BERLIN VERSES

adapting the Hollywooder Liederbuch

Artist Statement

Hanns Eisler composed the songs gathered in the Hollywooder Liederbuch while living in Los Angeles in exile from Germany during the Second World War. Los Angeles was a haven for German artists and intellectuals who had fled the Third Reich as it quashed out the forward-looking and diverse cultural milieu of Germany’s Weimar Republic. In southern California, Eisler found himself in the company of his old teacher Arnold Schoenberg, great novelist Thomas Mann, critic and philosopher Theodor Adorno, and his friend and collaborator from Berlin, Bertolt Brecht. While in exile, Eisler earned his living by writing film music for Hollywood. His lieder compositions were of a more private nature, a “diary,” as Eisler called it, that he shared only with his circle of friends. Of the forty-seven songs that make up the Hollywooder Liederbuch, twenty-eight are on poems that Brecht wrote during his flight from Germany and exile in the United States. Brecht’s poetry is supplemented by Hölderin fragments, Eduard Mörike’s translations of Anakreon, words from Blaise Pascal, Johann von Goethe’s Schatzgräber, Biblical verse, and Eisler’s own words. In sum, the work can be read as a musical-poetic reflection of Eisler and Brecht’s opposition to fascism’s rise in their homeland and their sense of alienation from American capitalism.

I first encountered the Hollywooder Liederbuch while a student at the Bard Graduate Vocal Arts Program. My years at Bard were a time of intense musical and vocal study, and of personal transformation, as I sought to reconcile, or to hold in fertile tension, my relationship to our ecological and political moment and my devotion to an archaic art form that is intertwined, materially and culturally, with the conservative power of the church, state, and aristocracy. Encountering Eisler’s songs was an answer, a clarification, example, and a gift from artists who had navigated this tension in far more perilous times than I. As I read the poems and hummed Eisler’s melodies I sensed that not only was it a work rooted in its historical moment, but a living document imbued with the hopes, fears, confessions, outburst, and memories of the artists and revolutionaries that created it.

In Berlin Verses, I am creating a continuation of their work. In doing so, I am employing methods inspired by Eisler and Brecht’s own. When setting poetry to music, Eisler would alter the material to fit the idea he wished to express in his songs. For Brecht, the question “is it politically useful?” outweighed questions of aesthetics. I am guided by the same question from my inherently contemporary perspective. I do not aim for contemporary idiomatic language, but rather to articulate the contemporary manifestations of the ideas and forces that shaped the contents of Eisler’s songs. I tether myself to the textual and musical stress of Eisler’s lieder and the symbolic, emotional, and political fields and structures of Brecht’s poetry. In some cases, this yields something close to translation, as in “the mother/Der Sohn I,” and in others, as in “the son/Der Sohn II,” it maintains the poetic and ideological structure of the poem but fills it with new imagery.

In this first installation of the project, sponsored by Neustart Kultur’s Stipendienprogramm Klassik, I have focused on Eisler’s settings of Brecht’s Steffinische Sammlung. Written between 1937 and 1941, the collection is named for the actress and working class revolutionary Margarete Steffin. After meeting Brecht in Berlin’s theater scene in 1931, the two developed a relationship as lovers and co-writers. Though Brecht did pen love poems to Steffin, the collection’s title is not in romantic dedication but in recognition of her importance as a professional collaborator.  As a fellow political dissident, Steffin joined Brecht in exile, fleeing first to Denmark in 1933, and later to Finland in 1939. Afflicted by tuberculosis since youth, Steffin succumbed to the disease in Moscow in June 1941, days after Brecht had departed on the trans-Siberian railroad in his eastward flight for the United States’ west coast. The poems that he would present to Eisler upon his arrival in Los Angeles were edited and organized by Margerete Steffin.

The poems that Eisler set to music recount both the peril of Brecht and Steffin’s situation as refugees, and the cognitive dissonance between the moments of peace they found in Scandinavia and the violent totalitarianism that ruled at home. The onset of war looms as an existential threat over the poems. The verse is suffused with the immanent threat of the adversary. There is a persistent tug between cynicism and hope in the poet’s outlook. This plays out most clearly in the relationship to his son. This is the sole relationship found in the poem, and serves as a link to an uncertain future.  Though it is not a narrative cycle, key artifacts – a radio, pipe and tobacco, a loudspeaker, and the poems themselves – accrue meaning as they reoccur throughout the collection. In writing these second strophes I sought analogous themes and artifacts.  

