Forbidden Music

by Michael Haas

  Alfred Einstein, letter to Hans Gál, 30 May 1947

  In today's so-called Fourth Reich, everyone is enthusiastically embracing anything that between 1933 and 1945 would have counted as ‘Cultural Bolshevism’ as an effective means of justifying their sudden change of heart.

  Alfred Einstein, letter to Hans Gál, 29 May 1948

  The letters quoted above provide a snapshot of life after Hitler. The first refers to cringing attempts by former Nazi-supporting academics to hold onto their livelihoods during the denazification processes. The plea for positive endorsements from the colleagues they forced into exile (or worse) is made in the context of revelations of extreme ruthlessness carried out by many non-Jewish academics between 1933 and 1945, profiting from the anti-Semitic tabula rasa in their institutions. Robert Haas, to whom Einstein refers, was the Nazi-supporting head of the Austrian National Library's Music Collection and principal editor of the Bruckner critical edition. He was removed from his position after the war and replaced by Leopold Nowak. Haas was a cantankerous anti-Semite who maintained that Bruckner had been corrupted by exposure to the ‘cosmopolitan influences of Jews’. With denazification underway, he was now trying to persuade various ‘Jewish corrupting influences’ to come his way as well.

  Erich Schenk, also referred to by Einstein, was the controversial rector of Vienna University who from 1957 had, faute de mieux, ended up as effective head of the Institute of Musicology founded by Guido Adler. Though Adler had retired in 1927, he was still Editor of Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich, the series he had initiated before the Nazis removed him at the age of eighty-one. The former Adler student, Rudolf von Ficker recalled that after Adler's death in 1941, he found his former professor's library stacked in Schenk's study. When von Ficker challenged Schenk about this, Schenk explained that Adler's daughter Melanie had tried to stop his requisitioning the library and had behaved ‘like a stupid sow’. Schenk went on to explain that though she had fled (after appealing to him for protection), he was confident that she would soon be found by the Gestapo and then, ‘she's off to Poland!’ She was murdered in the extermination camp Maly Trostinec near Minsk on 26 May 1942 after her deportation on 20 May.1

  Haas and Schenk were just two of the musicologists of the same generation as Gál and Einstein who had happily supported the Nazi regime. None of them would have anticipated the posthumous controversy surrounding the noted Schütz and Bach scholar, Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, who was implicated as a member of the SS Einsatzgruppe D, which, under SS Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf, murdered some 5,000 people in the Crimea between 9 and 13 December 1941.2 In twelve years, Hitler had converted Germans from their centuries-old reputation of ‘Dichter und Denker’ (Poets and Philosophers) into ‘Mörder und Henker’ (Murderers and Executioners).

  Einstein's second letter reveals the cynical view that self-preservation was being attempted by the postwar German music establishment through feigning revulsion at twelve years of Nazi brain-washing. The consequence was an escape into the arms of whatever appeared to be the diametric opposite of Hitler's national Romanticism. This reaction to the excesses of the past was strangely reminiscent of the early 1920s when writers, painters and composers turned to ‘New Objectivity’. Works such as Franz Schreker's Irrelohe, first performed in 1924, and Berg's Wozzeck, given in Berlin a year later, certainly owed much to Wagnerian Romanticism, turned Expressionist, and were written at the height of artistic detachment that followed the First World War. But if Germans in 1919 were trying to sober up their vision after the intoxicating delusions growing out of Bismarck's short-lived German Empire, the implications post-1939 of criminal behaviour accorded to every German man and woman by Hitler's yet more delusional Third Reich caused an even stronger artistic reaction.

