Today's Stories

October 2-4, 2009

Saul Landau
News From Raul Castro

October 1, 2009

Andy Worthington
A Truly Shocking Gitmo Story

Carl Ginsburg
The Great Marginalization

Mary Lynn Cramer
Seniors on the Chopping Block

Col. Douglas Macgregor
The Bog of History in Afghanistan

Brian M. Downing
The Paradox of Financial Disorder

John V. Walsh
Mao's China at 60

Ramzy Baroud
The Big Diversion

Norman Solomon
Starting Another Year of War in Afghanistan

Dan Bacher
Undamming the Klamath

Brenda Norrell
Lazy Journalists are the Darlings of the Corporations

Website of the Day
Neoliberalism as Water Balloon

September 30, 2009

Vijay Prashad
McChrystal's Afghan Desolation

Gareth Porter
U.S. Story on Iran Nuke Facility Doesn't Add Up

Andy Thayer
The Fiasco Behind Chicago's Olympics Bid

Paul Craig Roberts
Another War in the Works

Dean Baker
Medicare Buy-In: What's Wrong With Giving People a Choice?

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Mission Impossible

Laura Flanders
Punch in the Streets, But Not in the Suites

Dave Lindorff
The Baucus Excuse

Seumas Milne
Why British Workers Are Angry

Martha Rosenberg
What Integrity Means to Pfizer

Website of the Day
Why You Should Boycott Hyatt Hotels

September 29, 2009

Marshall Auerback
A Neoliberal Hijacking

Alan Farago
Recovery Without Feeling

Jeff Sher
Shopping for Health Care

Bruce Jackson
60 Minutes and the General

Gareth Porter
Fears of Defeat in Afghanistan

Jonathan Cook
Palestinians in the Israeli Army

Bouthaina Shaaban
Arabs in the International Balance

Dave Lindorff
Looking Under the TARP

Stephen Soldz
Spreading Hysteria About Swine Flu "Hysteria"

Sara Mann
The Party of No Meets the Island of No

Website of the Day
Cosmos, Autotuned

September 28, 2009

Laura Carlsen
The Sound and Fury of the Honduran Coup

Anthony DiMaggio
The U.S., Iran and Nuclear Terror

Paul Craig Roberts
More Lies, More Deceptions

Neve Gordon
On Palestinian Civil Disobedience

Bill Quigley
Street Report From the G20

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's LBJ Moment

Nicola Nasser
Stuck Between Two Failures

Ben Rosenfeld Murder in New Orleans: Remembering Kirsten Brydum

Website of the Day
The Short March

September 25-7, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Ruin of His Presidency

Daniel Wolff
Speculating on Education

Rev. William E. Alberts
How "White Magic" Makes the Ism of Race Disappear

Mike Roselle
Send Lawyers, Guns and Money

Saul Landau
Covert Memories From Miami

Eshan Azari
Why Afghan Intellectuals Live in National Despair

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Pentagon Feedlot

Robert Jensen
Is Obama a Socialist?

Jonathan Cook
Sleeping with the Enemy

Nelson P Valdés
Cuba, Hurricanes and the Internet

David Michael Green
Dumping Dubya

Ramzy Baroud
The Goldstone Report and Israeli Impunity

John V. Whitbeck
The Partition Straightjacket

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trial Delayed ... Again

David Ker Thomson
The Lady Vanishes

Seth Sandronsky
Obama and Race Management

Jim Goodman
Why are Farmers Afraid of Michael Pollen?

Charles R. Larson
From Oppression to Opportunity

David Yearsley
Froberger's Travels

Kim Nicolini
Hardcore Capitalism

Lorenzo Wolff
Transparent Pink

Website of the Weekend
An Emergency Appeal in the Fight Against Big Coal

September 24, 2009

Steven Higgs
Even in Indiana, Doctors Support National Health Insurance

Christopher Brauchli
Death Pays

Marshall Auerback
The Shortfall at the FDIC

Stephanie Westbrook
Italy's Fallen Soldiers

Nadia Hijab
Know Your Dictator

Sen. Russell Feingold
Fixing the Patriot Act, Restoring the Constitution

David Macaray
Goodbye "Norma Rae"

Binoy Kampmark
Curry Bashings in Oz

Joe Allen
Dancing With the Hammer

Website of the Day
The Most Corrupt Members of Congress

September 23, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
The Economy is a Lie, Too

Gabriel Kolko
The United States in Afghanistan: Eight Years Later

Uri Avnery
The Waldorf-Astoria Summit

Shamus Cooke
The First Shots of the Trade War

Missy Beattie
The Sound of Money

Gareth Porter
Taliban Rising

Mark Weisbrot
How Much Repression Will Hillary Clinton Support in Honduras?

