When in 1999 the German weekly Die Zeit published a five-part series on ‘enemy culture’ (‘Feindkultur’) edited by Fritz J. Raddatz – or, as it was called in the subtitle, ‘Art in Divided Germany’ – there were contributions on literature (no. 42), the performing arts (no. 43), film (no. 44), the fine arts (no. 45), and architecture (no. 46), but not on what Thomas Mann in Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus called ‘the most German of the arts’, namely music.Footnote 1 In his introductory comments Raddatz wrote of the ‘rough climate for artists’ in the shadow of the emerging Cold War: a time ‘of mutual dependencies’ as well as ‘of doctrines and denunciations’, in which ‘cross-border commuters on both sides aroused suspicions if they did not conform to the state-mandated dogma of socialist realism or the opposite dogma of abstraction’.Footnote 2 That such a characterization might apply equally well to music manifests itself especially in the postwar biography of Karl Amadeus Hartmann, adding weight to Raddatz's principal thesis that, where art is concerned, the ‘two Germanies were mirror images of each other’. Like other scholarship of the past fifteen years,Footnote 3 Raddatz's insight confronts once more the long-held belief – articulated, for instance, by Adorno in his 1948 essay ‘Die gegängelte Musik’ (Music Manipulated) – that the manipulation of music for political purposes was, in the post-war period, confined to the Soviet sphere of influence, whereas the Western world cultivated and guaranteed artistic freedom.
I
The development of New Music from the end of the war depended on a complex of extramusical factors to an extent unheard of in early periods. To capture this evolution mainly as a stylistic phenomenon would lead to an unrealistic or, at best, incomplete interpretation of a highly complicated process. Future music historians will have significant problems in assessing especially the time span between c1945 and c1975; it would certainly be important to affirm many a detail that otherwise could be easily forgotten.Footnote 4
That cryptic statement was made as early as 1980 by Everett Helm, an American composer, musicologist, and journalist, who had first-hand knowledge of the European music scene at the time in question, since he was a cultural officer of the US military government between 1948 and 1949, and lived mainly in Italy before spending the eve of his life in West Berlin. The ‘complex of extramusical factors’ as determinants of (musical) style is invoked but never specified. And then there is the puzzling reference to ‘many a detail’ that could shed light on the matter.
In this article I shall suggest that a number of such pertinent ‘details’, themselves conditioned by ‘extramusical factors’, can be found in the life and work of the German composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann. After 1945 Hartmann subjected the works he composed during the Nazi period (especially those espousing an antifascist position and often of a programmatic nature) to thorough revisions, a process which, for Andreas Jaschinski, was connected purely ‘to the formation of music-aesthetic goals that would become more concrete for Hartmann in the 1950s’.Footnote 5 But Jaschinki's interpretation of these revisions, echoed by other Hartmann scholars, seems insufficient in view of the drastic nature of these compositional interventions. The extent of the revisions may be briefly specified: of the nineteen works composed between 1930 and 1945 only three were entered with their original titles into the self-censored list of compositions that Hartmann produced after the war; these were the two string quartets and the opera Simplicius Simplicissimus. Of the remainder, scored mainly for large orchestral forces, nine were either never performed during Hartmann's lifetime or, after a few airings in the years immediately after the war, were never performed again. An additional seven works, or parts of works, were absorbed, sometimes in an adapted form, into the first six of Hartmann's eight numbered symphonies, composed after 1945.Footnote 6
All this begs the question of what really caused the aesthetic reorientation mentioned by Jaschinski. On the basis of archival research, this article suggests that the thesis already espoused by Jost Hermand and Hanns-Werner Heister, namely that political confrontations during the Cold War had a strong influence on music aesthetics in the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, provides a more convincing framework for assessing Hartmann's change of orientation in the post-war years.Footnote 7
II
Of those composers who did not go into exile it was Karl Amadeus Hartmann who was widely considered to have passed the test of conscience during the Nazi dictatorship with the most bravery. In contrast, say, to his Bavarian contemporaries Richard Strauss, Hans Pfitzner, Carl Orff, and Werner Egk, there was no sense that he had benefited at all from the questionable blossoming of ‘unculture’ furthered by the National Socialist régime. Instead, he was recognized as having withdrawn into a so-called ‘inner emigration’ and composed works whose humanistic and anti-militaristic orientation, interwoven with calls for solidarity with socialist utopias, made them rare documents of antifascist resistance in music.Footnote 8 After the collapse of the Nazi dictatorship, his exceptional conduct made him, in the view of the ‘music and theatre’ branch of the American military government, ‘the whitest of all prominent German musicians’Footnote 9 and a ‘solid non-Nazi brick’,Footnote 10 who deserved a central role in rebuilding German cultural life. A man of modest demeanour, Hartmann settled for the post of dramaturge at the Bavarian State Opera, where he was responsible for a series of modern music concerts with an international scope: the series was initially called the Morgenmatineen, but in autumn 1947 was renamed Musica Viva, the title it has retained ever since. This position enabled the now forty-year-old Hartmann to earn for the first time a regular salary, which secured the livelihood of his family (his son Richard was born in 1935) and freed him from financial dependency on his in-laws.