The set opens with two vignettes, “the mother” and “the son.” In the original, they are a two-part song under the single title “Der Sohn.” In “the mother” I lightly transpose the verse into the present and moves the action from a cabin (Hütte) to a trailer. The dialog between the father and son in “the son” also moves into the present, not through a substitution of set pieces, but by altering the backdrop. The threat of war, and ensuing famine, fills the father’s cynical answers in Brecht’s verse. The father’s contemporary cynicism casts mathematics, language, and history as useless pursuits when climate change and social unraveling await the son. As in the original, the verse concludes with the father’s encouraging the son to learn despite his own fears.

Brecht’s voice is most closely preserved in the four following songs – “to a little screen,” “escape,” “what good are books,” and “in the willows.” These are scenes from a refugee’s flight from a no-longer safe homeland. The most glaring alteration is the transofrmation of Brecht’s radio into a “screen” in the Liederbuch’s most recognized song “An den kleinen radioapparat.” The screen is most clearly inspired by the ubiquitous smartphone, but also echoes another early 20th century socialist artist, George Orwell, and his invention of “telescreens” as devices for communication and surveillance in the novel 1984. In “to a little screen,” and its later appearance in “motel room,“ the screen is both a link to the land left behind by the refugee and an instrument of control.  

The most radical departures from Brecht’s poems are in the three following songs: “prediction,” “drone strike,” and “it would be simpler.” Following the urgency of Eisler’s music, “prediction” takes the themes of drowning and mercy present in Brecht’s wryly humorous poem “Gedanktafel für 4000 Soldaten, die in Krieg gegen Norwegen versunken wurden,“ and turns it into an exhortation to have mercy for immigrants crossing the Mediterranean and to take responsibility for our role in creating the conditions from which they flea. In “Panzerschlag,” Brecht addressed his childhood friends who have grown into the men who steered the tanks and dropped bombs during German invasion of France. In “drone strike” a childhood friend becomes a remote drone operator, steering its deadly force with the same controls used to play violent video games in our youth. This sense of complicity in violence and injustice is reflected upon in “it would be simlper.” Brecht’s original poem “ Gedenktafeln für im Krieg des Hitler gegen Frankreich Gefallenen“[1] implies that a fallen soldier can now explicitly wish death upon Hitler, since he is securely in the grave. The poem seems prescient of the popular trope of time travel to kill Hitler. Inspired by Eisler’s ruminating music, I answered Brecht’s poem, with my own, “it would be simpler” for a time in which we are again tempted to pin our ills on a single figure while the lines of complicity are far more thickly woven.

The theme of complicity runs through the penultimate group of songs (“motel room,” “spring,” “bounty,” and “Easter”) and is joined by a stronger presence of what I call climate strangeness. These are near future scenes in which the natural beauty that surrounded Brecht in his pastoral poems is memory (spring); a farm where people still live off the fat of the land is a haven from burnt lands (bounty); and an orange tree blossoms during an unexpected early spring snowfall (Easter). Following Brecht, each poem points the finger at the unjust, yet whereas Brecht had a clear enemy at whom to point the finger, I seek to write words of responsibility in my own verses: the refugee awaits us in “spring,” the cornucopia of “bounty” is from land we stole, and we doom our children through commodification of the Earth even as we condemn it, in “Easter.”

The final song is a setting of a single stanza that Brecht wrote on the title page of the Steffinische Sammlung as a motto for the collection. Eisler gave it the title “Schlussspruch” (closing proverb). In the stanza, Brecht compares himself to one who carries a single brick in order to show the world how a house once looked. Following Brecht’s opening statement, I’ve crafted my own proverb for the themes of Berlin Verses: to find the seeds in the wreckage of history. Following Eisler’s suggestion, I’ve placed it at the end of the set.

Gefördert von der Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Kultur im Rahmen von NEUSTART KULTUR