Forbidden Music

by Michael Haas

  In dealing with how Jews saw themselves and the world around them, I have used two main sources: Vienna's newspaper the Neue Freie Presse, which, since its earliest days, was seen as one of the great European papers and a voice of social and economic Liberalism. Its daily essays, called ‘feuilletons’, offered an exceptional forum for intellectual discourse. The paper was written and produced largely by secular Jewish journalists for a largely Liberal readership, many of whom were also secular and Jewish. The Viennese Jewish polemicist Karl Kraus in his own publication, Die Fackel, defines the journalism of the day by relentlessly attacking it. He saves his most lethal darts for all writers of feuilletons, especially those writing for the Neue Freie Presse. To Kraus, feuilletons were an unhealthy and unwelcome mix of fact and personal creativity. Kraus's ethical and intellectual standards have, I suspect, made many historians reluctant to use feuilletons as a source for understanding the thinking of the time. His views on creative journalism turned out to be fully justified. Still, to ignore feuilletons that appeared in the Viennese press is to ignore the manner in which some of the age's brightest and most articulate writers viewed and responded to the world around them. I take the view that feuilletons (pace Karl Kraus) are not journalism in the pure sense of reporting events, but a literary genre that grew out of people's reaction to the world in which they lived. With photography and moving pictures still in their infancy, they offer some of the most captivating images of the past. Nobody would dare to challenge the ethical might of Karl Kraus, but I believe the world has moved on, and his rants against opinion-based journalism can – for our purposes – be respected, but passed over.

  My other key source comes from the journal Musikblätter des Anbruch, later called simply Anbruch. It was launched in 1919 by Universal Edition (UE), the Viennese publisher of many of the composers who would find themselves banned in Germany after 1933. Anbruch was run by secular Jews and aimed at a progressive readership. With the highly regarded Eduard Hanslick serving since 1864 as principal critic for the Neue Freie Presse, and his successor Julius Korngold, along with Guido Adler who was the ‘éminence grise’ of Anbruch, we gain a very clear idea of how Jews participated in musical life until 1933 in Germany, and 1938 in Austria. Both publications represented authoritative forums for cultural, musical and intellectual discourse: they were progressive, secular and resoundingly aware of their own Germanic culture in the international context of musical trends and developments.

  The 2003 exhibition at Vienna's Jewish Museum took the title ‘Quasi una fantasia’ to express the cultural delusion that grew out of Jewish political and social emancipation. The implication was that assimilation was a mirage that had beguiled Jewish composers into writing works that affirmed their entitlement to German culture, only then to be ejected from their natural home by Hitler. This implied delusion meant that even when they enjoyed great popularity among non-Jewish audiences, these composers remained very far from obtaining true equality and acceptance.

  Yet it wasn't only a delusion. To leave it at that would be to chalk up a victory to the anti-Semitism that culminated in the Third Reich. By banning Jewish artists, musicians and writers the Nazis had not removed delusional fantasists but, instead, broken fundamental links in the chain that made up German musical continuity.

  In an eerie fulfilment of Hugo Bettauer's satirical novel from 1922 The City without Jews or Die Stadt ohne Juden, Germany and Austria, rendered virtually Judenfrei after 1945, have struggled in the decades following, to regain their prominence as leaders of musical development. After centuries of determining how music interacted within society, these two German nations found themselves overtaken by the very countries that had given refuge to their émigrés. Yet even these host countries largely mishandled their opportunities. Few composers could establish themselves in their new homelands without either appealing to new and unknown audiences or relying on the support of fellow émigrés who ran many of the musical institutions in America and elsewhere for quarter of a century after the war.

  There may be no qualitative difference in the music composed by Weill on Broadway, or Korngold in Hollywood or even Joseph Kosma in Paris with his now iconic French chansons, but one thing is beyond dispute: their development as composers, despite new-found success, was disrupted. With many others, it was stopped altogether. It was perhaps only the most talented, opportunistic or resourceful who could continue to remain creative in their new environments.