While his Bavarian colleagues prepared themselves for their respective denazification hearings, Hartmann, in his Morgenmatineen, seemed almost to hold up a mirror for them in the form of concerts that focused in their programmes on problems of complicity and atonement, the music complemented by occasional recitations given by his comrades Wolfgang Langhoff and Johannes R. Becher. On Sunday 21 October 1945 the second of these concerts, combining poetry and music, contained three works for string orchestra, including the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony and Hartmann's own violin concertino Musik der Trauer, written at the start of the war in autumn 1939. The autograph score of this work, known today in its 1959 revision as Concerto funèbre, bears the following motto: ‘All brotherly-minded men are threatened with the greatest insanity – the most evil crime – war.’Footnote 11 Meanwhile, among the poems recited at the concert was the ‘Kriegslied’ of 1779 by the freemason Matthias Claudius, with its repeated lines ‘Alas it is war – and I beg that I should not be guilty of it’.Footnote 12 Hartmann also worked closely with Hans Rosbaud, who, being charged by the military government with the direction of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, had a near-exclusive control over the total budget for musical life in the city. Now recognized as an integral part of Munich's cultural élite, Hartmann could look back on the first year since the end of the war with some satisfaction.
But the political atmosphere was changing. On 12 March 1947 Harry S. Truman made the speech to the joint gathering of House and Senate that set out what became known as the Truman Doctrine. As Truman later wrote in his memoirs: ‘The line had been drawn sharply. […] [E]very nation was now faced with a choice between alternative ways of life.’Footnote 13 That this escalation in world politics did not stop at artistic discourses soon became clear to Hartmann, who, a few months after Truman's speech, had to prepare for the première of his Symphonische Ouvertüre ‘China kämpft’ (China Fights, composed in 1942) under the direction of his former teacher Hermann Scherchen at the second Darmstädter Ferienkurse für internationale neue Musik, which took place from 12 to 27 July 1947. Hartmann's overture was dedicated originally to Sergei Tretyakov and then to Tan Shih-hua, the communist revolutionary hero of Tretyakov's novel A Chinese Testament. It used as its main theme the well-known folk melody ‘Meng Jiang-nu’, which, as Agnes Smedley had reported from China a decade earlier, had become a revolutionary song.Footnote 14 Even though, as an analysis of more than thirty reviews makes clear,Footnote 15 the work found an enthusiastic reception with audiences, the music critics, almost without exception, condemned the composition solely because of the way it harked back to models of programme music. According to Wolfgang Fortner, ‘factional struggles over aesthetic issues’Footnote 16 now erupted at the Ferienkurse: while not linking these struggles to the political reorientation, Fortner went on to warn that ‘certain means of expression in new music, especially in terms of harmony and compositional technique, threaten to become divisive’.Footnote 17
An essential influence on the critical reaction of the trade journals was exerted by the Berlin-based Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, who had been invited to Darmstadt that year as lecturer in music criticism. Shortly after being released from American captivity as a prisoner of war, he had publicly adopted aesthetic positions that diametrically opposed those he had represented during the years of the Weimar Republic. In the time between the wars he had propagated viewpoints close to the philosophy of his friend Hanns Eisler. ‘Any bakery is more important’,Footnote 18 he proclaimed to his readers, than an art that ‘is socially irrelevant, without the power of commitment, without a function in the reality of life’.Footnote 19 He even asked the question of ‘why the ideas of an eight-hour workday, of the equality of all people, or of socialization in general should not become carriers of artistic inventions, comparable to the resurrection of Christ or the bourgeois revolution’.Footnote 20 Yet after World War II he followed in the footsteps of Arnold Schoenberg, whom he had denounced in the Weimar Republic as the head of ‘a club of out-of-touch aestheticists’ (‘eines weltfremden Ästhetenkränzchens’).Footnote 21 How can this change of position be explained?
