by Michael Haas
Hanns Eisler arrived in Hollywood with a decade of composing for European political cinema under his belt. Though he never worked at the same exalted heights as Korngold, Waxman, Steiner or Toch, he did set new standards for music in Hollywood with scores that achieved powerful effects by remaining in the background for much of the time, coming forward as part of the dramatic action, or by having no music at precisely the moment when it was expected. In short, his genius was in doing everything differently from the typical Hollywood film composer. Though studios allowed him less latitude for his dialectical dramatic effects than he enjoyed with his frequent collaborator, the Dutch director Joris Ivens, he still managed to achieve a great deal. His score for Fritz Lang's Hangmen also Die (1943, the story partially adapted by Bertolt Brecht) even managed an Oscar nomination. This was a remarkable achievement considering that the use of music in the film is sparse and nearly always operates as an active part of the drama rather than as mere illustration.
After the war, Zeisl, Toch and Korngold left studio work as quickly as they could, sensitive to the harm it would do their reputations and fearful of the damage inflicted on their talent by years of creativity on demand. After 1945, Waxman reduced his studio work to less than one film a year, but Eisler was keen to continue, and slowly but surely he started to demonstrate new directions in film music and to produce convincing cinematic effects with his counter-intuitive ideas and theories. It must remain a matter of speculation whether he could have changed the course of Hollywood film music had he not been forcibly removed from the United States by the House of Un-American activities in 1948.
No Escape
By 1939, just before the Nazi invasion of Poland, German, Austrian and Czech Jews were applying for visas for any country that would take them. Refugee colonies were springing up as far afield as Lima and Shanghai. Britain had started to deport refugees and internment prisoners to Canada, Australia and New Zealand, though Canada notoriously refused to take in more than 5,000 Jewish immigrants, while making it clear that it was happy to take any other highly qualified refugee. The heavy loss of life resulting from the sinking of the SS Arandora Star (one of several ships carrying refugees or ‘enemy aliens’ sunk by German torpedoes during the war) en route to Canada in 1940 along with the case of the transport ship Dunera would eventually result in a temporary suspension of this policy.
The case of the Dunera would become one of the most notorious accounts of disregard for the rights and wellbeing of ‘enemy aliens’ held in British detention. On 10 July 1940, 2542 inmates from internment camps, some having already survived the sinking of the Arandora Star, were placed on the Dunera with the information that they would be deported to Canada. Instead, after they had been rifled, robbed and abused by their British guards, their luggage, including musical instruments, was wantonly thrown overboard. They were taken under unsanitary and inhuman conditions to Australia and arrived malnourished and ill some 60 days later, resulting in the court-marshalling of several senior officers and a severe reprimand to Lieutenant-Colonel William Scott. The refugees were then transported to the middle of the Australian outback to a camp in the town of Hay in New South Wales, where they further suffered from extreme heat while enclosed behind several barriers of barbed wire. Relatives were not informed of their location and eventually objections to their treatment were raised in the British Parliament.56
Another tragedy was the MS St Louis, which transported over 900 Jewish refugees from Hamburg to Cuba in May 1939, only to have entry refused by Cuban bureaucrats on a contrived technicality. Canadian and American immigration officials also refused entry to the increasingly desperate passengers, and though the nearby Dominican Republic agreed that it would accept 100,000 Jewish refugees at the 1938 Évian Conference, the captain of the St Louis decided to return to Europe, docking in Antwerp on 17 June, more than a month after leaving Hamburg. Negotiations resulted in passengers being offered asylum in France, Holland, Belgium and the United Kingdom before the St Louis returned to its home port in Germany. With the fall of all of these countries (apart from the United Kingdom), it has been estimated by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that 254 of the original 937 passengers were subsequently murdered by the Nazis. The captain of the ship, Gustav Schröder, would not return to Germany until he was certain that every one of his charges had found a safe haven, an act of humanity that postwar was widely recognised in his native Germany as well as in Israel.
