Planning and Policy

In January 1943 Rear Admiral Denis Boyd was appointed to the post of Fifth Sea Lord replacing Admiral Sir Frederic Dreyer, the contentious choice as Chief of Naval Air Services since July 1942, and thereby reestablishing the position of naval aviation on the Admiralty Board. The use of the title ‘Fleet Air Arm’ and its potential abolition or the restriction of its use was discussed in a minute by the Head of Air Branch in March 1943 [161]. Objections had been raised to the title as a result of its association with the former term ‘the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Air Force’ and that it implied the Fleet Air Arm was not an integral part of the Royal Navy. However, the term was regarded with great affection by the public and widely used in official publications. While its use had been restricted by an Admiralty Fleet Order, any formal change would only be practicable after the war. The title Rear Admiral Lyster, a previous Fifth Sea Lord, had suggested to replace it was the Royal Naval Air Service.

As far as the future make-up of the fleet was concerned, Admiral Kennedy-Purvis, the Deputy First Sea Lord, laid out the Navy's Future Naval Building Policy in an important memorandum in January 1943 [142]. He acknowledged the central role of air power in naval warfare: ‘The increasing power of aircraft whether carrier-borne or shore-based must decisively affect the methods of applying Naval Strategy’ [142]. Perhaps most symbolic of the changes taking place was the assertion that in future the main role of the battleship was the Aircraft Carrier Heavy Support Ship while ‘the aircraft carrier must form an indispensable part of every naval force taking part in all operations other than purely minor and coastal ones’ [142]. Henceforth the completion of the new Fleet Carrier HMS Indefatigable was given priority over the battleship HMS Vanguard at John Brown's shipyard on the Clyde due to the former's importance and there was insufficient skilled labour to progress with the construction of both ships simultaneously [140]. There was a debate over the design of future carriers and whether the American open-sided design should be adopted for future Fleet Carriers in place of the British closed hangar design; key considerations were the operation of aircraft, the size and strength of the ship, protection against projectiles and fire risk [192, 198].

Planning and Policy

The post of Fifth Sea Lord and with it the Fleet Air Arm's representation on the Board of Admiralty was suspended upon the controversial appointment of Admiral Sir Frederic Dreyer, an officer with no aviation experience, to the post of Chief of Naval Air Services on 11 July 1942 [66]. Rear Admiral Lyster, the previous Fifth Sea Lord, became Rear Admiral, Home Fleet Aircraft Carriers. It was announced on 15 December 1942 that this unsatisfactory arrangement was to be brought to an end by the appointment of Rear Admiral Denis Boyd, formerly Rear Admiral, Mediterranean Aircraft Carriers and Captain of Illustrious at the time of the Taranto raid, as Fifth Sea Lord from 14 January 1943 [126].

The estimates of aircraft carrier requirements at the beginning of 1942 indicated that the biggest gap would occur with carriers to operate with the Fleet [3] and the limitations of naval forces without carriers were fully appreciated [17]. There was a growing realisation, fuelled by unfavourable comparisons with Japanese carriers [5, 30, 32, 32a], that to increase the numbers of carriers operating with the Fleet, simpler designs than the armoured Fleet Carriers were required [5]. In October, The Rt Hon. A.V. Alexander, the First Lord, acknowledged that less than half the required number of Fleet Carriers were available [95]. As a result proposals were put forward for the construction of Intermediate Aircraft Carriers, later known as Light Fleet Carriers, at the expense of a number of cruisers and conversion of the battleship Vanguard [52] and to replace the proposed construction of three cruisers with three Intermediate Carriers [88]. The aircraft repair ship Unicorn was to be commissioned as an operational carrier with only one-third of the complement of repair staff. It would take three months for the ship to reach full repair capacity once operations had been completed [85, 85a].

The lack of Fleet Carriers in the spring of 1942 saw consideration being given to approaching President Roosevelt for the loan of American ships, but Captain Lambe, the Director of Plans, recommended that given the threat faced by the Americans in the Pacific no such request should be made [34]. By the end of the year the situation was rather different with an assessment being made as to whether any British carriers could be spared for the South-West Pacific [106, 106a].

