Listening to Human Rights: Class Conflict in Hanns Eisler’s Deutsche Sinfonie

In what began as a piece against the Nazi concentration camps, the composer Hanns Eisler and his collaborator, the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, created the eleven-movement, twelve-tone Deutsche Sinfonie, Op. 50 (1935–1958) to communicate political ideas. They soon expanded it to articulate what they saw as the very roots of fascism: militarism and capitalism. To explain the problems of class conflict in Europe, Eisler and Brecht focused on two groups that were central to Marxist–Leninist ideology: peasants and industrial workers. In two movements, the Peasant Cantata (Bauernkantate) and Workers Cantata (Arbeiterkantate), they portrayed long-standing injustices that peasants and industrial workers endured in the twentieth century. Eisler thus viewed the Deutsche Sinfonie, his largest and most ambitious work, as a way of explaining the arc of modern German history—from the late nineteenth century through to the 1940s—and how the Nazis came to power. The article further argues that the Deutsche Sinfonie can be analysed in relation to the discourse on human rights, drawing on the work of Martha Nussbaum, Micheline Ishay and other human rights theorists and historians, as a contribution to what Mark Philip Bradley calls the ‘global human rights imagination’. The article explains the vital role that the Peasant Cantata and Workers Cantata had in the overall conception of the work and how human rights issues were at the core of that musical idea. To place the Deutsche Sinfonie in historical and cultural context, this interdisciplinary analysis integrates methodologies of both cultural history and musicology.