Dr. Susan Block
The Murder of Annie Le

Norm Kent
Pot and the Right to Pursue Happiness

Richard Neville
Apocalypse Porno

Website of the Day
In Carver Country

September 22, 2009

Franklin C. Spinney The Huge Hole in Gen. McChrystal's Afghan Counterinsurgency Strategy

Russell Mokhiber
Who's the Pimp?

Greg Grandin
Zelaya's Brazilian Gambit

Nikolas Kozloff
Salvaging Democracy in Honduras Will Be Tricky

John Ross
Mexico Convulsed by Paranoia

Ron Jacobs
Gen. McChrystal's Salespitch

Tariq Ali
The Afghan Folly

Dave Lindorff
NYT Trashes Single-Payer

Harvey Wasserman
Tom Friedman's Idiocy Atomique

Vijay Prashad
Is Anything Better Than Nothing?

Kareem Shora
After the CIA Torture Report

Website of the Day
Did a State Dept Official Sell Nuclear Secrets?

September 21, 2009

JoAnn Wypijewski
Will Trumka or the Steelworkers Push Labor Into Battle?

Carl Finamore
Backstage at the AFL-CIO Convention

Uri Avnery
Sliming Goldstone and His Report

Nikolas Kozloff
Joe Wilson's Immigration Hypocrisy

Paul Simpson, M.D.
Why Your Doctor May Have PTSD

Alan Nasser
New Deal Liberalism Writes Its Obituary

Ray McGovern
CIA Torturers Running Scared

Dave Lindorff
Thoughts on Saving an Old Barn

Lina Thorne
Women, War and Afghanistan

Jeb Sprague
Confronting the G20

Website of the Day
Petition: Save the Yellowstone Grizzly

September 18-20, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
When Gossip Came Back and Our Modern Age was Born

Russell Mokhiber
Meet the Real Death Panels

Mike Whitney
The Post-Bubble Malaise

David Michael Green
Can America be Salvaged?

Jonathan Cook
Boycott Derails Jerusalem Rail Line

Nadia Hijab
Sinking the Goldstone Report

Mark Weisbrot
Recession, Recovery and Reform: Will Anything Change?

Michael Winship
Let's Make a Deal, Beltway Edition

Michael Leonardi
The Nuclear Dump in the Mediterranean Sea

Andy Worthington
The Kuwaiti Who Met Bin Laden

Fred Gardner
The Prohibitionists' Manifesto

David Macaray
What Happens in Congress Stays in Congress

David Rosen
System Failure and the Garrido Case

Jason Mark
Hacking the Sky

Mike Ferner
In Praise of Senator Baucus

Farzana Versey
The Great Indian Rope Trick

Ron Jacobs
Dr. Guillotin and Dr. Faustus: an Interview with Marc Estrin

elin o'Hara slavick
Flags for Hiroshima: Artist's Statement

Gilad Aztmon
Vengeance, Barbarism and Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds

David Yearsley
Mendelssohn as Organ Maestro

Charles R. Larson
Darkness, Dignity and Hope in Liberia

Lorenzo Wolff
Dialing Up The Clash

Website of the Weekend
Meet Your Conservative Movement

September 17, 2009

Joshua Frank
Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler

Brenda Norrell
Cry Me a River: Uranium and Genocide in Indian Country

Robert Weissman
The Financial Crisis, One Year Later

Pam Martens
The Filmmakers vs. the Capitalists

Franklin Lamb
Palestinian Camps Are Ready to Erupt

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cuban Five: An Insult to Humanity

Jed Bickman
Drone War Over Pakistan

Alan Farago
The Mayor of Coconut Creek Gets Butterflies

Website of the Day
C.R.O.C.

September 16, 2009

Ray McGovern
Torture and Accountability

Stephen Green
America's Strange Health Care Debate

Andy Worthington
Is Bagram Obama's New Secret Prison?

