, “I have one or two questions. I know your background, of course, maestro. You come from the Steiermark in Austria.”
I got no further than that. “Hold on, young man. Bad research. You, as many others, are the victim of a name confusion. I come from Styria in Galicia, a city which American biographers confuse with Styria, Steirermark. In Styria the people yodel. We don’t.” The great man had a sense of humor, even if it was at my expense.
These and other small revelations about the exile writers and artists, though not published, became the spice of my exile courses and seminars here and abroad. It was also a way to personalize the study of exile literature, to wed research and teaching. To my mind such a personalized approach is indicated, since the individual travails of flight and exile were so often the catalysts for creativity. Furthermore, when teaching in Germany, this personal approach was also the key to a more perceptive reception on the part of my students.
I began asking myself why many of the exile writers, whom I met through my new contacts, were scarcely mentioned in American publications, and I became convinced that it was our task to keep alive the writings of those who tried to rekindle the past German cultural tradition in their country of asylum. When I entered Columbia as a graduate student, I made the first deferential suggestion that the department might wish to introduce a course on exile literature. Henry Hatfield liked the idea. As I mentioned earlier, his seminar on the exile writer Thomas Mann had drawn a record number of students, many of them from beyond the German Department, and had he not left for Harvard, he might well have followed it up with a class on Brecht. The textbook production at Columbia’s German Department—for example, those by Jack Stein and by the collaborators Gustave Mathieu and me—also sparkled with the texts of exilic writers. As I learned quickly, we were by no means the first ones to champion this novel field of research. The exiles themselves had broken down some of the doors that routinely opposed innovations in the once super conservative field of Germanistics.
Those early proponents and we, their successors, persisted. However the motives of us younger scholars were more diverse. Having accompanied my fellow scholars on their scholarly journey, I can, with a reasonable hope of success, guess at their individual motives, which I believe were widespread. For example, I infer from his writings that my colleague John Spalek was motivated by the exile fate of his Polish countryman, Jan Wittlin. Wulf Koepke, dedicated to restoring the wholeness of German culture while a department head at the Goethe Institute, gained a further incentive through his friendship with a Jewish Holocaust survivor, who would become his wife. Egon Schwarz could not and would not accept the forcible severance from his Austrian cultural heritage. Oskar Seidlin became a devotee of a single great exile author, Thomas Mann. Similarly, Harold von Hofe became a scholar and advocate of Lion Feuchtwanger, Dagmar Barnouw, and later, Dagmar Lorenz, highlighted the creative works of women writers in exile. And some, like Käte Hamburger, let it be known, if only by a chance remark, that they resented the slighting of the exiles by the first German post-war literary historians and therefore doubled their efforts on behalf of the refugee authors. But we all felt that it was our task (and continues to be so) to keep alive the works of the exile writers. They had stood up under the most adverse conditions, as defenses against the debasement of the German cultural tradition.
I have also come to reexamine my own attraction to the oeuvre of a younger generation of exiles. Some of them, like me, felt like exiles when they visited or returned to their hometown in Germany. A gradual estrangement had set in. Or, put differently, the world in which we had grown up, and had loved, had left us rather than the reverse.
My past vision of a yearlong course on exile writing didn’t come to fruition until I became “the boss” of a department at the University of Cincinnati and could bring along the standard definition of the subject. That was easy. Exile literature, I repeated, is the literature written by writers driven out of their native countries by tyrants and dictators. At first this umbrella definition was applied solely to those men and women who were persecuted by the rule of the Nazis. Later we would add the definition globally and include as well those in hiding or still tolerated because they were exercising self-censorship. We are still in the process of thinking through whether to include some expatriates and “internal exiles” in that honorary fraternity of “exile writers.” The thought struck me after a conversation with the African American writer James Baldwin. He rejected the label “expatriate,” applied to him after his move to Paris. “I was driven out,” he said. “A minority of racists deprived me of my creativity while I was in the US.” The tyranny of a fraction of ideologues can cause a creative person to seek a place of asylum.