There are many published accounts and several websites devoted to the music composed in Nazi concentration camps. For the present writer, it has always seemed a miracle that anyone could find the wherewithal to write anything in an environment that demanded so much in order to survive. Yet the essay by the composer Viktor Ullmann entitled ‘Goethe und Ghetto’ written in Theresienstadt (or Terezín), the so-called ‘model ghetto’ north-west of Prague and designed to show visiting dignitaries that Jews were being well looked after, raises important points and sheds light on how creativity could thrive under the most desperate circumstances:
Theresienstadt was and continues to be for me the school of form. In earlier days, when the magic of civilisation suppressed the weight and fury of material life, it was a simple matter to create beauty in form. Our true master-class in form, however, is to be found within our present situation, where we require form to dominate everything that makes up the material of our daily life, and any inspiration the muses may offer stands in the starkest contrast to our surroundings.[…] It's only worth emphasising how much my work as a musician has gained by being in Theresienstadt: in no manner did we just sit on the banks of the rivers of Babylon and weep that our cultural needs were not able to keep pace with our will to live. I am quite convinced that anyone who has ever had to wrestle art from life will confirm how true this is.57
This raises a crucial point about how environment can affect creativity. Whether adversity and a stressful environment are themselves the catalysts of creativity must remain a thorny, albeit rhetorical question. The circumstantial evidence offered by many exiled composers suggests that the transplantation of talent is rarely successful unless the artists have the resources to reinvent themselves in ways that are compatible with their new surroundings.
With Thomas Mann (but not his brother Heinrich), there was such a large international public that the change of geographical location made little difference to the nature of his output: Doktor Faustus, written in exile, became one of his most significant works. Lion Feuchtwanger was in a similar situation, with his international royalties allowing the purchase of an enormous villa in Pacific Palisades. Thomas Mann, while during this period not as popular as Feuchtwanger, also required his creature comforts, something his highly resourceful wife Katia Pringsheim (sister of the composer Klaus Pringsheim) was evidently able to provide.
Composers, however, are different from writers. Mann's quintessential novel-of-exile Doktor Faustus was read by individuals in the original language, or in translation, in the privacy of their homes all over the world. Mann certainly did not depend exclusively on an American public to guarantee readership. But music is an experience shared by an audience in a fixed place. At this time, music was usually only recorded if it had already established its popularity in the concert hall or the opera house. If the public did not respond, a composer's creativity either atrophied, as with Arthur Willner and Leopold Spinner, or went into overdrive in search of reinvention. This was the case with Toch, Rankl and arguably with Wellesz, all of whom embarked on a frenzy of symphonic composition.
The important composers working in Theresienstadt – Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein, Hans Krása and Viktor Ullmann – have become fairly well known, and their works are becoming a regular feature of the concert repertoire. All, with the exception of the younger Klein, were en route to becoming established composers before internment. Klein's genius was one of the many tragic miracles of Theresienstadt, his brilliance not becoming evident until he was imprisoned and long after his death.
In any case, the inhumanity of man and the undeniable creativity that it can generate is demonstrated in one highly symbolic work that came out of the Theresienstadt Ghetto. It can stand without explanation and be counted, regardless of its provenance, as a masterpiece: Der Kaiser von Atlantis by Viktor Ullmann and his youthful librettist, the painter and poet, Peter (or Petr) Kien. It is also a work of ethical genius. Its alternative title is The Abdication of Death and the plot is simple but powerful: Death has been overworked by the megalomaniac Emperor Overall and decides to go on strike. It was an obvious and dangerous parody of Hitler's ambitions. Yet what places it beyond the expectations of listeners today is its apparent lack of anger; soldiers who can't kill each other wonder why they're fighting, and a soldier-girl and soldier-boy fall in love after fruitless attempts to annihilate each other. A harlequin figure moves the action along while the Emperor Overall and Death argue. A drummer makes further pronouncements, ordering people to kill until nobody is left standing, while singing parodies of the German national anthem. The main protagonists are portrayed as buffoons while the music veers from the Bergian to cinematic hit-song and cabaret.
