Authors: Michael Haas
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 death 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.
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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
.
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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,
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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.
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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.
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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.
During the 1950s, German historians decided that a distinction was needed between cabaret songs that were seen as sleazy and those which were socially critical, though no such distinction had been made during the years of the Weimar Republic. ‘Kabarett’ was taken to represent the political and socially critical, while ‘Cabaret’ referred to the rest.
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Peter Jelavich's book entitled
Berlin Cabaret
defines both variants as the following:
Cabaret/Kabarett consisted ‘of a small stage in a relatively small hall, where the audience sat around tables. The intimacy of the setting allowed direct, eye-to-eye contact between performers and spectators. The show consisted of short (five- or ten-minute) numbers from several different genres, usually songs, comic monologues, dialogues and skits; less frequently dances, pantomimes, puppet shows, or even short films. They dealt in a satirical or parodistic manner with topical issues: sex (most of all), commercial fashions, cultural fads, politics (least of all). These numbers were usually presented by professional singers and actors, but often writers, composers, or dancers would perform their own works. The presentations were linked together by a conférencier, a type of emcee who interacted with the audience, made witty remarks about events of the day, and introduced the performers.
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In German, cabaret was already being spelt with a ‘c’ and a single ‘t’ by 1900 to emphasise the connection with such outré Parisian venues as Le Chat noir, founded in 1881 by the poet, rogue artist, and erstwhile Montmartre hydropath Rodolphe Salis, Baron de la Tour de Naintré. It was an organic offshoot of the Naturalist and Realist movements represented by writers like Zola and it created the impression of a counter-cultural ‘salon’ of prostitutes, pimps and pickpockets, along with the many artists and Bohemian intellectuals who sought their company. A hint of Salis's ability to amuse can be gleaned from the Berlin journalist Paul Goldman, who wrote in Salis's obituary in 1897 that it was difficult to imagine how such a ‘good-time-lad would ever have tried to tangle with anything as po-faced as dying’.
13
From Paris, cabaret moved to Barcelona's Four Cats and to Simplicissimus (known as ‘Simpl’) in Munich in 1903, providing naughty respite from straitlaced, Protestant Berlin. It took its name from the satirical publication
Simplicissimus
. ‘Destined to keep all of Germany high and low on its toes for several decades,
Simplicissimus
attacked the makers, purveyors and accepters of authority, literary kitsch and hypocritical morality. Its spirit made it the kin of cabaret.‘
14
Simpl was frequented by such figures as Frank Wedekind, and eventually such literary luminaries as Joachim Ringelnatz and Karl Valentin were recognised as house poets. It was also allegedly the source of literary ‘Dadaism’, with the term ‘Dada’ used for the first time by Marietta di Monaco in a recitation by the poets Klabund and Hugo Ball.
The subversive ideas that formed the basis of what we now think of as Berlin Cabaret started in the Café des Westens,
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colloquially known as Café Größenwahn (‘Café Megalomania’). Opening as the first coffee house in Berlin's boulevard Kurfürstendam in 1893, it was initially called Das kleine Café before being renamed Café des Westens in 1898, where it became a meeting point for the city's Bohemian community. The first two official Cabarets in Berlin, Ernst von Wolzogen's Überbrettl and Max Reinhardt's Schall und Rauch (‘Wind and Froth’), were both conceived at tables in the Café des Westens. It provided a salon atmosphere for average Berliners who were not necessarily part of the ‘salonnière’ circles of Berlin's upper bourgeoisie, offering an informal meeting place where they could mingle with artists and intellectuals. Much later, it was where the idea for Brecht and Weill's
Threepenny Opera
was born as well as Friedrich Holländer's seminal chanson
Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß (Falling in Love Again
), immortalised by Marlene Dietrich in the 1930 film
The Blue Angel
.