Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis

by Michael Haas

  But there was more at stake: Germany wanted to build on its territorial acquisitions, which had not expanded significantly since 1871, though ‘Lebensraum’ was not ever given as an official reason for going to war. If Germany had expansionist eyes, they most likely looked East towards what it called the ‘Near Orient’ as it set about building a railway line all the way to Baghdad in anticipation of opening up commerce beyond the Balkans. Austria wished to consolidate its foothold in the Balkans, which Bismarck (dead since 1898) had infamously described as not worth the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier – indeed, he had predicted that if there were to be a future war in Europe, it would be over something pointless ‘like the Balkans’. Yet it would be wrong to assume that Austria was eager to acquire yet more Slavic nations. Such an enlargement would have seriously upset the status quo and made further devolution to the Slavs unavoidable – something the Magyars would never have accepted, though this was precisely the ambition that Franz Ferdinand harboured.

  Austria was thus left to sort out its rights and wrongs with Serbia, while the Germans reacted to the declaration of war by turning their attention to the more advantageous opportunities they saw arising from the ensuing free-for-all. As Russian forces began mobilising on its western borders, the Germans decided to forestall a double-fronted war and knock out potential trouble from the French, attempting to render France neutral for the remainder of the conflict. This would allow German forces to concentrate on fighting Russia, which was perceived as being a far greater threat to its ‘Near Orient’ ambitions. The French were still smarting from the war of 1870 and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, and dearly wished to see Germany back to where it was before Bismarck's ‘blood and iron’ unification. The Kaiser had built a huge navy, as a challenge to Britain and hopefully allowing the Germans a toe-hold in the colonial acquisitions that the British had more or less monopolised. If the Saxe-Coburg and Gotha cousins (soon to call themselves ‘Windsor’) in England could acquire an Empire with the help of a navy, so could their half-English first cousin, Germany's Wilhelm II. This, at least, is what he and Admiral Tirpitz believed. As it happened, the German navy hardly left port for the duration of the conflict, and German naval warfare resorted to ethically questionable U-boat assaults on ships carrying civilians – ships which the Americans and the British had used for the equally questionable transport of military supplies. As the conflict was not between states, but between the symbols of power represented by monarchs, it became a fight that was meant either to strengthen the legitimacy of the established order, or to destroy it. Attempts to avert war through negotiation were arrogantly dismissed.

  Why everyone wished to go to battle remains a mystery to this day: Germany had not yet officially considered expansion; Germany, France and Britain were friendly trading partners and nobody, least of all the French, wanted to see the influence of the Romanovs encroaching further into Western Europe despite France's treaty with Russia. Austria had a bone to pick with the Serbs, but did not wish to acquire further Slavic territories. Britain wanted to stay out of the conflict altogether, but joined it once neutral Belgium was attacked in Germany's move to knock out the French before the Russians could mobilise. As tensions mounted, it would seem that only the French had a concrete goal: the reacquisition of Alsace-Lorraine. Everyone saw themselves as being the innocent party under attack: the Germans, as the Russians mobilised; the Serbs; the French. Everyone also saw themselves as being in the right, and God was evidently on everybody's side. Any goals that were to be achieved during the war were thought up after it had started. It would be the last conflict in which feudal values of honour were called upon to trump patient diplomacy and negotiation. It would end with catastrophic loss of life for the British, the Germans, the Austro-Hungarians and the Russians. With the exception of the British, all of the other combatants (including Turkey, which had fought on the Austro-German side) would lose their royal heads of state and re-emerge as republics.

  The casualties were unimaginable: France, Germany and Russia each lost one and three-quarter million men. Austria lost one million, two hundred thousand; and the British lost almost a million. These figures do not include the outbreak of the Spanish flu in 1917 that went on to claim three per cent of the world's population. At the end of the conflict, it was not clear who the winners and losers were: the ‘War to end all Wars’ had ended with everyone in a state of utter exhaustion.