  Music in the American, British, French and Soviet Zones

  In 1943, the USA, Great Britain and the Soviet Union recognised the illegality of Austria's Nazi annexation and issued the Moscow Declaration which guaranteed a free Austria independent from Germany. This was enforced as early as 27 April 1945 under the new Austrian President Karl Renner, who from 1918 until 1920 had served as Austria's first chancellor and from 1931 to 1933 had taken on the Presidency of Austria's parliament. Paradoxically he had sought the annexation of Austria with Germany as early as 1919 and welcomed it in 1938, deciding that Nazism was just a passing phenomenon and no worse than the Dollfuß-Schuschnigg dictatorship that had removed him from his position in 1933. On 3 June 1945, only five weeks after the founding of Austria's Second Republic, the Vienna Philharmonic under Robert Fanta performed Mahler's Resurrection Symphony. The symbolism was powerful, though the reality was more bracing. Austria post-1945 was divided into four different zones, each with local administrations determined by the values and priorities of whichever of the allies was in control: France was stationed in the West, Great Britain in the South, America in the middle, and the Soviet Union in the East. Germany was similarly divided with the Soviets occupying what would become the German Democratic Republic in 1949 in the ‘middle’ of Germany, reaching into the North East; the British were in the North West, the French in the Rhineland and the United States in the central regions and South East. As with Berlin, Vienna was in the Soviet Sector, but divided between the four victorious powers with each power responsible for rebuilding, restoring utilities, medical treatment, education and the process of ‘denazification’.

  Music was not the top priority when the Allies took on the responsibilities of occupation and re-education. Much of the documentation related to the restructuring of music in the different zones has been lost. Though there is plenty of information regarding the denazification of high profile individuals such as Furtwängler or Winifred Wagner, there is little on the rank and file, and academics, as we shall see, were treated quite differently. Documentation from the British and American zones is largely lost, while documentation on individual denazification processes in the French zone remains classified.3

  Nevertheless, music was an important element in re-education, and musical events were started in all sectors almost as soon as Nazi Germany had fallen. All four occupying powers were outwardly respectful of the importance of music in defining German identity, and all went in for varying degrees of undeclared cultural competition with one another. The view in Britain and the US was largely that Austro-German music had come to a standstill in 1933, the position that Adorno took in March 1945 when he spoke of the Nazi destruction of German culture in What National Socialism Has Done to the Arts. Certainly, the overwhelming number of important and high-profile musicians who had fled the country added considerable weight to this view.4

  The French, who had been made to watch their musical heritage subordinated to German occupation from 1940, quickly mounted their own counter-cultural and ideological agendas. René Thimonnier, Head of the Bureau des Spectacles et de la Musique, had initially considered a ban on all music composed after 1933, but abandoned this as impractical when it became apparent that many composers who were not sympathetic to the former regime would also be affected. French music was introduced to the Germans, and the French saw themselves as sharing with their German neighbours a higher regard for music than either the British or the Americans. The French were also quick to recognise the role that music had played in confirming a Nazi belief of racial superiority and brought in concrete measures such as broadcasting guidelines to counter former Nazi propaganda.5

  Censorship was practised in all the sectors, banning overtly political songs and music associated with the Nazi regime – not just blatant Nazi agitprop but also, at various times, core repertoire including Beethoven's Eroica, Siegfried's Funeral March from Wagner's Götterdämmerung or Strauss's Ein Heldenleben. The French went even further, placing temporary bans on German 'monumentalist’ music and adding Bruckner to the list of banned composers alongside Strauss and Wagner.6

  The Soviets saw music as a tool for shaping society. The Communists made a point of reclaiming high culture for the proletar
iat and were unwilling to see it exclusively reallocated to the bourgeoisie; as such, there were many musical events scheduled in the Soviet Zone – more so than in the others. Walter Ulbricht, the future First Secretary of the German Democratic Republic Communist Party, headed members of the so-called Ulbricht Group, made up of German political exiles returning from the Soviet Union. They were now employed as agents of the occupying Soviet forces and, having arrived in Berlin several weeks before the other Allies, the Ulbricht Group was able to establish a ‘Cultural Federation for German Renewal‘7 (referred to as the ‘Kulturbund’), which, though outwardly non-political, was run by the poet Johannes R. Becher, who later supplied the text to Eisler's music for the National Anthem of the GDR. Before this point however, music was not an important feature of the Kulturbund and, indeed, did not even warrant a mention in its manifesto.8 As the Ulbricht Group did not have any musicians among its members, it allowed music a degree of independence not accorded to the visual arts, theatre and literature.9 The Soviets were also the first to reinstate broadcasting and were offering a full programme of music by June 1945. The greater musical dynamism within the Soviet Sector was also a reflection of the musical pluralism permitted by the USSR during the later war years: Communist ideologues would have to wait until émigrés such as Hanns Eisler, Paul Dessau, Georg Knepler and Ernst Hermann Meyer returned before translating musical policy into broader Marxist doctrine.

