A marvelous profile of the German master song composer and co-worker of Brecht’s written shortly before their exile from Sergei Tretyakov, a leading Soviet constructivist writer and editor of Pravda, later to be a victim of the Purges.

‘Hanns Eisler: Revolutionary Composer’ by Sergei Tretyakov from International Literature. No. 5. 1933-34.

A Soviet Writer About A German Musician

“Neue Welt”, The New World, is a large concert hall. The public is going forward in a mass. Active natures push forward, to progress some thirty steps in a quarter hour. Passive natures act as ballbearings to two streams, in and out going. The traffic does not demolish the bearings. Elbows are pressed to sides. Feet take care of the neighbor’s shoe shine. The most delicate excuses accompany each poke in the ribs.

That means, this is Germany.

Men’s necks are encompassed by stiff collars, but the fingers show labor, many nails are broken. The trousers show a pressed crease, but they are old. The shoes show wear, are shabby. The faces show an unhealthy skin, are grey, the foreheads—prematurely furrowed.

This is proletarian Germany.

In the corridors stand determined looking figures. The collars of their green shirts open at the neck, the pose—a dare! From black hat, sailor type, to varnished chin. At the gate, the black varnish of Shuppo napes, as Berlin policemen are called.

At booths in the corridor—books: Fadeyev’s Nineteen (the German title of Debacle), Ehrenburg, Reisner. On a cover, the familiar profile of Ludwig Renn. A hand stretches out over heads to take a new issue of Worker’s Theatre. A voice shouts: “Moskau Rundschau.”

There two friends are saying goodbye to each other with fists raised to their shoulders.

I turn to one:

“Sagen Sie…”

He pricks his ears severely: “Warum sagst du ‘Sie’?”

My companion intercedes:

In Moscow even communists often address one another so.

The young fellow turns round flashing a KIM button.

This is communist Germany. An entertainment for the benefit of the striking iron workers.

The chairman has on a blue shirt, wears no coat.

The orchestra is conducted by a man with an accordion.

The red spokesman—the German Blue Blouse is presenting a number in which physical culture movements are interwoven with demonstration shouts. After the Blue Blouse—treaders, dancers. Then the chairman announces two names.

Bush and Eisler.

The names are met by the thunder of hands gone mad. A noise of applause as if elephants had stampeded in brushwood. The newsboys are silent. The vendors from the booths stretch their necks. Leaning on the backs of those before them, columns bend forward to have at least a view of the stage.

The singer Bush. Again coatless. Hands in pockets. An air of independence. That’s how young German workers like to stand and look laughingly at the gentleman in a top hat, a little hard of breath, who tries, somewhat alarmed, to hurry past them in order to ring at the front entrance of his house where an enameled plate reads: “Entrance for ladies and gentlemen only. Servants and messengers use the back door.”

Nothing about Bush recalls the full dress of the singer, the starched shirt, or the roll of notes in hand.

At the piano a little gnome, with a big head dazzlingly bald, and trousers that fall in accordion folds to his feet.

Hans Eisler the composer of the songs Bush will sing.

I have never heard such diction and phrasing as Bush gives. Not a word is muffled by the melody. It is hardly clear at first whether it is a song or just an intimate talk, an ironic tale making fun of the enemy.

For instance, a song about the naive Negro Jim who wants to know why there are two compartments in a car: one for whites—another for blacks. Or another one with the melody tender as a sentimental romance, with all the naivete of a little Gretchen, with tightly plaited hair—and the audience sputtering with laughter, because the song is about a June radish, red on the outside and white throughout, and only the last couplet reveals that the radish—is the Social Democrat.

There is a song of the English striking miners. A threatening song. At once a march and a warning around the words of a genuine miners song.

The song of an unemployed. Exhausted, worked out, sucked out of life blood and. disillusioned to the limit, shouting ready for a last explosion when he will tear out: cobblestones from the pavement with his fingers. And in the midst of this cry, a parody on a sentimental school song.

