Author: Eisler, Hanns [1898-1962]
Title: Statement
Description: n.p. [Hollywood?], n.p. [published by author?], n.d. [ca.1948?]. 27x21cm, 2 pages.. Folded in quarter. Stapled. Stencilled (mimeographed). VG. ¶ This is a two-page single-side caption-titled document issued by the German exile composer (& associate of Bertolt Brecht) upon his deportation from the USA on March 26, 1948. ["...Eisler's promising career in the U.S.was interrupted by the Cold War. He was one of the first artists placed on the Hollywood blacklist by the movie studio bosses. In two interrogations by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the composer was accused of being "the Karl Marx of music" and the chief Soviet agent in Hollywood. Among his accusers was his sister Ruth Fischer, who also testified before the House Committee that her other brother, Gerhart, was a major Communist agent. The Communist press denounced her as a "German Trotskyite." Among the works that Eisler composed for the Communist Party was the Comintern March, "The Comintern calls you / Raise high Soviet banner / In steeled ranks to battle / Raise sickle and hammer."Eisler's supporters—including his friend Charlie Chaplin and the composers Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein—organized benefit concerts to raise money for his defense fund, but he was deported early in 1948....On March 26 1948, Eisler and his wife departed from LaGuardia airport flying to Prague. Before he left he read a statement: 'I leave this country not without bitterness and infuriation. I could well understand it when in 1933 the Hitler bandits put a price on my head and drove me out. They were the evil of the period; I was proud at being driven out. But I feel heart-broken..." - wikipedia].

Keywords: American Political History, United States Exile, House Committee, Unamerican, Activities History, Hollywood Politics, Communist, Communism, German Exiles, Bertolt Brecht