Lotte Lenya:The very next day, Joseph Goebbels banned any more performances of Der Silbersee on account of that ballad.
A friend who had been arrested got word to Kurt that he must leave Berlin at once – his name was on a list. So, Kurt waited at a café and I packed some things for him and drove him to Munich. That was where all the refugees went to wait for the new election results. We thought Hitler would be defeated this time. Well, we were wrong. It was time to leave….

---The Frankfurt School of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse went further than Brecht in rejecting social realism altogether and by giving a privileged position to art and literature. These alone can resist the domination of a totalitarian state. Popular art inevitably colludes with the economic system that shapes it, whereas Modernism has the power to question. Art acts as an irritant, a negative knowledge of the real world. Built of Freudian and Marxist elements, their Critical Theory advocates an art that makes the down-trodden masses aware of their exploitation and helplessness. Absurd discontinuities of discourse, the pared-down characterization, the plotless depiction of aimless lives — all these are needed to shake audiences from the comfortable notion that the horrors and degradations of the twentieth century have left the world unchanged.--- Read More:http://www.textetc.com/theory/marxist-views.html image:http://www.lilashome.de/kurtweill/1.html
…I went back to Vienna to say goodbye to my mother and Mariedl. But Kurt was crazy – he went back to Berlin for his music. He could have been caught! But he grabbed what music he could and drove to the French border and on to Paris. After that, Kurt never talked about Germany. Never went back after the war, not even for a day. That is how hurt he was….
…Well, you know, Kurt had this big success in Paris with The Little Mahagonny, so it was hard for him to come back as a refugee. But Kurt never looked back. That is how he was so successful – he never looked back.
George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein formed a company in Paris and they asked Kurt to write a score for a ballet and Kurt asked Brecht to write the libretto, and that became The Seven Deadly Sins. I sang Anna One and Tilly Losch – very famous dancer – she danced Anna Two. Mr. Balanchine didn’t understand what it was about, but he did a beautiful job.

---Commercial exploitation of music in advertising and films, for example, forces serious composers like Schoenberg to produce fragmental atonal work. Each note is cut off from harmony with its neighbours and thus proceeds directly from the unconscious, much as individuals are forced to fend for themselves in monolithic free-market systems. {4} Walter Benjamin, though associated with Marxism and Surrealism, adopted various positions at first, most of them subtle, not to say ambiguous. Art, he thought, occupied a fragile place between a regression to a mythic nature and an election to moral grace. After his reading of Lukács and meeting with Brecht, he saw art as a montage of images specifically created for reproducibility. Stripped of mystique and ritual awe, the artist had now to avoid exploitation by revolutionizing the forces of production.--- Read More:http://www.textetc.com/theory/marxist-views.html image:http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/showcase/clips/p00gsb9h
But the French hated it because it was sung in German. We did the piece again in London. Terrible translation. It failed there, too – worse than in Paris.
Well, our divorce was granted and the one good thing about it was I was able to sell the house and try to get out all the money we had in Germany – the Nazis would have taken everything if I was still married to a Jew.
Hitler couldn’t last – that’s what I thought. Germany would see reason. He would go. He didn’t….
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Benjamin:So the explanation for the huge popularity of these films is not mechanization, their form; nor is it a misunderstanding. It is simply the fact that the public recognizes its own life in them. Read More:http://marklow.blogspot.com/2005/08/mickey-mouse-fragment-by-walter.html