This volume has a rather different character to that of Volume I which covered the operating years of the war between 1939 and 1941, not least on the account of Japan's entry into the Second World War on 7 December 1941 and the increased role which the Fleet Air Arm played in the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943. The struggle in the Mediterranean, which received widespread coverage in Volume I, continued and reached its peak with the efforts to relieve the siege of Malta in the summer of 1942. The Allied counter-offensive in that theatre gathered pace over the next twelve months with amphibious landings in North Africa, Sicily and finally Salerno in Italy, all of which were covered to varying degrees by carrier forces. Behind the scenes strenuous efforts were being made to expand the Fleet Air Arm in the face of inadequate shore facilities and major problems with aircraft production in Britain, both in terms of suitable types of aircraft and the ability to meet production targets. As the subtitle of this Volume, ‘The Fleet Air Arm in Transition’, suggests, the years 1942–43 marked a stepping stone between the small pre-war cadre operating from a small number of carriers to a naval air arm with modern aircraft types capable of operating a number of Fleet Carriers in the Pacific Ocean for sustained periods.

The aim of these volumes is to present an insight into the major planning and policy issues of concern to the Admiralty and extensive coverage of naval air operations. Hence the detailed introductions to Parts I and II are divided between coverage of planning and policy and that of operations. Whereas the majority of the documents in Volume I dealt with operations there is much more even balance in this volume between documents covering both key areas. This reflects the crucial nature of this period as the development and expansion of the Fleet Air Arm gathered pace, whilst also presenting coverage of an increasingly diverse range of operations.

As far as planning and policy is concerned the reader will gain a clear appreciation of the growing importance, indeed primacy, of the aircraft carrier within the proposals for the future composition of Royal Navy's surface fleet. In the short term both battleship and cruiser construction was sacrificed to expedite carrier construction, especially of what were initially referred to as Intermediate, later Light Fleet, Carriers.

The forty-first Brecht Yearbook features a set of essays focused on the special interest topic Teaching Brecht, along with a diverse mix of new research contributions that, once again, demonstrate the breadth and diversity of Brecht-related scholarship. The special section opens the volume. Guest editors Per Urlaub and Kristopher Imbrigotta offer an introductory essay that guides us into the work of contributors from three continents and a multiplicity of disciplines. Each essay provides a window into fascinating moments of teaching and learning that expose the productively porous bounds between, as Urlaub and Imbrigotta put it, stage and page, classroom and community.

The volume continues with the latest piece of work by intrepid theater scholar and oral historian Margaret Setje-Eilers. Her interview subject this time is Annemone Haase, who worked at the Berliner Ensemble from 1959 to 2001. As she did in her work that formed the special section on Manfred Karge in BY 38, Setje-Eilers again poses questions that open lines of thought and illuminate moments recent and distant, onstage and backstage, in art and in life. Her interview enriches our understanding, not only of the remarkable career of Haase but also of the cultural and historical forces that shaped her life in the theater.

We remain in the company of remarkable women as we move into the volume's open-topic research articles, first with a piece by eminent scholar Helen Fehervary that is targeted in its examples and sweeping in its basic claim. Fehervary's essay on Brecht's collaborations with women, which contemplates relationships that evolved in the early Weimar days as well as in later career stages in exile and in the GDR, is refreshing in its cool distance from the heat of familiar Brecht-and-women polemics and counterpolemics. In its stress on art instead of romance, it guides reader attention to the creative work to which Brecht and collaborators from Elisabeth Bergner to Anna Seghers contributed as peers.

Fehervary's article pairs fascinatingly with an article that zooms in on Skovsbostrand, in which Katherine Hollander delves into the spatial, political, material, and intellectual conditions of peer collaboration in a very specific place and time of exile. The method is surgically precise, and the insights have broad ramifications.

During their teaching careers at Carleton College, Ruth Weiner, professor in the Department of Theater and Dance, and Julie Klassen, professor of German, engaged with Brecht's plays and legacy in various ways. Weiner directed English-language productions of Brecht, including The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, and Man Is Man. Klassen directed two German-language student productions: Der Jasager / Der Neinsager and Der kaukasische Kreidekreis. In 1998, Weiner and Klassen organized a campus-wide Brecht symposium to celebrate Brecht's hundredth birthday and the fiftieth anniversary of the world premiere of The Caucasian Chalk Circle at Carleton. In 2006, Weiner invited guest director Edward Berkeley to Carleton to mount a main stage production of the musical Happy End, for which she made the arrangements, and Klassen was asked to be dramaturg. Together they conducted postproduction interviews with members of the cast and the production staff.

