In accordance with the appropriation regulation of 22.01.1041 B.No. 10341/38, all financial holdings of Egon Israel Wellesz and his wife Emilie Sarah née Stross last resident at Vienna, 19th District, Kaasgraben 38, have been confiscated on behalf of the ‘German Reich’ Arbeitsgruppe 9.
Assets-registry, 03.03.1941
Aryanisation documents housed at Vienna's Widerstandsarchiv relating to Egon and Emmy Wellesz
…More than once I envied my Jewish friends who seemed to be able to find relatives at the right time and in the right places. But Jews have two or three thousand years’ experience of persecution, whereas we have had to learn about such things quickly and with considerable effort.
Ernst Krenek, Im Atem der Zeit
So what should I do as an émigré from 8:00 every morning, other than compose? […] The greatest source of inspiration for an émigré is […] the torturous power of boredom that forces him to gaze at himself for twelve hours. That's productive power.
Hanns Eisler in conversation with Hans Bunge, 5 May 1958
In a letter to Erich Korngold dated 6 December 1934, Ludwig Strecker of the music publisher Schott confirms that with the new situation in Germany, the firm is not in a position to take on the composer's new opera Die Kathrin: ‘Only yesterday, Furtwängler, Kleiber and Hindemith have resigned from all of their posts and they stand accused of being “too Jew-friendly”. Fall's operettas, even Offenbach and Mendelssohn, are being boycotted these days and not even works by Kreisler are allowed to be broadcast on the radio.‘1 When, four years later, Otto Witrowsky wrote to his brother-in-law Julius Korngold on 15 August 1938 to inform him of their progress in leaving Austria, he made the humorous aside that a new history of the Jews was being written with the title ‘From King David to Affidavit’.2 To the cynical, the Austrian version of this ‘history’ would have been more accurately and less humorously titled ‘From the December Constitution of 1867 to the Affidavit of 1938: 71 Years of Delusion’. The subtitle for the German edition would have read ‘62 Years of Delusion’ as Jewish emancipation arrived four years later (1871) only to be removed five years earlier (1933) than in neighbouring Austria.
By 1938, nearly every Austrian and German Jew was concerned with finding an affidavit somewhere, somehow, from someone. Only with a document guaranteeing that somebody in America would cover financial costs could one obtain one of the coveted ‘quota’ or ‘non-quota’ visas to enter the country. Under the so-called quota-scheme, a certain number of immigrants, based on current numbers of any given ethnic community already resident in the United States, were allowed entry. Under the ‘non-quota’ scheme, a smaller number of immigrants were given permission to stay as a result of political or religious persecution. Entering merely with a common visitor's visa would mean deportation or arrest once the visa had expired or if the visitor had taken up any kind of employment. Despite the offer of a professorship at New York's New School for Social Research, Hanns Eisler and his wife Lou entered the United States with a visitor's visa and found themselves one step away from the police with arrest warrants being issued at one point. They were legally barred from re-entering the US from Mexico where they had to return continually in order to renew their entrance applications. Only after an official at a remote crossing (ignorant of the Eislers’ status) issued a visa that permitted them to enter the US and to work were their problems resolved – until Ruth Fischer denounced her two brothers five years later (see Chapter 7).
Gertrude Zeisl, wife of the composer Erich Zeisl, managed to lay her hands on a New York phone book and wrote to every Zeisl or Zeisel she could find, eventually locating a plumber named Morris Zeisel who agreed to provide her family with the necessary documentation. When Morris disappeared, they were helped by an equally unfamiliar and unrelated Arnold Zeissl from Milwaukee. They were lucky but had worked hard to make their luck. In truth, though, every individual had his or her own story. Probably the only generalisation that can be attempted is that by 1938 everyone wanting to leave Europe wanted to end up in America. If they landed in Britain or France, it was viewed as a purely temporary measure. A fair number of unlucky individuals went east to the Soviet Union, where many would fall victim to Stalin's purges in the late thirties and again in the early fifties. By the time of Austria's annexation in 1938, it was clear to the rest of the world that there would be a massive number of refugees to accommodate. How this was handled remains a matter of ethical debate to this day.
The World Braces Itself for a Refugee Crisis
By April 1933, British officials alerted by the Home Secretary Sir John Gilmore – who had raised matters at a cabinet meeting on 5 April – became concerned that though there were numbers of Jews arriving from Nazi-occupied Europe who were well-qualified professionals, there were others who were destitute.3 At this point, Jewish charities stepped in to cover the expenses incurred by German Jews without the financial means to support themselves. From 1933 to 1938, Jewish refugee organisations in the United Kingdom, alongside the Home Office, managed a controlled entry of Jews from Nazi Germany. The Home Office insisted that refugees register with the police on arrival but that refugee charities, such as the Jewish Temporary Shelter and the Jewish Refugee Committee headed by the stockbroker Otto Schiff, meet the costs of what was assumed to be transit immigration.4 In contrast to France, there were no visa requirements and the British government left it to Jewish charities to shoulder the immigration costs of refugees. It was assumed that given the restrictions placed on transmigrants, such as leave to stay for only short periods without the right to work, most would soon move on, generally to the USA.5 A few wished to remain in Europe in the anticipation that the ‘Brown Bolshevism‘6 would eventually run out of steam and sanity would return. From April 1933, a new restricted visa policy was set in place that offered refugees a visitor's visa, limited to a single month with a clause that forbade employment of any kind. Estimates of how many Jews could arrive came from British Jewry's weekly newspaper the Jewish Chronicle, which reported that of the 4,000 refugees who arrived between March 1933 and October 1934, four-fifths were German and most were doctors, lawyers, academics, accountants and other professionals.7 It was during this interim period, while refugees were organising further onward travel elsewhere, that Jewish charities guaranteed support.8
An additional difficulty emerged, since it was not immediately clear who counted as a Jew. Those who were defined as ‘Jews’ by Hitler and his regime were by no means Jewish according to the definition understood by the various charities or even the Jewish Refugee Committee. Hitler's view of Jews as a ‘foreign race’ was thus in stark contrast to the conventional, confessional definition held by charities. Jews who had left the religious community through conversion or conviction, or who were born in mixed marriages where the mother was not Jewish, were technically not Jews according to strict religious definitions. As far as Hitler and his Reich were concerned, someone born of, say, a converted half-Jewish mother and a converted or non-practising Jewish father was still a full Jew with three ‘racially’ Jewish grandparents (one from the half-Jewish parent and two from the converted Jewish parent), despite the fact that it was highly improbable that this person, or anyone in his or her immediate family, had ever been near a synagogue. Though Germans who converted to Judaism without any previous Jewish ancestry were counted as full Jews by the Nazis, few orthodox Jews would recognise them as such.
The British central government and the Jewish charities agreed that it was best not to emphasise the fact that the refugees pouring out of Nazi Germany were largely Jewish out of fear of inflaming anti-Semitism, which had briefly got out of control after the First World War, exacerbated by the Morning Post and The Times publishing articles on the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a mendacious bit of ant-Semitic counter-intelligence ‘leaked’ by Russia's Tsarist police.9 The British Union of Fascists (BUF) under Oswald Moseley was growing in popularity and by the mid-1930s had some 16,000 members, though it claimed membership to be as high as 50,000.10 Authorities were still mindful of the Battle of Cable Street of 4 October 1936, followed by London's East End pogrom along the Mile End Road. The BUF even enjoyed the support of the tabloid Daily Mail, with its proprietor, Lord Rothermere, writing an editorial in 8 January 1934 entitled ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’.
To the British Foreign Office, Jewish persecution was seen as an obstacle to Anglo-German relations and it was wiser not to publicise the problems Jews were having in Germany. Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister from 1937, accepted German anti-Semitism as ‘a fact of life’ but was unhappy at its extreme manifestations, and feared that public debate could be damaging to commercial, social and cultural relations between the two countries.11 He was inclined to believe the official line coming out of Berlin that, by not formally sanctioning the Jewish boycott of 1 April 1933 or the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, far greater bloodshed would have ensued.
Commercial considerations were an important issue and resulted in the British government taking the decision to downplay Nazi brutality towards Jews. In April 1933, the British directors of Anglo-Persian Oil (today known as British Petroleum or simply BP) dismissed all German Jews in its German sales subsidiary; still fearing potential loss of German sales, all non-German Jews were then dismissed, including Jewish Britons.12 The Foreign Office's determination to cultivate deeper Anglo-German relations with the holding of a football match between the two countries in December 1935 was equally questionable. But the decision that it be held in White Hart Lane, the home stadium of Tottenham Hotspur – a club that was (and is) predominantly supported by Jewish Londoners – was recklessly provocative. With an attendance of 9,500 predicted, tensions rose between the Home Office, concerned that there would be civil disturbances should the game proceed, and the Foreign Office who saw the match as a crucial step towards maintaining good Anglo-German relations. It ultimately took place with only minor incidents. Jewish refugees even stepped in to earn much-needed cash by conducting tours of London in German for visitors from Hitler's Reich. Meanwhile Lyons and Co., branded by the Nazi publication Der Stürmer as ‘a Jewish enterprise that all good Germans should avoid’, provided the catering. The visitors offered the Hitler salute before the anthems and swastikas were waved throughout the game. The home team won 3–0 – a predictable result.13
British government policy at this time stands in contrast to the United States, which had its strict quotas. British policy was still undefined and allowed individual officials to make case-by-case decisions. These were largely sympathetic, as can be deduced from the relatively small number of entry refusals. From 30 March 1933, Harwich officials enforced certain refusals, but reversed them as soon as support guarantees could be obtained.14 Such policies allowed for a greater degree of flexibility than America's quota system. Nevertheless, by 1938, officials were considering new measures that would go against prevailing public opinion – still largely sympathetic to the plight of Germany's Jews. With the annexation of Austria, visa requirements were enforced, and with Vienna operating as a provincial capital rather than a national seat of government, its embassies had been turned into much smaller consulates with reduced staff. As a result, desperate Austrians, now considered Germans, often had to queue for days for an appointment, while Nazi hooligans openly harassed them on the street. This method, though painfully slow, allowed British officials to preselect Austrians for immigration before their arrival in Britain. With the recognition of the legality of Austria's annexation in April 1938, only well-connected Austrians with excellent qualifications and access to foreign funds were being accepted, accounting for the high profile of émigré Austrians in Great Britain – especially in music, the arts and sciences – despite their proportionately small number.
