resented musicallythrough harmonyordisharmony, in simple unison folksong,
or do they call for polyphonic composition principles?”Confronted with the false
alternativesofreform and revolution, the class-conscious worker could find an
answer onlyinthe return to militant masculinity promised by the Communists;
thus the motto had to be:“Down with tame-lame men’schoruses! Down with
thatgossip hub and marriagebureaucalled mixed chorus!”³⁴
One of the most influentialvoices in the project of agitpropization was the
Austrian-born composer Hanns Eisler (1898–1962),who studied under Arnold
Schönbergand worked closelywith Bertolt Brecht.Eisler soughttobreak,
once and for all, with the legacies of the bourgeoisKunstlied,includingits con-
ventional forms of sociability and offer an alternative to the pathos-laden, bom-
bastic styles perfected byUthmann. Theworkers’choruses, he argued, had been
reducedto“amusical(performance) movement thatcultivatedavery backward,
petty-bourgeois musicalstyle,asedatechumminess that actuallymade its mem-
bers more apolitical and went hand in hand withadreadful clubbiness.”³⁵Ac-
cording to Eisler,the typicalTendenzlied,the kind that relied heavilyoncontra-
factum,combined revolutionary content with traditional musicalstyles and
promoted passivelisteningrather than active engagement.³⁶By contrast, the
communistKampflied(battle song or militant song), just like theKampfdichtung
promoted by KPD literarycritics, was to mobilize the workers through what he
called its“great comprehensibility,easy accessibility,and energetic, precise hab-
itus”³⁷and, in combination with shortskits, profoundlychangeproletarian mu-
sical culture. Eisler’s“Solidarity Song”from the 19 32 KuhleWampefilm, which
will be examined in chapter 18,maynot fit the definition of singinginone
voice givenatthe beginning,but it certainlyattests to the revolutionary energy
behindany musicalexpression of“the samefeeling and thinking.”Despite con-
siderable changes in the organizational structures and performance practices of
Durus,“Arbeitergesangund Agitprop,”Arbeiterbühne und Film3(1931): 12 and 13.
Hanns Eisler,“Geschichteder deutschen Arbeitermusikbewegungvon1848,”inMusik und
Politik. Schriften 19 24 – 1948 ,ed. Günter Mayer(Munich:Rogner&Bernard, 1973), 215. The impor-
tanceofchoral societiesto the socialist movement is confirmed byashort article by Vladimir
Ilyich Lenin,“The Development ofWorkers’Choirs in Germany,”https://www.marxists.org/ar
chive/lenin/works/1913/jan/03.htm,1March2017.
Hanns Eisler,“DieKunst als Lehrmeisterin im Klassenkampf,”inMusik und Politik. Schriften
1924 – 1948 ,120–129.
Hanns Eisler,“UnsereKampfmusik”(1932), reprinted in Lammel,Arbeiterlied—Arbeiterge-
sang,130.The continuities between communistKampfmusikin the lateWeimar Republic and
culturalleftism in theUnitedStates can be seen in Robbie Lieberman,My Song Is MyWeapon:
People’sSongs,American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930– 50 (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1989).
98 Chapter 4