ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the migratory journey of one of them, Hanns Eisler. Throughout the twentieth century, musicians were affected by outbursts of nationalist politics in direct and immediate ways. The century's extremist regimes, among them the mid-century fascists, led to the displacement of some of music history's most canonical figures. The chapter highlights how, paradoxically, migration acted as a catalyst for a dialectic engagement with the national past and, in the process, undermines nationalist historiographical approaches to understanding Eisler's musics, which are fixated on place. The beginning of Eisler's migratory journey highlights the fluent boundaries between travel, displacement, exile, and diaspora. Eisler's strategy may seem paradoxical: it reveals both a musical turning away from nationalism in search of more internationalist idioms, and a recourse to and engagement with Austro-German forms and traditions. The chapter discusses a space created by the mobility of migration, space understood as the dialectic Other to place.