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Our artists in exile:
Further on behind the horizon - Exile America - culture without home
Bertolt Brecht about the expression "emigrants":
"I have always found the name they gave us wrong: the emigrants. That´s what you call people that leave. But we didn´t leave out of our own free will, chosing a new country. We didn´t come to another country to stay, possibly even for ever. We had to flee. We are the exiled, the banished".
From 1950 until the middle of the 20th century about 7 million people left their german homeland via Bremerhaven. For the emigrants this often meant the end of many painful experiences. Predominantly driven out of their country by economic need and political prosecution. Most of the emigrants left between 1933 and 1941. In the first months and weeks after the national socialists had seized the power it was mostly their political oppponents that left Germany fearing repressive actions and pursuit. Amongst the exiled were many artists, musicians and literary figures that had been robbed of their basis of creation. Writers like Thomas und Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Alfred Döblin, Anna Seghers and Joseph Roth, directors like Billy Wilder and Otto Preminger and also composers, songwriters and actors such as Hanns Eisler, Friedrich Hollaender, Anna Seghers or Marlene Dietrich.
Exile – that stands for expatriation, the loss of civil rights, being homeless – Bertold Brecht wrote in his poem “Über die Bezeichnung Emigration” (about the expression emigration). For each emigrant it also meant disorientation, existential threat, lack of money, language barriers and political incabability as well as being homesick and pained by worries about the ones left behind.
Escaping Hitler many artists and intellectuals ended up in New York. Amerika should become the exile without a home. The artists and radicals amongst the emigrants thought of themselves as avant-gardists, vanguard for a future where the political and cultural limits of the present would no longer count.
The commoners amongst them followed their "functional" roles as doctors, lawyers or teachers. They came to America, knowing more about this country than any other emigrant ever before and with respect for the rough, modern civilization.
The fates are numerous: some of the emigrants became popular in Hollywood, others just barely made it in this new world. Without the protection of an institution many had to earn their living by dirty work. Others found badly paid jobs in radio stations others became journalists. Only gradually were they able to set up a new existence as artists, however always formed by the exile from their homeland. Some celebrated huge successes in Hollywood or on Broadway. At home their art was forbidden as “degenerate”.
After the war, cultural life developed with unexpected suddenness. Concerts were held, theaters reopened – the need to catch up was enormous. Work of artists that had been condemned during the 3rd Reich was back on the playlists, museums showed the works of the classic modern age.
Music was the fastest to recover: just a few days after the capitulation first concerts took place. Jazz, already popular in german urban culture of the 20´s, called “niggermusic” by the Nazis, celebrated a convincing comeback. Film became the most important medium for coming to terms with the past and entertainment.
The new, west-german post-war culture was essentially influenced by America. But the cultural heritage left by the emigrants remained forgotten. Also in the GDR hardly anyone treated the subject of art by the emigrated: the ash was worshipped, the memory institutionalized.
Udo Lindenberg now brings a piece of german cultural history back to Germany. He builds the time-bridge from New York over Bremerhaven, Hamburg and Berlin, between Berlin in its´ 20´s to contemporary Berlin 2005 to the future: Berlin 2020. He passes on the fire of those emigrants, that never had the chance at the time to present their works to a large german audience.
The music of the 20´s and 30´s, sung in todays´ style and groove, freed by Udo and his crew of experts from their nostalgic closet, celebrated in a big, flamboyant show and released on a new CD; up to now, no one in Germany has done this before.
Not tears of sorrow but tears of joy will stream on the Columbuskaje in Bremerhaven 2002 for the return of our great artists and rebels to the streets an theaters of the Colorific Republic Germany – and the world.
Kurt Weill
Born on 2 March 1900, the son of a cantor in Dessau, Kurt Weill displayed musical talent early; by the time he was twelve, he was composing and during his teens he was accompanying singers from the Dessau Court Opera and mounting concerts. He enrolled at the Berlin Musikhochschule and studied first under Humperdink (which he found stifling) and then, after a year as a theatre conductor, under Busoni. He lived by playing the organ in a synagogue, the piano in a tavern, by tutoring in music theory (including Claudio Arrau) and by becoming a music critic in the young medium of wireless.
During the mid-twenties, the success of his works at international festivals and in the theatre placed him swiftly in the front ranks of his contemporaries. Der Protagonist (Dresden 1926), the opera buffa Der Zar lässt sich photographieren (Leipzig 1928) and his first collaboration with Brecht in Mahagonny Songspiel, a commission for the 1927 Baden-Baden Music Festival, gave him the partner he had been seeking to help carry out his personal ambition to reform the musical stage. His musical language had by this time developed away from his earlier influences (Wagner, Reger and Mahler) to a more sharply-etched 'modernist' idiom, cross-cut with the use of dance and jazz influences.
In 1926, Weill had married the singer-actress Lotte Lenya and she played a major role in his gigantic success of August 1928, Die Dreigroschenoper, in which Brecht extensively adapted The Beggar's Opera, though Weill's music is totally original. The full-length opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Leipzig 1930) derived from the earlier Songspiel, and the school-opera Der Jasager and two radio cantatas Das Berliner Requiem and Der Lindberghtlug explored other media than the standard opera stage, but Brecht's restricted use of music for politico-polemic ends eventually made Weill look elsewhere and he collaborated with Caspar Neher and Georg Kaiser on Die Bürgschaft (1931) and Der Silbersee (1932) respectively.
By 1933, the rise of Nazi propaganda (including riots at performances of his works) made emigration imperative for Weill and in March of that year he fled to Paris. Here he spent two and a half years, during which his 2nd Symphony was written, also a ballet-with-voices Die sieben Todsünden (his last major completed collaboration with Brecht), the musical play Marie Galante and a number of cabaret chansons. He worked during this period on a large oratorio-like score for Franz Werfel's play Der Weg der Verheissung and it was his collaboration on its production in America by Max Reinhardt that took him there in September 1935,
Once in America, he realised that there, and no longer in Europe, was the chance for working with leading writers which he had always valued so highly, and he turned to the Broadway stage (and politically-committed theatre) with Johnny Johnson (1936). During the next decade, Broadway was enriched by Weill's partnerships with playwrights of the stature of Maxwell Anderson (with Knickerbocker Holiday in 1938, and Lost in the Stars in 1949), Moss Hart and Ira Gershwin (Lady in the Dark, 1941), Ogden Nash and S.J. Perelman (One Touch of Venus, 1948), Elmer Rice (Street Scene, 1947) and Alan Jay Lerner (Love Life, 1948). Although he had divorced Lotte Lenya when he left Germany, they travelled to America together and re-married in January 1937. He became an American citizen in 1943.
His tragically early death in April 1950 came at a time when his "German" works were beginning to be re-discovered. Yet, the resulting dichotomy of the "two Weills" remains for posterity to resolve. Only now, forty years later, are we coming to grips with the remarkable range and endlessly fascinating variety of his works, which nevertheless all carry his unmistakable stylistic signature.
Abbreviated version of the biography contained in KURT WEILL: A GUIDE TO HIS WORKS, published by the Kurt Weill Foundation of Music, Inc. New York, and reproduced by kind permission.
Lotte Lenya
Austrian-born singing actress Lotte Lenya is remembered for roles on stages and films in Germany and the United States (including Jenny in Die Dreigroschenoper and the Fräulein Schneider in Cabaret), as well as for her interpretations of the songs of her husband Kurt Weill. Born in 1898, she began training as a dancer in Switzerland, but after some acting lessons she moved to Berlin to pursue an acting career. She was introduced to Weill there in 1924, and two years later they were married.
Her first artistic collaboration with Weill was in his 1928 scenic cantata Mahagonny Songspiel, but she won international recognition the following year playing Jenny in Weill's and Bertold Brecht's Die Dreigroschenoper.
Weill wrote many more of his roles with her in mind, and she played in the original productions of the operas Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny and Die sieben Todsünden before they left Europe to escape Hitler in 1935.
In the years leading up to their departure their relations became increasingly strained, and they divorced in 1933. By the time of their emigration, however, they had reconciled, and once in the United States they remarried. Lenya continued to act in her husband’s musicals, including The Eternal Road and Firebrand of Florence, and after he died in 1950 she actively promoted his music on stage and screen in both America and Europe. Her career flourished until her death in 1981.
In the 1950s she made a number of historic recordings of Weill’s music with Columbia Masterworks, which have been reissued by Sony Classical, including the complete Die Dreigroschenoper (MK 42637), the complete Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (M2K 37874), Die sieben Todsünden and Berlin theatre songs (MHK 63222), and an album of American theatre songs (MHK 60647). She also appeared on the original cast recording of Cabaret, recently reissued as part of Sony’s Broadway Masterworks series (MHK 60533).
Marlene Dietrich
December 27, 1901
Birth of Marie Magdalene Dietrich in Berlin-Schoneberg.
Parents: Louis Erich Otto Dietrich and Elisabeth Josephine nee Felsing.
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1907 - 1919
School in Berlin and Dessau.
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1922
First stage roles in Berlin theatres, including the Grosses Schauspielhaus Berlin (director Max Reinhardt); first small parts in films.
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May 17, 1923
Marriage to Rudolf Sieber (1897 - 1976).
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December 13, 1924
Birth of daughter Maria Elizabeth Sieber.
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1929
First leading part in the film DIE FRAU, NACH DER MAN SICH SEHNT.
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October 1929
Screen tests and contract for the film DER BLAUE ENGEL.
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April 1, 1930
Premiere of the DER BLAUE ENGEL at the Gloria Palast in Berlin.
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April 2, 1930
Departure for America.
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November 14, 1930
Premiere of her first American film, MOROCCO.
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1935
After seven films together, parting of the ways with her director Josef von Sternberg.
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March 6, 1937
Became an American citizen.
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1944 - 45
Entertaining American troops in N. Africa and Europe.
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1950
The French government awards her the title of “ de la Legion d'Honneur”. She was later to be promoted "officer" by President Pompidou and “” by President Mitterand.
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1953 - 54
Appearances as show performer at the Hotel Sahara in Las Vegas and Cafe de Paris in London.
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1960
Publication of the book “ Dietrich's ABC”
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1974
Last cabaret/stage performance
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1975
Last film performance in “ A Gigolo”
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1979
Autobiography published “ nur mein Leben”
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1984
Biographical film “” by Maximillian Schell
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May 6, 1992
Died in Paris in her sleep; Services at La Madelaine May 10, Buried in Berlin next to her mother, May 16, 1992.
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October 24, 1993
Transfer of her estate effects to the State of Berlin and the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, assisted by John Block of Sotheby's (New York).
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Marlene, Inc.
Friedrich Hollaender
Friedrich Holländer (1896 - 1976)
Even though he received a classical education, Holländer ended up writing music for cabaret.
In Berlin's vibrant cabaret scene of the 1920's Holländer was an important figure, known for his skills in improvising, composing and writing lyrics.
Marlene Dietrich insisted on him as a pianist in 'The Blue Angel' ('Der blaue Engel') and he ended up writing the movie's music as well.
Famous 'Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß' is just one of his many successful songs he wrote exclusively for the great actress.
