kagablog

A conference on exile organized by musicologists is bound to raise some ambiguities. For a start the term exile exists under leaden skies after Edward Said : he conducted its most recent examination and concluded that using it to characterize anything short of mass political denationalizations like the Palestinian disaster is misleading and frivolous.

This also puts the topoi of literary exile off limits as voluntaristic and too imbued with creative transcendence to characterize the cruel political punishment meted out to the Palestinian people and others in their plight.

Biblical exile- despite its extremely rich theology of covenants, morality for life among strangers and vast pretext for prophecies and condemnations was too identified with Zionist Nationalists to illuminate other stories of exile without prejudice.

In sum Said was concerned with the way exile entered public opinion and wished to remove certain decoys between the public sense of culpability and the condition of ten million denationalized people whom he felt obliged to speak for.

Exile is neither creative nor allegorical, it has no distinct genres – or at least none adequate to serve as a voice to suffering collectively borne. It is not laden with promise or at least with no promise different to the promise of arbeit macht frei or the promise of self determination in homelands for the millions of south africans apartheid white supremacists denationalized between 1950 and 1988.

Said’s ultimatum -no metaphoric use of exile after the Palestinian disaster -has the same weight as Adorno’s more famous ‘all culture after Auschwitz is garbage’. Neither thinker wants to be thought of as placing the topics of exile or genocide off limits , merely highlighting inappropriate means by which to inquire into them.

Now since Adorno was a defining figure in musicology and the sociology of fascism and Said equally inaugural of postcolonial studies it would be expected that a conference on Friedrich Hartmann and exile in the then quasi colony of South Africa would be an enterprise laced between Adorno and Said. What occurred was something quite different. A concert of music by a former leader of the Austrian Fatherlands Front - a fascist organization- was played . This was the centerpiece of the conference which turned out to have been occasioned by the musicological effort of Timothy Jackson to rehabilitate the music of this controversial figure -Friedrich Hartmann-and to rehabilitate his political reputation.

Jackson , a Canadian professor working in Texas, argued that Hartmann had been relieved of his teaching post in Austria because his new Nazi overseer did not believe his sincere declarations that he would divorce his half Jewish wife in exchange for keeping job. Nor was Orel , the Nazi in question swayed by a student petition instigated by Hartmann approvingly describing him persecuting his Jewish students. Hartmann was at that time a voluntary leader of the Austrian Patriotic Front.

Hatmann lost his job and came to South Africa with his wife and child where he continued his career as an academic and composed the music which Jackson aired. Subsequently Hartmann returned to Austria.

Now this would be merely one of those sidelights on twentieth century music which illuminate the roads not taken by the renowned composers - except that this all took place in South Africa. Now few sensibilities are so far off the beaten track as to have not heard of the apartheid government, a white supremacist prolongation of colonial minority rule which hijacked South Africa between 1948 and 1994.

This regime imposed its racist separate development policy on over ninety percent of South Africans, denationalizing people and forcing them into bogus reserves called native homelands. This event stripped rights from , displaced and deracinated far more people then even the Palestinian disaster and counts as one of the largest sustained political harassments in history.

South Africa is still counting the cost of this political misadventure which only came to an end when the apartheid government capitulated in a civil war. Many people who took part in that war were forced into exile by state terror and assassination programs which they were not spared even far over South Africa’s borders. Some of these people were present when Jackson made his case for F. Hartmann being an exile too - a fascist exile ironically fleeing Nazi persecution to became a civil servant in the apartheid regime.

From Jackson’s account, which he never claimed was more than an initial assay, certain facts about Hartmann are not yet clear . These facts determine the status of Hartmann in both 20 c Austrian history ( both fascist and Nazi) and South African apartheid history. These facts will shape Hartmann’s reception in South Africa and the entire scholarly and aesthetic perspective imaginable towards him.

The role of these facts is best grasped via two divergent historical narratives. We do not yet have the information to choose between these narratives. They are as follows:

A) Friedrich Hartman sincerely believed that volunteering for a leadership position in the Austrian Fatherlands Front was a reasonable thing to do. Since antisemitism was not official policy of the Austrofascists he married a half Jewish woman. He felt pressured to lie in order to keep his job in Nazi Austria. These lies included declaring he was in the process of divorce from his wife and also petitioning students to vouch for his zealous persecution of Jewish students .

