Last night PBS aired "Solidarity Song," a documentary on the life of Marxist composer Hanns Eisler. (1898-1962). In tandem with last week's back-to-back profiles of Dashiel Hammett and Lillian Hellman, it gives you a glimpse into the kind of programming that was its original mandate. Created during the Vietnam War, PBS was intended to fill a gap in commercial programming for unpopular subjects. No other subject than the career of Hanns Eisler seems better suited for such programming.

Eisler was the son of a Jewish philosophy professor and his German working-class wife. Belief in socialism was shared by every member of the household, including Hanns's brother Gerhard who would become a powerful symbol in his own right of the clash between bourgeois society and the freedom to advocate unpopular ideas.

Eisler fought in the infantry during WWI and was seriously wounded. When he recovered, he started studies with Arnold Schoenberg, the father of 12-tone composition. While it is commonly understood that Alban Berg and Anton Webern were Schoenberg's most gifted followers, some musicologists include Eisler in this group. The reason that he is not is related to his break with what he considered "bourgeois" music. He turned his back on the world of the recital stage and began writing left-wing songs for the revolutionary movement. He said that the composer must not be a "parasite" but a "fighter".

Eisler's earliest collaborations were done with left-wing singer Ernst Busch. The songs were written for Communist Party rallies in the late 1920s in Germany. Eisler played the piano and Busch sang about the need for solidarity and resisting fascism. Goebbels commented that Eisler's music was one of the best propaganda weapons of the CP and urged the Nazis to find a way to counter him. Interestingly enough, the answer came in the form of Nazi marching band music that was copied from American Ivy League football rallies, which Hitler heard on records brought back to Germany from one of his henchmen who had been at Harvard.

In this period Eisler formed a strong professional and personal relationship with Bertolt Brecht. Their most important collaboration was on the 1932 anti-fascist movie Kuhle Wampe (To Whom Does the World Belong?), which was to be their last prior to Hitler's rise to power. The two came to America and like most German left-wing exiles developed a love-hate relationship to the country. They admired the energy and creativity of the popular culture, but hated the naked class oppression. When in NYC, Brecht and Eisler often took in 2 or 3 cops and robbers movies a day. While they claimed they were "researching American society", there is little doubt that they just dug a good James Cagney or Humphrey Bogart flick for its own sake--no Frankfurt School snobbery for them.

Both Brecht and Eisler eventually moved out to Hollywood, where Eisler became a successful film score composer for what he openly described as "schlock". He was part of the expatriate left-wing German social circle that included Thomas Mann and Leon Feuchtwanger. (John Russell Taylor, film critic for The Times of London, writes about this scene in "Strangers in Paradise"). Eisler enjoyed the Hollywood scene and often threw lavish parties that included his German comrades and left-wing figures such as bandleader Artie Shaw and his wife Ava Gardner, Charles Laughton, and Charlie Chaplin among others. While superficially appearing to enjoy his success, Eisler was depressed much of the time about Nazism and WWII. Like many depressed people, Eisler covered up his sadness by making jokes much of the time.

As soon as the witch-hunt began, Eisler and his brother Gerhard were singled out. The combination of xenophobia with red-baiting proved potent as German citizens fleeing fascism were transformed into de facto espionage agents. Another German émigré proved particularly useful in the campaign against the Eisler brothers, namely Ruth Fischer, who was a boneheaded ultraleft in the 1920s. She was continually colliding with Communist party leaders, who considered her an adventurist sectarian long before the rise of "third period" Stalinism. She eventually became the worst kind of Trotskyist, one that did not understand the need to not collaborate with the forces of repression.

The Eislers were deported to East Germany, where they were welcomed as heroes of the working-class. Hanns penned the national anthem for the new country and threw himself into teaching and composing. Unfortunately, he was never able to accommodate to the formalist prejudices of the Stalinist bureaucracy and was continually being lectured about the need to follow party line aesthetic principles. When he wrote an opera based on the Faust legend, he was summoned to hearings before party bosses who denounced his treatment as "petty-bourgeois".

Already embittered by this, Eisler's distance from official Communism would only deepen with the 1953 revolt which provoked Soviet armed intervention. He regarded the German and Soviet CP's as acting with bureaucratic stupidity. The final blow came with Khruschev's revelations in 1956 which had a catastrophic effect on him.

His last few years were spent in a drunken haze as he fought the depression over having been connected with a movement that could not make use of his talents. The problem Eisler and most talented intellectuals faced during the Soviet Thermidor is that the party leaderships were products of a general decline in the revolutionary movement, who lacked the practical and intellectual ability to lead the masses to the kind of socialism Lenin and Trotsky fought for.

Change The World - It Needs It

With whom would be the right minded man
Not sit down to help the right?
And what med'cine would taste too bad to a dying man?
And what baseness would you not commit
Could you rid the earth of all baseness?
And if in the end you change the whole world
For what task are you too good?

Sink down in the slime, embrace the butcher
But change the world: it needs it

Who are you?

(From the CD "Tank Battles: the songs of Hanns Eisler", sung by Dagmar Krause)

Louis Proyect