Forbidden Music (39 page)

In 1932, Flesch appointed his former pupil Stefan Frenkel, a Polish Jew, to cover his violin class during the periods he was away on tour. In light of the previous year's debate, the appointment proved explosive. It resulted in a storm of indignation from Havemann and his ‘Action League’ colleagues, including the composer Max Trapp, and less illustrious teachers such as
Romuald Wikarski and Valeska Burgstaller.
²⁵
Their tedious machinations, full of anti-Semitic innuendo, ultimately forced Schreker's resignation as the school's Director in June 1932.

As compensation, Schreker was offered a composition master class at the Prussian Academy of Arts, where Schoenberg had taken over a similar position in 1926. They both found themselves beholden to the new President of the Prussian Academy of Arts, the composer Max von Schillings, who joined the National Socialist Party on 1 April 1933. Schillings began the systematic removal of all members and faculty who were either Jewish or unsympathetic to the new regime. On 18 March, both Schoenberg and Schreker attended their last meeting at the Academy, where they were informed that they could not expect to keep their positions. The official dismissal was to take effect from 31 December.
²⁶

Schreker's appeal to the composer Joseph Marx to help find him a position in Vienna was met with seeming callousness by his friend and former colleague, who replied in a letter dated 2 July 1933: ‘The developments in Germany followed a clear inner logic of its own; it was to be expected that this enormously gifted and industrious people would not submit to being shackled forever by every conceivable and inconceivable kind of political trick. And as far as the Jewish matter is concerned, I explained to a Jew just a short time ago that they themselves are the ones who encouraged all manner of anti-Semitism with their absolutely indescribable actions.‘
²⁷

At his holiday home in Estoril in Portugal, Schreker worked on the monumental overture to his unfinished opera
Memnon
which he entitled
Vorspiel zu einer großen Oper
. In October he returned to Berlin, where he completed its composition in preparation for a concert in Vienna while continuing to search for projects or opportunities that would enable him and his family to leave the country. Removal of his works from performance (the
Vorspiel
would not be played until 1958), his inability to appear as a conductor, and a forced retirement from teaching with the knowledge that his pension was barely above subsistence level, most likely brought on the stroke in late December that eventually killed him on 21 March 1934. Not surprisingly, the ‘New Germany’ did not heap him with posthumous praise and honours. In the case of the unapologetically Nazi house magazine, the once moderate
Die Musik
, he received only the vilest opprobrium – indeed, it extended to well beyond his death. In May 1938,
Die Musik
ran a retrospective article on music since 1933:

Christopher Hailey reminds us that the German press offered only two sympathetic obituaries. It must be counted an unexpected stroke of good fortune that only a month before Schreker's death, Julius Korngold retired from the
Neue Freie Presse
, meaning that Schreker's obituary was written by the more sympathetic Josef Reitler. A condolence letter to Schreker's wife from Anton Webern reminds us of Schreker's importance within twentieth-century Viennese music. If Webern's appreciation reminds us of Schreker's contribution to the shaping of the Second Viennese School, Reitler reminds us that, with his early libretto-writing instruction coming from the Austrian novelist and playwright Ferdinand von Saar, Schreker was equally part of ‘Old Vienna’ (an important differentiation from ‘Young Vienna’, the group of writers who congregated at Café Griensteidl, such as Hermann Bahr, Arthur Schnitzler, Peter Altenberg and Hugo von Hofmannsthal). Reitler goes on to write:

Hailey also reminds us of a view expressed by the musicologist Károly Csipák that Schreker's ‘persecution complex’ made him unaware of the scale of what was happening around him.
³⁰
Unlike Gál, Erich Korngold or even Schoenberg, Schreker did not identify himself as a Jew, was never raised as a Jew, and was unversed in any Jewish traditions, even if other non-Jewish composers saw him as displaying Jewish musical characteristics. Ernst Krenek's recognition of Schreker's ‘Jewishness’ has already been mentioned, and as early as 1915 the composer Hermann Wolfgang von Waltershausen had sensed features in Schreker's music which, though praiseworthy, could never be considered native to ‘German’ composers. Be that as it may, it's worth recalling that Schreker's Jewish father had converted before his second marriage, and so before the birth of the children that came from this union. He died when his son Franz was only nine years old. Schreker therefore never developed the antennae of his colleagues from Jewish or partially Jewish households. Yet even among Jewish colleagues, he was hardly alone: Hans Gál, as we have seen, also refused to recognise the seriousness of the changes that were taking place around him.

Schreker's attitude may have been naïve, but his situation vis-à-vis the Nazis was similar to that of Walter Braunfels, whose father Ludwig had been baptised as an infant by his converted Jewish father. Like Gál and Schreker, Braunfels was also head of a leading music institution, the Cologne Music Academy, a school that during the nineteenth century had once been headed by the Jewish composer and pianist Ferdinand Hiller. Braunfels was married to the daughter of a notable German sculptor, Adolf von Hildebrand. He was thus partially immune from the loss of social status that threatened Schreker with financial ruin. Braunfels even felt that his removal from the directorship in Cologne following a denunciation by one of his faculty members, Hermann Unger (who replaced Braunfels in the next Dortmund Tonkünstlerfest), was responsible for his new-found creative vigour. Despite these injustices, and his ejection from musical life under similar circumstance to Schreker, Braunfels seems to have been confident that he would remain unharmed and moved first to Godesberg and, from 1937, to a modest home near Überlingen on Lake Constance, where he remained in near total anonymity writing some of his most important and searching music.

