About this Blog
In 2013, I published Forbidden Music – the Jewish Commposers Banned by the Nazis with Yale University Press. Ten years later, also published by Yale University Press, I wrote what was effectively its sequel: The Music of Exile. The blog was initially begun to highlight the cultural loss that resulted not just from the years 1933-1945, but for the following decades as well. The years of Adolf Hilter’s dictatorship were so murderous it was assumed an entirely new culture would be required to educate Europeans away from the racism and nationalism that had so bloodied the first half of the century. Sadly but inevitably, such re-educational efforts only resulted in the suppression of the already suppressed. Jews who had been so central to pre-war European culture found themselves in the crosshairs of those who believed it was European culture that had led to the cataclysm in the first place. A new culture was required that represented the opposite of the nationalism of nineteenth century. If Jews, along with other composers of their generation wrote music that was quintessentially German or French or Italian in character – or perceived to represent such characteristics, their music had to remain locked away so that inflated views of the exceptionalism of one people, one country, one religion or one language would never again be allowed to flourish.
Paradoxically, the one Jewish composer who was able to establish the foundation for such a ideal new world of artistic endeavour was Arnold Schönberg, and equally paradoxically, many of his most ardent followers were themselves not Jewish. Since they had started to compose music that was demanding and perceived as antagonistic to audiences, Hitler banned them as “cultural Bolsheviks”. Their works were black-listed and those who could, left the country. Perhaps it was the residual antisemitism of the age, but with the end of the war, it wasn’t Arnold Schönberg or any of the Jewish avant-garde who were taken as the model for the music of the new post-war age, but his non-Jewish followers. These included Anton Webern, Alban Berg and indirectly, Ernst Krenek – all three were great masters of their time with only Krenek living to experience the fullness of developments during the following decades. Yet one awkward truth remained unspoken, unreferenced and locked away like the mad woman in the attic in Jane Eyre. Jewish composers were rarely part of the avant-garde. Their post-war neglect following their Nazi years of persecution was not so much due to active antisemitism, but because they did not fit comfortably in a post-war re-education operation, a project that (again) paradoxically had grown out of the thoughts, advice and philosophy of another persecuted Jewish musician: Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno.
What emerged was that culture and politics are not isolated from one another. Culture is a mirror that reflects society, yet politics is society’s engine. There can be no politics without the ignition key of society, but once revved up, politics transports society to new places with the arts catching their reflections. To give an example from what was cited above: Jews tended to shun the avant-garde in the early twentieth century because of where they were on the assimilation trajectory, not because they weren’t natural “early adaptors”. The political circumstances that allowed the integration of Jews into European society were at a point when Jews who remembered days of restrictions felt the need to conform in order to be accepted. After the horrors of two world wars, conformity was what was perceived to have brought the world closer to the apocalypse.
Since 2013, this blog has attempted to draw these diverse strands together. When I write about a composer, I include a good deal about the ambient politics shaping his or her life and music. Sometimes, I only post on music and sometimes, I only post on politics because even if history doesn’t repeat itself, it does rhyme, as Mark Twain wisely observed.
Michael Haas