The British government continued even after 1938 to have Jewish charities deal with refugees in order to avoid the appearance of public money being spent on foreigners immigrating at a time of financial austerity, international uncertainty and an increasingly shrill tone in the tabloid press. Though the Daily Mail had dropped its open support of the BUF by 1934, it was still suggesting that Jewish refugees were economic migrants. Meanwhile, Lord Rothermere remained friendly with both Hitler and Mussolini. As MI5 papers released in 2005 show, Rothermere congratulated Hitler on his invasion of the Sudetenland and encouraged him to march into Romania.15
The musicologist Alfred Einstein writing to Hans Gál from America in April 1940 explained how he viewed international reaction at the time: 'I certainly share your wish to see Hitler and his accomplices hanged, but I fear we shall have to wait quite a while as England has made its own job all the more difficult by spending the last six-and-a-half years filling its soup bowl so full that it now has to try carefully to spoon it out again. We just finished reading the book by Sir Neville Henderson [British Ambassador to Germany, 1937–9] regarding the failure of his mission in Berlin, and what comes across most strongly is that he and others truly believed the words of the Führer. If the entire world had not been morally paralysed, things may have turned out differently. I simply hope that the censor who is no doubt reading these lines agrees with me, since I just happen to be one of the many victims of this moral paralysis. Especially as America is afflicted by the same condition and hasn't yet realised … how high the stakes are for this country.‘16
The Évian Conference
Nevertheless, it was the Americans who proposed setting up an Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (IGC) to coordinate refugee policies. This was established in what became known as the Évian Conference, held at Évian-les-Bains on Lake Geneva, 6–15 July 1938, and involving 32 different nations. The establishment of the IGC was not particularly well received by the Chamberlain government as it was wary of potentially unwelcome consequences. Indeed, it was thought that the use of public money for the Jewish refugee crisis would ultimately exacerbate the situation. However, the British wanted to work with the Americans and welcomed this as an initiative towards closer cooperation.17 Even at this late stage – after the annexation of Austria and with the impending annexation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland – Jewish refugees, who vastly outnumbered all others fleeing Nazi Germany, were not being identified specifically as Jews for fear of anti-Semitism in host countries. This was even the case with the ‘Kindertransport’, officially the Refugee Children Movement (RCM), which saw many Jewish children brought up as Christians by well-meaning adoptive parents, unaware of the true nature of Nazi persecution. As long as refugee work was carried out by Jewish charities, the scale of the crisis could remain helpfully vague. Should official agencies, especially international agencies, become involved, this could make the problem more complex, and more perilous.
The League of Nations remained sensitive to the danger of violent anti-Semitism erupting in countries with large Jewish populations such as Poland, Hungary and Romania. As it was, these countries had already approached the Council of the League of Nations asking for aid in relocating their own Jewish populations. The countries of the IGC would be vulnerable to such requests, since Poland, Hungary and Romania would not be receptive to help being made available for the relocation German and Austrian Jews when they saw their domestic Jewish ‘crisis’ as being equally severe. Sir John Hope Simpson, Director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs’ Refugee Survey, argued that the threats of violence against Jewish populations were potentially greater in these countries than in Germany and Austria.18 It was therefore decided at the Évian Conference that Poland, Romania and Hungary should be persuaded against making petitions for IGC funding. Britain, however, was concerned that the USA would manipulate the situation so that government spending would eventually become necessary, indeed unavoidable. The view of Sir Warren Fisher – Permanent Secretary to the Treasury – was more proactive:
The principal element is of course the Jews who are exposed to unspeakable horrors. It is clear that, however much we may sympathise, we cannot provide a solution of the terrible problem (which is not confined to Germany). […] (On a wholly lower plane of thought I may mention that this country has frequently been the gainer by providing refuge to foreigners highly qualified in various walks of life.) While, therefore, I would start in at the conference apparently square-toed about the American exclusion of Government Finance from any scheme of help, I think we should be well advised from every point of view – if not for reasons of humanity – to keep open minds (without avowing it) and be on the look-out for any opportunity of intelligent assistance (this of course won't help the majority of these poor people).
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir John Simon, initialled Fisher's memo without comment.19 In general, and in stark contrast to other Whitehall departments, the Treasury was receptive to the idea of providing public aid for humanitarian support.
The initial plan of the IGC was to use diplomatic means to persuade the German government to subsidise the removal of Jews by allowing refugees to retain some of their capital on leaving the country. Ultimately, the IGC provided a useful smokescreen, making it appear that governments were more involved than was actually the case. These often undermined private initiatives that would have provided more immediate aid to refugees. Official British policy clung to the idea of using diplomatic pressure to encourage other countries, especially the USA, to take more Austro-German Jewish refugees. The Americans avoided every one of these diplomatic booby-traps while Chamberlain remained paralysed by indecision.
On the one hand, he was appalled by German policy against the Jews, while on the other, he was nervous about damaging relations, which might make matters even worse. One moment he was refusing an honorary presidency of the German Shakespeare Cooperative because it had expelled its Jewish members, while the next he was writing the following letter to his sister Hilda, dated 30 July 1939: ‘I believe that the persecution arose out of two motives, a desire to rob the Jews of their money and a jealousy of their superior cleverness. No doubt Jews aren't a lovable people; I don't care about them myself; but that is not sufficient to explain the pogrom.‘20 Ultimately, it must be to Chamberlain's credit that despite his vacillation, he expanded a policy of offering temporary refuge to Jews, in the teeth of opposition from his Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare.21
With the annexation of the Sudetenland in September 1938, and Hitler's declaration of the Moravian and Bohemian Protectorate on 15 March 1939 effectively placing the largest Czech regions within the Nazi Reich, British reluctance to accept Jews became more pronounced. In this context, it needs to be noted that, with the break-up of the Austrian Empire in 1919, German speakers who lived within the borders of the new state of Czechoslovakia were offered the choice of becoming Czechs or remaining Austrians. Many German speakers who had lived in Vienna but who continued to maintain business or family interests in the newly founded republic of Czechoslovakia chose to become Czech citizens, a status that did not alter their rights to remain in Austria. Meanwhile, many German speakers who lived in Czechoslovakia chose to remain Austrians. The two countries were socially and culturally intertwined. Ernst Krenek chose to remain Austrian (he had always lived in Vienna and spoke only rudimentary Czech), much to the annoyance of his fellow Schreker pupil and Czech nationalist, Alois Hába. Viktor Ullmann was studying with Zemlinsky in Prague in 1919, but chose to remain Austrian – as did Zemlinsky himself, who continued working at the German Theatre in Prague until 1927. Czechoslovakia was not the ethnically homogenous country that emerged after 1945; there were pockets of Hungarians, Ukrainians, Poles and many German communities. The German-speaking Sudetenland community was the crux of the problem. Sudetenlanders saw themselves disadvantaged by the majority Czechs and appealed to Nazi Germany for annexation which was agreed after lengthy negotiations between major European powers (excluding the Czechs) on 30 September 1938. Since independence, the Czechs had indeed become more openly anti-German after centuries of anti-Slav attitudes emanating from their rulers in Austria. The Czech response to the Munich Agreement was to become even more antagonistic to its German speakers, and in September 1938 the German Theatre – one of the most prestigious German stages in Europe – was closed. Indeed, the Austrian-German equivalent of ‘Oxford English’ or ‘Tuscan Italian’ was Pragerdeutsch, the German spoken in Prague. Zemlinsky took over the music directorship of the German Theatre from the well-known entrepreneur Angelo Neumann, and he was followed by the conductors Wilhelm Steinberg and Georg Szell. Not only was this the theatre where Zemlinsky had conducted the premiere of Schoenberg's Erwartung in 1924, but also where Krenek's anti-fascist opera Karl V was first performed in June 1938 under Karl Rankl, after Clemens Kraus's decision not to mount it at Vienna's State Opera following the Nazi ban on Krenek's music, in place since 1933.
As it was largely British negotiations that had precipitated the fall of Czechoslovakia, it is surprising that British policy towards Czech Jews would be so unsympathetic. They placed refugees into three distinct categories. The first were the Sudeten Germans who supported the anti-Nazi ‘German Social Democratic Party’. They were seen as principal collateral damage from the Munich Agreement; though they were also German speakers, they obviously did not support the aims of Hitler. But as German speakers, they now belonged to the group that Czech speakers believed to have undermined national sovereignty, leading to the Czech central government revoking their citizenship. As anti-Nazis, they were unhappy with the outcome of the Munich Agreement and were rightly seen by the British as highly vulnerable. Politically active Jews and even Communists, along with other anti-Nazi activists, also belonged to this group.