The works that came out of this period in Braunfels's life included a powerful String Quintet, three string quartets, a number of church cantatas and three large-scale stage works:
Die Verkündigung
(1933–5),
Der Traum ein Leben
(1937), and
Szenen aus dem Leben der heiligen Johanna
(1939–43).
³¹
The reason he gave later for not choosing emigration was ‘the conviction that, merely through my continued presence, I was a stone in the dam that was
keeping evil from flooding everything; but also I realised that should I decide to leave my homeland, I would be ripping out the most important roots to my own creativity. I was well rewarded for keeping to this position […] the source of inspiration welled up.‘
³²

For his part, he refused any participation in German musical life on the rare occasions it was offered, initiating an internal boycott of his own. With the outbreak of war in 1939, he relocated to Florence, where he continued to work on his opera
Heilige Johanna
before returning to Lake Constance in the spring of 1940 eking out a living teaching local children. It is miraculous that in the course of the war he was neither denounced nor deported, but kept himself safe and anonymous among the villagers of Überlingen – coincidentally the same village where Winifred Wagner died in 1980 at the age of 82.

If the professional circumstances of Schreker and Braunfels appeared to be almost identical, Schreker spent his adult life in fear of having to return to the horrors of the genteel poverty of his youth, an insecurity that did not trouble Braunfels.
³³
Schreker's most successful years were during the period of Germany's hyper-inflation, meaning that he never achieved true financial security despite immense popularity. The shock of losing all sources of income at the age of 55 was more than his nervous state could bear. Braunfels, with a far larger family, followed a deeply devotional life as an observant Catholic. Schreker kept no such faith, and with his death in 1934 he can be counted as the first important musical victim to fall to Nazi persecution.

The Mechanics of the Purge

Scholars of National Socialism's music policies relate a never-ending tug-of-war for the cultural soul of the Nazi Party and, by extension, the German nation between the ministers Joseph Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg concerning questions of party dogma versus image and propaganda. Rosenberg, along with members of the younger Wagner clan, the virulently anti-Semitic editor of the
Zeitschrift für Musik
Alfred Heuß, and the editor of the Bayreuth newsletter, Hans von Wolzogen, formed the Kampfbund für Deutsche Kultur in 1929. Rosenberg remained its director and gave the appearance of having the upper hand in musical matters prior to 1933. Goebbels, perhaps owing to his hate-inspired rhetoric, gained Hitler's confidence and was permitted to incorporate music policy within his own Ministry of Propaganda. He was certainly the cleverer and more sophisticated of the two. There are even indications, such as the supervision of his doctorate by Jewish professors, that his anti-Semitism was an opportunistic add-on.

Goebbels was amenable towards new trends in the arts and he wanted to find a means of keeping Hindemith in Germany as the standard-bearer for contemporary music under National Socialism. For the purposes of selling Germany's image – especially abroad – it was important for Goebbels to challenge the perception that National Socialism, in common with other European Fascist regimes, was culturally backward-looking.

Rosenberg, despite what many took to be a Jewish-sounding name and his rather un-Teutonic appearance, took Nordic imagery as his reference for political dogma. Hitler told Rosenberg on 24 January 1934 that he expected him to act as his personal representative in all educational matters relating to National Socialist culture and the interpretation of its ‘world view’. In 1936–7, Rosenberg fused his money-losing Action League with Kraft durch Freude,
³⁴
an organisation that provided education and entertainment for the masses. Bundled together, they became known as the ‘Reich's Supervision Bureau’,
³⁵
colloquially referred to as ‘The Rosenberg Office’. This was subdivided into the various disciplines of Education, ‘The Cultivation of Literature’, ‘The Cultivation of the Arts’, ‘The Department of Early and Pre-History’, as well as an archive of ‘Clerical, [church]-Political Issues’, and the more general field of the sciences. The Department for Music, a subdivision of the Arts section, was under the responsibility of the musicologist Herbert Gerigk, later the co-author of the notorious
Lexikon der Juden in der Musik
.
³⁶
With this increase of influence, Rosenberg's department became a counter-balance to Goebbels's Ministry of Propaganda.

A Contemporary Account of Rosenberg in London

On 10 May 1933, the
Neue Freie Presse
gleefully recounted a story reported in a ‘London Telegram’ of the right-wing, anti-Nazi German paper,
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
, regarding the intellectual drubbing Rosenberg received at the hands of Margot Asquith, ‘Countess of Oxford and Asquith’ and widow of the former Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith. Rosenberg was in England in his capacity as Head of the National Socialist Party's Foreign Affairs Office. His stay had not been a success, and when Rosenberg laid a wreath on the Cenotaph, one of the monument's guards later tossed it into the River Thames. As related in the ‘London Telegram’, the encounter with Margot Asquith was even more humiliating: