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MUSIC OF EXILE
Copyright © 2023 Michael Haas
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any
form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written
permission from the publishers.
All reasonable efforts have been made to provide accurate sources for all images
that appear in this book. Any discrepancies or omissions will be rectified in future
editions.
For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please
contact:
U.S. Office: [email protected] yalebooks.com
Europe Office: [email protected] yalebooks.co.uk
Set in Adobe Caslon Pro by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd
Printed in Great Britain by TJ Books, Padstow, Cornwall
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023938935
e-ISBN 978-0-300-27460-8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated to the founding team of the Exilarte Center at
Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts and to my
colleagues Professor Gerold Gruber, Dr Ulrike Anton, Katharina
Reischl, Nobuko Nakamura, Lucia Lajčáková and Ulrike Sych, the
President of the University who was able to make it happen. I also
include Geraldine Auerbach, former Director and founder of London
University’s Jewish Music Institute, to whom I owe an enormous
debt of gratitude.
 CONTENTS

List of Illustrations
Foreword

Introduction
1 The ‘Hanswurst’ of Havoc
2 Exile in Germany: Of Jewish Destiny, the Composer Richard
Fuchs and the Jewish Kulturbund
3 Exile in Germany: Inner Emigration
4 The Music of Resistance
5 Kurt Weill and the Music of Integration
6 The Music of Inner Return
7 Case Study: Hans Winterberg and his Musical Return to
Bohemia
8 ‘Hitler made us Jews’: Israel in Exile
9 The Missionaries

Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
 ILLUSTRATIONS

1 ‘A picture worth one hundred souls: Richard Strauss and a lost

photo’, Vienna Konzerthaus, 22 January 1929. By permission of
Mark Latimer.
2 The Zeisl family before leaving Vienna, 10 November 1938. By
permission of Barbara Zeisl-Schoenberg.
3 A procession of ‘enemy aliens’ on their way to an internment
camp, May 1940. Photo by Keystone / Getty Images.
4 The Fuchs brothers, Richard, Sigmund, Walter and Gottfried.
Image via Johnny Mulheron and Danny Mulheron. © Richard
Fuchs Archive.
5 Letter from the heads of the Kulturbund cancelling the intended
performance of Vom jüdischen Schicksal. Image via Johnny
Mulheron and Danny Mulheron. © Richard Fuchs Archive.
6 Hermann Heiß, photo by Hans Kenner. © Internationales
Musikinstitut Darmstadt (IMD).
7 Mauthausen concentration camp’s orchestra playing at the
execution of Hans Bonarewitz, 30 July 1942. Interfoto / Alamy.
8 The Korngold family arriving into Los Angeles, 1930. Bettmann /
Getty Images.
9 Francesco and Eleanor von Mendelssohn, Kurt Weill, Lotte Lenya
and Meyer Weisgal arrive in New York, 10 October 1935.
Bettmann / Getty Images.
10 Walter Arlen in Chicago, photo by Gretl Silton, 1945. By
permission of Howard Myers, Walter Arlen Estate, Wien
 Bibliothek.
11 Hanns Eisler’s setting of Bertolt Brecht’s Über die Dauer des
Exils, 1938. Hanns-Eisler-Archiv 310, f. 1r. Akademie der Künste,
Berlin.
12 Signed portrait of Hans Winterberg, 1921. By permission of
Peter Kreitmeir.
13 Hans Winterberg at work, 1964. By permission of Peter
Kreitmeir.
14 Walter Bricht, mid-1920s. By permission of Dana Bricht-Higbee.
15 Guillermo Graetzer at a musical training course for young
people, 1970. By permission of Carlos Graetzer. © Carlos
Graetzer.
 FOREWORD

Trautwein hatte geglaubt, das Exil zu kennen. Das war ein

Irrtum. [. . .] Er begriff, daß er bisher immer nur Einzelheiten
gesehen hatte, ein Nacheinander, ein Nebeneinander. Jetzt
sah er in einem die Größe und Erbärmlichkeit des Exils, seine
Weite und Enge. Keine Schilderung, keine Erfahrung, kein
Erlebnis vermochte diese Ganzheit des Exils, seine innere
Wahrheit, zu offenbaren; nur die Kunst.

Trautwein believed he knew all about exile. That was a

mistake. [. . .] He now realised that he only saw singular
details of successive and parallel events. He now saw in its
entirety the enormity and wretchedness of exile, with all of its
vastness and constraints. No narrative, experience or
expertise could reveal the totality, or inner truth of exile. Only
art could do that.
Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel Exil, 19401

I
n my previous book, Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers
Banned by the Nazis, published by Yale University Press in 2013, I
largely dealt with musical developments in Germany and Austria
where Jewish composers were not only participants but catalysts.
The Epilogue of Forbidden Music was a plea for a place where the
musical legacies of those forced into exile could be recovered,
restored and essentially returned to the audiences from whom they
had been taken. So it was that with the founding of the Exilarte
Research Center and Archive at Vienna’s University of Music and
Performing Arts (the former Academy founded by Antonio Salieri in
1817), we were able to create such a repository for the musical
estates of exiled musicians, singers, performers, people who worked
in the music business and, above all, composers. With each arrival, a
new story of exile emerged, often stories that were overlooked, or
simply never considered by previous scholars. As so many of the
major émigré musical estates have already landed in established
archives, we took the decision to take any musical estate regardless
of genre and the profile of the individual. We have been fortunate in
still attracting many important names that one would have assumed
had already been housed by national libraries, or at the very least by
important university collections: Hans Gál, Wilhelm Grosz, Walter
Susskind, Georg Tintner and even items from Erich Korngold’s
estate. All are copiously represented by recordings either as
composers or conductors. Yet it was the estates of individuals with
less prominent profiles who often revealed the true costs of loss and
exile. Just as it was only those with luck, connections and, most
often, relatives and funds abroad, who could escape Hitler, it was
also largely only a lucky few who managed to make successful
careers in their new homelands. We think we know their stories
because we are grateful for the contributions they made to the
countries and communities that took them in. What has often been
casually passed over is an examination of the nature of the changes
that were necessary in order to survive professionally. Much of this
story is the story of music post-war, and as a result may come across
as something of a follow-up to Forbidden Music.
Exile is a familiar concept that most often applies to writers and
artists. It has more recently become associated with composers and
musicians as well. In German, the expression Exilmusik is used to
cover all music and musicians persecuted and censored by the Nazis.
It is strictly speaking inaccurate since composers were also banned
who were never in exile, such as Franz Schreker or even Felix
Mendelssohn; nor could it be applied to composers or musicians
murdered in Nazi death camps, since they too were not exiled, but
deported and interned. Exile is a term that allows a wide-ranging
genre to be classified without resorting to the Nazi word ‘entartet’,
usually translated as ‘degenerate’, but more accurately meaning
‘deformed’. Paradoxically, the term ‘entartet’ was conceived by the
Zionist doctor and philosopher Max Nordau in 1892 in his publication
Entartung. What the Nazis banned and persecuted goes beyond
strict classification because it covered everything from popular
music, cabaret and operetta to applied music, the avant-garde,
concert works and opera. By evading Nazi terminology and resorting
to the euphemistic notion of ‘exile music’, they placed the real music
of exile into a perpetual no man’s land. It was classified as music
written by exiles, but rarely examined as ‘exile music’.
When music and exile are considered, it is usually the nineteenth
century that comes to mind. One need only think of Chopin or
Wagner as examples. Their sense of identity was tied to a specific
concept of national self-determination. The idea of returning home
through music is not new. In the nineteenth century, however, the
idea of ‘home’ was most often replaced by ‘homeland’. This
difference becomes apparent with every performance of a Chopin
polonaise or mazurka. It is music that expresses defiance rather
than loss. Yet the nineteenth-century desire for national self-
determination, defined by homogeneous communities collected into
nation states, was different from the experiences of composers and
musicians forced to flee Nazi Europe. The subversive nationalists of
the nineteenth century, living abroad and pitching themselves
against supranational foreign rulers, were not comparable with
musicians and composers in the mid-twentieth century, oppressed
because of what victims saw as religious persecution, and what
oppressors saw as ‘racial cleansing’.
A political refugee has a sense of identity and homeland that is
different from the Jewish composer or musician who is told they are
no longer part, and indeed, have never been part of the national
narrative. To object to such mendacity and insist on defiantly
refusing to leave one’s homeland would prove tantamount to suicide.
It is here that we see an important difference: the political exile
leaves for reasons of conscience; the persecuted Jew flees the
genocide of ‘ethnic cleansing’. The hurt and indignation of being told
one does not, and can never, belong to the communities in which
one has lived for generations, is often translated into an even
stronger sense of entitlement. Anger and a coming to terms with
injustice were frequently expressed in works consigned to desk
drawers in distant countries. This is music that springs from a deep
need to demonstrate birthright, along with the necessity to
accommodate new and complex situations and the bewilderment of
learning strange new languages. This is not just music written by
