The Tainted Language of Home

EISLER's PERIPATETIC EXILE eventually landed him in the Los Angeles area during the Second World War. His compositions from this period reveal an ongoing argument with the Nazi-dominated country he had left behind. His Hollywooder Liederbuch (Hollywood Songbook) combines Brecht's aphoristic texts with fragments of nineteenth-century lyric verse, setting them all to music that both echoes and disturbs the German Lied tradition. In this chapter I examine the collection's ambivalent songfulness with a focus on Eisler's settings of Friedrich Hölderlin, a poet with his own uneasy relationship to the German homeland. The Nazi regime's appropriation of Hölderlin's as a “nationalist” poet gave Eisler's settings an interventionist purpose as well: to reclaim and at the same time to estrange the poet's well-known work. Hölderlin's early 1800s odes on southern German landscapes were read as paeans to “Heimat” in Goebbels's literary propaganda campaign, which missed the poems’ painful tension between utopian vision and outsider melancholy. Eisler's exile songs rupture the poems and set them to music that recalls the lyric spell of nineteenth-century Lieder, only to break it—and, as in his songs of the 1920s and 30s, to leave listeners asking why. Unlike his setting of Brecht's “An die Nachgeborenen,” however, this music does not protect its traditional, lyric elements as elusive traces but instead leans into them, exposing the ease with which they could be fetishized under fascism. Depending on how the cycle is performed, its lyric charisma may threaten to overtake Eisler's efforts at distancing through dissonance and interruption.

In the 1940s, Hollywood—hotbed of the very culture industry Eisler, Adorno, and other Marxist artists and thinkers loved to hate— became surprisingly fertile ground for Eisler's treatment of canonical literary material. Eisler arrived in California after having taught at the New School in New York City, where his reputation as a leftist composer had already complicated his integration into American society. Even several years before Eisler's HUAC hearing and deportation after the war, when he would become known as “Karl Marx of Communism in the realm of music,” the US government did not make his immigration easy.