Book Review: Forbidden Music

Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazisby Michael HaasYale University Press, 2013The catalog of Nazi evils is endless, virtually self-replicating. Every new historical inquiry reveals them to have been just a little bit worse than we previously thought, and the jolts are only worsened by the Nazi knack for cloaking iniquities in bland bureaucratic language.A perfect case-in-point is something called “The Re-Establishment of the Professional Civil Service.” Passed in April, 1933, it banned from any publicly subsidized position all Jews who could not prove they were combat veterans of the First World War. The Civil Service act is the first pebble in the avalanche Michael Haas chronicles in his dark, gripping new book Forbidden Music, because, as he writes, "This law hit orchestras, operas houses, and theaters particularly hard." The Jews who made up such a large part of the German artistic world – highly educated and thoroughly assimilated Jews who were themselves patriotic Germans – thus felt one of the first constrictions of the vise that would eventually drive so many of them into exile and so many of them into death camps from which they never returned. In sharply written and comprehensively researched prose, Haas details the workings of that inexorable vise, focusing on a handful of classical musicians whose worlds were upended by the rise of National Socialism.Ernst Toch, Erich Zeist, Egon Wellesz, Hans Gal, Erich Korngold, Franz Schreker, Walter Braufels, Hanns Eisler, Leo Fall … these were accomplished, talented musicians and composers who were attacked, banned, or banished by the Nazis, and Haas provides the best single volume on the nature of their fates ever written in English. He very properly grounds his study in the long and dispiriting history of German anti-Semitism, spending time, for instance, with one of its most prominent artistic architects:

Wagner was arguably more accurate in his view that Jews would eventually undermine the essential moral fabric of German cultural than he could have known. Nazi anti-Semitism, much of which was inspired by Wagner himself, had driven non-Jewish Germans to perform acts of cultural barbarity that would bankrupt for generations any ethical legacy by its greatest writers, artists, and philosophers.

This is direct, refreshingly subtle stuff, and it runs throughout Forbidden Music, constantly prodding the narrative into steeper discourse, consistently avoiding easy or facile answers to some of the hardest questions, including one at the heart of his subject: to what extent – and in what ways – does banishment matter to an artist? On this “crucial point” of how environment can affect creativity, Haas again plays against any reflexive expectation of happy endings:

Whether adversity and a stressful environment are themselves the catalysts of creativity must remain a thorny, albeit rhetorical question. The circumstantial evidence offered by many exiled composers suggests that the transplantation of talent is rarely successful unless the artists have the resources to reinvent themselves in ways that are compatible with their new surroundings.

Those resources of course varied wildly from artist to artist, as Haas is quick to point out by summoning one of the most famous examples of German creativity in exile, world-renowned novelist Thomas Mann, and how different was his case from most of Haas’ subjects:

Mann certainly did not depend exclusively on an American public to guarantee readership. But music is an experience shared by an audience in a fixed place. At this time, music was usually only recorded if it had already established its popularity in the concert hall or the opera house. If the public did not respond, a composer's creativity either atrophied, as with Arthur Willner and Leopold Spinner, or went into overdrive in search of reinvention. This was the case with Toch, Rankl and arguably with Wellesz, all of whom embarked on a frenzy of symphonic composition.

It’s the symphonic compositions we’ll never hear that are the saddest part of this very sad book. The heartbreaking case of 22-year-old Robert Dauber, who died at Dachau one year after writing the only piece of his music we have, his Serenade for violin and piano (Haas calls it “delightful yet disturbing”), stands in for all the lives cut similarly short and all the beautiful music the future will never get to savor. The poignancy of it all is perfectly conveyed by Haas:

It is a bitter irony that the Austro-German music tradition held in such high esteem by the third generation of emancipated, assimilated Jews was last heard wafting across the tundra and barbed wire of Eastern Europe's death camps, played by desperate inmates, most of whom would not survive.

For the strong of heart, Forbidden Music is most urgently recommended.