It’s what the French call Le Baroud d’honneur. Sure you go down, but you go down fighting. A few years back I was invited to a panel on Red Vienna, that brief period of time when Vienna was dominated, not so much by a Socialist administration (as it was), but a hope for socialism that affected all levels of life and culture. The other participants — younger techies—saw in Red Vienna only technical solutions to technical problems: better garbage pickup, more efficient housing programs. When my turn came I said:
“There’s a number of practical problems that can be found at the beginning of Red Vienna that are still relevant today. Presently we find ourselves in an epistemological crisis of the Bourgeoisie, hashtag Fake News… It's not about embalming the past but about finding out what that hope was all about and how we can take it up in our intellectual practice.”
„Es gibt eine Reihe von praktischen Problemen, die sich am Beginn des Roten Wien finden, die immer noch aktuell sind. Wir befinden uns gegenwärtig in einer epistemologischen Krise der Bourgeoisie, Stichwort Fake News… Es geht nicht darum, die Vergangenheit einzubalmieren, sondern herauszufinden, was es mit der Hoffnung auf sich hatte und wie wir sie in unserer intellektuellen Praxis aufgreifen können.“1
After that it was all downhill for me in Vienna: the idea that the problems of the Interwar period, whether of Red Vienna or Weimar Germany, are philosophical problems, not mere technical ones susceptible to technical fixes; the thought of solutions we’re not ready to contemplate, ways of seeing we can’t adopt: those are not the kinds of thoughts the Austrians or Germans want to hear.
Or, for that matter, Americans. If you visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art today you’ll note a neat epistemological split between what the curators are doing, and what the rest of the institution—the PR folks, outreach the tour guides, that odd entity known as Visitors Services—thinks is going on. The curators try to resolve the most abstruse art-historical, social, anthropological problems; the others throw out words like mahvelous! and sublime! and the same can be said of the Culture beat at the New York Times.
So I was surprised to read Zachary Woolfe’s review of the international concert series at Carnegie Hall titled “Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice,” in the New York Times, in which he complains that the programming doesn’t yield what the title promises:
“Carnegie [Hall] promised that ‘Fall of the Weimar Republic’ would yield ‘many lessons about the fragility of democracy.’
A tall order, even if the festival were single-mindedly focused on the culture of the Weimar period — its devil-may-care decadence and world-weary cynicism. But the programming has been a bit unpersuasive.”2
I’m not sure what the fuss is about. The title is little more than a PR gimmick like those of which the Met Museum’s a master: Splendor of the Weimarites for music lovers. No doubt there are lessons of all kinds to be learned from the various performances —why else would one go to a concert? Woolfe’s idea, however, your typical Times critic idea, is that the works can be made to yield a clear, unambiguous message: “Fall of the Weimar Republic” as a teaching moment.
That moment, according to Woolfe, occurs in the third section of the Incidental Music to Much Ado about Nothing performed at Zankel Hall this Friday past, as composed by the young Erich Korngold, a Viennese prodigy who would go on “to become the John Williams of his day,” as elegantly stated in Harry Haskell’s program notes.
Or perhaps the John Williams of his earlier days as well; that’s how Woolfe approvingly sees him:
“the march stepped along crisply, with dryly officious humor. But it also had an edge of sincere sternness. Cast over the bumptious charm was a hint of the ominous, of a real (rather than satirical) military buildup.
The same uneasy combination of optimistic energy and dark clouds characterized Germany during the Weimar Republic.”
Schorskied again. After Carl Schorske, the influential historian Carl Schorske, who made a specialty of finding signs of bourgeois decadence and despair in the cultural and intellectual productions of Late Habsburg Vienna—or Red Vienna, or Weimar Berlin: all decadent Germans are alike. Just as the bourgeoisie is always rising in Modernist narratives, so, too the bourgeoisie is always threatened in narratives of Germany and Austria from 1900 to 1938. Whatever you yourself may think it’s all supposed to mean, you’re going to find that explanation. And because you’re going to find that explanation everywhere you look you can most easily identify the Schorskeism by its love of anachronism.3 Perhaps optimistic energy and dark clouds “characterized” Germany during the Weimar Republic—but Vienna in 1920?