exiles, this is indeed the music of exile.
It was on a visit in San Diego, California, to see the Viennese-
born composer Robert Fürstenthal2 that I first stumbled on a
hitherto unresolved discrepancy between music written by successful
composers in former homelands and the aesthetic and stylistic
changes required in countries where they found refuge. Fürstenthal
was not a composer prior to his arrival in the United States in 1939,
but a casual comment he made regarding his need to maintain a
cultural identity, threatened by displacement, was revealing. He first
came to my notice while I was working as music curator at Vienna’s
Jewish Museum, when I received copies of manuscripts sent by the
Hugo Wolf Society. Its representative told me about an American
composer, formerly from Vienna, who so admired Hugo Wolf that his
compositions, including string quartets, chamber works and Lieder,
could be seen as something of an extension of Wolf’s own music. I
assumed this would have been a composer born around 1870, or
perhaps 1880, and was not prepared when it turned out to be
Robert Fürstenthal, an accounts auditor living in San Diego and born
in Vienna in 1920. Several years later, having left the Museum and
co-founded the Exilarte Center with the professor of theory Gerold
Gruber, I had an opportunity to meet Robert Fürstenthal and his
Viennese wife in San Diego. It was there that he said something that
unexpectedly clarified my perspective and perhaps explains the
provenance of this book. When asked why he had over the previous
decades continued to compose in the manner of Hugo Wolf, Gustav
Mahler, Richard Strauss and Joseph Marx, he answered, ‘Wenn ich
komponiere, bin ich wieder in Wien’ – ‘When I compose, I’m back in
Vienna.’ This concept of ‘return’ while composing in new homelands
was the spark that over time began to offer explanations for a
number of questions and paradoxes encountered while going over
the works of other, more established composers.
Fürstenthal was too young to have lived in the Vienna of Mahler
and Wolf. But this was the Vienna to which he returned when he
composed. To quote Orson Welles, ‘The true Vienna lover lives on
borrowed memories. With a bittersweet pang of nostalgia, he
remembers things he never knew. The Vienna that is, is as nice a
town as there is. But the Vienna that never was is the grandest city
ever.’3 Alternatively, as the philosopher Ernst Bloch put it, ‘Homeland
is a place where nobody has been, but is present in every memory
of childhood.’4
This book looks at the attempts to explore the more intimate
conflicts arising from the loss of homeland and identity, and the
need to return and often to heal, as expressed in music. It would of
course be a task of many volumes to cover every composer or
musician who fled Hitler and the Nazis. The selection of composers
to profile and the contexts in which they lived and worked is perhaps
arbitrary and subjective, but behind every one of these figures –
some well-known and established, others totally forgotten – stand
many others. The selection made for this book should be seen as
representative rather than comprehensive. It is not my intention to
profile every significant composer forced into exile, but to describe
the varied experiences of exile that can then be applied to different
individuals. For that reason, this is not meant to be read as a lexicon
of composers, but a selection of lives and experiences of exile, from
which others may be extrapolated. By describing different aspects
and experiences of exile, we often encounter the same composer in
different chapters. If each composer was to be treated individually,
then this work would have indeed become closer to a lexicon than
an examination of different aspects of music exile.
In my forty-odd years as a recording producer, it was my good
fortune to meet, work and come to know a number of musical
survivors. If I do not reference every analysis made by countless
academic colleagues, it is because I am presenting my own
conclusions, drawn from my own experiences. I was lucky that my
professional life would dovetail with working with this generation of
exceptional musicians, performers and composers. As Music Curator
at Vienna’s Jewish Museum and then as co-founder of the Exilarte
Center at Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts (the
former Music Academy where so many of the subjects discussed in
this book studied or taught), I met their families and heard their
stories. Interviews undertaken by many composers and musicians
with German and Austrian broadcasters would inevitably offer a
more candid appraisal of their individual experiences of loss.
Interviews conducted for media or oral history projects in new
homelands were more inclined to emphasise the gratitude that
composers and musicians felt at being given a second chance, even
if it meant losing what they had already accomplished. It is with
these interviews to hand that I have been able to compile and
organise the various complex categories and experiences that are
presented in this book.
My thanks go to my colleagues mentioned in the dedication along
with the many individuals who have followed, along with young
students who have proven that the restitution of these legacies is
relevant. Tanya Tintner has been a close friend and challenging
editor. She has lived through many of the issues described and her
input always went beyond correcting spelling and punctuation. But
other friends who read the manuscript searching for typos and
inconsistencies also need mentioning, such as Evelyn Chan and my
neighbour, the now retired Professor Christopher Taylor. I’m also
enormously grateful to Yale University Press’s team of Julian Loose
and Frazer Martin, along with their invaluable, one-to-one editor,
Richard Mason. Above all, however, my thanks go to the families
who held on to the musical estates of their forebears kept in
basements, in lofts and under beds until they believed they had
found an archive and research centre that could understand and
honour the legacies of parents and grandparents who had worked,
performed and composed in lost homelands.
All translations are by myself unless otherwise stated.

Michael Haas
May 2023
 Introduction

S
cholars who specialise in music during the Hitler years frequently
reach for the term ‘inner emigration’. It was a formulation
conceived by the writer Frank Thiess1 in August 1945 in response to
Thomas Mann, who had spent the years of the Nazi dictatorship in
Switzerland and the United States. Thiess, though not sympathetic
to the Nazis, had nonetheless chosen to remain in Germany. Its
relevance to musicians usually refers to composers who either
withheld their works from performance in Nazi-occupied Europe,
such as Karl Amadeus Hartmann, or who, like Walter Braunfels, lived
in secluded isolation. There were composers such as Max Butting,
Felix Petyrek or Eduard Erdmann who were not in sympathy with
Hitler, but found they needed to join the NSDAP2 if they wished to
continue a career as performer or teacher. Their works were, if not
directly banned, often tacitly removed from performance schedules.
The concept of ‘Cultural Bolshevism’ hovered over works composed
by those who were former members of the left-wing November
Group. Joining the NSDAP, even if seen as an expedient means of
continuing a professional existence, would cost them dearly after the
war. In the shadow of genocide, any concessions to the Nazis, even
those made by people with few or no options to emigrate, were seen
as damaging and viewed as being, at the very least, a form of
complicity. Over time, more sympathy has emerged for these
composers as it has been recognised that not everyone could leave,
even if they wanted to. Also, such dilemmas need to be seen in light
of the fact that refugee quotas in many countries were already filled
with Jews. Musicians who hated the Hitler regime but were
otherwise not politically exposed would have taken places needed by
Jewish musicians who would have been murdered had they
remained in countries controlled by the Nazis.
Thus, the logical inverse of ‘inner emigration’ becomes
‘immigration’ or flight to another country. It refers largely to
composers and musicians who would have been most exposed had
they remained. ‘Inner emigration’ for them would have meant
waiting for deportation to a certain death. These were usually Jewish
musicians, or musicians deemed Jewish by Nazi race laws, or
composers who had written works that were publicly discredited by
the new regime, such as Ernst Krenek or Paul Hindemith. Both
Jewish and politically exposed composers would experience
persecution and the full brunt of expulsion. What Jewish musicians
experienced, however, was very different: a loss of identity. The
Nazis had quite deliberately removed two layers of identity: the one
that allowed Jews to be culturally German, and the one that allowed
anyone to be nationally Austrian, following Austria’s annexation by
Nazi Germany in March 1938. For many musicians, being an Austrian
Jew, therefore, was to lose all sense of who you were. Countries
offering refuge had been too quick in shrugging off the loss of
Austria’s sovereignty, and considered all refugees from Austria as
Germans, for which there were set quotas. The Nazis, on the other
hand, had removed German citizenship from all Jews. Those
expelled for political reasons, or those who left because they could
not live under the Nazi regime, would never be compelled to deny
their sense of national or cultural identity. For that reason, this book
takes as its premise the idea that ‘inner return’ is the more accurate
inverse of ‘inner emigration’. It is the restoration of identity, and
sense of belonging, that was officially removed by a criminal regime.
It is the ‘restitution’ of self. If what Hitler decreed was accepted
internationally and Austrians were classified as Germans, but Jews
were not allowed to be Germans, then it should come as no surprise
that resistance and a need to return was most often expressed in
works confined to the desk drawer.
 Although refuge was also found in the Far East and South
America, most countries offering a safe haven for escaping
musicians were English-speaking, and given the vast colonial
heritage of Great Britain, most of these English-speaking countries
were ‘New World’ and strange to Central Europeans. If they spoke a
second language, it was most likely French rather than English. New
World countries came with different cultural priorities and traditions
demanding considerable accommodation. Performances of new
music from Germany conducted by Otto Klemperer would have been
met with bemused, polite interest by audiences in Los Angeles rather
than the enthusiastic admiration, or pink-faced indignation, of
audiences in Berlin. At some point, attempts to ignite the same
reactions and discourses in new homelands would come across as
patronising. Americans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders
had very different ideas regarding new music and, while welcoming
the wisdom, skills and depth of knowledge offered by refugees,
chose their own direction of cultural travel, often rejecting their
underpinning Old World values. Musical developments in Europe may
have illustrated moves from tonality to atonality, from consonance to
dissonance, from the subjective to the objective; but to many pre-
war New World audiences they came across as abrupt ruptures.
Over the last decades, a number of British and American books
have been published about the positive contributions made to the
cultural lives of countries that offered refuge to the artists, writers,
composers and performers exiled by Hitler’s ‘Third Reich’.3 These
studies have generally been triumphalist in perspective, underlining
the gains made by countries that took in Hitler’s unwanted Jews and
dissidents. Few have stopped to examine the losses that individual
composers and performers experienced. The overall theme of these
books was that Hitler’s refugees came to new pastures and were
hugely successful to the benefit of themselves as well as to their
new homelands. These examinations did not ignore stylistic or
aesthetic changes that took place, but too infrequently questioned
what these changes might have cost the individual. Nor did these
examinations tend to take much account of an inner urge to return
to symphonic, sonata and quartet composition from composers who,
prior to immigration, had assumed these forms to be superseded.
Comments about changes of style and aesthetics were put down to
the needs of communicating with new publics in new countries, but
few, unless writing about Arnold Schoenberg, asked what these
changes cost musicians artistically and whether these changes were
organic, or made out of existential necessity.4 If Schoenberg was
presented more objectively, it was because of his undisputed
importance in moving music away from the diatonic, a crucial
development in twentieth-century music that would germinate much
