Forbidden Music (20 page)
Authors: Michael Haas
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The Musical Consequences of Change: Expressionism
Expressionism was the artistic movement that primarily defined the age before the war, but continued to be a potent force during and afterwards as well. Raoul Auernheimer, nephew of Theodor Herzl, wrote a useful explanation as well as a sarcastic brush-off of Expressionism in the
Neue Freie Presse
exactly 20 years before a notorious event took place that became known as the ‘Expressionism Debate’. This debate carried out in the quasi-public forum of Communist émigré publications in German was primarily between the philosophers Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukás, but also involved the writers Bertolt Brecht and Alfred Kurella, as well as the composer Hanns Eisler. It was initiated following the support declared by the writer Gottfried Benn for Nazi criticism of Expressionism in 1933, and took place in 1937–8, at a time when Expressionism had already been overtaken by other modernist movements such as New Objectivity (discussed later in this chapter). The tone and length of the ‘dialogue’ in the Moscow-based émigré journal
Das Wort
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demonstrated not only the continued influence of Expressionism as a movement, but also its hold on artistic and intellectual circles. In the course of the increasingly doctrinaire and heated exchange, it paved the way to establishing a philosophical justification for what was becoming ‘Socialist Realism’.
But Auernheimer's attack dated from 4 July 1918, a decade after Schoenberg's
Book of the Hanging Gardens
(1907) and
Erwartung
(1909), and six years after the most quintessentially Expressionist of musical works,
Pierrot Lunaire
(1912). It also came long after the 1908 suicide of the Expressionist artist Richard Gerstl. Nor is consideration given to the Expressionist movement
Der blaue Reiter
, founded by the painter Vassily Kandinsky in 1911, which was a continuation of Dresden's proto-Expressionist movement from 1905 called
Die Brücke
. If one takes 1905 as a starting point and the Lukás–Bloch debate in 1937–8 as its last gasp, Expressionism, no matter how it was understood, dominated the European cultural environment for nearly 35 years before flaring up again in numerous postwar exile compositions. That music should latch on to this movement before literature and theatre is a result of the painter Gerstl's direct influence on Schoenberg.
To understand how it was seen at the time, it is worth looking at extracts from Auernheimer's article. He begins as follows:
There are quite a few myths being circulated about Expressionism these days – not only from this movement's literary and artistic leaders, but also from its most indoctrinated followers, not to mention the large number of camp followers who all hope that they won't find themselves left out. Yet nobody
really knows what to make of this dark, violent sounding word ‘Expressionism’ other than noting that it seemed to enter the German language around the same time as ‘Bolshevism’.
An explanation of what Expressionism might mean was offered in a lecture given in Berlin by one of the movement's most fervent followers, the writer Kasimir Edschmid. It is about this lecture that Auernheimer writes, quoting Edschmid, that ‘stagnation has been the state of things since Romanticism’.
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Auernheimer deplores this generalisation and asks what happened to four generations of developments that included ‘Naturalism’, which the Expressionists call ‘Impressionism’. He then goes on to write:
The young artists of today don't want to represent the world in the manner of artists in 1890. Instead, they would rather impose their own ‘vision’ created by emotion. They try and differentiate themselves from earlier exponents by insisting that ‘the world is out there already and it would be pointless to reproduce it’. They propose instead that the poet focus on ‘creating something eternal’. Naturally, there is nothing to disagree with here, though they shouldn't argue that this idea only appeared as recently as December 1917. […] What Edschmid calls the ‘relationship with eternity’ was already referred to in Goethe's day and then, a bit later, we came to recognise such ambitions as simply being part of ‘human nature’. […] From Edschmid's general introduction follow the specifics. Names are named and called out with the blissful partisanship that Expressionists see as their own rather endearing entitlement, as indeed it ever was with all youthful movements. Heinrich Mann leads in this particular dance; he's seen as some sort of ‘head boy’ within the Expressionist school, which is fairly amusing if one recalls that Heinrich Mann […] is already 40 years old. For the Expressionists, however, he has reached the outer realms of human existence with one foot practically in the grave.
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Auernheimer goes on to name the authors on Edschmid's list of Expressionists: ‘[Frank] Wedekind, [René] Schickele, [Walter] Hasenclever, [Paul] Kornfeld, [Fritz] Unruh, [Alfred] Döblin, Georg Heym, [Franz] Werfel and [Georg] Trakl.‘
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All are significant German writers and he follows with intriguing observations regarding literature following art and the actual position of Expressionism vis-à-vis Impressionism:
Only music has not been touched by Expressionism, perhaps because music was always expressionist. But what the devil
is
Expressionism? Literally
translated, it is ‘The Art that grows out of Expression’. Translating less literally, it appears to mean that it is that art which within expression seeks and finds its own Ends. ‘Feeling’ is back to being the basis for everything, just like in the days of the Romantics, and the youngsters today couldn't give a fig if the worldly weight that they lug around within themselves has anything to do with reality or not. The call of life doesn't register with them; rather they harken only to the sound of their own warbling and twittering. They also feel, not without some validation, that naturalistic art cannot be true to itself, since it can only represent what nature has by chance placed together and thus, the only thing that can be represented are objects without meaning. Art, according to them, should not concern itself with the outward appearance which is constantly changing but the eternal inner truths which they alone are able to translate. If left un-fashioned into art, these inner truths remain mere philosophy. […] The Expressionist is less concerned with painting a person than
representing
a person and painting them ‘as if they wore their heart on the outer side of their breast’.
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The rest of the article dismembers the assumed uniqueness of the Expressionist agenda (‘wasn't
Sturm und Drang
just Expressionism in the eighteenth century?’) and its ‘fatuous negation’ of Naturalism-Impressionism, a movement that Auernheimer defends using both Émile Zola and Gerhart Hauptmann. Auernheimer concludes that artists have always tried to connect to basic human emotions – it was ever thus: ‘Goethe in conversation with [Johann Peter] Eckermann once said, “Young people today seem to think that alongside the black round centre of a target, there must be another that they should aim for instead. They are wrong. There is only one bull's eye.” This is what the Expressionists, even with their new-fangled weapons, must still discover for themselves.‘
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Despite Schoenberg's reputation as the Expressionist composer
par excellence
, it is equally unsurprising that he would seek to impose some organisation onto the chaos that was starting to ensue.
Pierrot Lunaire
(1912), with its
Sprechgesang
and darkly symbolic poetry, shows, with its use of passacaglia, canon and other ‘learned’ compositional devices, signs of Schoenberg seeking some sort of atonal order. Even at his most extreme, Schoenberg seemed to yearn for the eighteenth-century musical Enlightenment in its search for clarity, purity of form, and balance of construction.