Dean Baker
Short Sellers: the Unsung Heroes of the Financial Crisis

Anthony DiMaggio
Killing the Messenger

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cuban Five: The Unheard Call

Benjamin Dangl
Justice Follows Direct Action

Robin Willoughby
The World Seed Conference: Good for Farmers?

Eric Walberg
EuroPeace, the Sounds of Silence

James Ridgeway
Bring That "Boy" Down

Website of the Day
Baucus' Bogus Bill

September 15, 2009

Mike Whitney
The Real Lesson of Lehman's Fall

Mutadhar al-Zaidi
The Story of My Shoe

Marshall Auerback
Government Spending is the Solution--Not the Problem

Afshin Rattansi
The Deal That Led to the Srebrenica Massacre: Former UN Spokeswoman Fingers Holbrooke and the Clinton Administration

Jonathan Cook
How US Tax Breaks Fund Israeli Settlers

Gareth Porter:
Niger Redux? IAEA Conceals Evidence Iran Nuke Docs Were Forged

Dave Lindorff
Congress Needs More Catcalls

Winslow T. Wheeler
Obama and Pentagon Pork

Franklin Spinney
Bin Laden's Latest Message and the Nuttiness of the War on Terror

Karen Korenoski /
Michael Yates
Up in Wood Smoke: Boulder's Dirty Little Secret

David Macaray
Government Cheese

Susie Day
President Mao-bama's Little Red Primer

Website of the Day
The Cotton Pickin' Truth: the Persistance of Slavery in Mississippi

September 14, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
The Health Care Deceit

M. G. Piety
The Danes Do It (Health Care) Better

Shamus Cooke
Wall Street Under Obama: Bigger and Riskier

Bouthaina Shaaban
Three Faces and a Homeland

Alvaro Huerta
In Defense of the Undocumented: Immigrants and Health Care

John Ross
Mexico Loses Its History

Harvey Wasserman
The Supreme Court and Corporate Money

Adam Federman
The Plight of the Bumblebee

Stephen Fleischman
The Federal Twist

Robert Jensen
Can Journalism Schools be Relevant in a World on the Brink?

Website of the Day
The Origin of Sex Offender Registries

September 11-13, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Big Speech: Math Trumps Rhetoric

JoAnn Wypijewski
Trumka Takes Over AFL-CIO

Carl Ginsburg
The Patient as Profit Center

Leonard Peltier
I am Barack Obama's Political Prisoner Now

Franklin Lamb
Ted Kennedy's Changing Take on Israel

Benjamin Dangl
Throwing Bullets at Failed Policies

Mike Whitney
How to Fight Deflation

John Berger
In Search of Antonello

Saul Landau
Watergate and Modern Scandals

Russell Mokhiber
Disgraceful Democrats

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Pryor's Judgment

Felice Pace
NPR's Linda Gradstein Has Done It Again on Gaza

Jordan Flaherty
The Battle Over Discriminatory Housing Laws in New Orleans

Ron Jacobs
It's Time to be Impolite About Afghanistan

David Macaray
The Utility of Boycotts

David Correia
Welcome to the Business-Friendly Carpenter's Union

Robert Bryce
Wind Turbines and Bird Kills

Christopher Brauchli
Defenders of the Classroom

Paul Krassner
Aha! A Few Words About the 9/11 Truth Movement

Charles R. Larson
Deracination

Kim Nicolini
"Extract:" An Exercise in Economic Realism

David Yearsley
Tall Buildings: the Sound and the Silence

Lorenzo Wolff
In Defense of the One Hit Wonder

Poets' Basement
McEnteer and Corseri

Website of the Weekend
Pizarchik: the Wrong Choice

September 10, 2009

Joshua Frank
Inside Hanford's B Reactor: a Tour of the World's Most Toxic Nuclear Site

Dean Baker
Bernanke's Bad Money

Brian M. Downing
The State of U.S. National Security

Franklin C. Spinney
Portrait of an Afghan Firefight: Up Close and Personal

Andy Worthington
No Escape From Guantánamo

Chase Madar
Samantha Power and the Weaponization of Human Rights

Farzana Versey
A Tale of Two Slums

Ronnie Cummins
Whole Foods, Fair Trade and Organics

Binoy Kampmark
Health Care, Obama and the System

Timothy Lebrón
The Conservative Case for Health Care Reform

Charles R. Larson
A Solution to the Health Care Dilemma

Website of the Day
The Debtor's Revolt Begins!