The second group was the mix of Austrians and Czechs who had fled to Czechoslovakia following the annexation of Austria in March 1938. British officials referred to this class of refugees as ‘Old Reich’, meaning citizens of the old Habsburg Empire, and further divided this group into ‘political refugees’ and ‘Jewish refugees’.22
The third group were the Jews who had, until the Munich Agreement, lived without difficulties in the Sudetenland. These numbered approximately 22,000 and began relocating to the still independent regions of Moravia and Bohemia. Slovakia, as a consequence of the Munich Agreement, would be partially folded back into Hungary between November 1938 and March 1939. Confusion reigned. As nearly all the Jews from these Czech regions were German speakers, they were not welcomed by the Czechs, and bureaucratic shenanigans made their continued presence dangerous. As it was, Moravia and Bohemia already had a total Jewish population numbering some 300,000, making a refugee tsunami inevitable. Britain, which had pushed for the outcome of the Munich Agreement, was caught between shoring up what remained of the Czech state and officially recognising Germany's sovereignty over the Sudetenland. It offered the Czech government huge funding, much of it private, but also a good deal of public money to deal with the refugee problem in the hope that this would somehow ease pressure on the United Kingdom.23
It was the opinion of British officials that the Munich Agreement had left anti-Nazi Sudeten Germans and former ‘Reich-refugees’ exposed to the most danger. They felt that they had an obligation to resettle these groups at the expense of the Sudetenland Jews. As the British government, the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, and the British committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia were all agreed that that they should in principle be against the emigration of Jews, they were accorded the lowest priority. This position was held not only because of fears of anti-Semitism in host countries, but also out of concern that it would encourage Germany's continued persecution of Jews by giving the appearance that they would be resettled elsewhere. From this context, it is possible to understand why Viktor Ullmann's children were evacuated to Britain, even though he and their mother were not. Tragically, nearly all of the Jewish composers living in Czechoslovakia, including such important figures as Ullmann, Pavel Haas, Hans Krása and Erwin Schulhoff, would ultimately end in Nazi camps – as would the exceptional young composer, Gideon Klein.
Of course, America, Britain and France were only three destinations. The Hindemith pupil Hans Joachim Koellreuter went to Brazil where he taught Antonio Carlos Jobim, the prime creator of the bossa nova. Manfred Gurlitt and Klaus Pringsheim ended up in Japan and were in no small measure responsible for fostering the talents of the postwar generation of Japanese performers. The Webern pupil Philipp Herschkowitz ended up in the Soviet Union and became the influential mentor to the ‘Underground’ composers of the post-Shostakovich generation that included Sofia Gubaidulina and Alfred Schnittke.24 Herbert Zipper eventually landed in the Philippines and, of course, there were many musicians who went to Palestine, such as Paul Ben-Haim, formerly known as Paul Frankenburg, who went on to establish a national school of the Eastern Mediterranean, a sound world that was an inspiring mix of Jewish ghetto and sacred music with a touch of Impressionism and Bauhaus Functionalism. However, the influences to come out of these far-flung destinations were ultimately marginal on postwar Western European and American music. The story of Palestine's evolution into Israel and the role music played in this process is too broad a topic to be covered in this context.
Escape: Great Britain
On 25 March 1938 Georg Szell wrote to his old friend Hans Gál from Marseille in France:
I can't tell you how happy I am to know that you are safely in London. I shall drop Tovey a quick note, he's a charming but somewhat cranky and unreliable individual who never answers correspondence. I advise you to contact (by mentioning my name) Dr Adolf Aber; he was formerly of [the music publisher] Hofmeister and critic in Leipzig; he's now a representative of many German publishing houses and is partial owner of Novello's. He may have something to offer to you in dealing with music publishing – at least he can offer advice. In England you must have, above all else, lots of patience!25
Szell then itemises his schedule for the next six months – divided between orchestras in The Hague and Glasgow – and provides his temporary addresses in the Netherlands and Sydney. Szell's future in America looked barely possible at this time. As the letter is dated less than two weeks after Austria's annexation, plotting elaborate career moves was less of a priority than getting friends and family out of Hitler's way. Writing to Gál from California a few months later, on 15 June 1938, Ernst Toch adds his advice:
I can only offer at most an introduction to [Alexander] Korda, but I can't promise much. It certainly didn't help [Nikolai] Lopatnikoff – but take it anyway. You have to put up with everything we've already been through and continue to go through. During my time in London, I wrote to every studio in town and begged for appointments. 98% were DIS-appointments and 2% resulted in stumbling a few steps forward by way of a couple of contacts. It's astonishing that somehow things work as long as you stay patient. Only when I left London was I told that it would have been better had I had an agent. So for good measure, I'll pass this bit of advice on to you. Nevertheless, here I have five agents and not one has ever managed to do anything for me. Ultimately, you have to do everything yourself. From where I am at the moment, I can't do anything for you. I would love to have helped Lopatnikoff, but here I'm simply a kernel of dust being stirred around in a witch's cauldron of intrigues and plotting. […] Louis Greenberg [1883–1964], one of America's most respected composers who had his opera [The Emperor Jones] performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York as well as in Chicago, has been sitting around here for the last two years without work, despite having an agent, while others seem to strike lucky. There seems to be no recipe of how things turn out. […] Emigration has taught me that you need to do everything tirelessly by yourself without losing patience; at some point, you find a small safe hole to slip into and from there, it all continues up-hill. What you need to appreciate is the fact that you're out of there. What would we give – my wife and I – if we could get our relatives and friends out of Vienna. Please don't be too disappointed and don't curse me too much for this idiotic letter. Believe me, it would make me the happiest man alive if I could help everyone who asked me – even if I could help those who don't ask me, but who I know need help.26
The music historian Jutta Raab Hansen in her seminal work on musical exile in Great Britain explains in detail the restrictions to which musicians who made it to the United Kingdom were subjected by the Incorporated Society of Musicians (ISM), headed by Sir George Dyson.27 Essentially, it was designed to protect the interests of British musicians who had been steadily losing employment since the demise of silent films in the late 1920s. Dyson's ISM successfully lobbied for regulations to guard against further threats by the influx of potentially better qualified musicians from the continent. These were controversial measures that were flagrantly broken by the likes of the tenor Richard Tauber, who toured the country without the slightest trace of official hindrance giving popular concerts and recitals. The wartime National Gallery Concerts organised by the pianist Myra Hess were slightly more provocative, since she involved many unknown refugees (such as the aforementioned Lopatnikoff), while numerous refugees took up employment at Glyndebourne, the country house opera company run by Sir John Christie before it closed for the duration of the war in 1939, or at the invitation of Michael Tippett, at London's Morley College. These infringements were more than balanced by the determined harassment of foreign teachers and orchestral players, a practice that relaxed slightly in the early 1940s as refugee organisations such as the German Kulturbund, the Austrian Centre and the Anglo-Austrian Music Society began admitting the public to its concerts. Hitherto, admission had been restricted to fellow refugees, who couldn't in any case pay for tickets.
One area where refugee composers were able to work with some degree of impunity was the film industry. By 1933, motion pictures using recorded sound had been around for some six years, but experiments as to how to position music within films was still quite hit-and-miss. Most film composing simply meant writing a hit song or two that cropped up at an apposite moment during the movie. Though Baden-Baden's new music festival had already focused on the potential uses of music with cinema as early as 1928, the first dedicated original score for a Hollywood film was not until 1933, with King Kong, and music by Max Steiner, a Viennese Jew who as a student had been dismissively regarded by Mahler as being ‘without talent’.28 Already recounted in Chapter 7, silent films, such as Berlin, die Symphonie der Großstadt (1927) and Battleship Potemkin (1925), both with scores by Edmund Meisel, had shown what the combination of music and image could achieve. By 1933, the field of film composition was still so specialised that composers such as Mischa Spoliansky, who arrived in London from Berlin almost as soon as Hitler took power, could start work without raising the suspicions, let alone the hackles, of the ISM. Other composers arriving in Britain for film work included Hanns Eisler with his 1936 adaptation of Pagliacci starring Richard Tauber, and his ‘anti-Hitler’ film Abdul the Damned (1935). Ernst Toch wrote scores for two films directed by Alexander Korda, Catherine the Great and The Private Lives of Don Juan, and a third, Little Friend, directed by the Austrian Berthold Viertel; to these composers can be added the Schreker pupils Karol Rathaus and Wilhelm Grosz.
As they were accepting commissions to produce music for films, they were not officially resident in Britain, but only in transit. They therefore did not need to apply for refugee status (though evidence has come to light that the British Secret Service was tailing Hanns Eisler and making it difficult for him to be paid for his work).29 This gave composers the same advantage as the pianist Artur Schnabel, who decided early on that the only way to continue performing in Great Britain was to be based elsewhere.
One notable exception to this rule was the former Schoenberg pupil Allan Gray who, as Josef Zmigrod (as he was originally known), had written the music for such classics as Berlin Alexanderplatz and Emil and the Detectives, both from 1931. Though he also arrived in London in 1933, it would be ten years before he wrote another film score with The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in 1943 and, in 1951, John Huston's The African Queen. Others who escaped the bans of the ISM by composing for the British film industry were Hans May, whose 1933 film with heartthrob tenor Joseph Schmidt, Ein Lied geht um die Welt (and its 1934 English-language remake, My Song goes Round the World), would assure him steady employment with a number of British ‘B’ movies such as No Monkey Business (1935) and a further film with Joseph Schmidt, A Star Fell from Heaven, in 1936.
