Forbidden Music (6 page)

For many Jews, musical assimilation, as opposed to social assimilation, became a tale of double- or even cross-assimilation, by which the Jewish musician or composer was accepted as a full citizen and, from there, could become an active proponent of German culture. The German nation, however, had split into two States, with the consolidated monoglot country on one side and a polyglot one on the other. Did German culture look inwards or outwards, and what was the effect of enfranchising Jews in Austria while, at the same time, denying all Austrian German speakers, Jews included, the ‘right’ of citizenship in a uniquely German state? A partial answer as to how this issue developed over the next half century can be found in the titles of two books written by the Jewish violin virtuoso from Austria's Polish district of Galicia, Bronislav Huberman, who addressed such dilemmas first in
My Path as a Pan-European
, published in 1925, and
Fatherland Europe
, written in 1932, just as the full force of German nationalist terror was to be unleashed.

The word ‘German’ as an adjective remained viable in the dual monarchy, yet there is confusion even to this day as to what constituted ‘Austro-German’ as opposed to the Prussian-tainted ‘Reich-German’. So numerous were the Slav-Austrians, that ‘German-Austrians’ (
Deutschösterreicher
) became the official definition accorded to all Austrian German speakers. It must also be recalled that German remained the official language of the Austrian half of the monarchy. Austrian Jews from the non-German-speaking eastern regions faced a double process of assimilation: the first was that of becoming Austrians, followed by the process by which they became German-Austrians.

Ernst Krenek refers to this point on several occasions in his memoirs, though in a manner that many have taken, wrongly, to imply a personal distaste for Jews. In fact, Krenek is merely making the point that he found German Jews assimilated to such an extent that it was nearly impossible to tell who was Jewish and who wasn't, while in Austria he found they were far more redolent of the
shtetl
(Eastern European Jewish communities). And little wonder: Jews in the Rhineland had lived in the area since Roman times and
inter-married with non-Jews, thus looking and sounding totally ‘German’, with no trace of the accent of the East-European closed communities. Czech, Alpine and even Hungarian Jews were also largely German-Austrian in manner, customs and speech. Austria also had more Jews than Germany from its eastern non-German provinces such as the Bukovina and Galicia, not to mention the Balkans and Hungary.

Some of the Yiddish-speaking Galician Jews such as Joseph Roth, Soma Morgenstern, Manès Sperber and Paul Celan from Romanian Bukovina would count themselves among the most elegant of twentieth-century German writers, along with the Bulgarian born Elias Canetti (for whom German was his third, if not fourth, language) and the Hungarian-born Arthur Koestler. Krenek mentions that his fellow Schreker pupil, Karol Rathaus, had been a childhood friend of Roth and Morgenstern, and took his Germanisation with the hyper-perfection typical of Galician Jews who had learned the language at a provincial German
Gymnasium
and was thus equipped with a command of the language that was far superior to many native speakers.
²⁴

The rapid migration to Vienna produced a near hundredfold increase in the city's Jewish population, from 2,617 in 1857 to over 200,000 by 1920. This move from the Empire's provincial ghettos and
shtetls
was accompanied by a liberating rush of assimilation that saw artists and musicians becoming fully enfranchised participants in Austrian intellectual life and players within the greater German cultural arena. Such rapid assimilation brought with it two extraordinary and seemingly contradictory effects: the first was that it provided the freshness that nearly always comes with the arrival of new blood, and the second was that this new blood arrived with a respect for German culture that had grown out of a near mystic reverence for the past and a profound comprehension of the enlightened values that this past had produced.

The Language of Assimilation:
Die Neue Freie Presse

In his memoirs, Julius Korngold, the music critic of Vienna's leading newspaper,
Die Neue Freie Presse
, and successor to Eduard Hanslick, mentions his good fortune at being born during the ‘age of Liberalism’. On 20 December 1927, the same year that the writer and journalist Joseph Roth wrote his extended essay entitled
Juden auf Wanderschaft
, the
Neue Freie Presse
ran a front-page article celebrating ‘60 years of Liberalism’. In it, we find not only a concise and lucid exposition of the historic and political processes that resulted in one of the most inclusive and wide-ranging European constitutions of the age, we also sense, as with Roth's essay, the reactionary powers
gathering steam in the years running up to National Socialism.
Juden auf Wanderschaft
tries to come to terms with what Roth saw as an inevitable development; the leader-writers of the
Neue Freie Presse
may have even sensed the same with their salute to 60 years of Liberalism aimed at a still undeclared but clearly present enemy.
²⁵
This was hardly surprising since the paper had been founded in 1864 by the Jewish journalists Max Friedländer and Adolf Werthner, and was published and edited from 1879 by two other Jews, Eduard Bacher and Moritz Benedikt. Benedikt was the only journalist whom the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph would meet. The
Neue Freie Presse
became the primary German-language paper offering a secular and politically liberal perspective and, with its flotation on the Viennese stock exchange in 1871, it was established as one of the leading papers published in the German language. The founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was its cultural editor, and Richard Wagner's favourite ‘Jewish’ hate-figure, Eduard Hanslick, Professor of Aesthetics at Vienna's University, was its principal music critic. With regular articles and features by Peter Altenberg, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Max Nordau, Felix Salten, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig and even Karl Marx, it was the paper of the liberal, educated bourgeoisie, a demographic in which Jews were becoming ever more prominent. Stefan Zweig in
The World of Yesterday
sums it up nicely by referring to the paper as ‘a Temple of Progress’ and goes on to write, ‘With its distinguished exposition on events, its cultural authority and its political prestige, it came to represent for the entire Austro-Hungarian monarchy the same as
The Times
for the English speaking world.‘
²⁶

Though life had become progressively better for Jews since the 1848 Revolution and the emancipation of 1867, the rise of Jewish scholars and intellectuals to the top of the professional classes – and even to the nobility – took place in less than a generation. Such rapid progress would not go without resentment. The ideals of the Austro-Hungarian Constitution of 1867 and Germany's Constitution of 1871 were directly responsible for creating the dynamic cultural environments in both German states prior to the rise of Nazism. It could be argued, as the 1927 article in the
Neue Freie Presse
makes clear, that the wide-ranging liberalism of these constitutions also allowed the emergence of a pan-German, exclusionist nationalism.
²⁷
To try to understand the dysfunctional relationship between Jews and non-Jews, we need to turn to Wagner, in many ways the father of German anti-Semitism based on ‘race’ rather than religious adherence, and as a composer, a central figure within this story.

Wagner's
Judaism in Music

In Richard Wagner's 1850 polemic
Das Judenthum in der Musik (Judaism in Music
)
¹
, several features demand special attention. Not only can the document be seen as a template for what was still to come, but it also offers a reflection of the period in which Wagner lived and wrote. The impulse to produce the pamphlet grew out of a casual reference to a work possessing a ‘Hebrew flavour’ that was made by Wagner's friend Theodor Uhlig in the
Neue Zeitschrift für Musik
. The gusto with which Wagner addresses this point becomes apparent within the first paragraph. It is equally clear that he is addressing a subject that already enjoys common currency. As with most demagogues, he writes as if addressing ‘Everyman’ and expressing an opinion that all are thinking but none dare say. It is the tabloid approach, but using language that is at once lofty and condescending, while making frequent self-regarding references to ‘the people’ in the safe assumption that his readers believe that Jews are hardly the same species. He published the work twice: under the pseudonym of ‘K. Freigedank’ (K. Freethinker) in 1850, and under his own name in 1869.

One of the most fascinating contemporary résumés of Wagner's tract comes from his nemesis at the
Neue Freie Presse
, Eduard Hanslick, who finds himself the object of attack in Wagner's 1869 revision. In the 9 March issue of the same year, Hanslick tells us perhaps all we need to know about the tract itself and offers a marvellous depiction of the way that both sides viewed this debate: