Composer Hanns (Johannes) Eisler was born in July 1898 in Leipzig, Saxony, where his Austrian father Rudolf worked as an academic. The family moved to Vienna in 1901 and settled in Leopoldstadt, a district known for its large Jewish population. Being an outspoken atheist (although of Jewish descent), Rudolf was denied a post at Vienna University and worked for the publisher Werner Klinkhardt as editor for a series of books on philosophy and sociology.
Hanns and his siblings were brought up in an atmosphere of social commitment. His elder sister Ruth (birth name: Elfriede) became a notable member of the German Communist Party (KPD) in the mid-1920s; his younger brother Gerhart was an associate editor of Die rote Fahne (The Red Flag), the country’s leading left-wing newspaper.
Eisler started his career as a promising composer in Vienna. His experience of the First World War as a front-line soldier and the trauma of exile following the rise of Adolf Hitler conditioned his development.
Today he is remembered for his productive working relationship with Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) and the harsh treatment he suffered before the US House Un-American Activities Committee.
Creative Dilemma
On his return from the trenches, Eisler entered the Vienna Conservatory to study composition under Arnold Schoenberg. In 1920 he married singer and music teacher Charlotte Demant. Five years later he took his family to Berlin, then a hothouse of experimentation in music and film, to start a teaching post at the renowned Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory.
In 1928, he taught at the Marxist Workers’ School. That same year his son Georg Eisler (1928-1998) was born (who would become a prominent painter in the tradition of Oskar Kokoschka).
Politically alert and active, he distanced himself from Schoenberg’s “Ivory Tower,” rejecting his former teacher’s twelve-note technique as elitist and esoteric.
Instead, he wrote anti-Nazi Kampflieder (Battle Songs), marches and music for film and drama. Berlin’s thriving subculture inspired his interest in jazz and cabaret. His work became popular with left-wing groups across Europe.
His long-lasting collaboration with playwright and song writer Bertolt Brecht originated in 1930. Together they produced socially engaged works such as Die Massnahme (The Decision, 1930) and Die Mutter (The Mother, 1932), based on Brecht’s adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s 1906 novel.
They also worked together on protest songs that mirrored the political turmoil of Weimar Germany in the early 1930s. The Solidaritätslied (Song of Solidarity) became a popular anthem sung in street protests and public meetings throughout Europe as its text was translated into multiple languages.
The best known version was performed by Ernst Busch, a working-class singer who performed in Berlin’s clubs and pubs.
The latter also appeared in the 1932 feature film Kuhle Wampe, oder: Wem gehört die Welt? (Who Owns the World? – released in the USA as Whither Germany?), a story that deals with unemployment, homelessness and politics in the Weimar Republic.
The phrase Kuhle Wampe is Berlin German (Berlinese) for “empty stomach.” The script was conceived and written by Brecht. Eisler composed the music. Soon after its release, the film was banned in Germany.
London & Manhattan
Eisler was engaged in Vienna in January 1933 when Hitler became German Chancellor. Those involved with the movement of German Workers were forced to cease their activities there and then.
Eisler feared for his safety and decided not to return to Berlin. His music was subsequently blacklisted by the Nazi Party.
During the early 1930s Eisler roamed throughout Europe and visited New York City, performing and lecturing to warn the world about the threat of Fascism.
His Deutsche Sinfonie, a series of anti-fascist instrumental and vocal movements set to texts by Brecht, was composed during those nomadic years (but not performed until 1959). In 1934, the year that he and his wife separated, Hanns moved to London.
Having found refuge in the capital, he settled at 147 Abbey Road, St John’s Wood, where EMI’s recording studios were located (its street crossing was made famous by The Beatles in 1969). Eisler was one of numerous refugees who needed to earn a living in an increasingly hostile environment.
British musicians expressed a long-smoldering resentment against the German and Austrian dominance of their profession. They feared for their jobs with the arrival of a new “foreign invasion” of talented
rivals.
Eisler had some successes. In March 1935, composer and activist Alan Bush and his colleague Michael Tippett mounted the first concert devoted to his music at Morley College (providing education to working men and women). The intention was to give a practical demonstration of the ways in which music could be used to further the class struggle.
On April 12, 1935, the BBC Symphony Orchestra premiered his Kleine Sinfonie, a choral symphony in eleven movements based on poems by Brecht.
The public was suspicious. British audiences were weary of Modernism and fearful of the composer’s radical message. Plans for a first performance of his recently composed Lenin Requiem had to be
abandoned after Adrian Boult and Henry Wood declined the invitation to conduct the work (the text exhorted the masses to rise up and fight capitalism).
Whilst staying at Abbey Road, he joined the exiled German Communist Party. Throughout his London residence, his movements were closely watched by MI5 as their primary targets at the time were communist agitators.
In 1938, Eisler was offered a teaching post at the New School for Social Research (NSSR) at 66 West 12th Street, Greenwich Village.
It was a suitable home. Designed by fellow Austrian Joseph Urban according to Bauhaus principles and completed in 1931, the school’s Director Alvin Johnson had initiated a programme of offering positions to scholars and creative artists who had fled the Third Reich.
Their presence initiated the formation of a “University in Exile” which eventually consisted of more than 180 faculty members.
Eisler faced an American people broken by the Depression and polarized by socio-political strife. He began by touring the country, performing his material for audiences of workers and intellectuals alike.
With the baritone Mordecai Bauman (1912-2007), he recorded an album of “Songs of the Spanish Civil War.” The latter was an active performer in New York City’s left-wing circles. With his group The New Singers he recorded English language versions of international communist or anarchist songs (you can hear some here).
Though Eisler had stylistically moved away from Schoenberg and the Viennese School, his attitude – inspired by American interest – had softened and he returned to experiment with serialism in new compositions such as the quintet Fourteen Ways of Describing Rain (1941: composed in celebration of Schoenberg’s seventieth birthday).
Much of his output in New York City was nevertheless composed for film or documentary and aimed at a wider audience.
Hollywood & Hell
In 1942 Eisler moved to Hollywood and took up a teaching post at the University of Southern California where he met up again with his friend and collaborator Bertolt Brecht. The latter had arrived in California from Europe in 1941 after a tortuous escape eastward from Denmark across the Soviet Union and the Pacific Ocean.
Eisler’s reputation and contacts enabled a fruitful career as a Hollywood composer. He published a cycle of forty-six art songs entitled The Hollywood Songbook with lyrics by Brecht and some of the classic German poets. Begun in a local hotel in 1942 and completed the following year, the collection established his reputation as one of the twentieth century’s outstanding composers of German “lieder.”
The cycle is as relevant today as it was then. Written against the toxic background of Hollywood’s extreme inequalities, it is a bitter chronicle of affliction caused by political oppression, forced migration and grinding poverty.
When the means of life are monopolized by the super-rich, Paradise becomes Hell for the poor, Brecht wrote in his song “Hollywood Elegies.” He hated the place and everything it stood for.
Hanns Eisler tried drowning himself in work. He composed music for eight Hollywood film scores, two of which – Hangmen also Die (directed by the German refugee Fritz Lang, the film depicts the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the principal architect of the Holocaust) and None but the Lonely Heart (in which Cary Grant speaks with a Cockney accent) – were nominated for Oscars.
From 1927 to the end of his life, Eisler wrote the music for no less than forty films.
In February 1940, he began work on the “Research Program on the Relation between Music and Films” funded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation which resulted in a book entitled Composing for the Films.
Published in 1947, he co-wrote the study with the philosopher and pianist Theodore Adorno, himself a pupil of Schoenberg who was attached to the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research).
This, the institutional home of the Frankfurt School, had moved to New York City in 1934 to become affiliated with Columbia University.
Marx of Music
The American intelligence services were onto Hanns Eisler from the moment of his arrival, exchanging information with their British counterparts. In May 1938 the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) had been established to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees and those organizations suspected of radicalism.
Chaired by Martin Dies Jr, the Committee concentrated its efforts primarily on left-wing activities. It would eventually deteriorate into a Cold War witch-hunt.
After the Second World War, HUAC – then chaired by J. Parnell Thomas – began an investigation into the “loyalties” of the entertainment industry. In nine days of hearings, members of the Committee interviewed forty-one Hollywood producers and scriptwriters who participated on a voluntary basis.
These “friendly witnesses” named nineteen people who they accused of holding radical views and spouting communist propaganda, including Eisler and Brecht. They were amongst the first artists to be placed on the blacklist. It was a painful irony. Two exiles who had tirelessly fought the curse of Fascism, were singled out to be the nation’s sworn enemies.
Charlie Chaplin, Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso signed a petition in protest. Igor Stravinsky, Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland organized benefit concerts to raise money for Eisler’s defense fund, but his adversaries triumphed.
One of them was his sister Ruth Fischer. Since her emigration to the United States, the former communist had turned into a fanatic anti-Stalinist. She accused him of being involved in subversive activities. When the Committee concluded its investigation, Hanns Eisler was being branded the “Karl Marx of Music” and the chief Soviet agent in Hollywood.
Bertolt Brecht decided to flee before being hounded out of the United States. Hanns Eisler avoided actual deportation in March 1948 by flying to Prague, protesting bitterly that being forced into exile for a second time was a devastating blow.
Leaving from New York’s LaGuardia Airport, he declared himself to be “heartbroken over being driven out of this beautiful country in this ridiculous way.”
Footprint
Eisler returned to Austria. In October 1948 moved from there to East Berlin to be reunited with Bertolt Brecht. He wrote scores for plays, films and cabaret and composed songs and marches. His setting of Johannes Becher’s “Auferstanden aus Ruinen” (Risen from Ruins) was adopted as the national anthem of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) in November 1949.
In spite of that, the composer’s relationship with the country’s authorities was an uneasy one and his music was not popular. He collaborated with Brecht until the latter’s death in 1956 and never
recovered from his partner’s demise.
His remaining years were marred by depression and declining health. Eisler died in 1962. Both men are buried in Central Berlin’s Dorotheenstadt Cemetery.
Composer and song writer left their footprint in New York City’s subculture. Woody Guthrie had protested the musician’s treatment in his lyrics for “Eisler on the Go.” In 1962, Bob Dylan attended George Tabori’s revue Brecht on Brecht at Theatre de Lys in Greenwich Village and he would later acknowledge the impact the master had made on his own writing.
He was particularly struck by the song “Pirate Jenny” to which he devoted four pages of analysis in his Chronicles.
One of the songs that featured in the show was “Das Lied von der Moldau” (Song of the Moldau), a Brecht & Eisler collaboration. The song’s second verse – and its original title – starts with the line “Es
wechseln die Zeiten” (The times they are a-changing).
Illustrations, from above: Hanns Eisler at work in the 1940s; Bertolt Brecht in Berlin, 1927; the proscenium-styled Tishman Auditorium in The New School’s JM Kaplan Hall, designed by Joseph Urban in 1930; original 1943 Argentine movie poster for Hangmen Also Die!; and Hanns Eisler and his wife Anna Louise leaving New York City from LaGuardia Airport in 1948.
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