Forbidden Music

by Michael Haas

  By the following year (1 January 1902) we have a run-down of the social changes occurring thanks to the emergence of a financially powerful mercantile class that demands greater democratic returns. Nordau elaborates at length on the vested interests and hypocrisy of the land-owning aristocracy and the church, exposing their twisted arguments for maintaining a feudal and greedy status quo. Nordau's Zionism was a result of the Dreyfus affair and he is merciless in his denouncement of the Catholic Church, which he calls a power as dark as that of Tsarist Russia. He accuses the church of resorting to the basest of instincts in order to maintain its grip on the European peoples: ‘clericalism in France uses patriotism as a means of stirring up anti-Semitism by having those with little resent those believed to have more. French clericalism promotes patriotic bravery and courage as a means of appealing to national vanity and thus manages to associate the authority of Rome, without the slightest doctrinal basis, to France's own glorious past. This results in a state of suspicion and unease amongst the masses and encourages the seeking of continuous revenge for perceived injustices and slights.‘3

  Finally, on 1 January 1914 we reach the year in which the world would change with the eruption of the Great War. Nordau gives us his view of British imperialism and accuses Sir Edward Grey of

  disregarding the rights and aspirations of the nations. He blithely sells out the island-dwelling Greeks to the Turks, the Armenians to the Persians, the Mongolians to the Russians and congratulates himself for keeping the peace at such a low price. Mind you, he only calls it peace as long as the big nations don't start to cross swords and drag England into the fray. He doesn't lose any sleep as long as it's only small countries that break each other's necks, and the raping and pillaging doesn't interfere with rail and sea routes.

  He goes on to expound on the social changes cited twelve years earlier as Lloyd George attempts to reclaim land held by aristocratic families, by decree if necessary. This has resulted in ‘feudalistic lords feeling under such pressure that they are selling their land before it can be taken away, with the recent sale of Covent Garden Market by the Duke of Bedford to Mr Mallaby-Deeley for three million pounds only being the most sensational’.4

  Nordau's ruminations on contemporary events offer a view of the social evolution taking place in the run-up to the First World War. They are the thoughts of an educated, middle-class, secular Jewish European. Born a German-speaking Hungarian, he considered himself Austrian but lived by choice in Paris. He was a medical doctor by profession and a clinical thinker with a firm conviction in both physical and social evolution. Though his ideas regarding ‘Entartung’ or ‘degeneration’ would later be appropriated in part by the Nazis, it was the institutional anti-Semitism demonstrated by the Dreyfus affair that ultimately made the militantly secularist Nordau into one of the leaders of the Zionist movement. His lengthy year-end interpretations of events add meat to the bones of empirical statistics and demonstrate that the duopoly of the church and ruling families was heading for a spectacular and utterly predictable end.

  The ambitions and entitlements of the rising middle classes could no longer be ignored. The threats to this rapidly developing demographic came not only from the unravelling of the nobility. Despite the annihilation of the aristocracy during the Bolshevik Revolution, Marxists aimed their anger principally at the bourgeoisie who, with their newly acquired wealth, were seen as replacing the absolute power that was once feudal. The proletariat was left just as disenfranchised as before. Even without modern communication technology, it was clear to working people that they had been used as pawns during the Great War, thus providing grist to revolutionary mills. That many young Jews would be prominent among them should come as no surprise given the measures taken by the churches in defence of a defunct dynastic order.

  The Eislers

  The futility of any war in which only the old orders, along with the self-aggrandising middle classes, stood to gain, tipped the balance in favour of the social subversion that defined the family of Hanns Eisler. Charlie Chaplin, Eisler's friend in postwar Hollywood, described the ruthlessness of the Eisler siblings as coming out of one of Shakespeare's histories. Hanns Eisler's use of music as a ‘political weapon’ would be a defining element in Weimar Germany. Many from the political centre and right would claim that Eisler's music was a factor in this shaky German Republic becoming unstable, even ungovernable. An Eisler family time-line from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth helps to clarify Hanns Eisler's unique contribution, and what many saw as an unnatural union of political doctrine and music.