  This is an epic story that starts with the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and ends with the new definitions of music and society in the 1960s. Such an expanse of history squeezed into a single volume means that significant people and events are sometimes merely signposted, in the hope that interested readers will investigate further for themselves. This book also tries to avoid the inevitable ‘what if’ questions, offering instead an account of what happened and exploring what shaped the decisions that an important lost generation of composers was forced to make.

  CHAPTER 1

  German and Jewish

  And as I reached the country's border,

  I felt an inner tremble growing

  It moved within my deepest breast

  And wet with tears my eyes were glowing

  Yet when I heard the German tongue

  A strange mood overtook my soul

  It seemed as if my very heart

  Though bleeding, filled with joy, was whole

  Heinrich Heine, A Winter's Tale, Caput 1

  Isak Schrečker, the Jewish father of the composer Franz Schreker, had been court photographer in Budapest to Franz Joseph, King of Hungary and Emperor of Austria, as well as to his son and heir Crown Prince Rudolf, since obtaining the royal seal of approval in 1871. In 1874, he divorced his Jewish wife, converted to Protestantism and changed his name to Ignácz Ferenz Schrecker before placing an advertisement in the paper in search of a new, presumably non-Jewish, wife. The success of this venture must have startled even him: with his marriage to the penniless god-daughter of Princess Eleonore Maria Windisch-Graetz, his new wife, Eleonore von Clossmann, was related to the families Thurn und Taxis, Fürstenberg, Lobkowitz and Waldstein, Austria's most blue-blooded aristocrats. Only a decade earlier, such a union would have been unthinkable, and seen in the context of the time, the marriage demonstrated the speed and degree of acceptance of Jewish assimilation.

  Isak had been born in 1834 in Bohemia, which at the time was Austrian. Typical of Jews during these early days of Liberalism, he had become an early adopter of new technologies and by the late 1860s had based himself in Budapest where, in addition to royalty, he accumulated an impressive list of celebrity clients.

  Equally characteristic of this new age of social emancipation was the fact that in 1912 Wilhelm Pickl von Witkenberg, the son of Eleonore von Clossmann's older sister, would compile a notorious directory of aristocratic families who had intermarried with Jews: Weimarer historisch-genealogen Taschenbuch des gesamten Adels jehudäischen Ursprungs – or simply known as the Semigotha.

  As we shall see later, Franz Schreker,1 born to Eleonore and Ignácz in 1878 during a family sojourn in Monaco, would be the object of virulent anti-Semitic attacks in the immediate lead-up to Hitler. Schreker, whose works are only today returning to opera houses and concert halls, was a central figure in pre-Nazi musical life; the number of performances of his operas came close to those of Richard Strauss and, in the early 1920s, frequently overtook them. He was thus one of Germany's most performed living composers in addition to being a highly regarded conductor who had given the premieres of many important works, including Schoenberg's Gurrelieder in 1913. He was accorded the ultimate German accolade when in 1919 one of Frankfurt's most influential critics, Paul Bekker, announced that Schreker – among a number of other prestigious German opera composers including Richard Strauss – was the only credible successor to Richard Wagner. In 1920 Schreker left Vienna to take up the directorship of Berlin's Music Academy. In 1932, he joined his friend and colleague Arnold Schoenb
erg at the Prussian Academy of Arts, where he held a composition master class. The names of Schreker's pupils, both in Vienna and Berlin, represent a roll-call of central European musical life during the 1920s and 1930s. He was unquestionably one of Germany's cultural giants.

  Schreker had nevertheless been the object of frequent anti-Semitic vilification even before the Nazi dictatorship of 1933, forcing his move from Berlin's Music Academy to the Prussian Academy of Arts. With Hitler's arrival, there followed a ban on Schreker as conductor and teacher along with a performance ban on his works. His complete removal from public life, his inability to emigrate and a vindictive cancellation of his promised pension resulted in a stroke that proved fatal only a few days short of his 56th birthday in 1934. He thus became Hitler's first high-profile musical victim.

