An Aesthetic Debate of 1951: Comment on a Text by Hanns Eisler

Abstract

published it under the title Letter to West Germany at the end of 1951 in the East German journal Sinn und Form (issue 6). Both the Federal Republic, founded in August, 1949, and the German Democratic Republic, founded shortly thereafter, were two years old. Just one year previous to this, in August of 1948, Andrei Zhdanov, the dominant Soviet cultural politician, died in Moscow. It was at this time that Hanns Eisler travelled from Vienna to the Polish city of Wroclaw to participate in the International Congress in Defense of Culture. The spirit of Zhdanov was present there, too, in the form of Alexander Fadejev, the talented Soviet writer, who was then a member of the Bolshevist Central Committee and who later committed suicide. He read an attack (approved by Zhdanov before he died) against Sartre and other western writers, calling them hyenas of the typewriter. Stalin had still a few more years to go, until 1953. He was very much alive when Eisler drafted his Letter to West Germany. This historical constellation can help us understand the concept of Eisler's letter, for it is a letter written with great cunning. Actually, it is not one of the musician's best literary works. It definitely cannot be compared to his book about composing music for film written in collaboration with T.W. Adorno, nor with the excellent essay on aesthetics, Dummheit in der Musik (Ignorance in Music), which also appeared in Sinn und Form. Nevertheless, Eisler's Letter to West Germany had a greater influence on the general aesthetic discussion of this time than any of his other critical essays, particularly in Eastern Europe. At the beginning of 1950, Eisler moved to East Berlin where he became a member of the Academy of Arts and professor of composition at the Music Conservatory. Before this he had been in America as an emigrant, that is, until September 24, 1947, when he was interrogated for three days by the House Committee for Un-American Activities (HUAC) and then deported from the U.S. in 1948. It was at the end of 1948, upon the initiative of Bertolt Brecht, that the Berliner Ensemble was founded in East Berlin. With Helene Weigel as administrative head, a collective was formed by important artists who shared the same political and aesthetic views. Among its members were Brecht, set-designers Caspar Neher and Teo Otto, actors Ernst Busch and Therese Giehse, and musicians Paul Dessau and Hanns Eisler.