Then again, it’s perfectly plausible Korngold did intend to send this type of message. No doubt Woolfe would have approved as well if Carnegie had programmed Richard Strauss’ ballet Schlagobers, composed in the same years in Vienna, whose plot involves a group of middle-class children whose dreams of feasting on Viennese pastries are threatened by an invasion of lowdown socialist matzo from the Jewish quarter. This type of musical messaging was common in Austria and Germany, the kind of spectacle that
“traditionally caters to the middle class, and […] tends to emphasize political issues on which bourgeois opinion is fairly unanimous.”4
The kind of Middle-brows that form the readership of the Times, for instance; the kind of musical messaging Korngold would go on to compose for Hollywood, whose attitude to musical signifying that great composer of the Weimar period, Hanns Eisler, would mercilessly deride: “Birdie sings, music sings.”5
There it is, the epistemological crisis I was talking about in Vienna: that moment where the Times, its critics and its readership go desperately fishing for life lessons and History lessons to buttress their belief that this is what the world was like, is like today; the ones for whom all music has to sound like what they want to think it represents, the way the paintings at the Met are always meant to represent what the Times critic thinks they’re meant to represent.
In the end what sank me in the eyes of the Viennese Kulturwelt was my concluding sentence:
“To paraphrase Frantz Fanon: the colonized presents the colonizer with all the cultural treasures of Red Vienna. But the truth is, the colonizer is not interested in whether the colonial subject has a history. He is only interested in that the colonized has no future.”
„Um es mit Frantz Fanon zu sagen: Der Kolonisierte präsentiert dem Kolonialherren alle kulturellen Schätze des Roten Wien. Aber die Wahrheit ist, der Kolonialherr interessiert sich nicht dafür, ob der koloniale Untertan eine Geschichte hat. Er interessiert sich nur dafür, dass der Kolonisierte keine Zukunft hat.“
Friday’s concert ended with an encore which was pointedly not listed on the program: Hanns Eisler’s savage setting of the Brecht poem, „Ballade vom Wasserrad“ (“Ballad of the Mill Wheel”) :
„Ihr versteht: Ich meine dass wir keine andern Herren brauchen, sondern keine!“
You understand: I’m saying we don’t need other masters, we need none!
Not the kind of “uneasy combination of optimistic energy and dark clouds” we were looking for exactly, was it?
April 16, 2024
WOID XXIII-48
„Ausblick: Hoffnung auf die egalitäre Stadt.“ [Debatte]. Werner Michael Schwarz, Georg Spitaler, Georg, Elke Wikidal, ed., “Das Rote Wien 1919-1934. Ideen Debatten Praxis. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2019, p. 418. The original statement was in English.
Zachary Woolfe. “At Carnegie Hall, Weimar is Irresistible but Poorly Defined. “New York Times, April 14, 2024; https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/14/arts/music/weimar-festival-carnegie-hall.html
Carl E. Schorske. Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. Politics and Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979; Paul Werner. “The Ghosts of Red Vienna,” Review Essay: Rob McFarland, Georg Spitaler and Ingo Zechner, ed. The Red Vienna Sourcebook (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2020); Das Rote Wien. Schlüsseltexte der Zweiten Wiener Moderne 1919–1934, herausgegeben von Rob McFarland, Georg Spitaler und Ingo Zechner De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2020 (May 1, 2021), p. 8.
Jeffrey S. Weiss, quoted in Wayne Heisler, “Kitsch and the Ballet Schlagobers,” The Opera Quarterly Vol. 22, no. 1 (2006): p. 56.
Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films [1947] with a new Introduction by Graham McCann (Continuum Books, 2007), p. xvi.
„Ballade vom Wasserrad.“ Lyrics by Bertolt Brecht [1932]; Music by Hanns Eisler [1934].