  Schreker, whose father Ignácz had died when Franz was still a boy of nine, most likely never set foot in a synagogue. With a Christian mother, he was by Jewish law not even a Jew. His musical education had been paid for by Princess Windisch-Graetz, and as a young man he had played the organ in his local parish church in Vienna. When in 1933 he stood accused of ‘racially’ being a Jew under Nazi law, his admittedly feeble defence was that his cousin had written the Semigotha. Yet when he completed his most popular opera, Der Schatzgräber,2 on 12 November 1918, the day that Austria, now bereft of its former empire, proclaimed itself a republic, he scribbled on the bottom of the final page of his manuscript that his most fervent hope was that his homeland would soon be annexed by Germany. It was a hope that would be fulfilled with tragic consequences only 20 years later.

  Jews on a Journey

  In the preface to the 1937 edition of his 1927 essay Juden auf Wanderschaft,3 the writer Joseph Roth, living in Paris, could conceivably have had both Isak Schrečker and Franz Schreker in mind while writing his attack on assimilated and inter-married German Jews – an attack that underlined the delusionary aspects of what they believed to be fulfilled aspirations:

  The German Jew is absolutely not an Eastern European Jew. He's forgotten how to suffer, pray and up-root himself. He's only good at working – and even this is now denied him. … In any event, these émigré German Jews [in reference to the influx of German Jews in Paris after 1933] constitute a new nation: they've forgotten how to be Jews and must laboriously re-learn Jewishness. On the other hand, they're equally incapable of forgetting that they're German and cannot escape their fundamental Germanness. They're like snails cursed to carry two shells on their backs. They can't deny either their Germanness or their Jewishness since they can't lie. Ghastly how the outside-world thinks in lazy worn-out pigeonholes and stereotypes! It demands to know where the traveller is moving from rather than where he's moving to. However, for the traveller himself, the goal is far more important than the point of departure.4

  The main body of this essay, originally written in 1927, dealt with Roth's view of what he saw as the unwholesome eagerness with which Jews acquired ‘Germanness’ and its ensuing delusions: ‘When Jews finally arrive, they do not, as they are so often accused, assimilate too slowly, but sadly, rather too quickly. … They become diplomats and journalists, mayors, nobles, police detectives, and bank directors, and other assorted pillars of a solid and decent society. Only very few become revolutionaries.‘5 And again, ‘The impoverished Jew is the most conservative of all impoverished creatures. He is a guarantor for the safeguarding of social order. The Jews by and large form a class of solid citizens albeit with their own racial, national and religious idiosyncrasies.‘6

  The misapprehension of being considered totally German despite having a single Jewish parent, as was the case with Schreker, is anticipated by the music critic Eduard Hanslick 40 years earlier in his memoirs from 1894. Hanslick would be the object of some of Wagner's most unpleasant anti-Semitic attacks. He faces them head on:

  That Wagner managed to smuggle me into his pamphlet Jewishness in Music disturbed me less. Wagner didn't like Jews and therefore assumed everyone who didn't like him must logically be Jewish. I would have felt myself flattered to be burned at the stake alongside the likes of Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn by Pater Arbuez Wagner;7 sadly this privilege would have to remain denied to me as my father and all of his ancestors, at least as far back as I can trace them, were the sons of staunch Catholic farmers. In addition, they came from an area where the only Jews they would have encountered would have been tinkers plying their trade door-to-door.8

  These comments demand more clarification. Hanslick specifically mentions his father but not his mother, Karoline Kisch, who was the daughter of wealthy Jewish merchants. Under Jewish law, this would have actually made him Jewish, should he have wished to count himself as such

  As Heinrich Heine and Felix Mendelssohn demonstrated, the choice facing German-speaking Jews at the beginning of the nineteenth century appeared to be one between full participation in German cultural life or continued religious adherence and exclusion. Wagner was only the first to articulate his paranoia that with conversions, assimilation and inter-marriage, Jews had masterminded an insidious deceit of racial camouflage that would eventually undermine German identity and its innate moral character.

