Music of Exile: The Untold Story of the Composers Who Fled Hitler. Michael Haas. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2023.

Reviewed by Dr. Alexandra Birch

Michael Haas’s new book is an expansion of his earlier work on Forbidden Music: The Composers Banned by the Nazis (Yale University Press: 2013) critically reconsidering different modalities of “exile” and the impact of exile on musical composition. Rather than a simple look at only those composers who fled to the United States, Haas engages with larger issues in the historiography of the Holocaust, like the material and financial ability to flee, the change in the perceived danger of Hitler across the 1930s, and how far was far enough to escape the war. Haas also complicates our understanding of those composers who remained in Europe, addressing the spectrum of complicity that they employed in order to continue working in occupied Europe. One of the strengths of the book is Haas’s experience both in performance and the humanities, where he elegantly puts the aesthetics of music in dialogue with Nazi racial and political strictures, emphasizing that denunciation and danger could be on both fronts with “Jewish” music and or a Jewish racial identity. The writing about music never feels cumbersome and is accessible to historians and musicians alike. 

Haas makes an excellent case for the reinclusion of forgotten exiles in the classical canon, without reducing their significance to their exile and persecution. Rather, he specifically problematizes the categorization of “Exilmusik” or even worse “Entartete (Musik)” which describes the situation of composers but not the aesthetic content of their music (p. 8). Haas’s challenge to this broad categorization is important as it recenters the perspective of affected composers outside of the binaries of Nazi acceptability and exclusion. Engaging with Thomas Mann’s concept of emigration, Haas introduces a number of terms throughout the book including “inner emigration” and “inner return,” (p. 216) challenging simplistic or reductive notions of flight and exile. These terms, and naming different modalities and motivations for flight, are critical to understanding the ability of composers to flee Nazi terror and their perceptions of danger with the rise of National Socialism. Because of how critical this discussion is to situating the selected composers and to the overall structure of the argument, more consistent references to these terms throughout the chapters and further unpacking of their varied significances would be helpful to the reader. 

Haas explains the Nazis’ racialized concept of Aryan-ness, integrating it with the aesthetic guidelines of the Reichskulturkammer and other institutions. Haas’s writing makes understanding the content of music clear without seeing scores or hearing examples, accomplishing the difficult task of describing the aural in prose. His deep subject knowledge is reflected in the description of individual works, such as Viktor Ullmann’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis (p. 150), allowing the reader to understand these pieces within a wider artistic context without necessarily having heard them. Looking at different forms of exile, Haas continues to discuss composers’ negotiation of a personal racial identity with their compositional style. Composers who fled corporeal threats also had to articulate European, German, and Jewish musical identities, which meant clarifying their relationships to these concepts both personally and musically.

In each chapter, Haas raises substantial, critical questions about Jewish cultural identity, all of which could be expanded into book-length analyses. His lens of largely German and Austrian refugees to Anglo-American exile provides a specific look at topics like the maintenance of Jewish cultural organizations abroad, the creation of modern Jewish (supra) national identity, and the complex entanglements between religious and secular Judaism. These larger themes serve as wider context to Haas’s arguments about the exile of central European Jews. For example, in Chapter Three, Haas works through the spectrum of complicity of composers under the NSDAP regime including opportunists, “grey zone” or “compromised” composers (p. 93) who outwardly appeared to support the NSDAP regime to maintain their positions, unable to withdraw completely in the interest of artistic survival, and the sole example in Karl Amadeus Hartmann of a composer in “Active Resistance” who was able to withdraw from artistic life to avoid any associations with the Nazi regime, as well as mixed race or inter-married musicians who “Passively Resisted” (p. 106).  