Some colleagues, no doubt because of my somewhat advanced age, have labelled me “the Nestor of Exile Studies.” I must reject that appellation, not only because the Nestor of the Iliad is afflicted with logorrhea, but because my colleagu
es and I did not “invent” Exile Studies. Not surprisingly, the first interpreters were the exiles themselves. They explicated not only their own works, but also those of their fellow exiles. When I started upon my investigations and attended forums and conferences, established writers, exiled from German-speaking or Nazi-dominated countries, were present—an added bonus for attending. At a conference in Stockholm, I got to talk to Carl Zuckmayer, the author of one of the most successful postwar dramas, a play about one of Hitler’s acquiescent air force generals. I met Günther Anders, an avowed pacifist writer, in Vienna; Hilde Spiel, an eloquent novelist about the Nazi past, on my own campus in Cincinnati; and Wieland Herzfelde (Heartfield) in Copenhagen. The creative writers were followed by established scholars, often exiles themselves. One of the earliest advocates of Exile Studies was Walter Berendsohn, who had spent his exile years in Bromma, Sweden.
What then were the contributions of my generation of exile scholars? A group of three obsessed devotees found their way to one another and joined forces: John Spalek, a native of Poland; Joseph Strelka, an immigrant from Austria; and I, the refugee from Germany. We explored not only existing archives, such as the New York Leo Baeck Institute, but also private holdings. At a party I met a couple that in all innocence told me that they and their acquaintances owned whole bundles of letters from prominent exile writers. That correspondence became grist for my article-writing mill. John Spalek took the initiative of starting a series of volumes in which virtually every notable exile in the United States was explicated in article-length studies. He had little trouble attracting contributions. The excitement of being co-pioneers in a new sub-genre of literature was, I imagine, an irresistible attraction. We became the driving forces behind finding sponsors for conferences. We founded the American Society for Exile Studies. It still exists in full force and has spawned similar organizations in other countries.
When I am looking at some of the correspondence—snail mail, of course—from that period, I recapture a sense of excitement. As with any new field, so many questions, so few answers. There were general concerns: when do the exile years of an author end? What are common themes in works born in exile, such as bemoaning a lost homeland? That latter theme accompanied exilic poetry from the times of the Jews’ Babylonian captivity (example: “By the Waters of Babylon we sat and wept”) till the modern, seer-like German writer Karl Wolfskehl, who exclaimed, “I am freezing somewhere in a far-off ocean.” We wanted to delve into specific mysteries: Why did one of the most globally famous exile writers from Austria, Stephan Zweig, safe and appreciated in Brazil, commit suicide? Why did Joseph Goebbels order the kidnapping of one specific exile, a journalist, after he had reached asylum in France? Why was an exile novel by Salamon Dembitzer published only forty years after its completion? And how did courageous Martha Feuchtwanger manage to smuggle her husband, the novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, out of a French internment camp? We solved some of these knotty puzzles.
Forty or more years of Exile Studies now lie behind me. I have just proofread yet another article of mine about exile literature (this one about its future), part of an anthology. It is edited by Dr. Doerte Bischoff of the University of Hamburg, who belongs to a still younger generation of exile scholars. It is probably my last on the topic. At an MLA convention I had made a similar resolution after I had presented, an analysis of an iconoclastic performance of Lessing’s tragedy, Emilia Galotti, by the Deutsche Theater in Berlin. So far I have stuck to that resolution concerning Lessing and the Enlightenment.
As an illustration of my scholarly pursuits, I have lifted out two of my three favorite subjects. Occasionally, I have poached on the preserves of others. If I can blame anyone for that waywardness, it was the actress of stage and screen Lotte Lenya, the widow of the composer Kurt Weill and arguably the greatest interpreter of his songs. She drew me into her orbit, the world of music. My friend and colleague Gustave Mathieu and I had successfully turned Kurt Weill’s correspondence concerning his composition for a music drama, The Eternal Road, into an adventuresome chronicle of the work’s genesis. Lenya’s new husband, the writer and editor George Davis, liked our chapter, “The Birth of a Broadway Play.” The proof of his and Lenya’s approbation came a half year later. Lenya had just returned from a trip to Germany; in her luggage she carried the first German recording of Weill and Brecht’s polemical and satirical opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Lenya had assembled a stellar cast in Berlin—with one of the leads, the prostitute Jenny, interpreted by her. Now George Davis was on the line. Lenya and he had selected me to write the first English translation of the work, which was scheduled to appear in an extensive brochure together with the 33-rpm recording by Columbia Masterworks. I was thrilled with the assignment, and also when the couple, shortly thereafter, commissioned me to produce a new literary translation of the earlier work The Threepenny Opera, also a synopsis, plus some rather scholarly commentaries on the work. I was no musicologist, yet I rushed in. Where I felt out of my depth, I harassed colleagues at Columbia University’s Music Department for explanations.