  Rudolf Eisler, father of Hanns, was a Jewish philosopher, essayist and lexicographer who married Ida Maria Fischer, a Protestant with whom he had been living while finishing his doctorate in Leipzig. In order to maintain the appearance of working-class origins, their three children would always describe their mother from Saxony as ‘proletarian’, though this statement is slightly off the mark: she was an ‘irregular’ student at Leipzig's university (the only option available to women at the end of the nineteenth century). Her family was militantly socialist and she was published locally as an essayist, journalist and poet. Her father was in the business of distributing meat products to Leipzig's butchers, resulting in her children referring to her as a ‘butcher's daughter’. Hanns later remarked that his parents met at a fair when his mother sold his father a sausage. Rudolf Eisler came from a wealthy family of Jewish merchants who disapproved of the relationship but accepted their eventual marriage, following the birth in 1895 of their first child Elfriede, who later became Ruth Fischer (discussed in the previous chapter). The family relocated to Vienna, settling in the city's comfortable Third District before circumstances forced a move to the Second, the so-called ‘Matzos Quarter’, where most of Vienna's working-class Jews lived. Rudolf had been denied a permanent position at Vienna's university, not, as often stated, because he was a Jew, but because of his openly declared atheism.

  The children's reminiscences of home life seem surprisingly mundane for a family of future revolutionaries: music within the Eisler family was provided by Rudolf, who played the upright piano in the sitting room while singing all of the roles of entire operas and operettas. Gerhart and Hanns pretended to be figures from the Nibelungen Saga, with Elfriede as a serviceable Brünnhilde. The conductor and childhood friend of Hanns Eisler, Jascha Horenstein, recalled his class-mate as badly dressed, already bald at the age of 13, and only interested in soccer.5 Hanns's school reports would seem to bear this out, with poor grades in all subjects except sport. That the Eisler children would become some of the most dynamic personalities in interwar Europe owes much to the Viennese secular-Jewish domestic life provided by their poor but fiercely intelligent parents.

  As Ruth Fischer, Elfriede Eisler rose to the top of the German Communist Party, only to be expelled by Stalin for being too radical. She was imprisoned in Moscow for a short period before making her way to Paris, where she became an active anti-Stalinist with Trotsky, staying one step ahead of Soviet death-squads. Her lover and fellow Trotskyite, Arkadi Maslow, was not so lucky, meeting a mysterious end in Havana while awaiting his American visa. Elfriede-Ruth Fischer, fearing for her life after Trotsky's murder and the death of Maslow, suspected her American-based brothers of treachery, believing that they were the only people who knew of Maslow's whereabouts. By this point, she too was resident in the United States, firing off scholarly, anti-Stalinist publications for Harvard University. She publicly denounced her brothers Hanns and Gerhart as Soviet spies, leading to their arrest and, in the case of Hanns, ultimately to his enforced removal, which amounted to deportation in all but name.

  Gerhart, who had been a genuine Communist agent, living under a false name, escaped as a stowaway on a Polish freighter before making his way back to the Soviet sector of occupied Germany. As a German returning from the West, and as the brother of Ruth Fischer, he was considered as suspect by the paranoid Stalinist regime and placed in custody. Only the dea
th of Stalin in 1953 saved Gerhart from a show trial and possible execution. Ruth meanwhile continued her work as an expert on Stalinist affairs at Harvard until she found herself in the sights of the anti-Communist Senator, Joseph McCarthy. She avoided arrest by returning to Paris, where she lived until her death in 1961.

  Gerhart went on to become a leading broadcaster in East Germany and, during his final years, even joined the Central Committee of the German Democratic Republic. He died as a highly regarded party functionary in 1968 while on holiday in Yerevan. Both of Hanns's elder siblings were audacious believers in Marxism and were both activists and propagandists.

  Hanns Eisler

  It is impossible to understand Hanns fully as the composer who attempted to reconcile music with political activism without knowing these essential facts about his family. His enforced removal from America in 1948 offers a well-documented account of the remigration of a returning composer from exile. His destination was the newly formed German Democratic Republic, for which he composed the National Anthem – though his first intentions had been to return to Vienna. American black-listing, however, barred him from working outside the city's Soviet sector, and as a former Schoenberg pupil he was unable to find an academic position in Austria, which had stuck to a remorseless musical conservatism following the mass exodus of Viennese progressives to Berlin after the First World War.

  Though he kept an address in Vienna until 1953, his eventual move to East Berlin could be understood as one made reluctantly. His Marxist wife Louise, with aristocratic Jewish, Austro-Hungarian lineage, disliked the Stalinist incarnation of Communism and after 1953 refused to join him, eventually marrying one of their closest friends, the prominent Austrian Communist Ernst Fischer. Eisler's musical output broadly falls into four distinct periods, with consistent stylistic elements common to all. The first period goes up to his break with his teacher Schoenberg in 1922–3 and the complete rupture between the two men that ensued in 1926. At this time he moved into 'agitprop’, a genre which he more or less established single-handedly in Germany; there then follows the music of exile, and finally the music of remigration which not only quietly echoed his agitprop and exile years with copious scores for stage and screen, but required him to conform to the conditions imposed by the new state with which, for better or worse, he had now become so closely identified.

  Eisler's poor school reports gave no indication of the brilliance of his mind, or the penetrating insight of his writing. After Wagner, few musicians had written so extensively and incisively on such a wide variety of social and political issues. As with Wagner, the socio-political component of Eisler's writings nearly outweighs his thoughts on music. He was contrary both as composer and as a person, seemed to enjoy his many contradictions, and frequently referred to them. For example, he saw the contradiction of being a twelve-tone composer, despite the fact that few prominent composers viewed as ‘Jewish’ apart from Schoenberg chose to take up what most found an isolating musical language with limited popular resonance.6 Most of Eisler's serial works, however, provide an immediate point of contact with the listener while avoiding any sense of tonal dislocation commonly found in Schoenberg and most of his adherents. Other works are in a richer, post-Romantic style, though Eisler vehemently rejected any suggestion that music could go beyond the immediately rational. He simply did not believe that Wagner's ‘German spirit’ could be the source of great art.

  Through all these contradictions and disparate styles, one element remains constant: his desire to communicate without musical impediments. His break with Schoenberg came about because he felt his teacher's output had isolated itself from the common man. He satirised the idea of l'art pour l'art in his Pierrot Lunaire epigone Palmström (1924), and again in his 1925 Zeitungsausschnitte (Newspaper Clippings), in which he takes personal announcements from a daily paper along with an assortment of provocative short poems, setting them as atonal art-songs.

  Eisler's arrival in Berlin and his participation in agitprop theatre – his collaborations with the charismatic agitprop performer Ernst Busch and the writers around Bertolt Brecht, to say nothing of his frequent collaborations with Brecht himself – took his music in a new direction. An Eisler ‘fight-song’, with its four-square march-rhythms, was meant to be sung at rallies and be instantly memorable. Incidental songs from stage works were allowed more harmonic and melodic sophistication, but did not sacrifice immediacy. His magnum opus, the Deutsche Sinfonie (1930–59), along with many of his secular cantatas, are twelve-tone works, yet their musical language is neither alienating nor any more demanding than tonal works from the same period by Shostakovich or Prokofiev. In keeping with his contradictory tendencies, one of Eisler's most notable serial works, the quintet Vierzehn Arten den Regen zu Beschreiben (Fourteen Ways of Describing the Rain) composed in 1941, and dedicated to Schoenberg on his 70th birthday in 1944, was far removed from his customary aim of approachability. It is exquisitely refined and febrile in character. As an act of reconciliation with his former teacher, it was warmly appreciated and Eisler was proud of Schoenberg's grateful and complimentary remarks, though he admitted that it might be generations before the general public would be able to appreciate its beauty.