  The Musical Legacy of the War

  In the Neue Freie Presse on 2 July 1917, Guido Adler wrote an article on music and war. Unsurprisingly, he speaks of Austria as the country that has the most music residing in its soul, though he includes Germany in his more general discourse. He makes claims for ‘predestined’ superiority within ‘musical culture’, pointing out how absurd it would be for the French and British to boycott Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert. There follow, however, some fascinating observations:

  Until now, wars have had little effect on a nation's musical output. If economies were disrupted, it meant that performers couldn't be paid, but musical creativity was not disrupted. If, however, things should turn out differently in this particular conflict, then it would provide the opportunity to reform music from the very roots upwards.

  In an echo of Wagner, Adler sees the German people needing to rediscover their natural musical talents and he hopes that postwar developments will guarantee musical opportunities throughout all social classes. He is careful to distance himself from ‘Socialism’, but uses the word ‘social’ freely to call for cultural renewal and accessibility throughout all levels of society. He calls for a new type of politics that views music as the ultimate catalyst of social reform.5

  More startling to modern readers is Adler's vocabulary. He uses the term ‘entartet’ (degenerate) to denounce what he perceives as negative developments. Continuing with the same language employed by malevolent politicians twenty years later, he calls for ‘musical boils to be lanced’ so that ‘degeneration’ should not spread and thus infect the culture-starved masses. This plea, however, is directed less at Schoenberg and his followers than towards light music and operetta. His prediction that music should help in widening social enfranchisement is more interesting.6 Hanslick's belief in music as an autonomous art that had no intrinsic means of confronting social issues or addressing non-musical questions still enjoyed wide currency at this time, yet what Adler was propagating was an ethical dimension similar to that proposed by Schoenberg, and an idea that had now taken root. From Mahler onwards, assimilated Austrian Jewish musicians saw their art as a tool that could help shape a more just, enlightened and unified society. That this view owed at least something to Wagner's anti-Semitic reactions to the half-Jewish Hanslick showed how far Jewish cultural integration had come.

  The Immediate Legacy of War and a Mass Migration

  The War and the Spanish flu epidemic were devastating. Jews saw the systems that had decreed and enforced their emancipation collapse. At the same time, many recognised the positive opportunities presented by the postwar secular republics that had sprung up in the wake of Austria's own ancien régime. This had steadfastly maintained the institutional anti-Semitism of the Catholic Church in spite of Franz Joseph's perceived philo-Semitism. Many Austrians and Germans believed that Jews preferred defeat in the war in the belief that memories of the ghetto could now be consigned to a closed chapter on feudal Europe. This ignored the far more generally held view among middle-class Jews that the Emperor was the only guarantor of equality. The Galician journalist and writer Joseph Roth, author of the novel Radetzky March, provided the most articulate voice for this position, and it was also the declared belief of Schoenberg and Wellesz. This generation of Jews (and former Jews) believed that the monarchy provided stability and protected minorities through its unquestioned authority. Democratic republics gave the people – potentially an unruly mob – too much influence and Jews were well aware that the unruly mob was, by and large, anti-Semitic. The need for work, for social housing, and for educati
onal opportunities for everyone was becoming increasingly urgent, especially among the proletarian masses, which were joining the Christian Social Party, with its overt anti-Semitic bias opportunistically propagated by the party's founder and populist former mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger.

  Jews therefore filled the ranks of both the Communist and the Social Democratic parties. The Communist Party was attractive because it was international – the working man has no nation, according to the Communist Manifesto. Jews who had spent the decades after emancipation being told how they couldn't truly be counted as German, French or British, had an active interest in seeing such barriers to integration eliminated. With the Emperor no longer the rallying point, the ‘International’, as the Communist Party was then called, was perceived as an attractive alternative. For most liberal, educated Jews, however, the Social Democratic Party was the only practical political choice. Other parties represented land-owning and farming constituencies, which would only include a small number of livestock-trading Jews. Right of Centre parties as well as the populist Christian Social Party were closely affiliated with the church's open anti-Semitism. The once powerful Liberal Party of the 1860s was now insignificant and in any case it was seen as being partially responsible for the gulf between the prosperity of the middle classes and the wretchedness of the workers during the final decades of the nineteenth century. The policies of individualistic capitalism formerly represented by the Liberals had little attraction for soldiers coming home to the devastated economies of Germany and Austria.