Ullmann's message, though, is that the only thing that needs to be feared is an absence of death. Its ethical message goes even further with Emperor Overall agreeing to be the first to die in order for Death to end his strike and thereby redeeming the apparently irredeemable. This was an extraordinary idea to present in a situation where death was ever-present – parts of the libretto were written on the backs of deportation lists to Auschwitz. Unsurprisingly, it did not make it to performance, though according to the memoirs of the bass Karel Berman, also interned in Theresienstadt, it did go into rehearsal. It has several alternative endings, and though Ullmann gives the official completion date as 13 January 1944, it is clear that during rehearsals there were disagreements about the ultimate version of the text. Kien was in general more cynical, angry even, while Ullmann comes across as verging on the serene with a view of death closer to that of Felix Salten's Bambi or Janáček's Cunning Little Vixen. The many variants of the final aria result in very different conclusions, changing the entire character of the work. It must surely be one of the bravest pieces of music-theatre ever written – and a powerful ethical testimony.
Music in Terezín, by the Polish-American music historian Joža Karas, remains the definitive work on music in Theresienstadt. Since its publication in 1984, the composers have become far better known and some, especially Ullmann, have been recognised as major figures. Hans Krása and Pavel Haas were two very distinctive composers who maintained a Czech musical identity that would be carried forward after the war by Martinů. Krása studied with Zemlinsky and Haas with Janáček, and both composers maintained a pronounced aesthetic distance to the New Objectivity, or twelve-tone trends dominant in Germany at the time. So, too, did their teachers, both of whom had already developed distinctive musical styles without conforming to current developments. Though the cultivated Krása employed neo-Classical Stravinskian devices, his music remains essentially Czech, with fewer rugged edges than Pavel Haas. It would be unfair to call their styles eclectic, as they seemed to have come up with something that was individual, though a fusion offering traces of Stravinsky, Janáček and even French Impressionism can be heard in the works of both.
The world inhabited by Czech composers grew from the same surreal environment that produced Franz Kafka: an emotionally defuse world somewhere between dream and awakening. In Krása's Dostoevsky-based opera Verlobung im Traum,58 given its premiere in Prague under Szell in 1933, there's a strong sense of the disparity between reality and the imagined. This blurring of reality and magic is also present in Pavel Haas's folk-opera Šarlatán59 of 1936, and in Erwin Schulhoff's weirdly surreal treatment of the Don Juan story in his only opera, Flammen (1929). It is a musical world that survived in Martinů's Julietta, given its premiere three days after the annexation of Austria, on 16 March 1938 in Prague, conducted by Václav Talich, the teacher of Karel Ančerl, who conducted much of the music composed in Terezín. Czech music was a product of what Max Brod – journalist, composer, Janáček translator and Kafka biographer – called 100 per cent Czech, 100 per cent German, and 100 per cent Jewish. It was a description he gave to the Czech capital, Prague, but it also works as a description of Czech composers as well.