of the post-war avant-garde.
Missing answers to previously unasked questions start to become
more pressing. For example, if Erich Wolfgang Korngold was such a
successful film music composer, why did he leave Hollywood as soon
as the war was over? Why is this period in his life so briefly covered
in the memoirs of his wife Luzi Korngold, and why are his film
scores, for which he is justifiably famous, so casually dismissed in
family correspondence? He and other refugees made indisputable
contributions to a fledgling industry, empowering it with their music
at least as much if not more than even the most glamorous movie
star. As John Mauceri argues in his book The War on Music, they
represented an organic transition from one century to the next.5 Yet
to Korngold, Ernst Toch, Erich Zeisl and others, what started out as
an exciting experiment with a new medium became a means of
survival and a limitation of possibilities of artistic development. The
inability to move into other genres during the war was
unquestionably seen by Korngold and his family as a rupture.
Britain is deservedly proud of having taken in a number of
musical refugees including the composers Hans Gál and Egon
Wellesz, both highly successful opera composers before 1938. Their
contributions to post-war British scholarship can hardly be contested.
Much of Britain’s early music research may be traced back to Wellesz
while Gál is remembered today as a co-founder of the Edinburgh
Festival and guiding spirit at Edinburgh University’s music
department. Other than an opera by Wellesz, written as a
submission for a competition held by the Arts Council of England,
neither composer would write another opera. Nor would they ever
hear another note of any of their operas that had previously enjoyed
regular performances in German and Austrian houses. Their lives
had been saved, but their legacies lost. Much of the music composed
in new homelands, often in the privacy of their studios, may be seen
as attempts to find connections between past and current situations.
Perhaps Hans Gál’s arid 24 Preludes and Fugues, composed for
himself in the 1980s and 1990s, can be taken as an example.
Another example might be Karol Rathaus, a composer whose
success in Berlin during the interwar years can hardly be
overestimated. As nearly 1,000 letters held in the archive of
Universal Edition attest, he was one of Germany’s headline
composers.6 His operas and ballets were performed at Berlin’s State
Opera; his orchestral works were performed by the Berlin
Philharmonic and conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. Rathaus’s
collaboration with Alfred Döblin briefly threatened the hegemony of
Brecht and Weill; Rathaus was the first classical composer to write a
film score. He remained successful as a composer of film music in
Paris and London after fleeing Berlin in 1933. He even composed a
ballet, which was performed at the Royal Opera House, Covent
Garden.7 When war threatened Europe, he managed to save himself
and his family, taking a low-paid job in a recently founded college on
New York’s Long Island. From the moment his worldly possessions,
still in London, were destroyed by a German V2 rocket in 1940, he
devoted himself to teaching and building up the music department
of Queens College in New York. Rathaus never spoke of his past to
any of his students and he avoided contact with former colleagues
and friends who were successfully conducting concert and opera
performances in nearby Manhattan.
Yet all of these composers continued to write music. Sometimes
it was didactic material for local educational authorities, at other
times it was an attempt to present themselves in a more exposed
context to local audiences; but very often it was simply for
themselves and their desk drawer, or even more occasionally, for
places of worship.
Since establishing the Exilarte Center, we have looked for lost
musical estates beyond the obvious countries of exile. It has taken
us to the Far East, the South Pacific, Central and South America. Of
course, we have also taken in a number of ‘orphaned’ estates from
North America and Great Britain. If the estates were of composers, it
has been surprising to see how many wrote music for themselves,
friends and family, without any intention of having it published.
Other works that these composers did intend for wider dissemination
were often stylistically distinct from what they had composed before,
though there was little accompanying information as to why or how
these changes had been made. Only a hint in a letter might offer an
explanation. The reasons for such changes can only be surmised. As
we so often heard from their surviving children and grandchildren,
these composers were grateful for simply having been able to
survive.
Yet many composers felt that Hitler had successfully smothered
their European creativity. Moreover, it wasn’t only composers and
musicians who were lucky enough to flee from the Nazis, it was also
their audiences with whom they were engaged in a creative
dialogue. The public reception of new works was just as important in
music’s European development as the creativity of individual
composers. With both public and composers severely constrained,
exiled creativity was forced to turn to new audiences. Dialogues with
new audiences were difficult to establish. Kurt Weill’s successes on
Broadway must stand as a singular exception, but do we know that
he fully understood his creative conversation with New York’s public,
and was he in full command of his dialogue with them? Or was he
writing works in the blind hope they would be understood and
appreciated? His early death at the age of fifty precluded any certain
answers to such questions. In any case, Lys Symonette, a singer
close to Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, told the author that it was ‘the
pain of losing Germany and the German language that killed him’.9 A
weak heart and smoking would not have helped Weill’s chances, but
we cannot know the degree and nature of the stress that ultimately
took his life. There is no ‘like-with-like’ comparison available, as he
was the only refugee from Nazi Europe who arrived in America and
went on to make a success on Broadway. Can we assume he did not
give a second thought to the composers who had been equally
successful in Germany before Hitler, who then found themselves
struggling in American exile? Composers such as Paul Benatzky,
Friedrich Hollaender, Emmerich Kálmán, Paul Abraham and Jaromír
Weinberger represented different genres of Central European light
musical theatre. They nevertheless enjoyed enormous success in
Europe prior to emigration, and unlike Weill, did not manage to
replicate their successes and continue their artistic development in
America. Weill must have felt like a lottery winner surrounded by
needy relatives.