  Eisler's album of songs composed in exile, later entitled the Hollywood Songbook, contains settings that cover all his compositional styles. Today it has become common practice for a selection of some 40 of these to be presented as a ‘cycle’. The only cyclical thing about them is their multi-layered narrative of exile. The majority of the texts are by Brecht, but Eisler includes other writers such as Rimbaud and Hölderlin. We shall return to Eisler later, but his contribution to interwar musical life and his creation of ‘agitprop’ as a musical genre place him in a central position among composers of the post-assimilation generation.

  Chuck out the Men! Jewish and Objective – Berlin Cabaret

  Eisler was not the only young composer of the interwar years attracted to the idea of crossing musical boundaries. Much of what has loosely been called ‘Berlin Cabaret’ is in fact a hotchpotch derived from different sources and different styles. Today, variété, revue, cabaret have all been jumbled together with stage and screen Schlager (‘hit songs’) along with political fight-songs and agitprop to form an encapsulation of interwar Berlin. Some of the most familiar numbers are theatre songs taken from Weill's Dreigroschenoper, Happy End and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny.7 Others were genuine cabaret songs performed as part of programmes satirising local issues or the politics of the still new Republic. Some of the most memorable were composed by Friedrich Holländer, including the feminist Raus mit den Männern! (Chuck out the Men!), made famous by one of Berlin's most popular performers, the lesbian Claire Waldorf. Another important Holländer song illustrating conditions under the new system was his scathing Münchhausen, a hypnotic strophic number with a never-ending list of the lies used to keep social injustices in place.

  Much of the appeal of this music to modern listeners is to be found in the sexual references stemming from the politics of the day. There is no doubt that German and Austrian societies were more unbuttoned about such things than their Anglo-Saxon cousins. As early as 1908, the Neue Freie Presse ran a front-page debate regarding the pros and cons of sex education in schools,8 and in 1919 it became obligatory for all 14-year-olds. Felix Salten was the author of the children's classic Bambi – a Life in the Woods and of the anonymously published volume of erotica Josephine Munzenbacher – die Lebensgeschichte einer Wienerischen Dirne von ihr selbst erzäht (Josephine Munzenbacher – the Story of a Viennese Whore as Told by Herself). Salten seems to have caught the mood of the day and he wrote persuasively in defence of the new educational ordinance.9 As early as 1897, the Jewish Berlin-based sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld was presenting frank arguments in defence of homosexuality, and Mischa Spoliansky's gay-liberation number The Lavender Song along with his Masculinum-Femininum provided the soundtrack for the Berlin of Thomas Mann's openly homosexual son Klaus and the British
writer Christopher Isherwood. Figures such as Magnus Hirschfeld, Sigmund Freud and Arthur Schnitzler (the playwright whom Freud considered his alter-ego), along with Felix Salten and his genius for both children's stories and pornography; the political writer, satirist and poet Kurt Tucholsky were all Jewish and, even by today's standards, not remotely squeamish about sex.

  Stefan Zweig in relating the social changes that came about after the war believed that young people held their elders responsible for the catastrophes of the day and that ‘eleven- and twelve-year-old children, all sexually enlightened, went on camping expeditions in groups with names such as Wandervögel (Birds of Passage)’. ‘[…] one even rebelled against the laws of nature’. Zweig goes on to relate how ‘girls cut their hair to look like boys, and boys shaved in order to look more feminine’. Conspicuous male and female homosexuality was not the result of what Zweig called ‘a natural sexual preference’, but an act of ‘open rebellion’. Fashion became shockingly revealing, literature became ‘activist and politicised’, and music ‘lost the coherency of melody and harmony’. But Zweig becomes most incensed at the German language losing its grammatical rules and is horrified at the truncated spelling of telegrams being used in general communication.10

  Raunchy and racy cabaret texts were set by any number of popular composers, but the Jewish composers Holländer, Spoliansky and Rudolf Nelson penned the most famous and certainly some of the most amusing. Whether or not enlightened non-religious Jews felt more at ease about sexual matters than non-Jews, there can be no doubt that Berlin Cabaret would be unthinkable without their openness. Needless to say, this was used as anti-Semitic ammunition in the run-up to the Nazi dictatorship, though even the Nazis were happy to promote a non-puritanical line as long as it was in the interest of propagating the Aryan race.