HANNS EISLER

The article about Hanns Eisler in “The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians” (1980) pays glowing tribute to the composer’s originality, productivity, and mastery of many forms. It also gives a thorough account of his unswerving commitment to the brand of communism he believed in. It was a belief aspoused by many in Germany during the Weimar Republic of the nineteen-twenties, by idealists who were disgusted by the gross inequities of the capitalist system. Unlike the socialists, who wanted to promote their cause within the framework of parliamentary democracy, these communists desired only a dictatorship of the proletariat; and they looked to the Soviet Union as an inspiring model. In hindsight, they must seem rather naive: for they swallowed Russian propaganda whole, they bestowed blind reverence on Lenin and Stalin, and they failed to realize that what those two wicked men put in place was not a dictatorship of the proletariat, but a dictatorship of the communist party, reinforced by the police; and the latter dictatorship, if perceived, was justified, in their minds, as a temporary means to a good end.

One of the leading leftist figures in Germany, during those years, was the composer, Hanns Eisler. He was born in Leipzig in 1899; and the welding together of his political creed and his music was just as solid as its counterpart, earlier in Leipzig, in the marriage of faith and art in the music of Bach. Even those who look askance at Eisler’s politics have to admit that he was no propaganda-spewing hack: he was a musical genius, classically trained; and in harnessing that genius to the service of his cause, he was unquestionably sincere. He developed a compositional style that was highly accessible, to the point where his songs were embraced and sung by the working class world-wide. But there was never, in them, the taint of meretricious mass-appeal. They spoke with a true voice.

That need not surprise anyone who knows that Eisler, in the Weimar period, collaborated closely with Bertolt Brecht. They seemed made for each other, with a common authenticity of feeling and a sharp, wry idiom. Brecht, in fact, during those years and before he had his own theatre company, was much drawn to that kind of musical collaboration — famously so with Kurt Weill. Indeed, Weill and Eisler were, in one respect, matching geniuses: they both incorporated jazz influences into their music, and their orchestrations had an astringent quality that was markedly similar. Each of them, like Brecht, was strongly anti-establishment. Of the two, though, only Eisler channelled his subversiveness into a specific political allegiance.

When the Nazi party came to power in 1933, all three men had to leave Germany. Weill was Jewish and would not have survived the Holocaust, had he stayed. Eisler, who was half-Jewish, would have been equally at risk. But he and Brecht, alike, knew there was no future for work like theirs in the Third Reich; and anyway their views would have almost certainly landed them in a concentration camp. They ended up in the United States. There, Brecht continued to write, biding his time until Hitler should be defeated and he could return to a Germany where his plays could find an audience. Weill stayed on, but composed Broadway musicals that were a faint commercialized echo of achievements like “Die Dreigroschen Oper”. Eisler, similarly accommodated himself to American taste and to financial necessity, composing scores for Hollywood movies: he despised the work, but he was able to take solace in a resumed friendship with Arnold Schoenberg, whose pupil he had been, and who was also living in exile in Los Angeles.

Like Brecht, Eisler knew where he naturally belonged, and he probably would have returned to Germany of his own accord some time after the war, as soon as he saw the possibility of a future there. But as it turned out, he was pushed in that direction by forces as hostile, in America, as Nazism had been in Europe, by the anti-communist witch-hunt that left such a stain on American honour. Hauled before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities because of his views, which were openly sympathetic to communism and outspokenly pro-Russian, he was abrasively interrogated. He maintained his dignity in the face of grave discourtesy, but the condemnatory outcome was inevitable. Before he could be officially deported, he left on his own initiative, to return to what was by now East Germany.

His return was more than a mere flight: it was something undertaken in a spirit of hope and confidence. He looked to East Germany as a place where his political aspirations would become reality: there would be a communist government, sworn to enact welfare and justice for all, with a special emphasis on guaranteeing the rights of workers; and all this would be achieved under the benevolent aegis of the Soviet Union, which would guarantee protection from the imperialist, capitalist West. He was welcomed back with open arms, a native son come home to put his talents to work in a great cause. He plunged right in, with enthusiasm.

Reality, alas, had rude shocks in store for Eisler. The promised workers’ paradise turned out to be a vicious police-state. Angry and frustrated, the very workers for whose sake the regime ostensibly existed rose against the regime in open rebellion. Eisler had to watch in horror as Soviet tanks rolled in, at the regime’s request, to crush the rebellion. This they mercilessly did, and they sealed the citizens’ doom by closing the border, trapping everyone in a kind of national prison: the Berlin Wall was built; and all along the western frontier, impassable barriers were put up, patrolled by armed guards with orders to shoot would-be escapers.

Eisler was a highly intelligent and well-educated man. He was incapable of viewing the world through blinkers, or of allowing others (to vary the metaphor) to pull the wool over his eyes. He had to face facts. To the end of his days, he stuck to his belief that the communist ideal was a worthy one. Yet he could not pretend that East Germany was anything but a sad perversion of that ideal. He became extremely depressed, taking frequent refuge in drink. And what added to his depression was that the regime continued, at least for a while, to treat him with official approval — as though he were its unequivocal supporter. This must have rankled. He continued to compose, but more now for himself than for the Revolution; and to a large extent, the heart had gone out of him. Perhaps the final and clinching factor in his disillusion was Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes: this stripped away from him, and from millions, the last vestiges of respect for the Soviet Union. Hard on the heels of that painful re-assessment came, for him, a re-alignment of his own individual situation: careerists in the cultural ranks turned on him and condemned a major project of his as a regressive piece of bourgeois trumpery. It stopped him in his tracks: he could not write a single note of the music he had envisaged. Somewhere within himself there may have lingered a flicker of the old defiance, a recognition that in all honour and honesty he ought to dissociate himself from the regime and all its works, much as he had refused, in youth, to countenance fascism and all its works. But he was aging now and in ill health. It was all too much for him.

In the end, Eisler’s life was a tragedy. He had struggled valiantly to serve humanity the best way he knew how, only to see his efforts wasted on a wholly inhuman monstrosity. In effect, all his efforts had simply served to install a tyranny of thugs and liars. Buried in Eisler there was much decency and good-heartedness. His anguish must have been almost unbearable.

It takes an honest man, at such a pass, to admit he is wrong, and has long been wrong. Eisler may have felt that, deep down. But he never said so. The pity is that he never, in the frailty of old age and sorrow, embarked on the one redemptive act that would have cleansed him: not a public recantation of his faith, but a penitential accounting of wrongs done in the name of that faith; a memorial, that is, to the many who had been executed on trumped-up charges, who had died in Gulag or its satellite equivalent, and who were shot trying to escape — this not in words, but in the music he was so amply gifted in. Had he had the strength and the willingness to compose it, one can imagine it would perhaps have taken the form of a German Requiem.

Hanns Eisler died in 1962. Ironically and hypocritically, he was given a full state funeral, attended by all the state bosses who had so grievously betrayed the cause he had so eloquently espoused.