Introduction

This a magic cauldron be,

Wherein we find bewitching forces;

If you place your head inside

You'll witness all your future courses

A German future here to see

Within this fetid sink;

Yet don't be sickened by the scum,

Or its penetrating stink

With a smile, she bade me hither,

I quickly hid my fear

I hurried towards her, ever eager

To see what held this sphere

What I saw, I shall not say

To silence I am vowed

Indeed I hardly dare describe

The stench-enfolding cloud

With reluctance I recall

That dreadful, cursed smell

It seemed a mix of unwashed masses:

Ovens from a tannery in hell

Hideous the stench! Oh God help!

That still continued to rise

The fanning of dung it seemed to me

Of three-dozen fields in size.

Of Saint-Just's words, I know quite well

Once uttered on charitable boards

That sore afflictions, with rose-oil and musk

Won't work to cure the hoards

This rancid reek of a German future

Overwhelmed the senses

My nose had never inhaled the like

It shattered my defences.

Heinrich Heine, Germany: A Winter's Tale, from Caput 26, 1844

As this excerpt shows, German Jews had a complex relationship with their sense of national identity. Heine's epic poem from 1844, Germany: A Winter's Tale, offers a chilling prediction of the disastrous direction in which the German nation would move. In an apparent contradiction, Heine states in his introduction that his sense of patriotism consisted of dreaming of a world that one day would be entirely German.1 Heine was simply personifying the conflict that resulted from his respect for German culture, above all its language, with his wariness about a national identity that saw itself as so exceptional as to be exclusive. As a Jew, he understood the notion of exclusion. At the same time, his response to German cultural exceptionalism was to reshape German culture through his own work: Heine was the poet for whom the Romantic German composers showed the greatest enthusiasm.

This book is about the Jewish composers who were banned by the Third Reich. Most of those directly affected were born within a decade of Heine's centenary in 1897. The mixture of exuberance and apprehension expressed by Heine had ripened by then into a sense of national entitlement. Jews were able to counter threats of exclusion from German culture by reacting as Heine, and reshaping it through their own creativity. Thus, by banning Jewish composers, Hitler's Reich amputated an essential limb from the body of German cultural continuity. Jews born within Germany or Austria had only recently been allowed to count themselves as full participants in their nations. In Austria, Jewish emancipation came about in 1867 with the creation of the new state of Austria-Hungary, while in Germany it started with the proclamation of the German Empire in 1871. Once Jews became active participants in what they viewed as the most cultivated and liberal society in Europe, they embraced all things German with a creative enthusiasm that came close to mania. As with Heine, years of looking into German Culture from the outside resulted in works of untold inventiveness. It was a creative intoxication so intense that many did not notice the numerous non-Jews who dismissed out of hand any notion of Jewish cultural entitlement. The more vehemently Jewish claims of cultural or national equality were rejected by anti-Semites, the more Jews proved that they were bringing creative elements to bear that resulted in the country's artistic life becoming more, not less German.

A fascinating example of this dynamic playing itself out in its many unappealing aspects was the slanging match between two Leipzig critics, Adolf Aber and Alfred Heuß, in the 1920s. It had been ignited by divided opinions surrounding Franz Schreker's opera Der Schatzgräber.2 Schreker was widely regarded as Jewish though he had been brought up as Roman Catholic by his mother, a member of Austria's impoverished aristocracy. Heuß greeted the premiere of Der Schatzgräber in Leipzig on 23 October 1921 with an incendiary article implying that Schreker's popularity was manufactured, supported by the press with its principal cheerleader being the influential Jewish journalist Paul Bekker, who in 1919 had proclaimed Schreker as ‘successor’ to Richard Wagner.

Heuß's vile and paranoid article is not explicitly anti-Semitic, but its rant against ‘the press’ and Bekker (referred to as ‘Plague-breath’) would have been understood by anyone reading it. He denounces his fellow Leipzig critic Adolf Aber as a ‘Bekker-poodle’ and Schreker's operas as ‘sexually charged kitsch’.³ Such a toxic attack could not go unanswered and Aber wrote a short essay entitled The Heuß Case which he had privately published and sent to interested parties – one of whom happened to be Heuß.⁴ Heuß reacted by dismissing Aber as ‘Leipzig vermin,’ but what disturbed Heuß most was Aber's reaction to the implication that Schreker, Bekker and Aber were somehow not sufficiently ‘German’. Aber wondered how a Swiss such as Heuß could wrap himself in the flag of German nationalism while questioning Aber's own national allegiance. Aber reminds his Swiss colleague, that he – Aber – had not only fought in the recently ended war (in which Switzerland had remained neutral), but had been an officer in the Prussian Army. This was clearly a sore point for Heuß, and his retort tells us a good deal about the attitudes of the time: he wonders how Aber, as a Jew, can dare to question Heuß's German credentials. The assumption, which would have been understood by everyone following this row, was that a Prussian Jew (or even half-Jew, such as Bekker and Schreker), was far less ‘German’ than a Swiss-German.

In an attempt to put disputes such as the Heuß–Aber row into context, this book sets the scene from before the emergence of the German nation into its two political states. It considers the historical and cultural significance of Jewish composers who have been ‘lost’, and examines the obstacle-strewn path towards musical assimilation that they were made to take. From the first half of the nineteenth century, Jewish composers who did not emigrate to France (as Meyerbeer and Offenbach had done) appear to have been almost stiflingly conventional in order to underpin their German cultural credentials. Wagner even dismissed the brilliance of Mendelssohn, declaring that he, too, was merely the product of Jewish over-compensation.