September 9, 2009

Richard Neville
Trigger-Happy in Afghanistan

Melissa Checker
Double Jeopardy: Carbon Offsets and Human Rights Abuses

Nadia Hijab
Settling for ... Settlements?

Robert Weissman
The Stakes at the Supreme Court

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Arabs Call for General Strike

Russell Mokhiber
Pollan, Mackey, Whole Foods and Single Payer

James Ridgeway
The Dotty Factor: Will Demented Geezers Wreck the Economy?

Richard W. Behan
Obama's Imperative in Afghanistan

James McEnteer
The Photo and the Secretary: How to Appall Robert Gates

Martha Rosenberg
Hatchery Horrors

Website of the Day
Belmondo Verité

September 8, 2009

Henry A. Giroux
The Corporate Stranglehold on Education

Stephen Soldz
Psychologist Accused of War Crimes Opposes Investigations

John Ross
Rituals of the Absurd

Jeff Leys
Health Care vs. Warfare: the Future of the Afghan War

Mike Whitney Ashcroft: Repugnant to the Constitution

Shamus Cooke
Obama's Empty Labor Day Speech

Ellen Brown
Did Lehman Brothers Fall or Was It Pushed?

Norman Solomon Men With Guns: In Kabul and Washington

Deepak Tripathi
The Axis of Evil and the Great Satan

Laray Polk
Personality Cults, Indoctrination and Inculcation

Charles R. Larson
Just Who Does He Think He Is?

Website of the Day
The President is Not a Guidance Counselor

September 7, 2009

Vicente Navarro
Obama's Mistakes in Health Care Reform

Bouthaina Shaaban
In Praise of Admiral Mullen

David Macaray
Obama's Labor Day Report Card

Paul Craig Roberts
Indefensible Nation

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Ads Warn Against Marrying Non-Jews

Conn Hallinan
Brazil Flexes Its Muscles

Walter Brasch
The Origins of Labor Day, the Unknown Holiday

Mark Weisbrot
IMF Gives Honduran Government $175 Million

Carl Finamore
China's Birthday Stimulation

C. G. Estabrook
Advance Text of Obama's Big Speech

Website of the Day
One Down, 20,000 to Go

September 4-6, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Deeper Into the Tunnel

Carl Ginsburg
Saving New Orleans' Charity Hospital

Jonathan Cook
The Missing Link in Israeli Organ Theft?

George Wuerthner
The Unintended Consequences of Wolf Hunting

Marc Levy
The Bling They Curse and Carry

Ray McGovern
Holbrooke's Afghan Benchmark

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
It Happened in Miami

Joe Paff
Organizing the Mission

Gareth Porter
Taliban's Tank-Killing Bombs Came From CIA, Not Iran

Devin Beaulieu
Scaremongering About Bolivia and Islam

Anthony Papa
Why Leslie Crocker Snyder Should Not Become New York City's New DA

David Ker Thomson
Love and Dekes in Utopia

Don Fitz
The Case of the Biodevastation 7: What the Police Won't Apologize For

Lee Sustar /
S. Sepehri
The Fallout From Iran's Elections

Jim Goodman
Why Honor Organized Labor?

Wajahat Ali
Domestic Crusaders: Making Muslim American Theater

Ron Jacobs
Agitator Journalism: Remembering Ramparts

Helen Redmond
The Lion Sleeps Tonight: the Crimes and Misdemeanors of Teddy Kennedy

John V. Walsh
Obama to Cindy Sheehan: Get Lost

Charles R. Larson
Mandanipour's Masterpiece: Censoring an Iranian Love Story

Mark Scaramella
Ho-Bleeping-Hum: a Few Well-Chosen Words About Valerie Plame's Book

David Yearsley
Cameron Carpenter's Amazing Organ Transplants

Ben Sonnenberg
Hooking, Breaking Friendships, Cross-Dressing and, Above All, Delphine Seyrig

Poets' Basement
Davies, Orloski and Bready

Website of the Weekend
Architectural Semiotics with Glenn Beck

September 3, 2009

Marcus Rediker
Inside Auburn Prison

Ron Jacobs
Embedded With the Taliban

Mike Whitney
How Bad Will It Get?

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Untold Story of the Cuban Five: Indictment À La Carte

Saul Landau
Moby Dick and Asian Typhoons

Anat Matar
Israeli Academics Must Pay a Price to End Occupation

Tanya Golash-Boza
How Immigration Enforcement is Weakening National Security

Dave Lindorff
Which Side Are You On?

Andy Worthington
The Story of Gitmo's Two Syrians

Website of the Day
Plundering Appalachia

September 2, 2009

John Ross
Mexico's Plagues

Vijay Prashad
Hey Ram, the Things the Financial Times Group Does!

Rev. Jim Rigby
Why is Universal Health Care "Un-American"?

Joanne Mariner
What the Inspector General Found

Missy Beattie
Hejira: At Martha's Vineyard with Cindy Sheehan

Soren Ambrose
Multilateral Money

Diane Farsetta
Water: the Newest Wave of Corporate "Social Responsibility"

Nadia Hijab
Mulling Mullen's Message

Shamus Cooke
How to Lower the Deficit Without Killing Social Security

Charles R. Larson
Is Dick Cheney Running Scared?

Website of the Day
Inside the Egg Hatchery

September 1, 2009

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Wolf at Trout Creek

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Not Sanctions for Israel?

Mark T. Harris
The Whole Foods Boycott: It's About More Than CEO Hypocrisy

Dean Baker
Bank Profits Are Up: Did You Hear Anyone Say, "Thank You"?

Jeffrey Buchanan
Ending the Human Rights Crisis in KatrinaRitaVille

Robin Mittenthal
A Sea of Monocrops: Old MacDonald Never Had a Farm Like This

Ellen Brown
Mercury Mischief

Martha Rosenberg
Vytorin Marketing is Back

Website of the Day
Crazy Town Hall Protester Interviews

Weekend Edition
October 2-4, 2009

The Musical Patriot

Hanns Eisler's Great National Anthem for East Germany is Available: Make It America's

By DAVID YEARSLEY

When a country disappears, its national anthem goes into limbo, condemned to purgatory for pomp and circumstance: instead of full orchestral treatment, the uplift of a brass band, or the quasi-religious affirmation of a massed chorus, the melody hums to itself forlornly in the darkness—no flag to hoist, no adoring populace to salute and shed a nationalistic tear, no troops to stand at attention to its heroic strains.

The greatest of these national hymns, that of the so-called German Democratic Republic, has been banished from glory now for twenty years: “Aus Ruinen Auferstanden” (Raised out of the Ruins) with music by Hanns Eisler, one of the most wide-ranging, prolific, and provocative musicians of the 20th century. Although I loathe nationalism, I hold a fascination for its central symbols, the flag and the anthem. Eisler’s is the best of them all. This coming Wednesday, October 7,  the GDR would have celebrated its 60th anniversary and many would have been the chances to hear Eisler’s anthem. For the lifespan of the forty-year “republic” it was his most famous creation.

Among the many YouTube offerings of the anthem—a prolific film composer, Eisler could well have foreseen the various strategies for setting his music to images—there are two categories: the historic videos from the GDR which wed the hymn with images of rebuilding and socialist concord (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ6Y4B4QZfo), and the critical readings, which claim that Eisler’s noble sentiments and soaring music is better associated with the real GDR, a police state (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4vEY7cmfMw)

Born in Leipzig 1898 into a family of with socialists going back two generations and raised in Vienna, Eisler served in a Hungarian regiment in World War I. The eexperience brought forth bitter, anti-war gallows songs from his pen. After the war he studied with the visionary modernist Arnold Schönberg in Vienna, though he eventually broke with his teacher over questions of the elitism of complex musical techniques and over Eisler’s belief in the political power and indeed obligations of music and its creators.

Eisler moved to Berlin in 1925 and joined the Communist Party a year later. In these years he also visited the Soviet Union, composed many socialism classics that now lie disused in an adjacent purgatory to that of his GDR anthem: the Kominternlied, Solidartiätslied and Einheitsfrontlied (Song of the United Front). In these works, Eisler demonstrates his mastery of the rousing phrase, the forward-marching harmony. Like no other composer, he makes it seem that ineluctable force of history is on the side of his music. His socialist songs carry the red banner without faltering for a single beat.

