A Socialist Defector. Victor Grossman
modern music, in over thirty GDR theaters. It was ignored in the West, which rejected almost everything from the “Soviet Zone” unless it could be labeled “dissident.”
The GDR had many disagreements about the arts. Some, after spirited theoretical debates, faded and were happily forgotten. One, famously, was not. Again, an opera was involved, or rather its libretto, since the great composer Hanns Eisler never wrote the music. Brecht’s close friend and collaborator, who composed the GDR national anthem, had also been forced to leave the United States by the Un-American Activities Committee. He had long planned an opera based on the story of Faust. Unlike Goethe, he placed his Johann Faustus in the midst of the Peasant Wars (1525), not as a hero but as an intellectual renegade seeking fame, selling out to the devil, betraying peasants and the poor, and symbolizing the sellout by many German intellectuals over the centuries, culminating in the Hitler era. Nor did those common people come off well who followed such a renegade.
But Faust, he discovered, was hallowed ground. His work, too, angered people like Ulbricht, who said: “In our struggle to preserve our German cultural heritage we must guarantee that one of the most important works by our great poet Goethe is not formalistically deformed, that the great ideals in Goethe’s Faust are not reversed into a caricature.” The Party newspaper called it “pessimistic, hopeless, anti-national, alien to the people.” Eisler, deeply hurt, gave up the project and moved (temporarily) to Vienna, his hometown, while a basic theoretical discussion on art and theater began in the Academy of Arts. It ended abruptly with the “workers’ uprising” on June 17, 1953.
Brecht’s sarcastic poem concerning this event, “The Solution,” is quoted over and over. Ridiculing one “official” author who said the people who had revolted might regain the government’s confidence by redoubling their efforts on the job, Brecht responded as cleverly as ever: “Would it not be easier in that case for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”
Rarely quoted are words, which, though highly critical, clearly iterate Brecht’s basic support for the GDR. Despite disagreements and disappointments, I think this remained his position for the three remaining years of his life, during which his theater productions were always masterpieces. But because of his refusal to bash the GDR, his plays and writings were almost totally barred in Austria and West Germany. A top minister in Bonn compared his poetry with that of the thug, pimp, and Nazi “martyr” Horst Wessel, about whom the Nazi anthem was based (but who never wrote anything). The Bonn government even tried to prevent performances by the Berliner Ensemble in London. For them, Brecht was not a poet or dramatist but simply “a Communist”!
But why was there friction with top leaders of the young GDR, who like him, hated fascists and had hopes and plans for a happy future in a humane Germany, free of past evil influences?
They were obviously convinced that their duties included not only building a political and economic structure to this end but also guaranteeing that art and culture were doing the same. They saw themselves as revolutionaries, heading a vanguard party, and believed that in this struggle “art is a weapon.” Their questionable manner of wielding this weapon was greatly affected by influences from their own past and pressures from the present.
Most of the Party leaders grew up in working-class backgrounds in the Kaiser Wilhelm era or early 1920s. A tradition in Social Democratic groups, before and after the Communist Party was founded in 1919, was the effort to raise working-class members’ appreciation of the classics: Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, maybe Heine, music by Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, painters like Dürer, Rembrandt, maybe a few contemporaries like Max Liebermann. These artists all merited love and respect, but that often led to a mistrust of strange new trends like Expressionism or Cubism. That may help explain why many who became Communist leaders had middle-class, parlor-piano tastes and were suspicious of intellectual, individualist, or anarchist trends, even in pre-Hitler years when modernists like Brecht and Eisler took clearly left-wing positions, but were less “manageable.”
But these attitudes did not always apply. Some leaders had intellectual backgrounds more attuned to experimenting; others, like President Pieck with working-class backgrounds, were quite open-minded. Contradictions and crosscurrents abounded, and views like those of Walter Ulbricht were strong: “We no longer want to see any abstract pictures in our art schools. Nor have we any need for paintings of lunar landscapes or rotting fish. Gray-in-gray painting, an expression of capitalist collapse, is in sharp contrast with present-day life in the GDR.” Such views applied to all the arts.
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