The irony is not only in the words—it is in the music. There is a song about Christmas, where the church choral is turned into a brazen, self-satisfied howl, recalling the caricatures of Grosz where the average respectable German is shown as the limit of meanness.

A song of philanthropists with the chorus: “Yes, this is the pfennig, but what has happened to the mark?”

And the threatening, final shout: “Fight!”

Bush and Eisler come out to bow, go away and come again to bow. Until tired of going they render another song.

The workers ask for their favorite songs. The call for Seife (Soap) is heard oftenest.

Before the 1927 elections, the Social Democrats distributed cakes of soap with the words “Vote for S-D” stamped on them. Comrade Eisler wrote the little song them with the ironic chorus of Social Democrats singing:

We work up suds,
And soaping well
We wash our hands of everything.

To soap well, in a figurative sense, means to deceive cleverly in German.

Eisler is famous in two ways: Bush-Eisler, as a workers’ vaudeville pair; Brecht-Eisler-Dudov, as a dramatic group consisting of the dramatist Brecht, the composer Eisler, and the producer, Dudov.

Going to visit Eisler with Dudov, I already knew that he is terribly Bohemian—will promise anything and promptly forget, will lose his manuscripts, but there is a man in Vienna, called Ratz who carefully collects every line written by Eisler systemizes stores and publishes.

I found out that Eisler’s march Red Weding had a circulation, in phonograph record alone of 40,000 and that the march has become the militant song of those going to demonstrations and on barricades not only in Germany but also in Austria, Denmark Czecho-Slovakia, Holland, Switzerland.

From wide clean avenues, we turned off into narrow crooked alleys of old Berlin. We found our way through yards and gates in stone fences on which in sharp competition Rot Front and Heil Hitler, the five pointed star and the swastika, shouted at each other—traces of the recent election campaign.

The entrance to Eisler’s rooms was closed. Although we had called him on the telephone before, he had evidently forgotten. We started to whistle the tune of Red Weding loudly to call his attention on the fourth floor, to the fact that we had arrived.

It was cold autumn already. Through the closed window we could hear, in answer to our whistle, a Bach fugue.

If Hans has immersed himself in the piano you can be sure he will not hear a steam siren blown in his very ears.

We listened to Bach for a long while and continued to whistle until we hit some kind of pause.

Eisler looked at the music tenderly and extolled Bach. He was trying to find in him an ally in his struggle for a chorus in which the entire audience joins, instead of the contemporary practice of the stage performance and passively listening audience, a chorus of a high cultural order which welds people together, unites them in a common rhythm and one emotion—this Eisler was seeking in those days when the church was cultivating the chorus and drew the genius of the time to its aid.

The concert as musical amusement was obnoxious to Eisler from the start. From the beginning he used the stage to ridicule and sarcastically mock the melodic trance of the public, their philistine love of the sentimental and pathetic; known in German as kitch.

“You want to know what kitch is,” asked Eisler.

“I’ll explain. Here is your Russian kitch:”

And in a funny shaking voice he sings the melody of the Volga Boatman, and then another song, and to demonstrate more effectively its quality of kitch he sat down at the table, rested his head on a fist and with the other hand grabbed an imaginary glass of whiskey.

In 1925 he already put to music a series of newspaper clippings: A Marriage ad, A Children’s Song of a Little Girl who Lost Her Nose, Ad of Dogs for Sale. There were performers, as is customary at bourgeois concerts, in full dress and decollete, and then there was a scandal because in the perfumed concert hall the stench of the decaying scums of the capitalist city spread from these newspaper channels.

Eisler’s journalism appears not only in the text. His music is not merely an accompaniment. It is a sounding blow to bourgeois canons of sentimental song, naive tune, pompous march, because life has turned ugly and has hidden its mean mug in its tail.

Eisler’s music is not illustrative. Quite the reverse, it is often opposed to its text producing a sarcastic effect.

There are protests all over Germany against the infamous 218th paragraph prohibiting abortions. Forty thousand female corpses the victims of illegal abortions, is the yearly score.

Eisler writes to the words of Brecht a dialogue song of a working woman begging a physician, who stands strictly by the law to perform an abortion:

You will an excellent mother make
For our industry’s sake.
That’s what your womb is for.
But then you should be — hep—
Must watch your step.
Enough—the law’s the law.
Bear—and fool around no more.

This chorus is in the rhythm of a careless dance and the staid figure of the Herr Doctor in soup and fish steps out in the shameless steps.

Eisler sits down to the piano. He pats it with the palms of his small hands like a child pats the water in its tub. He doesn’t pedal, he stamps the pedal as if it were a vicious snake. He breathes loud in rhythm with the march. His voice is hoarse and passionate:

Eh, hosts, we are your guests.
Unasked we’re here.
Into our bones you pressed
Your crutches dear.
You said: false limbs are best—
And hand and foot surpass—
You said—blind folk in the dark
Push better than the rest.

In the neighboring room a clock ticks and the neat housewife, accustomed to the musical bedlam of her boarder (up to 11:30 when her husband goes to bed) brings in three cups of coffee which she serves on a low table. The surface of the coffee trembles as Eisler marches on with his cripples.

No matter. Let the other foot
Be also torn away—
But to the bosses’ necks
Our hands will find the way.
An army of stumps we are
On wooden claws that ply.
And stamping we bring news—
The world October’s nigh.

Eisler rises from the piano. He feels good. Like after a bath. His bald head shines. He tells how hard it is to work in one of the most backward branches of the cultural movement of the German proletariat—in the chorus circles. And he, Eisler, is the leader of the musical opposition.

Social Democracy has for forty years drilled the German worker in choral song which was to have occupied his leisure and raised him out of his grey and monotonous life. In 1927 workers’ choruses performed Beethoven’s solemn mass and the Social Democrats were triumphant and the Christian Socialists, Catholic and Lutheran priests hugging themselves: Let it be Beethoven—but it is a mass just the same, church singing, whose esthetic charm is after all very close to religious hypnosis.

The first communist songs broke into the Social Democratic concerts. Their programs were sentimental, sweetly ribald and on rare occasions vaguely revolutionary.

Forward, forward, toiling masses.

The communists, Eisler and his group, brought new, burning subjects to these concert stages. The songs became concrete and the musical quality of the new programs so high that after the very first communist concert in 1929 there came a stream of petty bourgeois fellow-travelers.

But the sealed cans of the concert hall were capable of muffling even communist song. Is it not strange that Eisler’s song beginning with the words: Sing on streets should be sung indoors systematically? The communist song could not stand this long and came out on the streets in demonstrations, strikes, and from the very first it was evident that songs which sounded well on the concert stage were ill suited to the open air. There it was in the sway of the musical turn of phrase and the tastes of megalomaniacs. On the streets, it had to be simpler, rougher, easier to learn, in rhythm with the marching step. But coming out on the street the song went into a “left deviation,” declared the hall banned—and this played right into the hands of reformist song.

So, correcting its error, communist song returned to the concert hall keeping its open air rhythm and the concreteness of its militant subjects. Thus the didactic play originated, of which the first sample was Highest Mede written by Brecht, music by Eisler produced by Dudov.

Highest Mede is the staging of a mass trial. It is the choral rendering of a trial before the control commission which gives its decision upon the report of four underground agitators who were compelled, for the sake of the cause, to do away with a fifth one, who too weak and undisciplined, put the cause of the party in danger.

The chorus not only puts questions to the reporting communists. It also sums up its opinion in choruses, one of the best of which is Hail the Party:

The individual has two eyes,
The Party has a thousand eyes.
The individual knows his moment,
The Party days and years embraces.
The Party sees the peoples of the Earth
The individual only his own block.

“These choruses,” says Eisler, “are not just musical compositions performed for listeners. They are a particular kind of political seminar on problems of party strategy and tactics. The members of the chorus work these problems out, but they do so in the easily remembered and attractive form of chorus singing. We built this play not for concerts. It is only a method of pedagogic work with students of Marxian schools and proletarian assemblies.”

