The Fan Who Knew Too Much: Aretha Franklin, the Rise of the Soap Opera, Children of the Gospel Church, and Other Meditations by Anthony Heilbut

Author:Anthony Heilbut [Heilbut, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780307958471
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2012-06-19T04:00:00+00:00

Switching to the singsong rhythms of a popular tune, he adds:

Was sad, when I was young,

Am sad, now that I’m old.

So, when can I be happy?

It had better be soon.

Ah, but in that “So,” with its Berliner shrug, there is the great achievement of émigré tone—the gallows humor that turns all surprises, even death, into components of a comedy that is simply too political for pathos.

Brecht’s death at fifty-nine allowed him to miss the further degeneration of the East German system. (Stephen Parker, a British scholar, has recently surmised that the playwright’s early death was actually hastened by the Stasi, who may have withheld a 1951 X-ray that demonstrated the damage to his heart of a childhood bout of rheumatic fever. But would knowing this have led Bert Brecht to drop his cigar?) Less fortunate was his old friend the composer Hanns Eisler, whose songs of freedom had once been left-wing anthems. Shortly after Brecht’s death a drunken Eisler was reported wandering through West Berlin, complaining of life in the East. In fact, unlike Brecht, Eisler was never an uninflected Stalinist. In 1940, even while Brecht was rejoicing that “we” would soon control Paris, Eisler complained that Stalin was as bad as Hitler. After emigrating to America, Eisler was quite content, working in Hollywood, composing occasionally for the movies, and collaborating on a book about film scoring with Theodor Adorno.

His luck went bad in a most public and melodramatic fashion. In 1948 the postwar attack on Communists began with a congressional investigation of reds in Hollywood, and it started with Ruth Fischer, Hanns’s sister, testifying against him and particularly his brother, Gerhart, another émigré and a leading figure in the Communist Party. After Gerhart’s happy departure (the New York Daily News’s headline was “Red Sails in the Sunset”), an unhappy Hanns joined him. But he despaired that his beloved America had turned on him, and saw it correctly as a sign of further horrors to come.

The families of illustrious émigrés were often fractured. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s brother, Paul, didn’t forgive his sisters for their desperate dealings with Hitler (who bought their disingenuous argument that they were not really Jews but “mischlings,” because of a purported adultery committed by their grandmother), and chose to end communication with Ludwig, who had not even been involved. After Thomas Mann’s death, his surviving five children fought over his legacy: the right-wing Golo and the left-wing Erika wouldn’t speak to each other, and having survived his siblings, father, and uncle Heinrich, Golo would extract his revenge by attacking their politics when they couldn’t reply.

But that was quite tame compared to the Eislers’ public spats. Ruth Fischer seemed the most disloyal of sisters, particularly in the McCarthy era. But with the years, her story grows more complex. She had once been “Red Ruth,” the first member of Vienna’s Communist Party, and the most obvious heir to Rosa Luxemburg. She came to despise Stalinism, particularly after a period of living in the Soviet Union. But her perspective remained leftist, and most probably—as the Stalinists would contend—Trotskyist.

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