1. Richard Strauss rehearsing the Vienna Symphony Orchestra on 22 January

1929. Subsequent research carried out by Mark Latimer identified members of the
orchestra who were murdered or forced into exile. He also identified Nazi
facilitators and party members.8

Considering the output of composers prior to and post-

immigration into America, one can detect many consistent patterns
despite enormous stylistic differences. One of these patterns is the
need to reconnect to a place or a fundamental identity that is put in
question by transplantation. Sometimes it can be detected in a
certain choice of poetry for song settings, or a return to
quintessentially European forms. The return to classical ideas has
already been mentioned, but also the works written as exercises in
‘Aufarbeiten’ – a German word that means ‘coming to terms’, though
the German expression is active rather than passive. A more
complete translation of ‘Aufarbeiten’ would be ‘working one’s way
through to reality’. Other composers felt bludgeoned into accepting
racial and religious identities they had previously discarded, for
example embracing their long-forgotten Jewish faith or bypassing
confessional identities, embracing Zionism. Returning to a Jewish
identity, either confessional or political, was also an act of personal
restitution.
Music that was banned, forgotten, suppressed and then deemed
inappropriate for a post-Hitler Europe in need of re-education is too
stylistically varied in too many genres to be classified in one
category. The closest one can come to an umbrella term is the Nazi
word ‘entartet’, which is the worst possible solution to a complex
question of semantics. But so too is the classification ‘exile music’ or
Exilmusik. It is too vague and refers to the situation of individual
composers rather than the music they produced. The music of exile
was the means by which composers could return to a sense of inner
stability. Exile for composers thrown out of Hitler’s Europe meant
something broader than physical expulsion and was a loss of more
than place: it was a state of physical and mental transplantation. For
many composers, it could only be allayed through composing works
that suggested return and offered a sense of inner restitution. This
was more than just music written by composers forced by Hitler to
live in faraway exotic places. It makes its own statement. It is music
that could never have been written by a composer of the same
generation and hailing from the same homeland, but not forced into
exile. Nor is it music that a composer could have written who was
native-born in those countries that became new homelands for
refugees. The music of exile was a unique synthesis written by a
composer in a place to which they did not fully belong. As such, it
came across as too foreign for local audiences while remaining alien
to audiences in former homelands. It is music that, with its unique
synthesis emerging from displacement, deserves its own chapter
within the broader story of twentieth-century music.
 1

