Creating with eyes wide open

EUGENE KAELLIS

“Oh, the shark has many teeth, dear.” (The Threepenny Opera)

In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy wrote that happy people are all alike; it is only the miserable who are unique. An uninspiring commentary that many would, nevertheless, say has been rendered true, not only individually but, more significantly, socially. The 12-year tenure of Nazi Germany, which, according to Hitler, was destined to become “the thousand-year Reich,” brought the world unprecedented and concentrated misery. If Tolstoy was right, these 12 years provided enough uniqueness to last at least a millennium.

The Weimar Republic, formed optimistically after the overthrow of the kaiser, was of only slightly longer duration than the Third Reich, from 1919 until 1933, when Hitler and the Nazis achieved full dictatorial powers.

Weimar’s brief and troubled existence, marked by growing street violence and assassinations, nonetheless was punctuated by a significant, if ephemeral, efflorescence in German cultural expression, much of it generated and expressed by Jews, especially in literature and music. It is significant that, in this period, German literature, art and music quickly abandoned the romanticism that had dominated it since the middle of the 19th century, to be transformed into an in-your-face realism that expressed itself by frequently slipping into frank, even brutal, cynicism. Graphic art in that period, for instance, was deliberately provocative, to the point of being almost offensively ugly.

It was during the Weimar period that Franz Schreker wrote nine operas, many with recurring Freudian themes; Erich Maria Remarque wrote All Quiet on the Western Front, a powerful anti-war novel, later banned by the Nazis. More significantly, however, it was a time of inflation, of depression, of unemployment, of almost unrelieved misery, of deep social and political uncertainty and divisiveness. The divisions were largely between increasingly polarized and increasingly violent rightists and leftists, resulting in escalating political rhetoric and countless episodes of street thuggery. Antisemitism was on a malignant rise, its first major manifestation being the cold-blooded killing in 1922 of Walter Rathenau, the prominent Jewish industrialist who had had a significant moderating and progressive influence on German politics.

An outpouring, in the 1920s, of highly imaginative, music, art, literature and cinema, much of it centred particularly in the unique culture of the cabarets, especially in Berlin, was unprecedented in Germany (and elsewhere) and was later described firsthand by the British writer Christopher Isherwood in I Am a Camera, demonstrating the enduring interest in this unique period, which was later transformed into a movie (I Am a Camera) and a successful Broadway musical (Cabaret).

As noted, Jews were prominent in Weimar culture and, as the republic’s decline became obvious and increasingly menacing, many of them fled to the United States to continue their creative efforts in freedom. Some, who had been pioneers in German cinema, ended up in Hollywood, where they also became prominent and enduringly influential. Their talent added significantly to what retrospectively became the “golden age” of Hollywood movies.

Among those Jews who fled Germany was Kurt Weill, the composer, and his wife, Lotte Lenya, a well-known stage actor. More sensitive to what portended and having by then established useful contacts abroad, they left only weeks after Hitler’s ascension to power. They realized that, as Jews and, moreover, as outspoken socialists, their future in Germany would be dim and short.

With Weill as composer, Berthold Brecht as lyricist, and Lenya as the major performer, The Threepenny Opera had its Broadway première in 1933. Possibly reflecting the Depression and the then relatively unsophisticated tastes of even cosmopolitan New Yorkers, it received mixed reviews and closed after only 13 performances. The following year, Bruno Walter, also a refugee from Nazi Germany, conducted Weill’s Second Symphony, his last purely orchestral work.

Weill’s music, perhaps most expressive of the smoldering angst that pervaded Weimar Germany, still retains its attractive, if haunting, element. In collaboration with Brecht, who after the war chose to work in communist East Germany, Weill created The Threepenny Opera based, in genre, on The Beggar’s Opera. No heroes, like Manrico in Trovatore, no enchanting ingénues, like La Bohême’s Mimi, or enticing courtesans like La Traviata’s Violetta, no contrived quarrels, Threepenny is set in 19th-century London but is evidently a commentary on Weimar Germany. It revolves around the city’s significant criminal element and its corrupt police. All of the major characters are violent, venal, cynical and exploitative – a perceived microcosm of the larger society of contemporaneous Germany in which the elements of the drama were embedded.

The musical was, in an English version, produced successfully by Marc Blitzstein in an off-Broadway production that ran for years. Along with thousands of New Yorkers, I attended a performance and, for weeks thereafter, I was stuck in a “blue funk” of despair unparalleled for me until I saw Fellini’s La Strada (1957), which simply deepened and extended it.

Threepenny’s inexorable rhythms, its striking atonalities, its haunting melodies, its unmitigated social despair, the ugliness of all its characters, the vulgarity and crassness of their surroundings, the mocking displays of musical satire, were combined, regardless of its putative London setting, to generate an unforgettable social tableau of Weimar Berlin. Perhaps its most pointed satire is directed against militarism (“In the army, we’ll all go balmy”) and against society in general, evident in the song “Anstatt das” (“Instead of This”).

A photograph of Weill, taken in 1932, shows him with eyes wide open, brows raised as if he were disbelieving. With his substantial forehead, he looks owlish, as if he were alert, perhaps startled, but nonetheless still unconvinced about what was so manifesting all around him between the extreme left and the extreme right, the latter quickly to evolve under Hitler into the deliberate, organized and state-sponsored brutal instrument of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party, later called the Nazi Party).

Weill was evidently deeply affected by the rise of Nazism. After his departure from Germany, with the exception of letters to his parents, who had fled to Palestine, he never spoke or wrote in German again.

His music to The Eternal Road, written by another Jewish émigré, Franz Werfel, and commissioned by New York’s Jewish community, premièred at the Manhattan Opera House, running for 153 performances. It didn’t take long for Weill’s talent to make itself more widely noticed in his new country. He received the inaugural Tony Award for best original score for Street Scene, based on a play by Elmer Rice, with lyrics by Langston Hughes, the noted black poet, novelist, activist and playwright. In 1940, before American entry into the Second World War, Weill wrote the music for The Ballad for the Magna Carta, with text by Maxwell Anderson, commemorating one of the great landmarks on the road to freedom in the Western world as a tribute to Britain, which struggled valiantly against Nazi Germany.

Weill’s general concept of stage music was never art for art’s sake; rather, it revolved around social utility. He wrote the music for Down in the Valley, an opera based on American folk songs, and, during the Second World War, he wrote the music for the satirical song “Schickelgruber” (Hitler’s family name). His most popular songs, such as “Speak Low” and “September Song,” are still among the repeatedly performed “golden oldies.” After Weill’s death in 1950, the now-familiar “Ballad of Mack the Knife,” especially the versions sung by Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darin, became a jazz standard.

If one is driven by an impulse to uncover decency in any circumstance, in the (rather meagre) resistance of (non-Jewish) German artists and intellectuals to the Nazi regime, something positive and enduring – the music of Kurt Weill – derives from that otherwise incomparably shameful period.

Eugene Kaellis has written a novel, Making Jews, on the theme of the current basic problem of Diaspora Jewry, which is available from lulu.com.

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