This examination considers what effects production conditions had for staging Brecht with students in three of these plays: Der Jasager / Der Neinsager, Der kaukasische Kreidekreis, and Happy End. Some of the parameters included the language of the performance, the size and composition of the potential acting pool, the amount of time and production resources available, and the performance venue. The goals of the respective performance influenced each director's decisions regarding the amount of conscious attention to direct to such theoretical concepts as Verfremdung, Gestus, and epic theater. The results indicate that the effective embodiment of these concepts in actual dramaturgical practices proved more important for approaching Brecht's stagecraft than conscious engagement with his theories. Each production foregrounded Brecht's commitment as dramatist to create a universe where human agency could question and defy social and political realities. Each expanded the experiences of actors and audiences alike with an important era of German language and culture.

From the Classroom to the Stage: Two German-Language Productions

In contrast to the scheduled productions typical for a theater department, Klassen's staging of two German-language plays did not originate as college- wide productions or as separate projects; they came about from her midcourse decision to have students perform the Brecht text they were reading. She plunged into each of these projects aware of the limitations on availability of German-speaking student actors, preparation time, and staging resources. Yet the opportunity to explore the written texts as drama outweighed the difficulties of mounting the productions.

Introduction

While Brecht's best-known theatrical device may be the Verfremdungseffekt, his most consistent theatrical device—one that spans the entirety of his career—was that of appropriation and recombination. In Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) alone, he and composer Kurt Weill mixed gruesome crime reports with eighteenth-century ballad opera, contemporary dance melodies with Rudyard Kipling, medieval French poetry with the Bible, and the list goes on throughout the piece and throughout his career. Sampling (and arguably stealing) at will from myriad genres, authors, and cultural traditions, Brecht's plays often work in highly original ways precisely because he was not entirely original, and his considerable productivity stemmed at least in part from his artful borrowing techniques. Yet Brecht's works, like many dramatic texts, are often treated in the classroom as finished, polished products, with the messiness of their creation and performance history tucked away in the endnotes.

To drive the students in my Modern German Drama course to pull at the sutures of the bound text and to engage with the valuable cultural material that is often glossed over in purely textual discussions, I turned to Brechtian practice itself for inspiration. Specifically, I designed an assignment that required students to imitate Brecht and Weill themselves, who employed a mixture of cultural appropriation, translation, and combinatory creativity to generate the songs of Die Dreigroschenoper. For instance, their “Zuhälterballade” (Pimp's Ballad) was almost entirely a modern German translation of a medieval French poem, set to an original melody by Weill. Because the origin story of the “Zuhälterballade” is so well known, it was an excellent candidate for a sound design assignment in which students had to create a replacement for the original song by following an analogous creative process: translating an older German poem into contemporary English and setting it to a melody that was foreign to the source material. By asking the students to enact the same process as had been used by the artists they were studying, the assignment staged a revealing, productive encounter between the course material, the language acquisition process, and performance practice.

Learning Environment

To give some context for the learning objectives that generated this assignment, I will briefly explain how it was embedded in my course and what sort of students actually undertook it.

One reserves a special kind of disappointment for what one has once loved. This highly personal, polemical “Versuch” by former GDR writer Uwe Kolbe is a book of disappointment, by turns frustrating and intriguing. The modest title on the front cover, Brecht, suggests only part of the target, however. Even if it is “eine Rede mit Brecht, anhand von Brecht, über, gegen und für Brecht” (15–16), in truth it is the subtitle that more accurately suggests the larger and more distinctive purview of the work: the Brecht tradition in and after the GDR, and finally the relationship between politically engaged literature and power in the twentieth century.

Born in East Berlin in 1957, a year after Brecht's death, Kolbe is known as one of the last generation of GDR writers, those “born into” the established socialist state. His collection of poems Hineingeboren (published with Aufbau in 1980 and Suhrkamp in 1982) became emblematic of the frustrations of the generation who would go on to throng the streets and squares during the demonstrations of 1989/90. In 2014 his novel, Die Lüge, charted an autobiographically inflected account of the relationship between an artistic son and his father, representative of the orthodox socialist establishment (Kolbe's own father worked for the Staatssicherheit). During the reading tours associated with the book Kolbe found himself trying to make the fraught relationship with power in the GDR comprehensible, and took recourse to a single word that always worked: Brecht. Now this essay of sorts, or speech or at one point open letter, mines the same territory and unpacks the “lie,” as Kolbe sees it, at the heart of the GDR literary establishment. He identifies among the “old men” of the GDR cultural elite a cynical falsehood in their relationship with power: one that as a consequence he believes prolonged the existence of the socialist state (33). The original model for that lie he sees in its purest form in Brecht: “Es hätte ohne Brechts Anpassung an die Verhältnisse in der DDR die Anpassung so vieler Intellektueller an dieselben so lange und so geschmeidig nicht gegeben” (42).