The chapter on camp song, notably the Moorsoldatenlied, Dachaulied, and Buchenwaldlied seems misplaced in Haas’s discussion of exile, displaced composers, and internal exile. He first takes a nuanced look at resistance, and what sort of resistance music really is, arguing that music as “active resistance” is oxymoronic and in a different category than partisan counterinsurgency or other military activity (p. 128). Although the analysis and history of Ullmann’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis from Terezin is excellent, it does not fit well with compelled camp song and the work of Wilhelm Rettich, and its presence under the umbrella of “resistance” linked to Hanns Eisler and “the memory of a better Germany” (p. 160) seemed strained. Notably, this chapter does not include a detailed study of partisan or ghetto song, music which has the clearest historiography of explicit resistance. Haas does not return to a unifying argument about why these pieces represent resistance, nor does he complicate the argument with the sadistic and compelled use of music during the Holocaust. This also ignores the resistance of Jewish and Roma epistemic preservation against Nazi destruction, and, in many cases, postwar Soviet onslaught. A better interpretation of the entire chapter is “music from the brink,” or how composers functioned within the Holocaust, from forced song to Ullmann’s professionalism, to Eisler’s exile. 

Haas’s discussion in Chapter Five of Kurt Weill and a detailed look at both his successful and failed compositions in America is extremely compelling, and would be an excellent stand-alone chapter to teach about exile music in the United States. The primary point about composers fitting into a new country’s musical landscape while maintaining a degree of continuity from their European careers is correct and aptly reflected in Haas’s choice of Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Franz Waxman as counterpoints to Weill. 

The discussion of art as memory and mourning highlights the continued difficulty of composers in processing the war and the Holocaust in countries where the primary goal was commercial success (p. 230). Haas correctly parses the emotions of yearning, displacement, and bitterness in the selected musical works of Hanns Eisler, Walter Arlen, and Robert Fürstenthal. This segues nicely into a specific look at Hans Winterberg, an under-researched Czech Jewish composer whom Haas has situated well within questions of national identity and forms of exile. Winterberg’s relatively late internment in Theresienstadt (1945) and return to Prague is reflected in his and his family’s grappling with Czechness and Jewishness – an ideal example of Haas’s framework of “inner return.” 

The subheading of Chapter Eight, “’Hitler made us Jews’: Israel in Exile” is confusing and burdened by the contemporary understanding of Israel as a modern state rather than the conceptual understanding of Jewishness as articulated in 1930s and 1940s Europe. The discussion of composers and their conception of being Jewish during the war and the Holocaust is significant to understanding their expression of Jewish culture (or not) in their compositions. However, the political and historical overview of how the Holocaust was interpreted post-war is at times reductive and relies on a Western European or even Anglo-American understanding of the historiography (p. 288). Nevertheless, the comparison between composers who fled as adults and the generation born in the 1920s is a useful distinction. This comparison provides a more specific understanding of commemorative works, of working through Jewish identity and processing the Holocaust in music, and how that differed based on age, especially at the time of displacement. 

Closing with a discussion of exiled composers as emissaries of the European classical tradition is an interesting gloss of these composers’ work abroad. First, the Christianity-based language of describing these composers as “missionaries” spreading the “gospel of Austro-German music” (p. 319) seems misplaced. However, in this chapter we get a more global picture of exile including the Schönberg school composers who fled to Shanghai, including Julius Schloß, Karl Steiner, and Wolfgang Fraenkel, as well as Philip Herschkowitz who fled to the Soviet Union. This chapter introduces many unfamiliar names and different paths of flight while completing the story of the familiar composers to whom we have already been introduced. These global questions of exile are missing from earlier parts of the book, and introducing composers like Herschkowitz or Mieczyslaw Weinberg, a true “internal exile” within the USSR, earlier also would have provided a more complete picture of Holocaust history and Nazi Germany’s war and genocide on two fronts. This final chapter, with new composers and unconsidered paths of refuge, could be a full-length book on its own, excitingly setting up new trajectories of research on the subject. Haas’s book is a welcome addition to the literature on musicians persecuted by the Third Reich, complicating ideas of “exile” and elegantly framing composers within twentieth-century refugee history. 

Dr. Alexandra Birch is a professional violinist and historian, and is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University working on the intertwined spaces and music of Nazi and Soviet atrocity. She holds a BM, MM, and DMA in violin performance from Arizona State University and a PhD in History from the University of California, Santa Barbara.