Mischa Spoliansky had made a name for himself in Berlin cabaret with the husband and wife team of Marcellus Schiffer and Margo Lion, and the then still unknown Marlene Dietrich, who would be discovered by Josef von Sternberg performing in Spoliansky's Zwei Kravatten (Two Neckties); von Sternberg was seeking a leading lady for his film The Blue Angel. Spoliansky remained Dietrich's regular confidant until his death in 1985, and his daughter, Irmgard or ‘Spoli’ Mills, recalled first memories of London with Dietrich preparing breakfast for them, a family of freshly arrived, excited, yet insecure, refugees. Spoliansky moved seamlessly into composing for British cinema and provided scores for such films as The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1936), King Solomon's Mines (1937), Over the Moon (1939), continuing through the war and up to retirement. His career ended, appropriately, with the score for Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973), starring Alec Guinness.
Since the beginning of the First World War, Great Britain had lost its enchantment with all things German. The British royal family's name-change from ‘Saxe-Coburg-Gotha’ to ‘Windsor’ was symbolic of their specific shift from their Hanoverian roots, and Britain's broader rejection of German cultural influence in general. British music began looking towards Paris rather than Leipzig, Vienna or Berlin. Composers who had once embarked on pilgrimages to absorb the mastery of Mendelssohn and Schumann now immersed themselves in the musical spirit of France, creating a fusion from which grew England's appetite for all things pastoral as a distinctly British take on French Impressionism. Paradoxically, this occurred as Germany was locking itself into its mood of unemotional sobriety, and the French themselves had started to shed Impressionist tendencies in favour of a leaner neo-Classicism.
Ralph Vaughan Williams, writing to the Austrian pianist Ferdinand Rauter, commented on the ‘trampling of the tender flower of English music‘30 by insensitive but marvellously trained Austro-German musicians. There was, in general, scant sympathy in Britain for music coming out of Germany and Austria during the interwar years. The critic Ernest Newman disparaged the music of Weill's Threepenny Opera as being a conglomeration of the worst traits of numerous styles and the best traits of none.31 To be fair, he was in good company: Schoenberg had also commented that Weill was the only composer in whom he could find no qualities whatsoever.32 As if Newman's review of The Threepenny Opera wasn't bad enough, the Times correspondent declared that ‘Weill writes a particularly nauseous kind of jazz’, following the short run of his operetta Kingdom for a Cow at the Savoy Theatre in 1935. The incomprehension of London's critics contributed to Weill's decision to quit Britain as soon as possible.33 The British press treated contemporary Austro-German developments with varying degrees of disdain, with only the likes of Edward Dent and Adrian Boult showing any kind of sympathy for recent continental trends.
By contrast, Berthold Goldschmidt saw England as especially welcoming, following the BBC broadcast of Berg's Wozzeck conducted by Adrian Boult in 1934. Goldschmidt had been Erich Kleiber's assistant and orchestral keyboard player for the Berlin premiere in 1925. Despite Goldschmidt's hopes placed in the sophistication of the British public, he found that in general they thought the music coming out of Germany clangorous and dissonant with heavy dollops of artless pseudo-jazz. The Threepenny Opera would not enjoy the same success in England that it had in Paris, despite the high profile anti-Semitic cat-calls of the French composer Florent Schmitt at the Salle Pleyel during a Kurt Weill concert in 1933: ‘We have enough bad composers in France and don't need to add to them by bringing in all of the German Jewish composers as well.‘34 Ultimately, Schmitt was denounced as an extremist by most of the French press. In Great Britain, the press was more inclined to view German composers as the ‘extremists’.
With a few exceptions, British music from the interwar years veered towards some form of pastoralism, or found itself aesthetically between the salon and the palm-court, with only rare ventures into the tamer realms of Modernism. Indeed, the British composer most regularly mentioned in the German new-music publications Anbruch and Melos is Cyril Scott. Progressive British composers from the generation of Weill, Eisler and Goldschmidt were not nearly as domestically established as their German and Austrian colleagues had been. By 1940 the BBC had compiled a list of composers it had decided could not be broadcast, including many refugees who had fled to Britain. The influence of the Austro-Germanic tradition would thus have to be applied vicariously via teaching: Egon Wellesz arrived at Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1939, and Hans Gál was appointed Lecturer at Edinburgh University immediately after the end of the war, though neither was engaged to teach composition. Hans Ferdinand Redlich lectured first at the Workers’ Education Association as well as extramural departments of the Universities of Cambridge and Birmingham before accepting a professorship in Manchester. Walter Goehr and the Hungarian composer Mátyás Seiber found positions at London's Morley College. The Webern pupil Leopold Spinner and Arthur Willner, a former composition teacher from Berlin's Stern'schen Conservatory, worked as copyeditors or arrangers for music publishers, while the Schoenberg pupil Erwin Stein became the musical midwife to the young Benjamin Britten. Britten had hoped to study with Berg in Vienna, but was persuaded against the idea by his teachers at the Royal College of Music, who were suspicious of musical developments in central Europe. Erwin Stein's influence served as an aesthetic link to the Second Viennese School, arguably aiding the projection of Britten's work beyond the insular world of British music.
The Academic Assistance Council of Great Britain (AAC) was set up in 1933 by William Beveridge, Director of the London School of Economics. It was meant to help place reputable academics, but the reality was quite different. Of the 2,200 academics leaving Nazi Germany and Austria by 1938, half went first to Britain, but the AAC dealt only with what it considered the ‘elite’, so that many ordinary teachers and researchers were never allowed to stay. By 1935, only 60 permanent university posts had been found for fleeing academics, including a small number of scientists. The AAC was under pressure from the Ministry of Labour to encourage academics to find employment in the USA, with only 31 refugee academics ultimately ending up in British universities.35
Internment
It was in 1940 that Churchill gave his infamous instruction to ‘collar the lot’, meaning that ‘enemy aliens’ were to be interned.36 These included male (and in some cases female) Germans and Austrians, but not the so-called 'Old Reich’ Austrians who held Czech, Polish or Hungarian citizenship. It also included Britons of German and Austrian origin, so that in a few instances Britons found themselves interned (or indeed deported) because their parents or even grandparents had settled in Britain. Until May 1940, ‘enemy aliens’ had been classified in one of the three categories listed as A, B and C. Those in category A were deemed an obvious threat and were already detained. Most able-bodied Jewish and political refugees fell into category B and were subject to employment and movement restrictions, while those in category C were exempt. Churchill's order resulted in 27,000 category B aliens, and many from category C being added to the category A aliens, already detained,
Hans Gál's internment memoirs Musik hinter Stacheldraht or Music behind Barbed Wire offers a vivid first-hand account of life in British internment camps, recalling his five months surrounded by despair, death and frequent suicides.37 His own family was ripped apart: in 1942, his youngest son, unable to cope with the new life forced upon him, committed suicide, and his oldest son was deported to unknown shores during the months in which Gál was detained on the Isle of Man.
Jewish asylum-seekers, businessmen with Nazi sympathies working in Britain when war broke out, first- and second-generation Austro-German Britons, along with political refugees, were all thrown into camps together (Italians were placed in separate camps). As Gál explained, the cynical view among refugees was that Britain was preparing to present Hitler with all of his escaped Jews on a silver platter, once the country fell to Germany.38 The music that Gál composed in camps at Huyton (outside Liverpool) and Douglas (Isle of Man) does not reflect his mood of desperation. On the contrary, he wrote pieces to take people's minds away from the situation. He composed for whatever instruments were available, and when performers were released, transferred to other camps or simply deported, he rescored his pieces for new arrivals, or transposed them as the situation demanded. He described the guards as obtuse and often sadistic. The frequently cited ‘camp universities’ with lectures held by Nobel Prize-winning scientists and concerts by some of the greatest performers of the day, all of whom were interned together, reflect only a partial truth that belongs mostly to postwar British mythology. The lectures and concerts, the art classes offered by the likes of Kurt Schwitters and plays mounted by refugee actors and directors were, according to Gál's memoirs, far less of a feature of daily life than the unremitting tedium. Wellesz's Oxford University diary is empty from the moment he is interned until the week of 8 July 1940, with two consecutive entries that read ‘Schöne Müllerin – Zusammenbruch’, referring to a performance of Schubert's Die Schöne Müllerin, and the total mental breakdown which led to his being released after the personal interventions of Myra Hess, Vaughan Williams and others.
The Austrian pianist Ferdinand Rauter campaigned tirelessly after his own release from internment for freeing musicians who clearly posed no threat to the British public and who were sometimes young enough to be in danger of suffering permanent psychological scarring. Among this group were several young Austrians including Norbert Brainin, Siegmund Nissel and Peter Schidlof, whom Rauter managed to have released and placed with the Viennese violinist Max Rostal for instruction. Rostal was impressed enough by the youngsters to teach them without charge, and in 1947 he introduced them to the English cellist Martin Lovett, with whom they formed the Amadeus Quartet. Gál was also lucky enough to be released early and returned to Edinburgh in late September 1940 after suffering from an inexplicable skin disease.
During his internment, Gál worked with a group of writers and performers to put on an internment-camp revue entitled What a Life! for which Gál wrote the music, and among the humorous writers was the Schubert scholar, Otto Erich Deutsch. The first performance was such a success with both prisoners and camp personnel that Gál was persuaded to delay his release by one day so that a second performance could take place. Songs were bilingual and a taste of a verse in English translated by Gál himself from an original text by someone he identified only as ‘Hutter’ certainly implies a baffled incomprehension at locking up ‘Hitler's best enemies’.39
The seagulls are in a curious mood
Maybe they are getting too much food.
One thing they all very much deplore,
Is the ugly barbed-wire that grows up the shore.
So in the seagulls’ parliament
There was a great debate on that end
And many of them did then enquire:
‘Why are human-beings behind barbed-wire?’