The ‘Hanswurst’ of Havoc

Damals . . . lachten wir über diesen Hitler. Ein Verrückter,

sagten wir, ein’ Hanswurst, ein Idiot; von der Sorte haben wir
viele. Produkte des Krieges. Gesundbeter und stigmatisierte
Jungfrauen und Propheten, Putschisten und Mörder und wer
weiß, was sonst noch alles. Aber ihre Zeit ist vorbei. Nach und
nach werden sie ja wohl zu sich kommen und den Mund
halten.

Back then . . . we laughed at this Hitler character. He was a

nut, we told ourselves, a provincial and an idiot – the likes of
many others knocking about at the time. He’s a product of the
War: Messianic healers, virgins with the stigmata and
prophets, revolutionaries, murderers and who knows what
else. But their time has come and gone. Slowly they’ll start to
sober up and shut up.
Memoirs of the writer and journalist Vicki Baum1

T
wo quite incompatible strands existed in Nazi cultural ideology.
One strand designated any modernist development that
nationalist arbiters found offensive under the vague classification of
‘Cultural Bolshevism’. The other strand of works deemed
‘undesirable’ was the result of something referred to as ‘race’, a
wildly misunderstood concept that was applied as freely to
nationalities as it was to non-European physiognomy and skin colour.
Nazi cultural arbiters conjoined these two disparate concepts by
surmising that only representatives of a foreign race could be
capable of producing or influencing works of ‘Cultural Bolshevism’.
Included in these pseudo-scientific concepts were romanticised
ideals of the German people as Europe’s dominant ‘race’. This view
had evolved during a time when Germany was not a unified nation
state but a network of German-speaking, self-governing units, some
of which were too small to qualify as anything more than a personal
‘estate’ (Liechtenstein), whereas others were large and powerful
kingdoms. The only idea that could unite this diverse group, each
speaking their variant dialect, was the German of Luther’s Bible,
along with medieval or Norse mythology. The mid-nineteenth
century was an age that produced the poems of Des Knaben
Wunderhorn and thousand-page novels about knights and castles by
authors such as Adalbert Stifter. It was an age that craved national
self-determination. The French had shown what advantages were to
be found in the cohesion of the nation state. As a result, there was
not a linguistic community in Europe that did not strive to achieve
the same status of nation-state sovereignty.
The default setting of Europe was rule by foreign emperors,
whether it was the nominal head of the German Confederation, until
1866 the Austrian Emperor, who also held large tracts of Central
Europe, Italy and the Adriatic – or the French. The rulers of Europe
came from a limited number of aristocratic families evenly divided
between Catholics and Protestants. Protestants ruled in Great
Britain, much of Germany, Holland and Scandinavia, and Catholics
ruled the rest of Europe, including much of southern Germany and
Austria. It was incomprehensible to most Europeans that a continent
of nation states based on communities who spoke the same
language and practised the same religion was possible. At the same
time, such a Europe that used these markers for self-determination
could not avoid the pseudo-science emerging around Darwinism,
eugenics and the concept that certain commu­nities in Europe had
developed in particular ways because of some mysterious physical
component. One saw it in cattle, why shouldn’t it apply to people as
well? Racism had risen its very ugly head and would continue to
reverberate throughout the following century. It was one of the
driving philosophies behind German aggression in the First World
War, and with Europe’s new settlement of nation states, tidily
organised into self-contained republics, it would become an even
more deadly component of political philosophy leading into the
Second World War. The homogenised nation state had no use for the
Emperor as a unifying element in a network of disparate peoples.
Language and religion were all that were necessary. Such limiting
criteria inevitably led to debates as to who could belong and who
should be excluded. Early twentieth-century racism was the
malevolent shadow of new nationhood. Jews, Roma and Sinti all
found themselves vulnerable to exclusion, as were any number of
individuals deemed incompatible with the racial ideal.
Liberal constitutions in both Germany and Austria-Hungary
towards the final quarter of the nineteenth century had granted all
citizens, including Jews, full emancipation with the freedom to live
and work without hindrance. Individual rights had to be fought
through courts and parliaments, such as the right for Jews to marry
non-Jews or the right to attend or teach in universities or join the
military or civil service. By the start of the twentieth century, legal
equality had been achieved, but social prejudice continued. For some
antisemites, Jews were antagonistic to Christianity and had been