In the postwar years Stuckenschmidt had found a mentor in Nicolas Nabokov, an American cultural officer of Russian descent with a strongly anticommunist disposition.Footnote 22 Nabokov was himself a composer, who had studied music first with Rebikov in Yalta, and then (on fleeing Russia) at the Stuttgart Conservatory with Joseph Haas, who happened also to have been one of Hartmann's composition teachers. After studying in Berlin with Busoni (1922–3) and then in Paris at the Sorbonne, he embarked on a teaching career, before emigrating to the USA in 1933. Stuckenschmidt's appointment books record several meetings with Nabokov.Footnote 23 While the content of these meetings cannot be known for certain, it would be surprising if their conversations had not touched on the latest chapters of Soviet music history, which had remained little known in the West during the upheavals of the pre-war and wartime periods. Certain parallels were no doubt striking: for instance, that the ‘early phase of Soviet idealism’Footnote 24 had found a sudden end in 1932 with the doctrinaire implementation of socialist realism at about the same time that the ‘golden’ age of art in the Weimar Republic gave way to the ‘Blut und Boden’ (blood-and-soil) aesthetic enforced by Nazi ideologues.Footnote 25 And, likewise, that Dmitri Shostakovich was confronted with the accusation of ‘petty bourgeois’ and sterile formalism (a denunciation presaged by the Stalin-instigated criticism of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District) just two years before the 1938 Düsseldorf Entartete Musik (Degenerate Music) exhibition.Footnote 26 For Nabokov – and, it would seem, now also Stuckenschmidt – realism in both its socialist and National Socialist guises was therefore stigmatized, in view also of the growing confrontation with the Soviet sphere of influence (which did not make any effort to distance itself from its earlier aesthetic imperatives). The impending culture war would require of artists a complete and exclusive commitment to subjectivity. Moreover, the baby was thrown out with the bath water, in that any artistic position that espoused collective responsibility and social relevance was to be ostracized, including the various ways, developed during the Weimar Republic, of liberating art from any kind of manipulation (‘von jedem Gängelbande’).Footnote 27
A document supporting this thesis is a programmatic article by Stuckenschmidt that appeared in November 1947 (thus only a few months after the Darmstädter Ferienkurse) in the first issue of Stimmen,Footnote 28 a magazine edited in Berlin with the support of Nabokov. In the essay, characteristically entitled ‘Maßstäbe’ (Standards), Stuckenschmidt renounces the very aesthetic positions that he upheld during the Weimar Republic:
What to do? In order to create standards again and to awaken a sense for the laws of composing and music-making, a strict schooling of the young is needed, and not only of the young. It must be made clear to the widest circles of music listeners that art cannot thrive in a one-sided relationship to extramusical aspects, to social, economic, and psychological situations. As revealing as the disciplines of music sociology are for the study of music history, the musical artwork itself is closed off to them. For twelve years, we have been trained to despise and reject the principle of l'art pour l'art (art for art's sake), until everybody believed that art did not have its own laws. To correct this erroneous dogma – even though, conditioned by the times, by way of the opposing extreme of pure aestheticism – is the most important task of music education in the years ahead.Footnote 29
It is clear that Stuckenschmidt not only accepted the justification for the change of paradigm (a justification based on a particular, and ideologically driven, reading of historical facts), but also its Gleichschaltung of cultural-political concepts. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in his characterization of Schoenberg. Stuckenschmidt would have known those late works of Schoenberg that were saturated with political meaning (‘I myself have written several pieces that are undeniably political: for instance, my Ode to Napoleon’Footnote 30) as well as Schoenberg's essay ‘Heart and Brain in Music’,Footnote 31 which was sent to him personally by the composer and which emphasizes the collaborative nature of reason and feeling in the creative process. Nevertheless, Stuckenschmidt characterized Schoenberg, both during and after his period of teaching at Darmstadt, as an artist whose ‘brain ruled supreme’ (‘Das Gehirn siegte auf der ganzen Linie’Footnote 32). He presented an image of Schoenberg as an apolitical rationalist, thereby ironically coming close to confirming Soviet clichés. With this sleight of hand he not only made Schoenberg the protagonist of ‘formalism’ – an aesthetic position polemically stylized by Soviet chief ideologues as opposed to the correct, approved path – but also, in a certain sense, adopted the Manichaean aesthetic worldview of Soviet propaganda.