  German

  How Jews in German-speaking Europe would become such enthusiastic chauvinists in the cause of German culture, particularly when seen through the prism of the Holocaust, demands a good deal of explanation. Jews would only achieve social and political emancipation with the creation of Europe's two German-speaking States: the German Reich (Empire), headed by the Prussian King in 1871, and the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, headed by the Austrian Emperor in 1867. Emancipation was a result of guarantees made by the freshly drawn-up constitutions of both. It corresponded to the prevalent mood that Europe's many diverse people, with their various languages and religious confessions, were allowed self-determination within the structures of a uniquely individual nation state, such as the newly created German Reich. In Austria-Hungary, rights were accorded so that no cultural or ethnic community within the multi-cultural dual monarchy could gain an advantage over any of the others. Thus the German Reich along with Austria-Hungary guaranteed the rights of confessional diversity, and their new constitutions meant that Jews, long denied the rights accorded to other German-speakers, could finally become fully active participants in the culture, language and music of the German-speaking people. To Jews, who had lived among Germans for two thousand years, it was the long-awaited entry into the most élite, educated and cultivated ‘club’ on earth. Membership was an honour bestowed on only a few; after millennia of being kept outside, they embraced their new identity with an enthusiasm that frequently resulted in an exuberant rejection of their Jewishness. To sceptical anti-Semites, such exuberance appeared not only vulgar but potentially oppressive. Reactionary forces, along with the Roman Catholic Church, meant that rights guaranteed by the constitution would still need to be fought through the Austrian Parliament individually. For example, a Parliamentary rejection of an imposed concordat between Rome and Vienna in 1868 allowed Jews access to education and access to teaching positions, while the intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews in Austria was not made legal until 1869.9 Yet Parliament and the Habsburgs stood firm in their support, and once these essential rights were won, there were no theoretical barriers to Jews integrating into every part of Austrian society.

  Why ‘German’ does not mean ‘from Germany’

  In the English-speaking, post-Hitler world, we see what we assume to be a clearly defined state called Germany populated by a collection of Europeans calling themselves ‘Germans’. We speak of ‘the Germans’ as we speak of ‘the French’ or ‘the English’ and never assume that the confluence of state, culture and people should ever have been a subject of debate or misunderstanding. In today's transient and global society, we shrug our shoulders and assume that if one is born within the geographical borders of a country called Germany or France and speaks the language reflected in the name of the country, then one is obviously German o
r French. But ‘Germany’ as a place and, more importantly, ‘German’ as an adjective were different, and it was the insecurity surrounding what it was to be German that culminated in many of the horrors of the twentieth century. Only after the defeat of Hitler in 1945 has ‘German’ come to mean ‘from Germany’.

  What's more, when we speak or write of ‘German’ achievement, it is usually assumed that it took place somewhere within the regions of today's Germany. It probably never occurs to us that disparate German thinkers, musicians, writers, adventurers, politicians and artists should come from anywhere else. That such ‘German’ cultural and intellectual icons as Immanuel Kant and E. T. A. Hoffmann should hail from present-day Russia, or Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka and Gustav Mahler from the Czech Republic; Arthur Schopenhauer, Günter Grass or the physicist Max Born from Poland; Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, from Hungary or Walter von der Vogelweide from Italy, seems contradictory – or even contrary. Why would such prominent individuals call themselves ‘German’ when all of them quite obviously hail from countries with very impressive cultural legacies of their own?

  The Germany we know today is a very different country from the Germany of the nineteenth century and bears little resemblance to the Germany of earlier times. Today, it is a neatly defined country that covers the bit of central Europe occupied by those German speakers not in Switzerland and Austria. Until the latter part of the nineteenth century, however, Germanic Europe was not a single unified country but a network of independent fiefdoms, principalities, bishoprics and kingdoms, often reaching far into neighbouring regions. Nor was Austria the tidy German-speaking Alpine Republic of today, but a sprawling empire consisting of Slavs, Italians and Hungarians ruled by the German-speaking House of Habsburg. Austria's German-speakers were a volatile minority; German was the official language throughout most of the Empire and Austria's Germans, known as German-Austrians, saw themselves as being part of the greater German nation. Most of Austria's assimilated Jews, whether living in Hungary or in the Slavic regions, spoke German as a first language.