Die Debatte um Hanns Eislers "Johann Faustus": Eine Dokumentation.

Blake, David

Hanns Eisler's libretto to his opera "Johann Faustus" was published by Aufbau-Verlag Berlin in 1952. It runs to seventy-six pages of text and represents one of the most extended and complex creative efforts of his life. Completion of the opera would have been a summation of the intellectual, musical, and ideological questions that had occupied him since his earliest years. In 1951 he had seen and hugely enjoyed a performance of the Faust puppet play. For his libretto he went back to this and the earliest sources and bypassed Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. There are three acts with a prologue in the underworld. The comic folk character Hanswurst plays an important part and it is he who flirts with the servant girl Grete. Act 2 takes place in Atlanta and includes three magic biblical scenes. Eisler's Faust is the dark brother to Goethe's; it is despair that leads to his involvement with magic, to his pact, not wager, with Mephistopheles. The action is set at the time of Thomas Munzer and the Peasant's Revolt of 1525 and it is because Faust betrays both the people and himself that he is a negative figure whose final realization is that there can be no true evolution for such a betrayer.

This fascinating and appalling book not only provides us in documentary form with the reasons why the opera was never composed but also gives a profound insight into the complex intellectual world of the fledgling German Democratic Republic. Many of the protagonists in the debate are major international figures - Ernst Fischer, Arnold Zweig, Walter Felsenstein, Johannes R. Becher, and Bertolt Brecht. Such men, returned from exile after the war, had invested in the GDR all their hopes and aspirations for a better future for mankind, believing profoundly in the potential of a Marxist-Leninist dialectic to create a society free from the horrors of fascism and the manifest injustices of capitalism. (It must be remembered that only at the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow in 1956 was the full extent of Josef Stalin's atrocities revealed.)

The debate over "Johann Faustus" was sparked by an essay published in the influential literary journal Sinn und Form in June 1952 by Fischer. In his entirely personal interpretation of Eisler's text, Fischer used phrases which at once raised hackles throughout GDR artistic circles: "Eisler's 'Doktor Faustus' will become what we have lacked for a century: a German national opera" (p. 36). "Faust stands for a character who is central to Germany's calamity [Misere]. . . . [He is] the German humanist as turncoat" (italics in original; p. 27). Strangely, Eisler at no time criticized or disassociated himself from Fischer's article, although so much of the argument that broke out seemed to be about Fischer's text rather than Eisler's. The issue inevitably became more than a literary one as it was still GDR policy to work towards German unity. (It was then still possible to sing Eisler's beautiful 1950 Brecht setting "Anmut sparet nicht noch Muhe," which speaks of the blooming of "a good Germany.")

Three special meetings of the so-called "Wednesday Society" of the Academy of the Arts were held, on 13 May, 27 May, and 10 June 1953. Many of the participants understood that the proceedings might well represent a literary controversy of historic significance. To begin, Alexander Abusch read his essay "Faust - Hero or Renegade in German Literature," which was published in the journal Sonntag four days later. Faust's lofty humanistic ideals, presumably as expressed by Goethe, make him for Abusch a "great and positive hero of classical German national drama." Fischer had dated the beginning of the "night of the German catastrophe" from the putting down of the Peasant's Revolt and had asked why the Faust saga had not mirrored this tragedy. As a renegade, he became a negative hero. Foreseeably, Abusch summons Friedrich Engels (not to mention J. S. Bach, Gotthold Lessing, Friedrich Schiller, Immanuel Kant, and so on) to his aid in denouncing Fischer's denigration of the many-sidedness and greatness of the German humanistic tradition.

Running through the entire debate was a feeling of resentment that Eisler had challenged Goethe, that by his beginning again with the saga and interpreting it anew, he had somehow wished to diminish Goethe. Inevitably Thomas Mann's novel was frequently mentioned, but as something different - a rewriting of the legend in modern terms in which the actual personage of Johann Faust does not appear. This seemed to be the sticking point. So much talk of a historical figure raised to mythic status some three centuries later in the greatest work in German literature, whose historical role was open to question (all in the context of the immediate postholocaust years) seems to expose the depth of the national trauma. Abusch therefore categorically stated that Fischer's thesis is "unhistoric and anti-national."

The first to speak in the discussion that followed was Brecht, who immediately tried to preempt any passionate response to Abusch by saying that time would be needed to digest so many points but put his view that Eisler's Faust is not a purely negative figure; indeed, were this to be the case, all the many beauties of the text would be of no value. In the twelve theses that he formulated for the second meeting, he emphasised all the positive aspects and disagreed with Fischer's basic premise of the German humanist as renegade. Zweig's first statement was well meaning if a little bizarre in suggesting that renaming Eisler's hero Knaust or replacing him with another historical figure like Agrippa von Nettesheim would solve the problem.

The long statement by Wilhelm Girnus, who later became a much-respected editor of Sinn und Form, was obviously prepared, as were most of the subsequent ones, to judge by their length and density. He turned out to be Eisler's (and Fischer's) most outspoken critic. He maintained that a Faust portrayed as living at the time of the Peasant's War must be a "heroic, spiritual figure." Eisler shows German humanists typically as turncoats and German history as a calamity. He concluded: "I believe Hanns Eisler has arrived at this fundamentally false conception because he has a false, unpatriotic, anti-patriotic conception of German history and a false conception of the further development of realism under present conditions, a conception which is based on a negation of the classics" (p. 73).

Anyone who knows anything of Eisler knows that nothing could be further from the truth. In an attempt to end the first session positively and refocus attention on Eisler's text, Brecht read aloud the thirty-five four-line stanzas of Faust's Confessio, which he considered, rightly, to be the kernel of the work. Eisler later said that Faust, after all his wavering, "in his Confessio turns into a human being, for self-knowledge makes him human and so this negative figure also exhibits a positive streak." Regular tribute was made to the libretto's literary merit, "astonishing" for a musician.

There is no doubt that Eisler was hurt by much of what was said, in spite of the support and positive reactions he had received from Mann, Leon Feuchtwanger, Zweig, and Brecht. At the meeting of 27 May he defended himself spiritedly and so successfully that his critics' most extreme statements became manifestly foolish. For example, he quoted Girnus, "'The Third Reich collapsed for the precise reason that it was a betrayal of German humanism, so that in the downfall of the Third Reich it was German humanism, the German humanistic spirit which triumphed.' He (Girnus) should better have said - it survived it! Can we describe 1945 as a victory for the German humanistic spirit? Regrettably we cannot, friend Girnus. And one should not polemicise against me with such crude arguments" (p. 141).

Sensibly, Eisler directed his subsequent points to those of Girnus's criticisms that can be demonstrated to be misinterpretations, wrong, or downright obtuse. There followed the first contribution from the Eisler pupil Ernst Hermann Meyer, who in general found the negative criticisms justified and virtually begged Eisler not to "waste valuable years of his precious life on a subject doomed to failure."

Brecht's role in all this was intelligent, calculated, and diplomatic. Anxious to see a positive outcome for his close friend and collaborator, his Twelve Theses were the most significant contribution to the debate, helping to focus it when repetition was creeping in. Although it was obvious that Eisler would have welcomed a point-by-point discussion of these, this never came about, mainly because, in a quite subtle way, the course of events was dominated by Girnus. The Aufbau-Verlag publisher, Max Schroder, deplored the whole proceedings and said Eisler had been ill-advised to publish the libretto before composing the music and had been badly served by the discussion. Felsenstein had earlier made the crucial point that a libretto has no validity without the music.

At the third session, Brecht lost his temper, Becher spoke with a passionate subjectivity that is rather touching, and Eisler's impatience for the whole business to end became obvious. Strangely, although references were made to Stalin and Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov, only once was the question of "socialist realism" raised. When Girnus presumes that Eisler works according to its principles, Eisler replies, "Of course. But this is an opera and I know as yet no principles for a socialist-realist opera." Although another meeting was planned, none took place. Eisler went to Vienna for a few weeks and from there sent a letter dated 30 October 1953 to the Central Committee of the SED. "An artist works on many levels and as well as that which is easily understood, there must be the more complicated. I need an atmosphere of good will, of trust and friendly criticism in order to be able to work. Of course criticism is necessary . . . but not criticism that kills enthusiasm, diminishes an artist's standing and undermines his self-confidence. After the attack on Faustus I lost all impulse to write music. I fell into a state of deep depression such as I had hardly ever experienced" (p. 263).

Forty years on, with a wall built and demolished, it is easy to be cynical about this sorry affair. That one of the century's major figures should have been not forbidden but rendered spiritually incapable of composing his magnum opus is deeply saddening. Fortunately Eisler's spirit was a resilient one and he composed much more in the last eight years of his life, ending it with his lovely Ernste Gesange. The aftermath has its ironies. In 1974 the text was produced as a play in Tubingen and at the Berliner Ensemble in 1982. A new edition prepared by Hans Bunge was published by Henschelverlag in 1983 with a long and valuable afterword by Werner Mittenzwei. The text's literary merit is now recognized. This book offers a stimulating intellectual challenge and important insights into another episode in the "German calamity."

DAVID BLAKE University of York, England