Lenya, George Davis, and I became close friends, a valued friendship that continued beyond George’s death and into Lenya’s third marriage with the painter Russell Detweiler. She came to my son’s Bar Mitzvah, visited FLES (Foreign Language in Elementary School) classes I had helped initiate at a Cincinnati elementary school, and headed a local cast of performers when we, at UC’s German Department, commemorated Weill’s eightieth birthday in the largest campus auditorium. It was fun being with her. When we both found ourselves in the German state of Bavaria, we decided to visit the widow of Georg Kaiser, one of Germany’s best-known dramatists prior to the Nazi takeover. She asked me to escort her to her performance at the triumphant opening night of the musical Cabaret, where I met several of her fellow actors. We met by chance in Vienna, where she confided in me that she had just consented to the marriage with Russell Detweiler. “Isn’t that rather sudden?” I asked tactfully. Lotte replied, “Well, when somebody keeps after you night and day, what else can you say?”
During that stay in Vienna, she also had her famous set-to with a female Viennese vegetable stand proprietor. When Lenya turned out to be rather choosey, the woman cursed her in a Viennese proletarian dialect inaccessible to anyone not a native, but Lenya heard and understood her. She replied in the same patois, retained from her childhood days. The woman apologized, “How was I to know that the lady in the fur coat was one of us?” At another time I took my advanced German class to Cleveland for Lenya’s performance in the play Brecht on Brecht. She had my students in stitches when she added a line to the play at the end of one of her entrances, which was clearly addressed to her visitors from Cincinnati.
But the most palpable token of her trust in me came when she asked me to join the board of the Kurt Weill Foundation that she had recently founded. She showed me a letter from her lawyer that described its goals.
“The purpose of the foundation will be to perpetuate Kurt’s memory by promoting the use of his music and keeping alive an interest in his works. The foundation would have the power to exploit and publish Kurt’s music, arrange concerts, award scholarships, give prizes, etc. In addition, I should think that the foundation might also have as one of its purposes the right to promote an interest in music generally.”
Today the foundation has undertaken so many more activities, notably among them, an annual Kurt Weill-Lotte Lenya Singing Contest, which has launched the careers of some outstanding performers here and abroad.
Judy and I visited Lenya during Lenya’s final days. To our horror she was dying in the studio of a sculptress, one of her many friends and acquaintances. We also met her designated successor as president of the foundation, a young Weill scholar from Occidental College, Professor Kim Kowalke. He had concerns. He was being importuned by the new lawyer of the foundation, who had succeeded the author of the above quoted mission statement. Kim needed an ally and asked me where we could counsel against the cou
nsellor. In one meeting we learned to trust each other because our goals and ambitions were parallel to Lenya’s.
Lenya’s choice of Kim as a successor was inspired; her choice of me led at first only to my most ambitious excursion into autodidactisism—disciplined self-education. My education in Germany, high school courses in music and choral training in synagogal singing by Cantor Cysner, then classes in musical appreciation at Hofstra, coupled with frequent concert going, had lifted me a bit above a musical illiteracy. But then, after Lenya’s death, I attended my first Kurt Weill Board Meeting. I was surrounded by some of the most prestigious names in the world of music: Julius Rudel, conductor of the New York City Opera Company; Harold Prince, the producer/director of some of the best-known Broadway musical dramas, Kim Kowalke later a department head at the famous Eastman School of Music; prize-winning musicologist Lys Symonette, Weill’s rehearsal pianist—to give just a sample of the personages surrounding me and a highly abbreviated list of their achievements. I listened to their musical small talk. It was simply over my head.
My leisure reading turned to music. I learned how to read a piano vocal score, caught on to a “diminished fifth chord,” and came to appreciate such experimenters as Stockhausen, Schönberg, and Glass. And then I dared write about some works of Weill, at first concentrating more on texts than notes. A few articles later, I wrote on some of Weill’s musical offspring, for example the Belgian lyricist-composer Jacques Brel. When a French journal asked for permission to reprint the Brel piece, first submitted to a German journal, I knew I had arrived at the lowly peak of my musical expertise, but only by having Kim and Lys give my contribution a critical reading first. I quit writing on musical theater while I was ahead. Nowadays I am a most dedicated listener and still a devoted vice president of the Kurt Weill Foundation.
