“Disrupted Language, Disrupted Culture”: Hanns Eisler’s Hollywooder Liederbuch (1942-43)

Summary

From Among The Many German-speaking émigrés in 1940s Los Angeles it is difficult to imagine two with seemingly more different views on the time-honored Lied than Hanns Eisler and Thomas Mann. What perhaps is most surprising is that Mann or Eisler gave the German art song any thought, for by the twentieth century’s fifth decade the favored mode of musical expression of Hugo Wolf, Johannes Brahms, Robert Schumann, and, above all, Franz Schubert—nineteenth-century composers all—found its critical fortunes waning. The author of Der Tod in Venedig and Der Zauberberg simultaneously lauded the genre while holding it responsible for the Third Reich. Eisler traveled a different path. Then devoting most of his attention to film music, little by little he also began composing Lieder, the result of which is an anthology of forty-seven, most dating to his first fifteen months in California beginning in May 1942, known as the Hollywooder Liederbuch (see the appendix for an overview). In this essay I make the case that German song provided Eisler with a medium to mediate a left-behind world and one that was at the time decidedly unsettled. I therefore part company with most scholars who have examined the composer’s lyric omnibus. It is not an exile’s outcry of despair, a retreat from life. It is his sonic shield and sword.

In advance of his novel Doktor Faustus (begun 1943, published 1947) Mann, on May 29, 1945, previewed his views on German music in a speech he gave less than a month after Hitler’s death. Calling his talk “Germany and the Germans,” he asserts that “music is a demonic realm … Christian art with a negative prefix … calculated order and chaos-breeding irrationality at once, rich in conjuring, in incantatory gestures, in magic numbers, the most unrealistic and yet the most impassioned of arts, mystical and abstract.” Laying a base for the equation that the German cult of music carries an unsuspected evil, the syphilitic infection of the fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn he will develop in Doktor Faustus, Mann charts “a secret union of the German sprit with the Demonic” through the plotline of a musical Faust.