It is perhaps an irony, therefore, that Stuckenschmidt, the anti-Schoenbergian fox of the Weimar Republic, was given the task after World War II of guarding the geese, in that he was commissioned by Martin Hürlimann of Atlantis Verlag to write a biography of the composer. Stuckenschmidt later claimed in his autobiography that he was not approached to write the book until July 1948;Footnote 33 however, his correspondence with Hürlimann shows that he agreed to write it a year earlier in June 1947.Footnote 34 Already at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in July 1947, therefore, it would seem that Stuckenschmidt was preoccupied with positioning Schoenberg as ‘the agent of cultural change’, as he put it,Footnote 35 and appropriating the composer as an involuntary symbol of ‘formalism’. It was this image of Schoenberg that Stuckenschmidt would continue to propagate through such media institutions of occupied Germany as RIAS (Radio im amerikanischen Sektor) Berlin and the papers Neue Zeitung and Stimmen.
The enterprise was furthered not only by Stuckenschmidt but also, later and with similar justifications, by other influential contemporaries such as Heinrich Strobel, who already by 1947 had become a ‘brother in spirit’ to Stuckenschmidt at Darmstadt,Footnote 36 as well as Theodor W. Adorno.Footnote 37 That the effort succeeded is documented by Stuckenschmidt's own comment that by 1949 ‘there was hardly anybody who dared not to compose dodecaphonically’Footnote 38 and Carl Dahlhaus's statement that ‘twelve-tone technique has spread, almost epidemically, since the Second World War’.Footnote 39
In the factional disputes that ensued in Darmstadt, Karl Amadeus Hartmann found himself between the cultural fronts of the Cold War – formalism vs socialist realism – that became reality in the aesthetic discourse of the Western hemisphere after the stigmatization of the characteristic features that Andrei Zhdanov, the chief ideologue of the Communist Party in Moscow, had formulated as determinants of socialist realism.Footnote 40 It is clear that this also meant the opening of a front against the composers of the Soviet hemisphere and the urgent need for a revision of the respective standards of reception. And that is exactly what the strategists Stuckenschmidt and Strobel had agreed on during their first post-war meeting in Darmstadt: ‘Dear Stuckenschmidt, I hope that you have returned to Berlin without being too burned out [by the Darmstadt events]. Just to refresh our memory, I want to remind you again of the next articles that I trust I will get from you for MELOS. And about which we have an overall agreement, don't we? 1) Shostakovich, 2) Formalism’.Footnote 41
In November 1947 Melos therefore published, as agreed, three essays on Shostakovich in what amounted to a special issue on the leading Soviet composer, who was admired by Hartmann. As was to be expected, Shostakovich's aesthetic position was denounced, not only by Stuckenschmidt but also by other authors, as outmoded. ‘It is unlikely that he has an impact outside of Russia. The music of that part of the world has moved in a different direction, which, because of the mass appeal of Shostakovich's (in some ways) astonishing talent, cannot be reversed’.Footnote 42 Equally noteworthy in this regard are two comments by Edmund Nick, who later served as director of music at West German Radio (WDR) from 1952 to 1956. In July 1946 he considered Shostakovich a ‘symphonist of high merits’,Footnote 43 whereas twenty-two months later he articulated a complete volte face: ‘I do not know whether Shostakovich is a good composer. According to his reputation, it may be true. But I know better composers who are not Communists.’Footnote 44
III
If Hartmann, with his antifascist orientation anchored in an undogmatic socialism, was destined initially to serve cultural life in post-war Germany, he must have been afraid that his very different political and aesthetic perspectives (which were increasingly difficult to communicate) would make him suspect as a fellow traveller of the opposing ideological camp. He must have seen the writing on the wall, especially after the restoration of anticommunist animosities and in view of the suspicion with which he was met by his fellow composers, who, after Wilhelm Furtwängler's professional rehabilitation on 30 April 1947, considered themselves exculpated as well. His experiences in Darmstadt were already an unmistakable signal, as Hans Werner Henze, a Fortner student who was present in Darmstadt in 1947, recalled in detail decades later: ‘Hartmann's “charming” colleagues and contemporaries’ tried to push him, together with Hermann Scherchen, ‘into the red corner. People were encouraged, as it were, not to attend the concert.’Footnote 45
Dangers of this nature lurked in the background from the end of 1947 onwards, especially in view of Bavarian regional politics: Hans Ehard, the governor of Bavaria, causing political waves with an inflammatory speech,Footnote 46 had made no secret of his anticommunism, and the same was true of Alois Hundhammer, his Secretary for Culture, whose views were articulated in an interview in Frankfurter Hefte.Footnote 47 Stuckenschmidt later recalled: ‘I had a choice to make and decided in favour of the American side.’Footnote 48 In the same way, a bit later than Stuckenschmidt, Karl Amadeus Hartmann saw himself (after the Darmstadt experiences and because of the ominous restoration of anticommunist animosities) forced into a situation where he had to make a decision.
The political representatives of the Western zones of Germany and most of Hartmann's colleagues had already fallen into line with US-sponsored values some time earlier. Should he do the same, or should he follow his brother and others, who, after the repressions of the Nazi régime, had chosen to settle in the Soviet zone on their return from exile in Switzerland? Faced with these alternatives, Hartmann decided to stay in his home town, Munich. Several reasons may have led him to this decision: on the one hand he recognized early on that artistic life in the East was threatened by repression, and he had had some bad personal experiences with ‘old comrades’, who often posed with the narrow-minded smugness of returned emigrants; on the other hand he found decidedly pleasant his encounters with the American cultural officers, who not only convinced him with their daily display of their understanding of democracy but also gave him enthusiastic reports of Roosevelt's New Deal era and instilled in him a more relaxed attitude towards capitalism. Socialism had meant, not only for him, a spiritual vanishing point during the long years of Nazi rule; now he was able to observe the social realities of both competing systems as well as meet their representatives, and what he experienced made him correct his earlier worldview. It was a step that subsequently cast him in the role of a ‘leftie without a homeland’ (‘heimatloser Linker’)Footnote 49 and forced him into what Heister considers his ‘inner emigration after 1945’,Footnote 50 in terms of both politics and aesthetics. His decision may have been influenced by the reports of socialists who had broken away: in Hartmann's library can be found Ein Gott der keiner war, a German translation of The God that Failed, a 1949 volume containing six essays by writers (including André Gide and Arthur Koestler) who had abandoned their belief in communism. This decision, which even necessitated the painful break with his brother, nevertheless became the point of departure for an artistic development whose paradigmatic potential cannot be underestimated.
Hartmann's decision meant, as the Darmstadt events had foreshadowed, a painful compromise that took its toll and forced him, as his friend Hans Werner Henze put it after his death, to ‘neutralize’ himself: in other words, to distance himself from not only the political but also the aesthetic imperatives of the socialist world.Footnote 51 It is for this reason that Hartmann, after the eye-opening event in Darmstadt, and after his disillusioned abandonment of post-war hopes, suppressed the politically charged subtitle on the posters for the repeat performance of his Symphonische Ouvertüre ‘China kämpft’ in Munich in the autumn of 1947, and – a point that is even more significant in view of the aesthetic reorientation of West Germany – expressly distanced himself in the programme booklet from any characterization of the work as programme music.