Eisler’s lifelong friendship and collaboration with Bertolt Brecht  began in 1930. The composer’s vision of himself and his music is reflected in the premiere of the Brecht/Eisler didactic oratorio, Die Massnahme in Berlin in 1930. Rejecting the division that placed the composer far above the performer, Eisler unobtrusively joined in the chorus. Has such a graceful move been repeated by other composers in the thrall of the “great man” theory of musical progress?

The followg year Brecht and Eisler worked together on the film Kuhle Wampe (subtitled To Whom does the World Belong) with its bleak vision of the depredations of global capitalism. The final scene, directed by Brecht, in which a spirited discussion of the immorality of international coffee market takes place in a full tram car is unlikely to screen in a Starbuck’s near you. The argument between the passengers seems to end with a general feeling of impotence at the global forces, the initiator of the debate claiming that no one can change the world. At last a young woman speaks up: “I will change the world!” she says softly but firmly. This promise introduces the Solidaritätslied accompanying shots of  the masses, seen from the back, as they funnel relentlessly into an underpass: the song’s determined bursts of melody marches along  on sooty Elgarian boots and is interspersed with tenor solos that sound imported from the smoky world of Berlin’s Cabarets, to which Eisler was also a frequent contributor. The Solidartiätslied combines the massed hymn with the committed personal utterance. No one did the ideological song as compellingly, prolifically, and with as much sense of optimism, as Eisler.

Kuhle Wampe was immediately banned by the Nazis when they came to power the year after its release. Like so many others, Eisler and Brecht fled Germany; after stays in Moscow, London, Madrid, and Paris, they  eventually found their way to Hollywood.  Together Brecht, he worked together with fellow refugee Fritz Lang on Hangmen Also Die, a semi-fictional film, part crime drama, part propaganda piece, about the assassination of the SS Reichsprotector of Bohemia, Reinhard Heydrich in 1942. In the book Eisler coauthored with another German refugee, Theodor Adorno and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Eisler singled out his “rat” music—high, scrabbling string figures—that accompanied a single, short shot of Heydrich on his hospital bed, not yet having succumbed to his wounds. Eisler was making sure that the SS Hangman would not be granted a drop sympathy nor anointed with the tiniest bit of heroism. Eisler’s account of this passage was a testament to the power of music even given only a few seconds to discharge its mission. Eisler duly dashed off another nationalist rouser for the movie’s closing hymn that conveys the solidarity of the Czech people against the Nazi oppressors. Eisler committed himself to major works, like Die Massnahme and later the Deutsche Sinfonie with poems by  Brecht,  the genesis of which spanned two decades and which received its premiere fifty years ago at the Berlin Staatsoper.  But Eisler deployed his art with just as much force in the shortest of spans, where it too could be instantly effective, indeed lethal. Eisler received an Academy Award nomination for his Hangmen score.

What astounds most throughout Eisler’s career, but especially in the oppressive and opportunistic Hollywood is his compositional range: who else in the history of 20th-century music could finish off Heydrich in a few seconds and then five years later write ironic rococo pastiche for Douglas Sirk’s period melodrama Scandal in Paris of 1947?

But the same year that he was working on Hangmen, effectively producing propaganda for the war effort, Eisler had gained the malevolent attention of J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI file on Eisler is 686 pages, and the dossier shows that the director himself took a kean interest in the case, asserting from the outset that the composer came to America as an agent of the Cheka not a film composer. Hoover dispatched his FBI staff to translate and offer interpretationsof Eisler’s complete works, in what amounts to the greatest single effort in Eisler scholarship ever undertaken. The G-men’s  judgment was not favorable to the composer’s chances of staying in the country.

By 1947 the House  Un-American Activities Committee had Eisler firmly in its sights, with Congressman Richard Nixon claiming Eisler’s to be the most important case before it. Eisler testified twice before the committee, and the proceedings elicited several classic exchanges, like this one between Eisler and chief investigator Robert Stripling

Stripling: The purpose is to show that Mr Eisler is the Karl Marx of Communism in the musical field and he is well aware of it.

Mr. Eisler: I would be flattered …

Mr. Stripling: Haven’t you … said, in effect, that music is one of the most powerful weapons for the bringing about of the revolution?