The book then starts by offering a biographical sketch of Brecht's life and writing.

On December 22, 1933, a few days after moving into a thatched-roof house just outside the Danish town of Svendborg, Bertolt Brecht wrote his friend Walter Benjamin with instructions for sending Benjamin's library ahead to Denmark so that it would be waiting for him when he arrived for a visit. Brecht's plan to have Benjamin ship the books in advance showed a subtle and sympathetic understanding of his friend. Taking into account Benjamin's hesitations about leaving Paris and his deep, almost mystical attachment to his library, Brecht's plan was pitched to encourage Benjamin to make the journey, and offered convenience, consolation, and productivity once he got there. Brecht included his wife Helene Weigel's assessment of how little money one needed to get by in Svendborg, and praised the town library for its ability to “get you any book.” Moreover, he wrote coaxingly, “We have radio, newspapers, playing cards, your books soon, stoves, small cafés and an uncommonly easy language.” Perhaps most importantly of all, “the world is expiring more quietly here.” Benjamin should send the books in care of Maria Lazar, Brecht wrote, and gave the address: Skovsbostrand per Svendborg.

Brecht's list of Svendborg's assets is characteristically concrete. But it represents abstractions: access to information, leisure, diversions, material comforts, and a small, reliable, and localized network of intimate intellectual comrades. These plain but vital attributes, Brecht seemed to say, were the basics required for personal and intellectual survival in exile. They would underpin the sense of security and refuge that developed in and around Brecht and Weigel's house at Skovsbostrand 8, and they were at the heart of the community that strove to alleviate the anxiety and profound dismay that accompanied the flight from Germany and marked its aftermath.

This article investigates the period between 1933 and 1939, when a small society of German-speaking, exiled Mitarbeiter (coworkers) made a home for themselves in Denmark. This group included Brecht, Benjamin, Weigel, and the German dramaturg, Margarete Steffin, and was anchored in Svendborg by the Danish novelist Karin Michaëlis. It was frequently filled out by other visiting or local colleagues, including, to a significant degree, the actress and photographer Ruth Berlau, also Danish.

Es gibt das Vorurteil, die Liebe des “armen B.B.” zur Dialektik sei unglücklich gewesen, weil unerwidert geblieben. Brecht selbst jedenfalls hätte ein Liebesverhältnis wohl gar nicht erst für sich beansprucht: So wie Marx im Vorwort des Kapital gab sich auch Brecht nüchtern als Schüler Hegels und seiner Dialektik zu erkennen. Ohnehin gefiel Brecht das Lehrer-Schüler- Verhältnis; es entsprach seinem emphatischen Begriff einer Praxis, die “eingreifendem Denken” verpflichtet ist und keine Angst vor Erziehung hat. Er akzeptierte Hegel als Lehrer und sogar “Meister” allein schon darum, weil er, Hegel, es ja gewesen war, der in seiner Phänomenologie des Geistes den Herrn als Knecht des Knechts vorstellte, und für Brecht ist, wie wir spätestens seit dem Leben des Galilei wissen, der Lehrer von den Fragen des Schülers abhängig. Oder vielmehr ist es das Wissen des Lehrers, das davon abhängig ist.