The Symphonische Ouvertüre, with the title ‘China kämpft’, was written in 1942 and consists of two parts, each of which begins with a similar introduction. The first part is a broadly conceived Adagio followed by the main movement: a theme with three variations. The idea of the work aims to be an essay in a special form on the path to a large-scale one-movement orchestral composition; at the same time it is an attempt to portray the idea of eternal humanity in contrast to uncontrolled urges and struggles – a portrayal which ends with the belief in the victory of stronger and purer powers. The architecture of the piece, however, is based on musical germ cells and their potential for development, and is not experienced as ‘programme music’.Footnote 52
This correction, however, was only the beginning of the revision of Hartmann's œuvre mentioned above. In the following years he eliminated from his works movements with a bent towards programme music, especially movements of a political-confessional nature or those pervaded by quotations of songs of the socialist movement. The remaining ‘non-suspect’ material he transferred to his revised six symphonies (which now carried just ‘neutral’ numbers). He even withdrew in their entirety compositions that he now considered had catered too much to the taste of audiences or that, in their truncated form, had lost too much of their substance. ‘To express oneself in a realistic, intelligible, or even popular manner’, as Jost Hermand correctly observes, ‘was seen in these latitudes [i.e., the Western hemisphere], at a time of increasingly sharper confrontation with socialist realism, as increasingly totalitarian.’Footnote 53
A clear example of these revisionist practices is the fate of the Sinfoniae Dramaticae (1941–3), the orchestral triptych of which China kämpft made up the first panel. China kämpft itself was withdrawn after three performances and never played again in Hartmann's lifetime. The second panel, Symphonische Hymnen, was not performed until 1975, more than a decade after the composer's death. Of the third panel, Vita nova, the Adagio first movement was absorbed into the Second Symphony, while the remainder of the work was suppressed. One reason for this would appear to be that it was to contain nine verses of Shelley's Mask of Anarchy, declaimed by a speaker in Bertolt Brecht's German translation. In 1948 Hartmann wrote to his publisher Willy Müller: ‘Vita nova cannot go to press at the present time, since the military government has declared its doubts about a text that has the potential to be incorrectly understood; for this reason it must be put to one side for the moment.’Footnote 54
That aesthetic issues were seen as an important locus of ideological discourse can be illustrated by way of a contemporary statement by Dieter Sattler, State Secretary for Fine Arts in the Bavarian Department of Culture, and thus Hartmann's superior. Sattler's estate, housed in the Munich Institut für Zeitgeschichte, contains a letter to the Bavarian Governor Hans Ehard from 1950, in which he describes the importance of the position he had occupied since February 1947: ‘Art in all its manifestations (film, radio, concert, theatre, literature, museum, exhibits, etc.) is one of the principal battlegrounds of the cold war.’Footnote 55
IV
Despite the above-mentioned precautionary measure of removing the work's subtitle, the Munich performance of Symphonische Ouvertüre on 22 November 1947 saw Hartmann confronted with another problem. After the concert, a review appeared in a seemingly insignificant Munich high-school newspaper, Das Steckenpferd (The Hobby Horse). Its author characterized Hartmann together with Käthe Kollwitz as the ‘creator of a socialist approach to art’Footnote 56 and, evidently in possession of insider information, correctly identified the principal theme of the composition as a ‘free reworking of a socialist song from the Chinese civil war’.Footnote 57 Alarm bells no doubt rang for Hartmann, for he knew all too well that the high-school newspaper was printed by the same company as the Neue Zeitung and, with a print run of ten thousand copies, was distributed as a model of democratic journalism in the service of education in the entire American Zone. Das Steckenpferd was read not only by the students’ parents, who belonged to the social élite and thereby constituted a significant secondary circle of readers; it was also read by Alois Hundhammer, the Secretary for Culture (with responsibility for education), as is confirmed by the fact that he regularly, and always conscientiously, responded to questions addressed to him by the editors. It would not have required much imagination to predict how Hundhammer, a professed anticommunist, would have reacted if news had reached him that the ‘red Kapellmeister’Footnote 58 Scherchen had performed with the Bavarian State Orchestra a work expressing solidarity with a Communist party involved in the Chinese civil war, and that this political statement in music was written by a composer receiving a salary from the State of Bavaria. It would have been easy for Hundhammer to have allowed Hartmann's contract (subject to annual renewal until his death) simply to expire. Hundhammer would only have had to veto an extension of the contract when deciding on the annual theatre budget.Footnote 59
No surprise, then, that Hartmann, shortly before the end of the year and a few weeks before the latest possible date to give notice of termination (31 January 1948) – ‘out of fear’, as Heister surmisesFootnote 60 – sent a ‘Richtigstellung’ (correction) to the concert review not only to the young music critic but also, copied for his information, to the Secretary for Culture.Footnote 61
In your review it says: ‘The main theme of “China kämpft” is the freely adapted theme of a socialist song from the Chinese civil war.’ […] The fact is that I took as my theme an eight-bar (pentatonic) Chinese melody freely adapted by myself. It has nothing to do with a socialist song.Footnote 62
V
Even though he lived in the same city, Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt never again met his old ‘friend’ Hanns Eisler, who had returned from his American exile via Vienna to East Berlin because of anticommunist reprisals.Footnote 63 Despite the fact that he lacked a high-school diploma, Stuckenschmidt succeeded in becoming professor of music history and ‘paradigm-setting dean of West German music criticism’,Footnote 64 with his defence of élitist concepts of art focused on a concept of progress. An umbrella organization for his activities was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, founded in 1950 in West Berlin and equipped with generous financial subsidies, which soon operated world-wide; its general secretary was Stuckenschmidt's friend Nabokov, with his many connections to influential politicians, cultural officials, and artists, not only in West Germany. When the American press revealed in the mid-1960s that the paradigmatic ‘campaign for atonal music and abstract painting’Footnote 65 had been financed by the American CIA, the dismay of all those ‘freedom fighters’ who had not been let in on the secret knew no bounds.
Karl Amadeus Hartmann, however, viewed the aesthetic concessions he had to make to secure his livelihood as a regrettable compromise. Looking back in melancholy on the cultural situation during the war and pre-war years and clairvoyantly diagnosing the dependence of aesthetic on political discourses, he wrote as early as 1950 to the Stravinsky biographer Herbert Fleischer: ‘The movement of Weill, Hindemith, and Eisler has, unfortunately, not found a continuation. In the confrontation between East and West, all such problems died away.’Footnote 66 In view of the developments sketched here, it is no wonder that Hartmann, even before the revelations about the Congress for Cultural Freedom and shortly before his death in 1963, looked back in bitterness:
Whoever thinks that repressions would have stopped with the end of the Nazi era does not know life. […] Thus, the necessity during the postwar era to provide information to a public that has been manipulated for twelve years generated a concert agency for modern works. It has grown, in the meantime, into a seven-headed Hydra, which threatens to devour its own father.Footnote 67
Immediately afterwards he cites two lines from Goethe's poem ‘Urworte: Orphisch’: ‘So sind wir scheinfrei denn nach Jahren / Noch enger dran, als wir am Anfang waren.’ (It only seems as if we're free, years hem us in, constraining more than at our origin.)Footnote 68
Karl Amadeus Hartmann's aesthetic evolution in the decades after World War II thus sheds further light on the way in which new music in the West was under illusions as to the true extent of its autonomy and freedom. The boom enjoyed by ‘autonomous art’ after World War II, epitomized in music by the Schoenberg renaissance and continued in the works of composers who adopted serial principles more or less dogmatically,Footnote 69 was not simply the glorious manifestation of a world spirit returning to itself after the fascist era,Footnote 70 but was deeply enmeshed in the cultural Cold War between East and West. The famous maxim attributed to the Minnesinger Walther von der Vogelweide, ‘Wes Brot ich ess’, des Lied ich sing’ (loosely translated as ‘Whoever pays the piper calls the tune’), was turned by Adorno, one of the chief proponents of the autonomous work of art in the twentieth century, into a negative yardstick for measuring artistic integrity. It is ‘the sharpest objection one can raise against any kind of art that wants to preserve its claim to truth!’Footnote 71 As scholars become increasingly aware of the political factors that assisted avant-garde music in taking root after World War II, we can see that Adorno's objection might apply equally to the music that he was so eager to defend, and to its composers, who proudly saw their musical material as resisting the mere appeal to listeners.