In truth, internment was standard in times of war and carried out by all sides, often with tragic consequences. Roosevelt's order for the internment of Japanese-Americans is copiously documented and the United States has been quicker than other countries in dealing with this dark chapter of its domestic history. Documentation concerning British internment that should have been released after 30 years remains embargoed to this day. But the Nazis also operated internment camps in addition to their many concentration camps. It was in such a camp, in the small Bavarian town of Wülzburg, that the Jewish, Prague-born composer Erwin Schulhoff died. He had been imprisoned, not as a Jew, but as a naturalised Soviet citizen, even though the camp in Wülzburg separated Jewish prisoners from other internees. His death from tuberculosis in 1942 was in the same year that the film star and opera tenor Joseph Schmidt died in a Swiss internment camp at the age of 38, proving that even the internationally famous matinee idol was not spared unsanitary and crowded conditions. There were also many deaths and suicides in French and British camps. Jewish inmates of French internment camps were regularly deported to the death camps in the East after the fall of France in 1940. The twelve-tone composer and protégé of Theodor Adorno, Erich Itor Kahn, and his wife, the Russian pianist Frida Rabinovitch, were relatively lucky. Having been shipped from one camp to another in France, they eventually managed, with help from the American Refugee Committee, to reach Casablanca and find safe passage to the United States in 1941. If his music remains largely unfamiliar today, his view of the dilemmas presented to a German Jewish composer at that time is revealing:
I believe that during such a time of profound world crises even art must be affected. In such periods as these, there is no stability of stylistic or expressive means and anything that is completed appears short-lived. The ultimate recognition of the limitations of recognised truth, treated also as a dialectical argument regarding material, is fundamentally shattering and seen as a point of departure. In the midst of such an age, the composer has only one means of guaranteeing his artistry: to yield to the rights and duties that have grown from an historic musical inheritance while at the same time yielding to the spiritual and intellectual vision demanded by its expression. The first and most determining question is this: How far can we go without betraying the past, and what do we need to keep without betraying the future?40
Less fortunate was the violinist Alma Rosé (niece of Gustav Mahler, and daughter of Arnold Rosé and Mahler's sister Justine), interned in Drancy before being deported to Auschwitz. The librettist Richard Fall, brother of the composer Leo Fall, was also arrested in France before his murder in Nazi gas chambers, sharing the same fate as the composers Szymon Laks and James Simon along with Fritz Löhner-Beda, the librettist for Lehár's Land of Smiles and Giuditta.
Escape: France
Fleeing from Nazi Germany in 1933 to neighbouring France, Czechoslovakia, Italy or Austria was only a short-term solution. But unlike Czechoslovakia and Austria, there was less apparent sympathy in France for Nazi anti-Semitism. Indeed, France had been helping Jews flee from central and Eastern European pogroms with its Comité central d'assistance aux réfugiés juifs since 1928. There was broad establishment support for aiding German Jewish refugees from 1933, and for Austrian composers such as Toch and Schoenberg, France was felt to be a more secure refuge than a return to Dollfuß's corporatist dictatorship in Austria. French was also the most common second language for German and Austrian refugees, and this fact regularly tipped the balance in favour of Paris over London.
But like Britain, France too was suffering from massive unemployment; its musicians were reeling from the loss of work that came with the arrival of sound films, and as a result, life was especially difficult for fleeing musicians. German music was not appreciated by the broader French public, though young French composers had greater sympathy for German modernist trends than their British counterparts.41 Refugee musicians did not form self-help leagues or societies such as those formed by German writers in French exile. Nor were they engaged to teach in institutions.42 If the British were fretful that, by hiring refugees as teachers, they were putting their native musical flower, ‘tender’ as it was, at risk from being trampled underfoot by better-qualified Huns, the French were sufficiently nationalistic to dismiss the idea of Austro-Germans teaching at their institutions altogether. With the exception of the teutophile, anti-Semitic Florent Schmitt and a small number of others, the French maintained the anti-German stance present since their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.
As in Britain, official attempts were made to preserve an outward appearance of friendly cultural relations between Germany and France, often leading to excessive concessions being made to avoid harming international relations. In 1936, Hanns Eisler submitted several movements of an oratorio that would eventually become his Deutsche Sinfonie, with texts by Bertolt Brecht and Ignazio Silone, to the committee of the ISCM in the hope of having it performed at the 1937 ISCM festival in Paris. The composer Jacques Ibert headed the jury along with the ISCM President Edward Dent. Neither was instinctively sympathetic to Eisler's politics, and both were wary of offending the remaining German delegates (Nazi Germany had officially withdrawn its cooperation and started a rival organisation). In an effort to appear as non-partisan as possible, the ISCM committee suggested to Eisler that the vocal passages be replaced by saxophones – a suggestion that Eisler, unsurprisingly, did not take up.
The film industry provided the easiest means for composers to enter French musical life. The Hungarian pupil of Hanns Eisler, József Kozma, later Joseph Kosma, arrived in Paris from Berlin in 1933. His first score, following the success of his 1936 hit-song ‘Au jour, le jour; à la nuit, la nuit’ from Jean Renoir's film Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, was La grande illusion (also directed by Renoir) in 1937, followed by La Règle du jeu in 1939. In due course, Kosma became the father of postwar chanson with such hits as Les feuilles mortes and Les enfants qui s'aiment set to texts by Jacques Prévert. But other composers would also find work in France's film industry, Eisler himself with Le grand jeu in 1934 and La vie est à nous in 1936. Paul Dessau, another frequent Brecht collaborator, composed scores for L'or dans la rue in 1935, Taras Bulba in 1936, and Cargaison Blanche in 1937, and even the future Hollywood great, Franz Wachsmann, later known as Franz Waxman, worked in Paris on the films La petite de Parnasse and Un peu d'amour (1932) and La crise est finie and Mauvaise graine (1934) prior to leaving for America. Of all of the composers seeking refuge in France, only a few, such as the Hungarians Joseph Kosma and Imre Weisshaus (later known as Paul Arma), and the Polish Webern pupil René Leibowitz, remained in France during the years of the Vichy regime, while the Austrian operetta composer Joseph Beer remained in hiding until the end of the war.
Most German and Austrian composers either left France or were deported to the East. Beer remained too damaged through his experience to participate in postwar musical life and any of his prewar operettas that found postwar productions were mounted without his involvement. His family, along with his regular librettist, Fritz Löhner-Beda, had all been murdered. He remained a virtual recluse in the South of France until his death in 1987. During the Occupation, Jacques Prévert was able to feed film work through to Kosma, under house arrest in France's Alpes-Maritimes region, which was then published under the names of other, non-Jewish composers. Arma, also hiding in the South of France, compiled political songs held today at the Musée régionale de la Résistance de Thionville, and composed a song cycle entitled Les chants du silence setting poems by Vercors, Éluard and others. In the immediate postwar years, Leibowitz, who would become the teacher of Boulez and Henze (among many others), fostered an interest in Schoenberg among younger composers in both France and Germany.
Escape: The United States
Given the choice, nearly all Jewish refugees would have preferred emigration to the USA, but the quota system made this difficult for those without funds and contacts. Introduced in 1921, the quota system was a convoluted affair: within the total number of annual immigrants set at 350,000, ‘quotas’ were pegged at no more than 3 per cent of the absolute number of émigrés from any given country living in America since 1910. In 1924, the laws were made even more proscriptive with the capping of levels of existing populations being backdated from 1910 to 1890, and the total number of immigrants was reduced to 150,000. These regulations were brought in to stem the flow of immigrants after the First World War, and to reduce the numbers arriving from Southern and Eastern Europe in order to give an advantage to those from Northern Europe, which already represented the largest of the many ethnic groups.43
With many prominent professionals and intellectuals stranded in France in 1940, Roosevelt was able to introduce an Advisory Committee on Political Refugees (known as the ‘Refugee Committee’) so that visas could be quickly made available to selected individuals who could make their way to neutral Portugal, possibly via French Morocco. From this pool, over 3,000 special visas were offered to those who were deemed to be able to make a tangible contribution to American cultural, financial or academic life. It was under this system that Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel and his wife Alma Mahler-Werfel were able to enter the United States after crossing the Pyrenees on foot and making their way from there to Lisbon. Erich Itor Kahn, once released from French internment, travelled to French Morocco and thence to the United States. Refugees waiting for visas in North Africa were immortalised in Casablanca (1942) starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, a film made all the more authentic by the participation of numerous Austro-German refugees working in Hollywood including Paul Henreid, Conrad Veidt, Peter Lorre, Curt Bois, Ilka Grüning and Ludwig Stössel. The music was by the Vienna-born, Hollywood-based Max Steiner.