When these lies failed to prevent his dismissal he fled Nazi Austria for South Africa with his wife, presumably not divorced and settled into an academic position where, chastened by his experiences with fascism, he became apolitical and applied himself to composition , administration and teaching. Alarmed by the growing intolerance in apartheid South Africa and by xenophobic denials of opportunity to him in the musical world, he ended his exile and returned to Austria where he spent the rest of his life.

B) Friedrich Hartmann was a deeply sincere fascist. He joined the Austrofascist Fatherland’s Front because it was politically and institutionally dominant- dominant enough under Mussolini’s protection to actively persecute Nazis as well as communists in the Austrian opposition.

When it became clear that Hitler was in the ascendant, Hartmann decided to switch allegiance to the Nazi party as more appropriate to his convictions To achieve this he was prepared to abandon his wife and to persecute Jewish students. He sincerely wished for Nazi acceptance and was shocked when his former allegiance to the Vaterländische Front was, despite his sincere zeal , held against him and he was purged from his job. His fascist beliefs led him to chose South Africa as more promising frontier for his extreme rightist thinking, using his wife’s half Jewish status as a sweetener to his immigration bid he entered South Africa under the mask of political exile and joined over six hundred other fascist and Nazi diehards who were recruited by the sa nationalist government to man its upcoming state and academic takeover. When the South African government realized that it could achieve its white supremacist goals without retaining now unpopular neo Nazi ideologies , Hartmann found his role as fascist aesthetic and ideological exemplar undermined. Unable to endure the decline of explicit fascist thinking in the wily apartheid state- by then trying to construe itself as a democratic whites only republic- Hartmann went back to Austria where a strong neofascist movement had never declined and where he lived in hope of the return of the VF.

both scenarios are over etched, designed to convey the ideal-typical sketches which Max Weber believed were indispensable to the beginning of any historical or social investigation- ladders which, once climbed, can be thrown away in favor of more subtle hypotheses once the most parsimonious explanations are put in place.

The historical and aesthetic evaluation of Hartmann, which Tim Jackson has begun will not progress until scenario A can convincingly refute scenario B or vice versa.

It is likely that this evaluation exceeds the capacity and expertise of any one scholar. Judgment beyond musicology is required to understand the migrations between the VF and the Nazi party- the kind of judgment possessed by general historians of the era such as Michael Kater and his colleagues. The relation of Hartmann to fascist recruits into South African administration and universities needs to be investigated by historians of apartheid structures and of the fascist diaspora.

Why does any of this matter ? Because Hartmann’s music was presented in South Africa on the strength of narrative A. This narrative is based on anecdotal evidence which at the moment is insufficient to rule out the plausibility of narrative B.

If A turns out to be well supported in future then premiering Hartmanns music and theming a conference around his then proven exile will seem a commendable exercise in historical objectivity and insight.

If B turns out to be well supported then South Africa has unwittingly hosted the celebration of a fascist, an apartheid zealot and an unrepentant opportunist.

The present issue is simply whether the conference rooted in Hartmann’s exile and promoted alongside a premiere of his music should ever have gone ahead before the musicological, historical and South African political communities had an opportunity to adequately weigh the evidence for A or B. No single scholar, however gifted, can claim to represent consensus on a matter that they themselves have only recently brought to discussion I hope that the decision between A and B is not still simply seen as some scholarly stake because it is a political issue which at worst portrays South Africa today as a safe cultural harbor for neofascists.

Today we consider the merits and contributions of Leni Riefenstahl, Martin Heidegger, Gottfried Benn, Werner von Braun, Giuseppe Terragni, Richard Strauss, Herbert von Karajan, Paul de Man and many others only against a clear understanding of their involvement in fascism . It is only correct that a recently rediscovered composer who shares their provenance should be subject to equal deliberation and scrutiny. This has nothing to do with witch-hunting ; it has everything do with bringing appropriate collateral and contextual information to bear before putting a work of art into candidacy for our appreciation.

The denazification process around Heidegger did not turn on the high opinion in which he was held by peers- including Sartre- but around his role in the National Socialist state and institutions. The German people had a right to deliberate whether they wanted Heidegger’s ideas to re enter the public realm as authoritative opinion in a society recovering from Nazism. South Africa held a truth and reconciliation process to deal with apartheid crimes against humanity. Its statutes ought to apply to the process of rehabilitating Hartmann. Certainly no more unilateral construals of Hartmann or other apartheid era public figures as exiles or victims ought to be simply accepted at face value. What if , on further examination, Hartmann turns out to be Hartmann B?

After decades of equivocation few who examine all the facts doubt that Heidegger was a sincere Nazi. Somehow it became possible to imagine Germanys best philosopher and Nazism as compatible- a perception that eluded earlier generations.

Has Nazism become more subtle? Has Heidegger simply slipped out of contemporaneity in being well enough understood and settled more obviously in his era?

When a significant piece of thought, art or music is put into candidacy for our appreciation, it is vital that its provenance be disclosed and understood for this alone confers its identity. This is obvious in those far from rare cases when a painting long attributed to a famous name is revealed as a fake (despite remaining physically identical to itself , it becomes a different work overnight ) The great Viennese architect Adolph Loos stands today under consideration as a pedophile.

Perhaps everybody who knew Loos knew this fact about him. Perhaps only today has pedophilia become sufficiently established as a violating criminal occurrence to begin attracting some sense of heinousness to Loos? The recent arrest of Roman Polanski has brought underage sex and the power to evade answerability for it into public debate . Nobody can argue that the answer to these questions is irrelevant to our relationship to Loos. Nowadays he has to be great despite his vice- a complex case to argue, not viceless because he is great.

Hartmann’s actual stance on Nazism and his role in the apartheid state makes a nonnegotiable difference to how we consider his music. Riefenstahl’s lifelong denial of the extent of her Nazi involvement is a salient fact in how we experience her films . Her achievement would be different- not better or worse but different (as all historical differences picked out by counter factual conditional sentences are) if she had even once seriously been puzzled by her former self. If Tim Jackson wishes to attain historical justice for Hartmann, pre empting reliable consensus by presenting Hartmanns music as the music of a victim is not a useful way to do this.

Another strand at the exile conference that struck me as interesting but exposed to misunderstanding is the movement to meticulously reconstruct the worlds and idioms of Afrikaans composers of the mid twentieth century. Flowing from the very innovative Stephanus Muller a new kind of archival awareness and biographic detail has entered the musicology of the nationalist and apartheid period: it certainly achieves, in that scholar, a tremendous suggestiveness and adventurousness - as in his examination of Arnold van Wyk via the counterfactual setting of a vast roman a clef. Esme Berman and Karel Nel’s extraordinary Alexis Preller monograph and exhibition is of a piece with this fine grained contextual , document and biographic based inquiry, a final dispensing with the thin, allusive generalities that have stalled South African art writing for decades.

But before this kind of study can reveal the fine grain of musical cultures – the way Baxandall , Podro and Alpers revealed the filigree of period visual cultures, the issue of the cultural policies and academic framework of the apartheid state needs to be addressed. This is not from some wish to put an obligatory political ball and chain on this scholarship but to augment its strength and consequences. It is hard to imagine a contemporary study of reniassance painting without an understanding of mercantile capitalism or a study of Thoreau which ignored agribusiness or the civil war. The danger in South Africa is that apartheid is so central to post 1948 scholarship that it has become a kind of premiss, a background noise to be acknowledged with regret. In recent South African memory, apartheid was the ether in which the spectrum bathed- capitalism, politics, rights, culture.

Ironically it regained some of this former pervasiveness after 1994- the study of apartheid seems always to be either completed or to be somebody else’s problem.

Since 1964, at least , the frame of art and music study has been the elaboration of a world- an art world through which works achieve stable identity or value or a music world such as the ones elaborated in recent ethnographic studies of IRCAM or the attempts to see Darmstadt and die Reihe as a discursive formation. There is - following the extraordinary work of Mary Douglas, Bruno Latour, David Bloor or Ian Hacking, no way in which even the study of logic,probability or polynomials can evade the methods by which groups achieve cohesion and consensus. The synthetic moderne whites only civil society is a veritable Mont Blanc on the horizon of worldmaking - of contrivances of cohesiveness- its reach into education and patronage was subtle and filled with paradoxical effects. The school of Muller- as I like to imagine it, is as close to a genealogical perspective as SA scholarship has yet come. It is a phenomenon to be strongly supported and encouraged for its subject matter as well as the methodological and stylistic sophistication it brings; nonetheless it stands in the same danger as Tim Jackson’s far more conventional dealings with Hartmann- in all these excavations of the personal and the contingent a dimension for analysis of power and the state needs to be reserved Not as a concession to South Africa’s perennial Marxism – which like its expressionism missed its moment and lingers on as a ghost- but as an analysis of public life, patronage, civil society and consensus building that can only honor music by illuminating the seductive matrix in which it made its way.

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