Die Aufgabe, das Verhältnis von Brecht zu Hegel zu bestimmen, hat Frank D. Wagner in Hegel und Brecht. Zur Dialektik der Freiheit sich gestellt. Trotz gelegentlich weitschweifiger Ausführungen des 516 Seiten starken Buches werden Status und Stellung der Dialektik bei Brecht regelmäßig zuverlässig auf den Punkt gebracht. Diese Punktgenauigkeit gilt vor allem für die Haltung, die Brecht gegenüber Hegel einnimmt. Wagner stellt sie als ebenso ehrfurchtsvolle wie antiautoritäre Haltung vor, sowohl gegenüber Hegel als auch, was letztlich auf dasselbe hinausläuft, gegenüber Hegels Version der Dialektik, die Brecht als “die Große Me thode” bezeichnet. Diese Haltung gilt auch gegenüber Hegels Texten, die Brecht, bei aller Bewunderung, Wagner zufolge durchgehend pragmatisch und selektiv gebraucht—jedoch stets, um mit Hegel das zu treffen, was alle angeht: “seine Lektüre ist ein Verstehen-wollen und Kritik-Üben, also ein produktives Verfahren” (S. 218). Und wo Hegel hermetisch, übermächtig oder gebieterisch wirkt, ist für Brecht, so wie das auch für seine Figuren gegenüber der Macht kennzeichnend ist, der listige, ironische Umgang befreiend und entlastend.

Zum pragmatisch-selektiven Gebrauch von Hegel passt, dass Brecht weder, wie etwa Benjamin, vom Hegel-Gegner zum Befürworter wurde, noch war die Hegel-Lektüre nur eine kurze intensive Phase der Versenkung wie bei Lenin, noch war sie eine Art Erweckung und brachte eine Wendung, wie das dem jungen Lukács mit Marx widerfuhr. Hegel war vielmehr ein ständiger Begleiter, und letztlich hat Brecht wohl schlicht, wie Wagner feststellt, bei Hegel immer wieder nach “Vorlagen gesucht für eigene Produktion” (S. 108).

Nicholas Ridout's Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism and Love (2013), recently published in paperback and made open access by the University of Michigan Press, is an ambitious contribution to the scholarship on labor and performance, as well as to the wider scholarship on the political potential of theater. The book's development of the theme of labor and theater is not, as its title might suggest, research into the world of nonprofessional, applied, or community theater. Instead it is a materialist historiography that offers a critical treatment of wage work in (primarily) twentieth-century Europe by discussing a range of theater plays and productions, but also of a film (and theater in it) and a piece of theoretical writing. Passionate Amateurs focuses on the relation between work and nonwork, often moving away from theater to discuss how this relation materializes, for example, in the figure of “the professional” or in changes to the university and the social function of the scholar.

In pursuing this line of inquiry, Ridout finds moments in theater where structures of wage work both become apparent and present opening points to possible resistance and subversion. For example, he sees Godard's La Chinoise (1967) not as foreseeing the events of May 1968, but, following the film's group of amateur theater-makers cum revolutionaries, as both making visible and challenging the Fordist organization of work. From the Nanterre campus students in the film, Ridout launches into a discussion of work and the university system in 1960's France and “its transformation from a site of scholarly privilege into the edu-factory” (101), illustrating this turn's dramatic effect on course material and teaching. Throughout the book Ridout offers wholly original insights into theater and politics, which allow for a reconsideration of the material and affective relations between performers and audience while also exploring the potential for intervention through a Benjaminian concept of history and time. Ultimately, his inquiry is about a unique vision for a communism in theater.

This, we might say, is not easy work. Ridout weaves together theoretical, historiographical, and critical accounts of multiple provenances into a is precisely because of its speculative daring that the collective movement practice Marchart analyzes avoids the pitfalls of representation with which Malzacher wrestles in the volume's lead essay.

Through an examination of the ethical constellations in Bertolt Brecht's Der Jasager / Der Neinsager, this article develops an approach for teaching Brecht that engages philosophically with his core concepts of the Verfremdungseffekt and Gestus while also exploring their practical application as tools for literary analysis and as dramaturgical intentions in theater performance. To that end, the article frames the examination of the play in a broader theoretical discussion of Brecht's theater and also draws from a concrete teaching experience, the workshop production of Der Jasager / Der Neinsager on December 4 and 5, 2012, by the students in the course “Performing German Drama” offered in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria, Canada. This is a unique hybrid course open to both nonspeakers and speakers of German and taught in a bilingual setting. Combining theater history and performance, it provides an experiential, collaborative learning environment in which students collectively develop a dramaturgical approach for a German play based on textual analysis and research of the relevant culture, theater, and performance history, and then stage a workshop production of the play in German. This course experience is relevant for the present study beyond the mere fact that students staged a play by Brecht. With its emphasis on the workshop process, its bilingual educational setting, and the blending of theater history with performance, the course takes both language learners and theater students out of their respective comfort zones and is to some extent methodologically modeled after the Brechtian Lehrstück, regardless of what play is staged in any given year. As a genre, the Lehrstück is positioned at the intersection of theory and practice and is designed for self-aware, critical engagement with the theater method by performative means rather than the mere application of a method for the sake of a performance. Given that in this particular instance the task was to stage a Lehrstück, this meant that the course participants needed to develop a dramaturgical approach for their production of Der Jasager / Der Neinsager that would make that performative engagement with Brecht's theater method demonstrably part of the production itself.