  A problem encountered by all of the Allies was the high degree of Nazification among the German musical elite. Most soloists and professors had been obliged to join the Nazi Party, a situation that would lead to difficulties for a number of pianists, composers and scholars who were not remotely sympathetic to the Nazi regime. Many had even seen their own compositions banned as ‘cultural Bolshevism’ leaving them no option but to join the Nazi Party in order to earn a living, at least as performers or teachers. Three of the most intriguing of these were composers with highly individual views of musical modernism. One was the Baltic German pianist Eduard Erdmann; another was the Socialist composer Max Butting, who, despite his music being banned, joined the Party in 1940; a third was the Schreker pupil, Felix Petyrek. All had previously moved in progressive circles, with Erdmann a close friend of the notorious anti-Nazi Ernst Krenek, the Jewish pianist Artur Schnabel and the charismatic Australian violinist Alma Moody who had spent much of her childhood mentored by Reger and later became Carl Flesch's favourite pupil. Moody came to prominence as a champion of concertos by Pfitzner and Krenek, and became the basis for the character Anita in Krenek's opera Jonny spielt auf. These individuals were not only unsympathetic to the Nazi cause, despite enforced party membership, they did not move in Nazi circles. However, to overworked re-education officials, membership of the Nazi Party – for whatever reason – was difficult to justify. Another headache was caused by the composer Heinz Tiessen. Though he was a vehement anti-Nazi, a former member of the ‘November Group’, denounced as a ‘cultural Bolshevik’, and had performances of his music banned in 1933, he also served on the jury of the Olympic Music Competition in 1936. Thiessen had been brought in as the conspicuous dissenting voice to give an appearance of balance to international critics. The paradox was that having been removed from various positions, participation on the jury was one of his only sources of income, leaving him severely compromised following the defeat of Nazism. It goes without saying that he had never considered joining the Nazi Party, though incredibly they allowed him to remain composition professor at the Berlin Music Academy.10

  In any case, the Americans had confiscated the Nazi membership index and were in a position to enforce the exclusion of all members of the party regardless of their personal sympathies. American blacklists were hastily drawn up and are often illegible. As the historian Toby Thacker writes in his summary of postwar musical life in Germany, Music after Hitler, it was ‘draconian, inevitably arbitrary, and partial. It left hundreds of professional musicians out of work and facing an uncertain future.‘11 Denazification was accorded higher priority in the American sector than even reconstruction. It was carried out with a breathless zeal and penetrated into even the smallest of villages and communities. This intense denazification reached its peak in April 1946, when the names of 10,000 musicians, some extremely prestigious, were added to the American Information Control Division. They included the performers Wilhelm Kempff and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and the composers Johann Nepomuk David, Ernst von Dohnányi (father of the resistance hero Hans von Dohnányi, executed by the Nazis in 1945) and Wolfgang Fortner. The American hard-line policy could not be maintained, as many of the most famous musicians simply carried on performing in the French, British and Soviet Zones.