The composers Eisler and Toch, the director Erwin Piscator, the critic and musicologist Max Graf and other academics were able to enter the USA with offers to take up professorships at New York's New School of Social Research, a specialist college founded in 1919. Graf, Eisler and Toch were only a few of the well-known European intellectuals to be offered positions by one of the School's co-founders, Alvin Johnson. In 1933, Johnson, together with the Austrian economist Emil Lederer, set up a postgraduate division of the New School that he called the University in Exile, supported in part by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Jewish philanthropist Hiram J. Halle. Over the next few years, it would offer permanent positions to refugee-academics including the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, and the Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer. The New School of Social Research, however, was only one of several elite institutions that saved lives by making offers of employment to refugee intellectuals and artists. The neo-Marxist Frankfurt School (of interdisciplinary social theory), formed under the sociologist Max Horkheimer, left Germany and relocated to Columbia University in New York in 1933 where it re-established itself as the Institute for Social Research. From the very beginning, it had attracted leftist scholars, intellectuals and academics such as Walter Benjamin and Paul Tillich.44 Theodor (Wiesengrund) Adorno was director of a social research project called the Radio Project, which would lead to collaboration with Hanns Eisler on the use of music and film, and was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, a source of income that must have left many Marxists culturally bemused. Eventually, it resulted in the publication of their co-authored book Composing for the Films (1947).45
One of the most prestigious locations of all was Princeton, New Jersey, where the generously endowed Institute for Advanced Study established by Abraham Flexner became the temporary home for the writers Thomas Mann and Hermann Broch, the art historian Erwin Panofsky, and the archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld, with its most significant academic acquisition being the physicist Albert Einstein.46 America was proving itself enormously resourceful at taking in the brains which were being squeezed out of Hitler's Europe and marginalised in nationalist Britain, though it was a source of endless frustrations and humiliation for many of the émigrés themselves. Salaries for academics in America were not always what Europeans expected, nor did the system appeal to academics from Germany and Austria, where universities had been places for students to learn from professors. In America, students were able to choose the people under whom they wished to study, a change in focus that caused bewilderment. Along with these cultural upheavals came the genuine difficulties of not finding suitable employment at all. Paul Dessau worked on a chicken farm; the satirical writer Walter Mehring was a warehouse foreman; the poet, philosopher and second husband of Hannah Arendt, Heinrich Blücher, was a porter in a chemical factory; the Brechtian actress Ruth Berlau worked in a bar; and Lou Eisler worked as a cleaner.47
Ernst Krenek wrote of the ‘echolessness’ of America's vast expanses’,48 which seems to refer to not only the geographical size of the country but also the inability of a composer to resonate. After countless false dawns and frustrations, some of Europe's finest composers and musicologists found themselves teaching in America's numerous provincial colleges and small universities. Krenek himself taught at Vassar, America's leading college for privileged young women, but left under a cloud, ostensibly for promoting twelve-note composition. He subsequently found a post at Hamlin University in St Paul, Minnesota, which provided him with the introduction to his third wife, the composer Gladys Nordenstrom. Other notable names would also find themselves teaching in colleges: Karol Rathaus at Queens College in New York, Alfred Einstein at Smith College (like Vassar, an outstanding liberal arts college for women), Paul Pisk at the Baptist University of Redlands in California, before he moved to the University of Texas in Austin, Erich Zeisl at Los Angeles City College, while the Austro-Hungarian pianist Lili Kraus took up the position of artist in residence at Texas Christian College in Fort Worth.
There is no question that many were deeply grateful to the United States for the opportunities they were offered. At the time, the American West Coast became such a haven for refugee academics that the musicologist Christopher Hailey told the author that, as a youngster growing up in California, he and other young musicians didn't trust a teacher without a foreign accent. These were known locally as the ‘Bei-uns-niks’ for their constant prefacing of every conversation with the phrase ‘Bei uns …’, which in this context meant ‘Back where we're from …’. Hailey wrote in his essay ‘Émigrés in the Classroom’:
It is possible that the influx of German-speaking émigrés of the 1930s and the ‘40s served as something of a brake on America's process of self-discovery. Through the introduction of systematic musicology, analytical procedures such as those of Heinrich Schenker, and compositional models such as those of Hindemith and Schoenberg, the émigrés helped establish a set of academic priorities that were heavily dependent upon the precedents of central European repertoire. The émigré presence also introduced or re-enforced certain long-held prejudices, including the notion that German music was superior to that of, say, France or Italy (substance over style), and the belief that instrumental music represented a higher, purer form of musical culture than vocal or theatrical forms, which were among America's strengths.
Hailey concludes, however, that far from transferring the seed of European culture to the fertile soil of California, young American composers such as John Cage and Lou Harrison, both Schoenberg pupils, would react with their own strong musical statements, representing a definitive break with old-world aesthetic principles.49
American ensembles and opera companies were just as suspicious of musicians without foreign accents, and probably nowhere were refugees taken up with greater enthusiasm than by American orchestras and the organisers of subscription concert series. Established conductors such as Bruno Walter, Georg (now George) Szell and others soon found first-rate orchestras with much better terms and conditions than the ones they had conducted in Europe. Otto Klemperer may have been frustrated with life in Los Angeles, and its obligatory income-producing Hollywood Bowl season, but there was no denying that he was able to establish a world-class ensemble from what was still a relatively young orchestra at a time of general financial hardship. In addition, he had the freedom to perform a good deal of modern repertoire to an inquisitive, if occasionally puzzled, audience. With so many immigrants arriving, many émigré conductors recognised players in their new ensembles from earlier days in Europe. A few had orchestras founded for them, such as the NBC Orchestra established in 1937 for Arturo Toscanini but also regularly conducted by Bruno Walter, George Szell, Ernest Ansermet and Charles Munch. The Jewish Hungarian Fritz Reiner had been working in the United States since 1922, long before the arrival of Hitler; but Erich Leinsdorf came to New York's Metropolitan Opera in 1937 on the recommendation of the soprano Lotte Lehmann. By the 1950s, he had become a household name throughout America, while remaining largely unknown in his native Vienna. The Hungarian conductor and violinist Jenő Blau, later known as Eugene Ormandy, had, like Fritz Reiner, also come to America before the advent of National Socialism. Like Reiner, he was unable to return to Europe and was plagued by the inability to rescue family and friends after the outbreak of war. He went on to enjoy 44 years as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, from 1936 until 1980. Wilhelm, now William, Steinberg and Antal Doráti were other names that started to appear as regular conductors with provincial ensembles, while the Utah Symphony Orchestra in Salt Lake City was able to increase its national profile substantially from 1947 with the help of the Jewish Swiss conductor Maurice Abravanel, who fled Germany in 1933. These were just some of the conductors. There were, if anything, even more instrumentalists who arrived first as refugees in the United States, then stayed as immigrants such as the pianists Rudolf Serkin, Artur Schnabel, Lili Kraus, Eduard Steuermann; Jews from Russia such as Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubinstein from Poland; the Viennese cellist Emanuel Feuermann and the violinists Fritz Kreisler, Rudolf Kolisch, along with the Russian violinists Jascha Heifetz and Nathan Milstein, who as Jews were unwilling to return to Nazi-dominated Europe, having already fled Bolshevik Russia.
American musical life took off as never before, with every school and provincial orchestra boasting its own celebrity émigrés who guaranteed that local standards of performance were as high as they were in Europe. More importantly, they inspired young Americans to meet the exacting standards demanded by their new teachers, conductors and even administrators. George Szell (who remained ‘Georg’ in correspondence with Austrian friends), wrote to Hans Gál in 1946 to explain his conducting post in Cleveland:
The position in Cleveland, about which I have been unable to write until now, is truly ideal. The financial foundation of the society is the best that can be found amongst all American orchestras with the possible exception of Boston. The Hall, and indeed the entire building, is splendid and is in due course meant to become our permanent home. The orchestra, which was already one of the best in the country, will soon become one of the very best to be found anywhere as I have succeeded in increasing the personnel to 95 and have all of programmes for the coming season now scheduled. It goes to press in September and I'll have a copy sent to you.
The interest and the participation of the public is enormous. Six weeks ago we had already sold $92,000 worth of subscription concert tickets. Last year at this time the figure stood at $42,000, but we need to remember that the strongest month for subscription sales is September, meaning it's still to come. Last year the final amount came to $77,000.50
The musicologist Alfred Einstein, writing to Gál in early 1940 from Northampton, Mass., offers another picture of émigré life:
Our larking about at Christmas in New York was repaid with double the normal work-load upon my return. In New York we heard almost only German – and what's more, German with a Viennese accent. Heini Schnitzler [son of Arthur Schnitzler], an evening spent with three conductors: Szell, Stiedry and Breisach, each at varying points put into a bad mood as they switched on the radio to hear a good Belgian conductor. […] We missed […] Karl Weigl, but the best of all, the one we most longed to see was of course you. Back in Northampton, one only hears English, but English that is coloured by every imaginable accent these days.51
A selection of correspondence gives an impression of the pressures and problems of leaving Germany and Austria, and of obtaining an American visa. Temporary asylum in Switzerland is illustrated by letters of reasonably well-connected refugees trying to get to the United States. Erich Korngold's brother Hanns writing from Zurich on 26 March 1939 (where he had been stuck since the previous year) writes as follows:
Four weeks ago, I received my deportation orders, against which I have already appealed. I've had numerous meetings at the special police office in charge of aliens. These meetings deal largely with the question of when I am planning to leave and what funds I have for supporting myself. Prospects are worse than ever with the American visa. The latest news from the local consulate is that it's pointless to expect a visa for at least another two years. This is hopeless. That was point one; my second point is that the officials here cannot be duped into thinking that I finance my existence simply by selling jewellery. The only means of deferring my planned deportation is not by showing them the cash I have in hand but by showing them bank statements that prove that I'm being supported from overseas. The longer such funding appears to be guaranteed, the better my position for trying to remain here.52
He goes on to request a sum of between $60 and $70 a month – astronomical, he admits, and ‘adding unwanted pressure on Erich who already has so many obligations’. With this amount of money, he wrote that he would move out of Zurich and live in a small provincial bed-and-breakfast somewhere in the country until his visa came through.53
Alfred Einstein, writing to Hans Gál in 1939 from Brooklyn, seems to corroborate this sorry state of affairs:
Sorry to have missed you in London. […] We had to break our necks to get out of Switzerland and on to Naples in order to go through the usual purgatory at the American consulate (trying to organise matters from the Consulate in Zurich would have meant a delay of 2 to 3 years), without having the foggiest notion that we, that is to say, our daughter, was to be detained by Mussolini. In short, we did not return to Zurich where there was a British visa waiting for us. We were instead relieved that under these most dangerous circumstances, we managed to cross the border by boat from Ventimiglia into Cannes.54
Hollywood
As with the UK and France, one of the choice positions for a musician in America was with a film studio. For instrumentalists, it was a secure, well-paid job with one of the Hollywood orchestras or as a rehearsal pianist. For composers, it meant making arrangements, checking parts, orchestrating or, for an elite, actually composing film music. The nature and purpose of film scores was still not fully established. During the days of silent films, it was largely left to pianists to improvise as they saw fit. Larger cinemas in metropolitan centres had organs, and even bands and small ensembles. In due course, scores of arrangements were provided, but there was little if any original music included, and films ran to the accompaniment of well-known works such as Rossini's William Tell Overture or a Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody, or generic works that could be slotted in for any given love scene or moment of suspense. If there was thought and planning behind the potential of music and film, it seemed to be coming in the main from Russia and Germany.
Everything changed in 1933 when Max Steiner wrote the music for King Kong and transformed a gorilla puppet that had raised guffaws from American test-audiences into an object of genuine terror. In their book Composing for the Films, Adorno and Eisler lay out the means of achieving the maximum emotional effect by combining music with moving images: either musically to ‘replicate’ and amplify the visuals, or to set off images with a contrasting musical counterpoint – composing the obverse of what the visuals dictated; if the scene was swift-moving and tense, the music was slow and dreamy, and if the scene was dreamy, the music was tense and fast-paced. In this manner, a ‘dramatic dialectic’ or a synthesis of emotional responses could be created. The opposite extreme was to emphasise the visuals; for example, a ship on the high seas called for music that accentuated the vastness and majesty of the ocean. In other words, the composer simply replicated the visual image by expanding it musically.55 Not surprisingly, Hollywood usually opted for the latter solution and left arty intellectual ideas to Soviet and European filmmakers. For a Hollywood blockbuster like King Kong to come across as frightening, the music had to exaggerate the visual terror as much as possible. This recipe worked, and few studio composers, apart from Eisler, considered the alternatives.
Steiner composed music for nearly a dozen films a year. The sheer number he worked on (no fewer than 62 from 1930 until King Kong in 1933) meant that he is remembered for the themes of such iconic pictures as Now Voyager, Gone with the Wind and Casablanca. Compare this with Erich Korngold, who during the decade he worked in Hollywood provided scores for roughly the same number of films as Steiner in a year. Korngold, who certainly drew on Steiner's methods (and vice versa), arrived in Hollywood as the first composer of film music already established as a successful composer of serious, ‘classical’ music. Up to this point, film composers had come from vaudeville or cabaret, or had worked as arrangers or bandmasters. Korngold was far classier than anyone Hollywood had encountered before, and everyone was in awe of him. His contract was unique, and he was spared the assembly line methods of other studio composers. He could choose which films he worked on, composed everything himself (with very few exceptions), and orchestrated as much as commitments would allow. His usual editorial and musical assistant was the young American cellist Hugo Friedhofer, who also came from a ‘classical background’ and had the advantage of speaking German. Korngold, who first went to Hollywood to arrange Mendelssohn's score for Max Reinhardt's Midsummer Night's Dream in 1935, left his mark on a series of swashbuckling films with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland along with classics such as The Prince and the Pauper (1937), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Anthony Adverse (1939), Juarez (1939), The Sea Wolf (1941) and Kings Row (1942, starring the young Ronald Reagan).
The many Jewish composers arriving in Hollywood from Vienna could hardly have been more varied. On one hand, there were Steiner and Korngold, who, along with Franz Waxman from Berlin, dominated cinematic, wide-screen sound with extraordinary acoustical effects and romantic, sweeping melodies accompanied by lush harmonies that stirred the passions of the motion-picture-loving public. On the other, there was Dr Ernest Toch (as he insisted on being credited, though he grumbled at being billed as ‘Ernest’), who was a child of Germany's New Objectivity and a fearless enemy of the ersatz-Romanticism that Hollywood promoted (though on occasion he could provide generic movie tunes as required, such as, for example, his Oscar-nominated theme for Peter Ibbetson). As a modernist, he specialised in tense chromatic sequences, which were perfect for supplying the studios with yards of stock music that could be used for gangster car chases through Chicago, or the sleigh-chase through the Alps in Shirley Temple's Heidi. Though he received Oscar nominations for his music to Peter Ibbetson, he was normally assigned to comedy horror films (some of the best of which were with the young Bob Hope) and suspense movies.
Hanns Eisler arrived in Hollywood with a decade of composing for European political cinema under his belt. Though he never worked at the same exalted heights as Korngold, Waxman, Steiner or Toch, he did set new standards for music in Hollywood with scores that achieved powerful effects by remaining in the background for much of the time, coming forward as part of the dramatic action, or by having no music at precisely the moment when it was expected. In short, his genius was in doing everything differently from the typical Hollywood film composer. Though studios allowed him less latitude for his dialectical dramatic effects than he enjoyed with his frequent collaborator, the Dutch director Joris Ivens, he still managed to achieve a great deal. His score for Fritz Lang's Hangmen also Die (1943, the story partially adapted by Bertolt Brecht) even managed an Oscar nomination. This was a remarkable achievement considering that the use of music in the film is sparse and nearly always operates as an active part of the drama rather than as mere illustration.
After the war, Zeisl, Toch and Korngold left studio work as quickly as they could, sensitive to the harm it would do their reputations and fearful of the damage inflicted on their talent by years of creativity on demand. After 1945, Waxman reduced his studio work to less than one film a year, but Eisler was keen to continue, and slowly but surely he started to demonstrate new directions in film music and to produce convincing cinematic effects with his counter-intuitive ideas and theories. It must remain a matter of speculation whether he could have changed the course of Hollywood film music had he not been forcibly removed from the United States by the House of Un-American activities in 1948.
No Escape
By 1939, just before the Nazi invasion of Poland, German, Austrian and Czech Jews were applying for visas for any country that would take them. Refugee colonies were springing up as far afield as Lima and Shanghai. Britain had started to deport refugees and internment prisoners to Canada, Australia and New Zealand, though Canada notoriously refused to take in more than 5,000 Jewish immigrants, while making it clear that it was happy to take any other highly qualified refugee. The heavy loss of life resulting from the sinking of the SS Arandora Star (one of several ships carrying refugees or ‘enemy aliens’ sunk by German torpedoes during the war) en route to Canada in 1940 along with the case of the transport ship Dunera would eventually result in a temporary suspension of this policy.
The case of the Dunera would become one of the most notorious accounts of disregard for the rights and wellbeing of ‘enemy aliens’ held in British detention. On 10 July 1940, 2542 inmates from internment camps, some having already survived the sinking of the Arandora Star, were placed on the Dunera with the information that they would be deported to Canada. Instead, after they had been rifled, robbed and abused by their British guards, their luggage, including musical instruments, was wantonly thrown overboard. They were taken under unsanitary and inhuman conditions to Australia and arrived malnourished and ill some 60 days later, resulting in the court-marshalling of several senior officers and a severe reprimand to Lieutenant-Colonel William Scott. The refugees were then transported to the middle of the Australian outback to a camp in the town of Hay in New South Wales, where they further suffered from extreme heat while enclosed behind several barriers of barbed wire. Relatives were not informed of their location and eventually objections to their treatment were raised in the British Parliament.56
Another tragedy was the MS St Louis, which transported over 900 Jewish refugees from Hamburg to Cuba in May 1939, only to have entry refused by Cuban bureaucrats on a contrived technicality. Canadian and American immigration officials also refused entry to the increasingly desperate passengers, and though the nearby Dominican Republic agreed that it would accept 100,000 Jewish refugees at the 1938 Évian Conference, the captain of the St Louis decided to return to Europe, docking in Antwerp on 17 June, more than a month after leaving Hamburg. Negotiations resulted in passengers being offered asylum in France, Holland, Belgium and the United Kingdom before the St Louis returned to its home port in Germany. With the fall of all of these countries (apart from the United Kingdom), it has been estimated by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that 254 of the original 937 passengers were subsequently murdered by the Nazis. The captain of the ship, Gustav Schröder, would not return to Germany until he was certain that every one of his charges had found a safe haven, an act of humanity that postwar was widely recognised in his native Germany as well as in Israel.
There are many published accounts and several websites devoted to the music composed in Nazi concentration camps. For the present writer, it has always seemed a miracle that anyone could find the wherewithal to write anything in an environment that demanded so much in order to survive. Yet the essay by the composer Viktor Ullmann entitled ‘Goethe und Ghetto’ written in Theresienstadt (or Terezín), the so-called ‘model ghetto’ north-west of Prague and designed to show visiting dignitaries that Jews were being well looked after, raises important points and sheds light on how creativity could thrive under the most desperate circumstances:
Theresienstadt was and continues to be for me the school of form. In earlier days, when the magic of civilisation suppressed the weight and fury of material life, it was a simple matter to create beauty in form. Our true master-class in form, however, is to be found within our present situation, where we require form to dominate everything that makes up the material of our daily life, and any inspiration the muses may offer stands in the starkest contrast to our surroundings.[…] It's only worth emphasising how much my work as a musician has gained by being in Theresienstadt: in no manner did we just sit on the banks of the rivers of Babylon and weep that our cultural needs were not able to keep pace with our will to live. I am quite convinced that anyone who has ever had to wrestle art from life will confirm how true this is.57
This raises a crucial point about how environment can affect creativity. Whether adversity and a stressful environment are themselves the catalysts of creativity must remain a thorny, albeit rhetorical question. The circumstantial evidence offered by many exiled composers suggests that the transplantation of talent is rarely successful unless the artists have the resources to reinvent themselves in ways that are compatible with their new surroundings.