On March 20, 1980, Harry Smith's Mahagonny film opened at the screening auditorium of Anthology Film Archives located at 80 Wooster Street in Lower Manhattan. Less a screening than an underground performance by an avantgarde artist, the event was “staged” under Smith's supervision with four 16mm projectors running simultaneously in combinations he had designed in advance. Interchangeable gels were attached to the projectors and painted glass slides had been prepared but then not used to frame the images on the four screens set up in a square grid configuration at the front of the cinema. Two projectionists each oversaw twelve twenty-five-minute rolls of 16mm film, while Smith himself manipulated a spotlight with green, red, and yellow color filters as well as a sound tape with the German-language recording of the entire 1930 Brecht/Weill opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny that was synchronized manually with the projected images. Like his earlier, shorter films, this was conceived as a trance-inducing sound-and-light show, but never before had Smith produced such a long and complicated live spectacle. Symptomatically it is reported that he refused the offer of the Austrian avant-garde artist Peter Kubelka, who attended one of the original screenings, to open his film in Vienna because, so Smith explained, people there would understand the German opera libretto and thus be distracted from the overall effect. The screenings/performances were repeated several more times over the course of about two weeks. As one audience “witness” confirmed, Smith was so drunk and angry at one of the screening “performances” that he actually destroyed some of the glass plate slides he had prepared but didn't use. And others noted that he became increasingly agitated at each of the repeat screenings.

Harry Smith's epic Mahagonny is virtually unknown among Brecht and Weill scholars. The definitive catalogue listing radio, cinema, and television adaptations of Brecht's plays that accompanied a television retrospective on the occasion of his centenary in 1998 includes five Mahagonny films, but not Smith's. Roswitha Mueller's 1989 English-language monograph on Brecht and film theory, with its last chapter on Brecht reception in the cinema, also does not mention Smith. The Brecht Archive in Berlin, the clearinghouse of material and scholarship on Brecht, has no record of the film; neither does the Kurt Weill Foundation's “Sourcebook” on the opera include this cinematic adaptation.

In exile from Nazi Germany, the modernist composer Hanns Eisler spent six years working in Hollywood (1942–48), and this exhaustively researched book analyzes two of his most important achievements in those years: his collaboration with Theodor W. Adorno beginning in 1942 on the book that we know today as Komposition für den Film, and his work in 1942/43 as the composer for the anti-Nazi film directed by Fritz Lang, Hangmen Also Die, which had a screenplay cowritten by his friend Bertolt Brecht. Gall provides a detailed history of the complicated publication history of the book, which was first published in the United States in 1947 as Composing for the Films and then published in German as Komposition für den Film in 1949 by the Henschel Verlag in East Berlin. A third version was published by Adorno in West Germany in 1969 using the original typed manuscript in German that Eisler and Adorno had produced in 1944. Gall then examines the main theses of the book in order to understand the specific contributions of each coauthor but also to evaluate the book as primarily the result of a (somewhat tense) compromise between the two men. In the same way, after providing the history of the making of Hangmen Also Die—including the story of Brecht's disappointment and anger about the final film Lang made (and about the way he was not given a credit for the screenplay)—Gall provides a detailed analysis of Eisler's music as it interacts with various scenes of the film. This is an especially original contribution to the Eisler scholarship, in that it had long been (incorrectly) asserted that Eisler's score was entirely lost or that only fragments had survived, but in fact all of it is available in the Hanns Eisler Archive. In his conclusion Gall attempts to compare what Eisler was able to do with this film score—the first of the eight film scores he would compose in Hollywood—with the positions taken in the book with Adorno on composing for film, a book clearly influenced by Eisler's experience on Lang's film.

Eisler was an Austrian who had studied with Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna in the early 1920s, moving to Berlin in 1925, where he became involved with other avant-garde musicians and artists and also with leftist politics.