Such views were a reflection of the hostile environment in which nineteenth-century Jewish composers found themselves rather than an objective assessment of their talent. This sheds light on the sobering fact that few of these composers – Mendelssohn excepted – have much to say to us today. Yet the cautious emergence of Jewish musicians evolved into a position of near dominance within German and Austrian musical life over the course of a mere half-century. Such was the situation that in 1938 the Nazis mounted an exhibition, ‘Entartete Musik’ (‘Degenerate Music’) in Düsseldorf to demonstrate the supposed ‘degenerate’ influence on German musical life by what they called ‘Jewish Cultural Bolshevism’.

This is not a book about Nazis but about the composers who were lost, and the musical trends they established before being banned, murdered and exiled. It also examines the tragic postwar developments that kept them on the margins long after the fall of Hitler's Reich. As such, this book lays out how Jews saw themselves, and how they were seen by non-Jews. It tries to contextualise the discrepancy that often emerges from these different perceptions and to evaluate the music written by Jewish composers, much of which remains unjustly neglected.

In dealing with how Jews saw themselves and the world around them, I have used two main sources: Vienna's newspaper the Neue Freie Presse, which, since its earliest days, was seen as one of the great European papers and a voice of social and economic Liberalism. Its daily essays, called ‘feuilletons’, offered an exceptional forum for intellectual discourse. The paper was written and produced largely by secular Jewish journalists for a largely Liberal readership, many of whom were also secular and Jewish. The Viennese Jewish polemicist Karl Kraus in his own publication, Die Fackel, defines the journalism of the day by relentlessly attacking it. He saves his most lethal darts for all writers of feuilletons, especially those writing for the Neue Freie Presse. To Kraus, feuilletons were an unhealthy and unwelcome mix of fact and personal creativity. Kraus's ethical and intellectual standards have, I suspect, made many historians reluctant to use feuilletons as a source for understanding the thinking of the time. His views on creative journalism turned out to be fully justified. Still, to ignore feuilletons that appeared in the Viennese press is to ignore the manner in which some of the age's brightest and most articulate writers viewed and responded to the world around them. I take the view that feuilletons (pace Karl Kraus) are not journalism in the pure sense of reporting events, but a literary genre that grew out of people's reaction to the world in which they lived. With photography and moving pictures still in their infancy, they offer some of the most captivating images of the past. Nobody would dare to challenge the ethical might of Karl Kraus, but I believe the world has moved on, and his rants against opinion-based journalism can – for our purposes – be respected, but passed over.

My other key source comes from the journal Musikblätter des Anbruch, later called simply Anbruch. It was launched in 1919 by Universal Edition (UE), the Viennese publisher of many of the composers who would find themselves banned in Germany after 1933. Anbruch was run by secular Jews and aimed at a progressive readership. With the highly regarded Eduard Hanslick serving since 1864 as principal critic for the Neue Freie Presse, and his successor Julius Korngold, along with Guido Adler who was the ‘éminence grise’ of Anbruch, we gain a very clear idea of how Jews participated in musical life until 1933 in Germany, and 1938 in Austria. Both publications represented authoritative forums for cultural, musical and intellectual discourse: they were progressive, secular and resoundingly aware of their own Germanic culture in the international context of musical trends and developments.

The 2003 exhibition at Vienna's Jewish Museum took the title ‘Quasi una fantasia’ to express the cultural delusion that grew out of Jewish political and social emancipation. The implication was that assimilation was a mirage that had beguiled Jewish composers into writing works that affirmed their entitlement to German culture, only then to be ejected from their natural home by Hitler. This implied delusion meant that even when they enjoyed great popularity among non-Jewish audiences, these composers remained very far from obtaining true equality and acceptance.

Yet it wasn't only a delusion. To leave it at that would be to chalk up a victory to the anti-Semitism that culminated in the Third Reich. By banning Jewish artists, musicians and writers the Nazis had not removed delusional fantasists but, instead, broken fundamental links in the chain that made up German musical continuity.

In an eerie fulfilment of Hugo Bettauer's satirical novel from 1922 The City without Jews or Die Stadt ohne Juden, Germany and Austria, rendered virtually Judenfrei after 1945, have struggled in the decades following, to regain their prominence as leaders of musical development. After centuries of determining how music interacted within society, these two German nations found themselves overtaken by the very countries that had given refuge to their émigrés. Yet even these host countries largely mishandled their opportunities. Few composers could establish themselves in their new homelands without either appealing to new and unknown audiences or relying on the support of fellow émigrés who ran many of the musical institutions in America and elsewhere for quarter of a century after the war.

There may be no qualitative difference in the music composed by Weill on Broadway, or Korngold in Hollywood or even Joseph Kosma in Paris with his now iconic French chansons, but one thing is beyond dispute: their development as composers, despite new-found success, was disrupted. With many others, it was stopped altogether. It was perhaps only the most talented, opportunistic or resourceful who could continue to remain creative in their new environments.

This is an epic story that starts with the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and ends with the new definitions of music and society in the 1960s. Such an expanse of history squeezed into a single volume means that significant people and events are sometimes merely signposted, in the hope that interested readers will investigate further for themselves. This book also tries to avoid the inevitable ‘what if’ questions, offering instead an account of what happened and exploring what shaped the decisions that an important lost generation of composers was forced to make.