murderers of Christ. Unless they converted, they were condemned
by God. To others, Jews were representative of an outside interest,
another nation and therefore another ‘race’. They could convert all
they wanted. It would never result in the Jew becoming a fellow
citizen. As Richard Wagner wrote, ‘The Jew could no more become a
German than an African could become a white European.’2
This concept of ‘foreign’ would be extrapolated into making Jews
responsible for every modernist development in the twentieth
century, all of which were deemed as ‘non-German’. Perhaps this
was the greatest and most damaging of all racist lies. Far from being
behind movements that wished to tip over the apple carts of
convention, Jews were assimilating and had subsumed conventions
so thoroughly that they initially showed a reluctance to deviate from
them. The most popular genres exploded with Jewish creativity, a
thorn in the flesh of the antisemite. If Jews were behind the most
popular songs, the most popular operettas, that could only have a
negative influence on the purity of the German non-Jew. This
disregarded the fact that large communities of Jews had lived in
what would become Germany before the arrival of Teutonic tribes
and had intermarried with locals for millennia. The Russian Empress
Catherine the Great may have confined Jews in her realm to the
strip of the Empire called the Pale of Settlement, but it did not make
them any less a European people. They were simply a non-Christian
European people, something that disturbed Catholic, Orthodox and
Protestant clergy and the uneducated masses even more.
Nevertheless, the Eastern European, as opposed to the German, Jew
was usually seen as a shtetl Jew, or a Jew from the ghetto, and no
matter how educated and assimilated, the traces of accent and the
sound of their spoken language continued to betray them, even if
they were tall, blonde and blue-eyed.
This short excursion into German antisemitism is intended to
demonstrate the synthesis of nationalism, racism and avant le mot,
denunciations of ‘cultural appropriation’. The Jew was, according to
the nationalist antisemite (of which Richard Wagner was something
of a prototype), as incapable of composing a symphony or a sonata
as today’s claims that whites are incapable of writing from the
viewpoint of someone who is black, or a man is of writing from the
viewpoint of a woman. No matter how worthy, good and admirable
such a work might come across, it could only be viewed as imitation
and artificial. The closeness of ‘art’ to ‘artificial’ in English is even
closer in German, with the concepts being ‘Kunst’ and ‘künstlich’.3 All
art is by its nature artifice, even the Gesamtkunst works of Wagner.4
But racism, the draw of science, the traditions of religion all
conspired against anyone Jewish. If they were successful in
business, medicine and law, professions in which Jews were
particularly prominent, this was seen as an insidious rather than a
benevolent development emerging from the Liberal constitutions of
the late nineteenth century.
Antisemitism in the early years of the twentieth century,
camouflaged as nationalists protecting ‘native’ German culture, had
become ingrained in the public discourse, with even Jewish writers
and critics disparaging Jewish composers.5 When dissonance was
left unresolved in music, it must have been the fault of a Jewish
composer, since no ‘German’ (i.e. non-Jewish) composer would
dream of such a thing . . . pace Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and of
course Richard Strauss. The same view was held in questions of
departures from tonality, or the transition from artistic subjectivity to
objectivity. All of these departures and deviations were ‘non-
German’, and it was easy for German antisemites to make German
Jews into scapegoats.6 The German Jew could never win, could
never fit in, and could never be allowed to participate or contribute
to the narrative of German culture. Those who did, such as Heinrich
Heine or Felix Mendelssohn, were simply denounced as frauds and
their admirers were told they had been taken for fools, incapable of
seeing the deceit.
But Jews were crucial to German culture and tacitly accepted by
even the likes of Richard Wagner, whose final opera Parsifal was
given over to the Jewish conductor Hermann Levi. Heine’s poems
had been set by every important composer in the nineteenth century
and even Wagner’s Flying Dutchman can cite Heine as its original
source. No amount of antisemitism could remove the appeal of
Offenbach’s operettas, Meyerbeer’s operas, or the overwhelming
popularity of Mendelssohn. Nathan the Wise may not have been
written by a Jew, but Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s play demonstrated
Jewish entitlement. Because of intermarriage and assimilation, some
of the greatest writers of the German language would later be
wilfully suppressed, and their books burned. No matter how great
their poetry, how compelling their plays or popular their novels, they
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