  War has a democratising effect. It may be fought over issues between potentates, but it must be fought by the people. They had to be persuaded, cajoled and bribed into fighting enemies who represented no threat to their personal interests. There was a limit to how much could be accepted by the masses before they demanded the right to join in the decision-making processes.

  The 1919 peace treaties concerning Germany at Versailles and Austria at Saint-Germain were devastating for both. Nobody wanted to pick up the bill for the disaster. The most expedient solution was to declare Germany and Austria as sole aggressors, thus lumbering them with the full costs of all reparations. As Germany and Austria were not invited to the negotiations until the deal was settled, they had little choice but to accept, not without bewilderment since they had believed the war had ended in stalemate. Had not Serbian aggression against Austria started it? France had no desire to see a strong, united German state, or a return of the dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, and convinced the allies to recognise the autonomy of the self-declared independent states that had formerly made up the monarchy's constituent parts, reducing Austria to its German-speaking core around Vienna and along the Alps.

  Berta Zuckerkandl, related by marriage to the French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau (her sister Sophie was married to Georges's brother Paul), wrote of the anger Clemenceau felt against Austria and his desire to see its empire wiped off of the face of the earth. Zuckerkandl's attempts through family connections to negotiate a separate peace between Austria and France during the war came to nothing. In addition, the French were determined that Austrian German speakers should not be allowed to fold themselves into the larger German republic. Indeed, undermining German unification was their major, though largely unspoken, priority. Occupation of the Rhineland, which the allies hoped might become an independent republic, and economic pandemonium created by eye-popping war reparations, started a process in which some of the constituent German states temporarily declared independence in order to take control of local finances.

  Postwar Austria was in ruins. It lost its agricultural holdings to Hungary, its port to Italy, and its industrial belt to Czechoslovakia. It was left with the Alps and a crescent-shaped stretch of the Danube, while conceding much of Tyrol to the Italians. Vienna looked like a faintly ridiculous duchess whose wig had suddenly blown away in a gale. If one thing united most Austrians, it was the wish in 1919 to be absorbed into Germany. With only the Alps and some farming along the Danube as natural resources, Balkan poverty would extend throughout Austria, with most of her rural population barely able to eke out a living.

  On 3 September 1918, the Neue Freie Presse ran a moving account of Austrian soldiers on the wrong side of the front trying to return home. It was its last outwardly patriotic feuilleton. It refers specifically to Austrians rather than Germans, and describes in loving detail everything that made this homeland special to its young men and women.7 Two months later, and a year before the Republic of Austria was declared, the paper carried news on 13 November 1918 of the Austrian parliament's decision to unite with Germany:

  At one time it was said that the German people [in the multi-national conglomeration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire] were the manure that allowed the other nations to grow. Well, the Austro-Germans are tired of being manure. The only harvest they have reaped has been the hatred and aggravation of foreign races. It too now wishes to be in a position of widening its horizons. The last war demonstrated how important it was that a state be able to feed and finance itself independently. This fact is no less true in times of peace.8