With Thomas Mann (but not his brother Heinrich), there was such a large international public that the change of geographical location made little difference to the nature of his output: Doktor Faustus, written in exile, became one of his most significant works. Lion Feuchtwanger was in a similar situation, with his international royalties allowing the purchase of an enormous villa in Pacific Palisades. Thomas Mann, while during this period not as popular as Feuchtwanger, also required his creature comforts, something his highly resourceful wife Katia Pringsheim (sister of the composer Klaus Pringsheim) was evidently able to provide.
Composers, however, are different from writers. Mann's quintessential novel-of-exile Doktor Faustus was read by individuals in the original language, or in translation, in the privacy of their homes all over the world. Mann certainly did not depend exclusively on an American public to guarantee readership. But music is an experience shared by an audience in a fixed place. At this time, music was usually only recorded if it had already established its popularity in the concert hall or the opera house. If the public did not respond, a composer's creativity either atrophied, as with Arthur Willner and Leopold Spinner, or went into overdrive in search of reinvention. This was the case with Toch, Rankl and arguably with Wellesz, all of whom embarked on a frenzy of symphonic composition.
The important composers working in Theresienstadt – Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein, Hans Krása and Viktor Ullmann – have become fairly well known, and their works are becoming a regular feature of the concert repertoire. All, with the exception of the younger Klein, were en route to becoming established composers before internment. Klein's genius was one of the many tragic miracles of Theresienstadt, his brilliance not becoming evident until he was imprisoned and long after his death.
In any case, the inhumanity of man and the undeniable creativity that it can generate is demonstrated in one highly symbolic work that came out of the Theresienstadt Ghetto. It can stand without explanation and be counted, regardless of its provenance, as a masterpiece: Der Kaiser von Atlantis by Viktor Ullmann and his youthful librettist, the painter and poet, Peter (or Petr) Kien. It is also a work of ethical genius. Its alternative title is The Abdication of Death and the plot is simple but powerful: Death has been overworked by the megalomaniac Emperor Overall and decides to go on strike. It was an obvious and dangerous parody of Hitler's ambitions. Yet what places it beyond the expectations of listeners today is its apparent lack of anger; soldiers who can't kill each other wonder why they're fighting, and a soldier-girl and soldier-boy fall in love after fruitless attempts to annihilate each other. A harlequin figure moves the action along while the Emperor Overall and Death argue. A drummer makes further pronouncements, ordering people to kill until nobody is left standing, while singing parodies of the German national anthem. The main protagonists are portrayed as buffoons while the music veers from the Bergian to cinematic hit-song and cabaret.
Ullmann's message, though, is that the only thing that needs to be feared is an absence of death. Its ethical message goes even further with Emperor Overall agreeing to be the first to die in order for Death to end his strike and thereby redeeming the apparently irredeemable. This was an extraordinary idea to present in a situation where death was ever-present – parts of the libretto were written on the backs of deportation lists to Auschwitz. Unsurprisingly, it did not make it to performance, though according to the memoirs of the bass Karel Berman, also interned in Theresienstadt, it did go into rehearsal. It has several alternative endings, and though Ullmann gives the official completion date as 13 January 1944, it is clear that during rehearsals there were disagreements about the ultimate version of the text. Kien was in general more cynical, angry even, while Ullmann comes across as verging on the serene with a view of death closer to that of Felix Salten's Bambi or Janáček's Cunning Little Vixen. The many variants of the final aria result in very different conclusions, changing the entire character of the work. It must surely be one of the bravest pieces of music-theatre ever written – and a powerful ethical testimony.
Music in Terezín, by the Polish-American music historian Joža Karas, remains the definitive work on music in Theresienstadt. Since its publication in 1984, the composers have become far better known and some, especially Ullmann, have been recognised as major figures. Hans Krása and Pavel Haas were two very distinctive composers who maintained a Czech musical identity that would be carried forward after the war by Martinů. Krása studied with Zemlinsky and Haas with Janáček, and both composers maintained a pronounced aesthetic distance to the New Objectivity, or twelve-tone trends dominant in Germany at the time. So, too, did their teachers, both of whom had already developed distinctive musical styles without conforming to current developments. Though the cultivated Krása employed neo-Classical Stravinskian devices, his music remains essentially Czech, with fewer rugged edges than Pavel Haas. It would be unfair to call their styles eclectic, as they seemed to have come up with something that was individual, though a fusion offering traces of Stravinsky, Janáček and even French Impressionism can be heard in the works of both.
The world inhabited by Czech composers grew from the same surreal environment that produced Franz Kafka: an emotionally defuse world somewhere between dream and awakening. In Krása's Dostoevsky-based opera Verlobung im Traum,58 given its premiere in Prague under Szell in 1933, there's a strong sense of the disparity between reality and the imagined. This blurring of reality and magic is also present in Pavel Haas's folk-opera Šarlatán59 of 1936, and in Erwin Schulhoff's weirdly surreal treatment of the Don Juan story in his only opera, Flammen (1929). It is a musical world that survived in Martinů's Julietta, given its premiere three days after the annexation of Austria, on 16 March 1938 in Prague, conducted by Václav Talich, the teacher of Karel Ančerl, who conducted much of the music composed in Terezín. Czech music was a product of what Max Brod – journalist, composer, Janáček translator and Kafka biographer – called 100 per cent Czech, 100 per cent German, and 100 per cent Jewish. It was a description he gave to the Czech capital, Prague, but it also works as a description of Czech composers as well.
There were other composers in Theresienstadt such as the Hindemith and Hába pupil Zikmund (Siegmund) Schul, whose few surviving works, such as the Two Chassidic Dances, various Hebrew Choruses and a Cantata Judaica, employ explicitly Jewish subjects. There was the bass Karel Berman, who as well as being a singer, also composed songs and piano works; and there was the Austrian-Polish composer Carlo Taube, who composed a Terezín Symphony. The score is lost, but a report of a secret performance held in a prayer room in one of the barracks has come down to us from one of the prisoners, an engineer named Arnošt Weiss:
Not much remains in my memory from the first two movements that characterized the milieu with Jewish and Slavic themes. But the third movement had a shattering effect on the listeners. Mrs Erika Taube, the wife of the composer, recited in a moving way, with a pianissimo obligato from the orchestra, a lullaby of a Jewish mother, which she had composed. There followed a turbulent finale in which the first four bars of Deutschland, Deutschland […] did not continue to über alles, but died out in a terrible dissonance. Everyone had understood and a storm of applause expressed thanks to Carlo and Erika Taube and all the musicians. Naturally a work of this sort could not be performed officially, and it is distressing that this unique cultural document was not passed on to us.60
There were other less important figures composing in Theresienstadt. The 22-year-old Robert Dauber wrote a delightful yet disturbing Serenade for violin and piano, in the Palm Court style of his father Adolf ‘Dol’ Dauber. It remains the only work of this gifted young man who died of typhoid in Dachau at the age of 23. Dauber was the only member of his family to end up in Theresienstadt and even sent occasional post-cards telling his family that he was well. The Serenade is best seen as another of Dauber's post-cards: short, sweet and positive. As with the works by Gál composed in Huyton, it has nothing didactic, symbolic or redolent of his experience as a prisoner. On the contrary, it is a work that was no doubt written to help people forget their situation. Perhaps another of these lesser figures who still resonates today is the poet Ilse Weber whose poem I wander through Theresienstadt / My heart a lump of lead … has become a regular feature at the many concerts in which the music of Theresienstadt is remembered. All of these composers, apart from Berman, were either murdered or died in camps. More recently and astonishingly late in the day, Hungarian composers murdered in the camps are starting to receive scholarly attention. In addition to Ferenc Weisz, murdered in 1944, we are finally able to hear works by Pál Budai, Jenő Deutsch; György Justus; Sándor Kuti; Walter Lajthai-Lazarus; Sándor Vándor; and László Weiner.61
It is a bitter irony that the Austro-German music tradition held in such high esteem by the third generation of emancipated, assimilated Jews was last heard wafting across the tundra and barbed wire of Eastern Europe's death camps, played by desperate inmates, most of whom would not survive. Heinrich Heine was surely thinking of the Germany of Dichter und Denker, ‘poets and philosophers’, when he wrote in his forward for Germany, a Winter's Tale: ‘If we could rescue God from indignities which inhabit mankind here on earth, we would thus become the redeemers of God himself – if we could restore dignity to a people deprived of joy […] then […] the whole of Europe, indeed the whole world, will fall to us! It is this message of universal domination by Germany of which I so often dream when I wander amongst the oaks. This is my patriotism.’
The poems of the Jewish poet Heine, which inspired countless settings by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt and Loewe among many others, were banned. Jewish musicians performing Beethoven and Wagner, the strands of which whispered across the moorlands and plains in Central Europe (the very regions being claimed for German Lebensraum), had previously, as with Heine, considered themselves ardent defenders of Germany's most humanist values. Yet here they were, their national and cultural identity taken away by neighbours who had convinced themselves that their own entitlement to all that was ‘German’ could only come at the expense of those whom they could unilaterally declare ‘un-German’. Wagner was arguably more accurate in his view that Jews would eventually undermine the essential moral fabric of German culture than he could have known. Nazi anti-Semitism, much of which was inspired by Wagner himself, had driven non-Jewish Germans to perform acts of cultural barbarity that would bankrupt for generations any ethical legacy bestowed by its greatest writers, artists and philosophers.