Mr. Eisler: Sure … The truth is songs cannot destroy Fascism, but they are necessary. It is a matter of musical taste as to whether you like them. I am a composer, not a lyric writer. If you don’t like them, I am sorry.

Stripling: You have written a lot of songs, Mr. Eisler, have you not?

Eisler: I have written not only songs, but I have written everything in my profession. Here is a book printed by a subversive organization, the Oxford University Press [He indicates Composing for the Films], but I couldn’t say that I am a member of the Oxford University Press.

Charlie Chaplin, Igor Stravinsky, Arron Copland, Virgil Thomson came to his defense with moral support and benefit concerts, but the unrelenting Hoover continued to push for Eisler’s deportation. In March of 1948 Eisler departed before the deportation decision was handed down. Before he left from LaGaurdia airport, Eisler read a statement decrying the fascism of HUA, but registering his love for the “real America people.”

Hoover was furious at being deprived the pleasure of actually deporting Eisler; also in the F.B.I file is a 1948 memorandum from the bureau’s director asserting that “even though [Eisler] had been allowed to leave the United States voluntarily [he] was actually deported.”

After nearly a decade in the United States, Eisler arrived back in Berlin in the Soviet Zone a year before the founding of the GDR.  In August 1949 he was in Warsaw with the poet Johannes Becher, later East German Minister of Education. Surveying the ravaged city, a melody came to Eisler. The next afternoon the pair visited Chopin’s birth house, and there, on Chopin’s own piano, Eisler played what would become the national anthem for the man who had subsequently write its lyric. Less than two months later the Eisler/Becher hymn was declared the national anthem of the GDR, and received its first performance on November 7, 1949.

In the 1950s Eisler would run afoul of the GDR regime for his opera Johann Faustus, which took a revistionist view of the story as one of betrayal to the cause of the Peasants’ War. However, ideologically plausible this interpretation was, even the GDR President Walter Ulbricht decried Eisler for having “disfigured the work of our great German of our, Goethe.” Too often for his own comfort, Eisler composed against the grain.

For the forty years of their parallel existence of the East and West Germany the states boasted the two best national anthems.  It was only fitting that the two halves of the country claiming the greatest composers (Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms) should compete in this way, too. With the demise of the GDR almost all its cultural and political accessories were buried along with it. Only a few things East German things survived reunification, like the children’s television program Das Sandmännchen. One can understand the impulse  to purge the past. Yet the West German anthem, with music by Joseph Haydn for the name day of Hapsburg Emperor Francis II, was much more severely poisoned by its past. Miraclous or crazed, depending on how you see these things, is the anthem’s survival even after its appropriation by the Nazis.

It is not just nostalgia for the sight of a hormone-addled East German female weightlifter enjoying her Olympic glory atop the winner’s platform that makes me think the Germans chose the wrong anthem for their reunified state.  Haydn’s is good. It projects majesty in every line. But Eisler’s is better for the way it alternates passages of general euphoria fuelled by shared purpose with a disciplined determination representing the harsh realities and responsibilities of state building. Eisler’s anthem combines the style that yielded so many socialist hits of the 1920s with the surging pomposity of the German symphonic past. It makes you want to rise to your feet, to grab a hammer or a rifle, and keep singing. In short, it does everything a national anthem should do.

Down at the bottom of the international rankings of national anthems, dragging along with the similarly dire world position of its “healthcare system,” is the United States.  The American national anthem was ceded to an Anacreontic tune that, true to its origins, veers drunkenly beyond any reasonable vocal range and a stumbles through its melodic obstacle course as if it had several glasses of wine too many.

Eisler’s tune awaits a new home, an invitation from the living to sing again. A post-industrial America in need of rebuilding should welcome even the GDR anthem’s lyric. Its import wouldn’t even add a cent to the trade deficit. Germany and America even have the same number of syllables so, with only a bit of tweaking the scansion fits nicely to the new national setting, even (in the final strophe) perfectly pitched for the renewable energy revolution:

Let us plough and build our nation,
learn and work as never yet,
that a brave new generation,
faith in its own strength beget!
American youth, for whom the striving
of our people is at one,
you are America’s reviving,
and over our America,
there is a radiant sun,
there is a radian sun.

Hanns Eisler, I invite back you  to American shores!

David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University. He is author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint His latest CD, “All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London”, has just been released by Musica Omnia. He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu

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