  By January 1947, musicians were being cleared for performance in the American sector, though in March 1947, the composers David, Fortner, Richard Strauss and Carl Orff remained banned. Notwithstanding this American embargo, Strauss was accorded a hero's welcome when he visited London in 1947. It was slowly becoming apparent in all sectors that denazification in general wasn't working. It simply left too few competent and qualified professionals to re-build the devastated infrastructure of the country.12

  If the Americans were unyielding, they had little to gain. They uniquely held the position that music had been used as a political weapon by Hitler's regime. By sticking to this belief, they forfeited any advantages that a rapid rehabilitation of blacklisted musicians would have brought among the German people and even missed the opportunity of positioning their clemency as an endorsement of their counter-Nazi cultural policies. The British by contrast were cynical and resigned, believing denazification to be largely pointless, while the French joined with the Germans in venerating artists and musicians to the point of forgiving all transgressions. It came down to the Russians as the most accepting of all in recognising the advantages of co-opting important musicians in the physical as well as cultural reconstruction and re-education of the Germans. The notorious Gustav Havemann, who had been responsible for hounding Schreker from his position at the Berlin Music Academy, testified to an ‘anti-fascist’ past and settled down within the Soviet Sector. As he had been an advocate of progressive, modernist music prior to the arrival of the Nazis, there was perhaps some foundation to this self-delusion. He had been cold-shouldered by the Nazis following his defence of Hindemith, despite years of purging Jews from any and every institution or event with which he was associated. Similarly, defence of Hindemith's opera Mathis der Maler in November 1934 had cost Furtwängler his position at the Reichsmusikkammer.

  It quickly became apparent to even the most robust denazifier that it would take more than the personal distancing of individual musicians from the previous regime to restore legitimacy. Several additional changes were demanded. The most obvious was a return to programming composers whose works had been central repertoire before their banning from 1933. To these were added composers who had been removed during the course of the ‘Totaler Krieg’ including French, British and Russian composers who had joined the ranks of those the Nazis had already declared racially or politically ‘degenerate’. As a result and following Hitler's downfall, performances of Tchaikovsky or Mahler conveyed to German audiences the same clear anti-Nazi statements. In the case of Mahler, as related by the writer Soma Morgenstern in his memoirs, most of his public had gone into exile or been murdered. Writing in the 1950s, he mentioned that though Mahler performances in Vienna before 1938 were sold out weeks in advance, he was depressed to discover on revisiting the city in 1957 that there was hardly anyone attending a performance of Mahler's 6th Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos.13 As a result, Mendelssohn, rather than Mahler and certainly more than Schoenberg, Zemlinsky or Schreker or indeed more than any other ‘degenerate’ composer, came to symbolise the newer post-1945 anti-Fascist Germany.

  Despite Goebbels's professed belief that the Nazi government should support modernism, National Socialism was fixed in the minds of denazification officials as musically rea
ctionary. As we have seen, this was not always the case: performances of a twelve-tone work such as Paul von Klenau's opera Michael Kohlhaas in Stuttgart in 1933, or Die Windsbraut by Winfried Zillig at Leipzig in 1941, were officially sanctioned.14 Less controversial, but welcomed by the critic H. H. Stuckenschmidt, who had previously been a member of the ‘November Group’ and was close to the Schoenberg circle, was the opera Die Wirtin von Pinsk by Richard Mohaupt, first performed in Dresden in 1938 before Mohaupt left Germany with his Jewish wife in 1939.15 The pressures of rapid reconstruction and re-education meant that attitudes deemed anti-Fascist by the Allies were sufficient to help the vetting of many composers. This would set the tone for the musical avant-garde for the next two generations, when to call oneself ‘modernist’, or outwardly to support ‘modernist’ aims, became synonymous with making a declaration of anti-fascism in general and, more specifically, anti-Nazism.

  Promoting modern music, particularly its less audience-friendly varieties, thus became a priority of postwar re-education. The Bavarian government brought back the composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann, who had spent the Hitler years in self-imposed internal exile, to conduct the new Musica Viva series at the Prinzregententheater, broadcast by Bavarian Radio. It was not a popular success, as he wrote to Egon Wellesz on 2 January 1948: