Musical Memories—with Twist

Sometime a chance stimulus leads to a string of associations—and they produce new, and amusing, insights. Here is such a case. I am quoting here from a letter I received this morning from my old friend Philip Cavanaugh:

A couple of days ago I heard the recording “Goodnight Irene” on an internet music site. I remembered this silly song from my high school days and remembered that it had been composed and sung by Peter Seeger, my favorite American Communist. 

I met Seeger twice, once in 1965 when I was working at the New Windsor Cantonment in Newburgh, NY. You once visited there in our 1725 house; we drank a lot of Ballantine Ale that night. The museum hosted a group of Czech students and invited Pete Seeger to come over from Poughkeepsie to their campsite and sing. Seeger is a delightful and sharp guy. That was the first time I had heard the song “Die Moorsoldaten,” and he sang some of the songs of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of Spanish Civil War-fame. I met him again a couple of years later aboard his reconstructed 19th century Hudson river schooner “The Clearwater”; he was then active in creating awareness of the terribly polluted Hudson river.

Anyway, after hearing his song I looked him up on Wikipedia, knowing he was in his 90’s and wanted to see if he is still around. He is, but while reading about his life I encountered the name “Hanns Eisler”; this jumped out at me, as this name appears on the dust jacket of a recording of the DDR national anthem I had bought in East Berlin in 1957. Reading further I found Eisler was indeed a Seeger friend. Eisler, Brecht, Kurt Weil were émigrés in the 1930’s who came to the US to get away from the Nazis. Eisler and Brecht ended up in Hollywood and Eisler composed music for American films during the war; in fact, he was nominated for an Oscar for his film score for “None but the Lonely Heart” starring Cary Grant. He had a bad time in the late 40’s and 50’s with the House Un-American Activities Committee and left the country, eventually ending up in East Berlin. He composed “Auferstanden aus Ruinen” [“Risen from the Ruins”] and it became the official East German anthem. He remained a staunch communist and defended not only the regime against the demonstrators of the 17th of June but also defended the construction of the Berlin Wall. So a one time American Oscar-nominated film music composer wrote the DDR’s Nationalhymne? Is that cool or what?
                      [Philip Marshall Cavanaugh, private communication]

Die Da!

The title is in German and simply means “Those there”; it’s pronounced “deed ahh.” We’ll get there. Long ago now we made a visit to the German Democratic Republic, communist East Germany. We had family there. Tensions had eased enough to make the trip without concern. We went as a family, driving a little Opel we’d rented in the West, first to West then to East Berlin; we crossed at the famous Checkpoint Charlie and, once over there, navigated the horrendous bureaucratic wall (much worse than The Wall) to get permission to travel further inland. Finally we had the go ahead and zoomed off on a virtually empty autobahn into the East. It was the closest thing to time travel I’d ever engaged in: From booming West Germany in the 1970s we were suddenly transported to the 1940s. Time had literally frozen.

Some time after reunion with the family, late one morning on a weekend, Jonas, my brother-in-law (by profession he was a psychiatrist) headed out to buy the paper. Eager to see the papers myself I tagged along. We stopped at what looked like a tiny but well-stocked kiosk. I asked Jonas to point out the best paper to buy. He already had one in his hand. “Don’t bother,” he said. “There’s nothing in the papers.” Then, catching my pointed look at the paper he held, he laughed, dryly, and said: “It’s a sports paper.” His hand swept over a large display. “All of these are. Sports papers. That’s what we read here.” Intent on penetrating communism, I bought three of the ordinary papers for myself and later discovered the strangely fictional world projected by the authorities of the Deutsche Demokratische Repulik—unbelievably heroic figures of men and women who, in transports of joyous labor, climbed the steepest quota mountains and outperformed their eagerly following comrades in the production of plywood, steel, and even in milking cows.

Jonas took me on a walk and commented wryly on the strange realities on display everywhere in this frozen time. One of our stops was beside a damaged little car, a Trabant, the VW of the East. He showed me—and made me touch the surface of—its ripped fender so that I could experience a car the body of which was made of cardboard. We wandered long enough so that it was time for lunch, and on an impulse Jonas took me to a restaurant. It overflowed with masses of people, every table in crowded use. Some eight or nine people, two or three families, waited for a table. It looked like it was going to be a long wait. We were looking at each other, kind of questioning this decision, when three short, energetic, well-dressed men in suits entered the restaurant. Their leader immediately engaged the maitre’d in conversation. A fair amount of hand-waving went on; the leader spoke in a kind of stilted too-formal German. The maitre’d looked in deep pain; he seemed determined to prevail but, quite rapidly, folded. After a tiny shrug, he nodded and led the men inside to seat them somewhere—where it was impossible to see.

Jonas now looked at me. “Die da!” he said. Then he turned, and out of the restaurant we went. Communist party members in the DDR invariably wore a tiny round emblem on their lapels, the regime’s coat of arms. To indicate the identity of these worthies, East Germans had a habit of pointing a finger at the left-hand lapel and to say, Die da, the eternal them.

This memory suddenly surfaced the other day when I was reading a story about Iraq’s painfully forming democratic government. The DDR lasted from 1949 to 1990. How long would glorious new democracy reign in Iraq? And it struck me as odd that in that realm we were and are…Die da!