Political Ironies: Hanns Eisler in Hollywood and Behind the Iron Curtain

Abstract

In 1943, the German Marxist emigre' composer Hanns Eisler was nominated for the prestigious Academy Award in recognition of his firs Hollywood film score Hangmen also Die.1 Only a few years later in a starkly contrasting setting, Eisler would be honored again. This time the award, East Germany's 1949 National prize, was given in recognition of his patriotic song Auferstanden aus Ruinen, the newly adopted national anthem for the communist German Democratic Republic.2 In hindsight, the juxtaposition of these two events constitutes a dramatic contradiction. With the eventual onset of the cold war, these musical episodes would come to idealize a crystallization of the struggle between two opposing ideological and political worlds. Whereas Eisler's Hollywood film score is a product of American commercial enterprise distinguishable by the values of capital ism at its most extreme, the East German national anthem is a symbol for communism idealizing the values of an opposing socialist political ideology.

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