Michael Haas’ Music of Exile: The Untold Story of the Composers Who Fled Hitler sets out to capture the diverse experiences of composers exiled from Europe in the 1930s. Following the author’s debut monograph, Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis (2013), which primarily detailed the bodily and sonic treatment of composers in the lead up to and under the Nazi regime, this new book focuses on how “a representative rather than comprehensive” group of composers personally and professionally negotiated the process of exile through their music during the wartime and the postwar eras (xiv). As Haas argues, “the music of exile was the means by which composers could return to a sense of inner stability” through “a state of physical and mental transplantation.” It was “a unique synthesis written by a composer in a place to which they did not fully belong” (9).
Haas’ findings speak to a plethora of highly individualized experiences of exile as expressed through music, but he also identifies certain patterns in compositional approaches that reflect a shared longing for “return” or “inner restitution” (9). As Haas explains, these composers yearned for return not only “to a country, a homeland, a language, but also to a particular way of life, a loss of privilege and position within an educated and cultivated society” (20). Both the composers who remained in Nazi-occupied Europe and those who left composed music that employed the same compositional tools, structural forms, or poetry as revered composers of their former homelands, while many of the Jewish exiles drew on quintessentially Jewish, Yiddish, or Zionist texts, titles, or musical language.
One of this book’s many interventions is its deliberate reconceptualization of the meaning and long-lasting impacts of exile. Haas understands exile to include both those Jewish and non-Jewish composers who were physically displaced, as well as non-Jewish composers who experienced what he calls “inner emigration” or “internal exile” by bodily remaining under Nazi authority but composing as if they were abroad (1-2). Music of Exile endeavors to resolve a discrepancy between the music that composers crafted in their former homelands, and the aesthetic and stylistic changes they later made either in internal exile or in the countries where they found refuge. Rather than foregrounding the triumphalist view of émigré musicians’ contributions to their new homelands, as many contemporary scholars have done, Haas instead asks what the “cost” of these aesthetic and stylistic changes were, and whether they were “organic, or made out of existential necessity” (4). Composers who remained in Nazi-occupied Europe, he explains, navigated the local regime by withholding their work from performance, living in isolation, or complying with Nazi policies even as their works were removed from performance schedules due to their musical language or personal politics lacking sympathy with Hitler. Likewise, most composers who left Nazi-occupied territory could not replicate their former successes and continue their artistic development from before the war.
Music of Exile is structured according to a non-linear narrative and driven by subject rather than by chronology. In the process, Haas restores many lesser known names to accounts of Holocaust music history. The book’s nine chapters divide somewhat evenly into two parts, with the first four chapters dedicated to those who encountered what Haas calls “internal exile” or “inner emigration,” as a result of their choice to stay in Europe and continue their creative work, either under a dictatorship or within the framework of ghettos or concentration camps. Among this number, some pursued music as a creative force for “resistance.” The remaining five chapters consider the impact of exile on composers and their music beyond Europe.
In Chapter 1, Haas shows how the new geographical locations in which these composers found themselves directly impacted their compositional possibilities, with those who arrived in Britain encountering a vastly different environment than those who arrived in the United States. Chapter 2 centers on the case study of Jewish composer and former architect Richard Fuchs (1887–1947), who navigated the complexity of composing music for performance by Karlsruhe’s Jewish Cultural League. Chapter 3 categorizes those who remained in Germany into four groups: (1) the opportunists, (2) the compromised, (3) those who engaged in passive resistance, and (4) one composer who undertook active resistance, while providing a generous reading of the implications of these composers’ choices. Chapter 4 explores music’s function as a form of “resistance” to Hitler’s regime within the European context through agitprop and fight songs, works composed in Theresienstadt, and others written by those in hiding. Chapter 5 surveys Kurt Weill’s English-language compositions to demonstrate how they helped him to integrate into and adapt to his new home in the United States. Chapters 6 utilizes the concept of “inner return” to show how several composers turned to the composition of Lieder to come to terms with being in exile. Chapter 7 is devoted to the case study of Hans Winterberg, a Czech Jew who made the unusual choice to move to Germany in the postwar era even as he remained on a journey of “musical return” to his native Bohemia. Chapter 8 considers the diverse trajectories of composers who had already fully assimilated or converted out of Judaism before the war but found themselves forced to grapple anew with their Jewish heritage, practice, sonic inheritance, and political ideologies as a result of their categorization by Hitler’s regime. Chapter 9 considers how a final subset of composers brought their Austro-German compositional practices with them on their exile to far flung locations such as China, the Soviet Union, Latin America, Japan, the Philippines, India, and Africa.
As the Music Curator of Vienna’s Jewish Museum and the co-founder of the Exilarte Center at Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts, Haas is deeply knowledgeable about his book’s subject matter and draws on a wealth of significant primary source documentation in support of his research. Citations of interviews, memoirs, compositions, correspondence, press coverage, photographs, program and liner notes, and other archival findings provide a multidimensional look at his research subject’s individual biographies, motivations, contexts, and compositions. As Haas states in the book’s introduction, his focus is on interpreting primary sources based on his own perspectives rather than on critically engaging with extant secondary literature (xv). As a result of the lengthy sections of the narrative devoted to contextualizing his specific examples, this book is geared more toward serving a general rather than an academic readership. Toward this end, a more preparatory introduction that guides the reader through Haas’ plans for the rest of the book, as well as a glossing of non-English and composition-related terminology at their first appearance, would have helped to better orient this book’s intended readers. Certainly, its narrative and bibliography will also serve as a helpful reference resource to scholars with an interest in Holocaust studies, émigré and exile studies, European studies, Jewish studies, (ethno)musicology, and composition.