  As if confirming the view that the Austrian Emperor was the only guarantor of Jewish freedom and safety, Lemberg, formerly part of Austrian Poland (today Lviv in the Ukraine), witnessed a monstrous pogrom only days after independence. On 16 March, the paper reported on Woodrow Wilson's decision to consider whether Austrian-German unification was in keeping with his ‘Fourteen Points’, which had become the basis of the Armistice in November 1918.9 To the shock of the Austro-Germans who had believed that the ‘Fourteen Points’ guaranteed self-determination of Europe's many national identities, it didn't, and on 12 November, the Republic of Austria was declared. It was the day on which Franz Schreker completed his opera Der Schatzgräber, which by 1922 would become the most frequently performed opera by a living composer in the German-speaking world. At the bottom of the last page of the score he inscribed a disappointed note that acknowledged the founding of the Austrian Republic and called for immediate unification with Germany. As Zweig writes in The World of Yesterday, it must have been the first time in European history that a country offered independence, demanded instead absorption by a neighbouring state.10 By the following year, however, at the invitation of the Jewish, Hungarian-born Leo Kestenberg, advisor to the Prussian Minister of Culture, Schreker had abandoned Vienna to take up the directorship of Berlin's Academy of Music and had taken his entire Viennese composition class with him: Max Brand, Walter Gmeindl, Alois Hába, Jascha Horenstein, Ernst Krenek, Alexander Lippay, Alois Melichar, Felix Petyrek, Karol Rathaus and Josef Rosenstock.

  Meanwhile in Vienna, Elfriede Friedländer, her husband Paul Friedländer and brother Gerhart Eisler, established in 1918 the first Communist Party outside Russia. Elfriede and Gerhart were the elder siblings of the composer Hanns Eisler. The three Eislers, children of the noted Jewish philosopher and lexicographer Rudolf Eisler, had been antiwar activists in 1914, resulting in house searches and enforced conscription of both Gerhart and Hanns. Gerhart returned a decorated hero, whereas Hanns's service-record was more modest. Both had landed in non-German-speaking units so that they could not proselytise fellow conscripts with their Marxist beliefs.

  With civil war still raging in Russia, political chaos was obstructing developments in both postwar Germany and Austria. With the Bolshevik Béla Kun on the rampage in Hungary and a ‘Soviet Republic’ declared in Bavaria, it was a miracle that Austria did not succumb to revolution. Nevertheless, the Communists moved in quickly. Elfriede Friedländer, following a jail sentence for initiating an armed occupation of the offices of the Neue Freie Presse in 1919, also joined the great migration to Berlin. Taking the name of her mother (her parents had not been married at the time of her birth) and her middle name, she became known (and later, notorious) as Ruth Fischer. At the invitation of local Berlin party activist Willi Münzenberg, she was soon leading the Communist Party, where many saw her as successor to Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-born co
-leader of the Spartacus League who had been murdered in January 1919.

  Between the political extremes of the Marxist activist Ruth Fischer and the composer Franz Schreker were legions of politicians, intellectuals, artists and performers joining in a mass exodus from Vienna to Berlin: Hanns Eisler, Erich Kleiber, Fritz Kreisler, Fritz Lang, Lotte Lenya, Edmund Meisel (the composer for Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 film Battleship Potemkin), Georg Pabst, Max Reinhardt, Artur Schnabel, Arnold Schoenberg, Misha Spoliansky, Josef von Sternberg, Erich von Stroheim (though he first settled in the United States before moving to Berlin); Ernst Toch, Billy Wilder, and Alexander Zemlinsky. All saw Vienna as an impoverished city with no future. Many, like Meisel, Schnabel and Kreisler had relocated to Berlin much earlier. Others like Gál and Toch took up prominent positions in other German cities, though Toch moved to Berlin in 1929. Berg, Erich Korngold and Wellesz, along with the writers Karl Kraus and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, would simply commute. Berlin as a global centre was, according to Zweig, a fairly new concept, unencumbered by the traditions that weighed down Vienna.11 Anton Kuh, self-confessed professional scrounger, cabaret artist and literary adversary to Karl Kraus, relocated to Berlin because he preferred being among other Viennese rather than the ‘Kremsers’ – citizens of the Lower Austrian town of Krems – whom Kuh holds up as the provincials who now blighted Vienna.12