There were other composers in Theresienstadt such as the Hindemith and Hába pupil Zikmund (Siegmund) Schul, whose few surviving works, such as the Two Chassidic Dances, various Hebrew Choruses and a Cantata Judaica, employ explicitly Jewish subjects. There was the bass Karel Berman, who as well as being a singer, also composed songs and piano works; and there was the Austrian-Polish composer Carlo Taube, who composed a Terezín Symphony. The score is lost, but a report of a secret performance held in a prayer room in one of the barracks has come down to us from one of the prisoners, an engineer named Arnošt Weiss:
Not much remains in my memory from the first two movements that characterized the milieu with Jewish and Slavic themes. But the third movement had a shattering effect on the listeners. Mrs Erika Taube, the wife of the composer, recited in a moving way, with a pianissimo obligato from the orchestra, a lullaby of a Jewish mother, which she had composed. There followed a turbulent finale in which the first four bars of Deutschland, Deutschland […] did not continue to über alles, but died out in a terrible dissonance. Everyone had understood and a storm of applause expressed thanks to Carlo and Erika Taube and all the musicians. Naturally a work of this sort could not be performed officially, and it is distressing that this unique cultural document was not passed on to us.60
There were other less important figures composing in Theresienstadt. The 22-year-old Robert Dauber wrote a delightful yet disturbing Serenade for violin and piano, in the Palm Court style of his father Adolf ‘Dol’ Dauber. It remains the only work of this gifted young man who died of typhoid in Dachau at the age of 23. Dauber was the only member of his family to end up in Theresienstadt and even sent occasional post-cards telling his family that he was well. The Serenade is best seen as another of Dauber's post-cards: short, sweet and positive. As with the works by Gál composed in Huyton, it has nothing didactic, symbolic or redolent of his experience as a prisoner. On the contrary, it is a work that was no doubt written to help people forget their situation. Perhaps another of these lesser figures who still resonates today is the poet Ilse Weber whose poem I wander through Theresienstadt / My heart a lump of lead … has become a regular feature at the many concerts in which the music of Theresienstadt is remembered. All of these composers, apart from Berman, were either murdered or died in camps. More recently and astonishingly late in the day, Hungarian composers murdered in the camps are starting to receive scholarly attention. In addition to Ferenc Weisz, murdered in 1944, we are finally able to hear works by Pál Budai, Jenő Deutsch; György Justus; Sándor Kuti; Walter Lajthai-Lazarus; Sándor Vándor; and László Weiner.61
It is a bitter irony that the Austro-German music tradition held in such high esteem by the third generation of emancipated, assimilated Jews was last heard wafting across the tundra and barbed wire of Eastern Europe's death camps, played by desperate inmates, most of whom would not survive. Heinrich Heine was surely thinking of the Germany of Dichter und Denker, ‘poets and philosophers’, when he wrote in his forward for Germany, a Winter's Tale: ‘If we could rescue God from indignities which inhabit mankind here on earth, we would thus become the redeemers of God himself – if we could restore dignity to a people deprived of joy […] then […] the whole of Europe, indeed the whole world, will fall to us! It is this message of universal domination by Germany of which I so often dream when I wander amongst the oaks. This is my patriotism.’
The poems of the Jewish poet Heine, which inspired countless settings by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt and Loewe among many others, were banned. Jewish musicians performing Beethoven and Wagner, the strands of which whispered across the moorlands and plains in Central Europe (the very region
s being claimed for German Lebensraum), had previously, as with Heine, considered themselves ardent defenders of Germany's most humanist values. Yet here they were, their national and cultural identity taken away by neighbours who had convinced themselves that their own entitlement to all that was ‘German’ could only come at the expense of those whom they could unilaterally declare ‘un-German’. Wagner was arguably more accurate in his view that Jews would eventually undermine the essential moral fabric of German culture than he could have known. Nazi anti-Semitism, much of which was inspired by Wagner himself, had driven non-Jewish Germans to perform acts of cultural barbarity that would bankrupt for generations any ethical legacy bestowed by its greatest writers, artists and philosophers.
CHAPTER 12
Restitution
…By the way, we're also in receipt of many letters from [Austria]; amongst others, one from Dr Robert Haas who has lost his position and needs recommendations from people with such dubious sounding names as ‘Nettl’ (whom he has contacted) and Einstein. Are you aware of the story about how they got rid of Guido Adler's spinster daughter [Melanie]? It seems the rogue Erich Schenk wanted to get his hands on the old man's library. I don't know whether for himself or his institute, but he wouldn't rest until she had landed in one of the gas-ovens in Auschwitz. Just remember these things when arming yourself against calls to hook up with former professional acquaintances ‘for old time's sake’.