Hanns Eisler

He was a member of the German Communist Party, which he joined in 1926, though he later told the House Un-American Activities Committee that he was never really a member as he was never very active in the Party. His brother Gerhart Eisler, a top agent of the Moscow-controlled Comintern, reportedly was the USSR's top man in the US during World War II and has been active as an agent in the US since at least 1933. Ironically, it was Eisler's sister Ruth Fischer (the former Elfriede Eisler), a German Communist Party leader and co-founder of the Austrian Communist Party who had become disillusioned with Stalinism and had been expelled from the party, who outed their brother. Hans Eisler's fealty remained with his brother and he denounced his sister. Dubbed "The Karl Marx of Music," he was deported from the US after being deemed an unfriendly witness after his 1947 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. There are substantive claims that Gerhart Eisler was the man to whom Hollywood communists owed their fealty. After being deported from the US, he was expelled from Great Britian. (The British Secret Service had opened a file on Eisler when he briefly lived in London in 1936 as he associated with many known communists.) He eventually settled in what became the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), as did his friend, Bertolt Brecht, with whom he socialized in Hollywood.

After being deported from the US and expelled from the UK, he settled in Vienna. In 1950, he moved to East Berlin, where he took a faculty appointment as a professor at the German Academy of Music. His musical work "Faustus" was attacked by the East German Communist Party, and Eisler announced in 1952 that he had no longer had any desire to be a composer.

A faithful communist, he wrote the national anthem of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), 'Auferstanden aus Ruinen.' While in official circles he was held up as a celebrated cultural figure, Eisler's avant-garde music was rejected by Communist authorities. Eisler would slip away from East Berlin to go bar-hopping in the Allied sectors of the city, a form of recreation cut short by the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.