On a special dais the four agitators appear and demonstrate before the chorus in consecutive stages the way things happened. They don half masks, yellow, with Chinese eyeholes, throw a rope over their shoulders and there is a group of Chinese coolies singing its barge hauler’s songs, while the soft hearted comrade forgets all about agitating and runs, instead, to put stones under the slipping feet of the hauling crew.

The agitation comes to naught. The foreman gets the others to quarrel with the comrade. The four comrades explain the mistake to him. The chorus sings a song—a fugue on a quotation from Lenin:

Wise is not the one that made no errors,
Wise the one that knows how to correct one.

Unlike the street song, the didactic play does not limit itself to primitive melody. It draws upon all the mastership of the composer and the entire technical armory of the modern concert. The play put anew the question, so recently ridiculed, of a broad canvas, only the canvas is not used as a screen for throwing on it figures of the imagination, but as a path that leads to communism.

The play intends to transform people. It is a process of revaluating the world. This is the slogan of the proponents of the didactic play.

Thus communist music becomes the heavy artillery of the battle for communism.

Eisler’s songs and melodies, like the first transient flames of a grand conflagration, flare up now in the hall, now cutting in on the gayety of the march in the streets, now in the classroom. And there men in lacquered helmets are already running, trying to put the fire out by means of rubber clubs, put them out by means of hooves of police: horses. Remember that Red Weding was written to the order of one of the agitprop troupes. These agitprop troupes and their entire repertory are strictly forbidden in Germany.

On a Berlin street I once saw how a big heavy guy in a green uniform and pince-nez tore into a group of small children, scattered them, slapping their cheeks. He slaps their cheeks and pulls their ears to put out the flame of an Eisler song the children had — started to sing.

Breche-Eisler-Dudor made a film Coulet-Vampe about the unemployed who settled in tents on the outskirts of the city and the great lesson of solidarity among the workers.

Whose street—this street?
Whose world—this world?

the militant song of the film asks and ends:

—But don’t forget—Solidarity.

The film was first cut, mutilated, then altogether prohibited. Eisler writes choruses about unemployed, about Murder Of a Peasant Revolution, but in one of these choruses are the words:

Place the red roosters
On monastery roofs.

Hence—Prohibited.

Eisler makes the music for the film Nobody’s Land. But in the film there is a chorus:

Worker and farmer, arm, grab your guns,
Keen the proletariat’s bayonet…

Hence—Prohibited.

Eisler visited the U.S.S.R. He went to Magnitogorsk and noted the songs of the migrating Cossacks, new songs, in which the word magnitka already figured, he saw how young communists build their blast furnace, and how a city grows up where yesterday blank fields stared.

He was thus preparing to write the music for Evens’ film Magnitostroy.

I remember an evening at the hotel Novo Moskovskaya. From the window the frozen Moscow river and the lights of the Kremlin could be seen. Eisler was walking about the room steering away from the gilt bentwood chairs. He was excited—only a half hour ago he finished a song. The trousers fell in accordion folds down to his heels. He sat down to the piano and, unbelievably distorting the Russian, sang in this language:

Urals, Urals!
Iron ore watch,
Urals, Urals!
Steep is mount Atac,
By the Party’s orders:
Pig iron must be got, must be got!

The sole hammers at the pedal. The hands strike the keys. The voice hoarsely ratchnes:

And the Komsomol has answered:
The blast furnace is hot.

In time to feet and hands, he violently shakes his head demanding that we join in. And together, in one chorus, to the consternation of the hotel management, we sing the concluding lines:

The lapse and shady blades
We fought with brigades,
Built and now erected stands
Magnitostroy.

Literature of the World Revolution/International Literature was the journal of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers, founded in 1927, that began publishing in the aftermath of 1931’s international conference of revolutionary writers held in Kharkov, Ukraine. Produced in Moscow in Russian, German, English, and French, the name changed to International Literature in 1932. In 1935 and the Popular Front, the Writers for the Defense of Culture became the sponsoring organization. It published until 1945 and hosted the most important Communist writers and critics of the time.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/international-literature/1933-34-n05-IL.pdf