Angels in Paris: On Migratory Aesthetics

In 1937, Hanns Eisler was highly productive, composing workers’ songs, chamber music, lieder to texts by Brecht and other authors, nine chamber cantatas, the Lenin-Requiem, and parts of the Deutsche Sinfonie. He was also mobile, travelling almost frantically across Europe, before eventually migrating to the United States. Paris, too, was among these locations in Eisler’s itinerant life that year. In March, at the Paris-held ISCM Festival, a performance of a portion of the Deutsche Sinfonie—then still titled Anti-Hitler Symphony—was thwarted due to interference by the Nazi regime with French authorities. My paper charters the importance of Paris as a location in Eisler’s long migration, especially through an examination of the emerging Deutsche Sinfonie, which emerges as a work marked by the dichotomy of places and displacements.

Beyond this biographical focus, I view Eisler’s music in a wider context of migratory culture in mid- to late 1930s Paris, in which Eisler played a prominent, if transitory role, mixing with other refugees from Hitler Germany like Lion Feuchtwanger, who modelled Sepp Trautmann, the protagonist of the novel, Exil, on Eisler. I draw attention to contemporaneous novels, such as Klaus Mann’s Vulkan and Lion Feuchtwanger’s Exil, as well as Walter Benjamin’s philosophical writing. While alert to their distinctive qualities and differences, I foreground common themes, all of which are treated dialectically, such as breadth and fragmentation, specificity and namelessness, place and space, and an engagement with Jewish concepts and thought. The engagement with utopia and dystopia emerges as the most persistent feature, and I explore the extent to which Mann, Eisler, Feuchtwanger, and Benjamin conjure up a migratory heterotopia in their works. Despite these tentative suggestions for intertextual commonalities, the migratory culture of my named community is not homogeneous. Instead, it is an aestetic that speaks profoundly of migration and mobility as heterotopian spaces of engagement, envoicement, and empowerment.

Florian Scheding is Lecturer in Music at the University of Bristol. He previously studied for an MMus and PhD here at Royal Holloway.