Forbidden Music (48 page)

Escape: The United States

Given the choice, nearly all Jewish refugees would have preferred emigration to the USA, but the quota system made this difficult for those without funds and contacts. Introduced in 1921, the quota system was a convoluted affair: within the total number of annual immigrants set at 350,000, ‘quotas’ were pegged at no more than 3 per cent of the absolute number of émigrés from any given country living in America since 1910. In 1924, the laws were made even more proscriptive with the capping of levels of existing populations being backdated from 1910 to 1890, and the total number of immigrants was reduced to 150,000. These regulations were brought in to stem the flow of immigrants after the First World War, and to reduce the numbers arriving from Southern and Eastern Europe in order to give an advantage to those from Northern Europe, which already represented the largest of the many ethnic groups.
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With many prominent professionals and intellectuals stranded in France in 1940, Roosevelt was able to introduce an Advisory Committee on Political Refugees (known as the ‘Refugee Committee’) so that visas could be quickly made available to selected individuals who could make their way to neutral
Portugal, possibly via French Morocco. From this pool, over 3,000 special visas were offered to those who were deemed to be able to make a tangible contribution to American cultural, financial or academic life. It was under this system that Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel and his wife Alma Mahler-Werfel were able to enter the United States after crossing the Pyrenees on foot and making their way from there to Lisbon. Erich Itor Kahn, once released from French internment, travelled to French Morocco and thence to the United States. Refugees waiting for visas in North Africa were immortalised in
Casablanca
(1942) starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, a film made all the more authentic by the participation of numerous Austro-German refugees working in Hollywood including Paul Henreid, Conrad Veidt, Peter Lorre, Curt Bois, Ilka Grüning and Ludwig Stössel. The music was by the Vienna-born, Hollywood-based Max Steiner.

The composers Eisler and Toch, the director Erwin Piscator, the critic and musicologist Max Graf and other academics were able to enter the USA with offers to take up professorships at New York's New School of Social Research, a specialist college founded in 1919. Graf, Eisler and Toch were only a few of the well-known European intellectuals to be offered positions by one of the School's co-founders, Alvin Johnson. In 1933, Johnson, together with the Austrian economist Emil Lederer, set up a postgraduate division of the New School that he called the University in Exile, supported in part by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Jewish philanthropist Hiram J. Halle. Over the next few years, it would offer permanent positions to refugee-academics including the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, and the Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer. The New School of Social Research, however, was only one of several elite institutions that saved lives by making offers of employment to refugee intellectuals and artists. The neo-Marxist Frankfurt School (of interdisciplinary social theory), formed under the sociologist Max Horkheimer, left Germany and relocated to Columbia University in New York in 1933 where it re-established itself as the Institute for Social Research. From the very beginning, it had attracted leftist scholars, intellectuals and academics such as Walter Benjamin and Paul Tillich.
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Theodor (Wiesengrund) Adorno was director of a social research project called the Radio Project, which would lead to collaboration with Hanns Eisler on the use of music and film, and was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, a source of income that must have left many Marxists culturally bemused. Eventually, it resulted in the publication of their co-authored book
Composing for the Films
(1947).
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One of the most prestigious locations of all was Princeton, New Jersey, where the generously endowed Institute for Advanced Study established by
Abraham Flexner became the temporary home for the writers Thomas Mann and Hermann Broch, the art historian Erwin Panofsky, and the archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld, with its most significant academic acquisition being the physicist Albert Einstein.
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America was proving itself enormously resourceful at taking in the brains which were being squeezed out of Hitler's Europe and marginalised in nationalist Britain, though it was a source of endless frustrations and humiliation for many of the émigrés themselves. Salaries for academics in America were not always what Europeans expected, nor did the system appeal to academics from Germany and Austria, where universities had been places for students to learn from professors. In America, students were able to choose the people under whom they wished to study, a change in focus that caused bewilderment. Along with these cultural upheavals came the genuine difficulties of not finding suitable employment at all. Paul Dessau worked on a chicken farm; the satirical writer Walter Mehring was a warehouse foreman; the poet, philosopher and second husband of Hannah Arendt, Heinrich Blücher, was a porter in a chemical factory; the Brechtian actress Ruth Berlau worked in a bar; and Lou Eisler worked as a cleaner.
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Ernst Krenek wrote of the ‘echolessness’ of America's vast expanses’,
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which seems to refer to not only the geographical size of the country but also the inability of a composer to resonate. After countless false dawns and frustrations, some of Europe's finest composers and musicologists found themselves teaching in America's numerous provincial colleges and small universities. Krenek himself taught at Vassar, America's leading college for privileged young women, but left under a cloud, ostensibly for promoting twelve-note composition. He subsequently found a post at Hamlin University in St Paul, Minnesota, which provided him with the introduction to his third wife, the composer Gladys Nordenstrom. Other notable names would also find themselves teaching in colleges: Karol Rathaus at Queens College in New York, Alfred Einstein at Smith College (like Vassar, an outstanding liberal arts college for women), Paul Pisk at the Baptist University of Redlands in California, before he moved to the University of Texas in Austin, Erich Zeisl at Los Angeles City College, while the Austro-Hungarian pianist Lili Kraus took up the position of artist in residence at Texas Christian College in Fort Worth.

There is no question that many were deeply grateful to the United States for the opportunities they were offered. At the time, the American West Coast became such a haven for refugee academics that the musicologist Christopher Hailey told the author that, as a youngster growing up in California, he and other young musicians didn't trust a teacher without a foreign accent. These were known locally as the ‘Bei-uns-niks’ for their constant prefacing of every
conversation with the phrase ‘Bei uns …’, which in this context meant ‘Back where we're from …’. Hailey wrote in his essay ‘Émigrés in the Classroom’:

Hailey concludes, however, that far from transferring the seed of European culture to the fertile soil of California, young American composers such as John Cage and Lou Harrison, both Schoenberg pupils, would react with their own strong musical statements, representing a definitive break with old-world aesthetic principles.
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American ensembles and opera companies were just as suspicious of musicians without foreign accents, and probably nowhere were refugees taken up with greater enthusiasm than by American orchestras and the organisers of subscription concert series. Established conductors such as Bruno Walter, Georg (now George) Szell and others soon found first-rate orchestras with much better terms and conditions than the ones they had conducted in Europe. Otto Klemperer may have been frustrated with life in Los Angeles, and its obligatory income-producing Hollywood Bowl season, but there was no denying that he was able to establish a world-class ensemble from what was still a relatively young orchestra at a time of general financial hardship. In addition, he had the freedom to perform a good deal of modern repertoire to an inquisitive, if occasionally puzzled, audience. With so many immigrants arriving, many émigré conductors recognised players in their new ensembles from earlier days in Europe. A few had orchestras founded for them, such as the NBC Orchestra established in 1937 for Arturo Toscanini but also regularly conducted by Bruno Walter, George Szell, Ernest Ansermet and Charles Munch. The Jewish Hungarian Fritz Reiner had been working in the United States since 1922, long before the arrival of Hitler; but Erich Leinsdorf came to New York's Metropolitan Opera in 1937 on the recommendation of the
soprano Lotte Lehmann. By the 1950s, he had become a household name throughout America, while remaining largely unknown in his native Vienna. The Hungarian conductor and violinist Jenő Blau, later known as Eugene Ormandy, had, like Fritz Reiner, also come to America before the advent of National Socialism. Like Reiner, he was unable to return to Europe and was plagued by the inability to rescue family and friends after the outbreak of war. He went on to enjoy 44 years as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, from 1936 until 1980. Wilhelm, now William, Steinberg and Antal Doráti were other names that started to appear as regular conductors with provincial ensembles, while the Utah Symphony Orchestra in Salt Lake City was able to increase its national profile substantially from 1947 with the help of the Jewish Swiss conductor Maurice Abravanel, who fled Germany in 1933. These were just some of the conductors. There were, if anything, even more instrumentalists who arrived first as refugees in the United States, then stayed as immigrants such as the pianists Rudolf Serkin, Artur Schnabel, Lili Kraus, Eduard Steuermann; Jews from Russia such as Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubinstein from Poland; the Viennese cellist Emanuel Feuermann and the violinists Fritz Kreisler, Rudolf Kolisch, along with the Russian violinists Jascha Heifetz and Nathan Milstein, who as Jews were unwilling to return to Nazi-dominated Europe, having already fled Bolshevik Russia.

American musical life took off as never before, with every school and provincial orchestra boasting its own celebrity émigrés who guaranteed that local standards of performance were as high as they were in Europe. More importantly, they inspired young Americans to meet the exacting standards demanded by their new teachers, conductors and even administrators. George Szell (who remained ‘Georg’ in correspondence with Austrian friends), wrote to Hans Gál in 1946 to explain his conducting post in Cleveland:

The musicologist Alfred Einstein, writing to Gál in early 1940 from Northampton, Mass., offers another picture of émigré life:

A selection of correspondence gives an impression of the pressures and problems of leaving Germany and Austria, and of obtaining an American visa. Temporary asylum in Switzerland is illustrated by letters of reasonably well-connected refugees trying to get to the United States. Erich Korngold's brother Hanns writing from Zurich on 26 March 1939 (where he had been stuck since the previous year) writes as follows: