Eisler’s Music for Resnais’ ‘Night and Fog’ (1955): a musical counterpoint to the cinematic portrayal of terror

While political music was marginalized in West Germany during the Konrad Adenauer era, the artistic confrontation with the Nazi past was initiated abroad by artists such as Arnold Schönberg, Luigi Nono, Peter Weiss, and Alain Resnais. In May 1955, on the tenth anniversary of the liberation of the German concentration camps by Allied troops, the Comité d'Histoire de la Déportation de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale commissioned Resnais to make a documentary film on the subject. Lacking the necessary historical experience, the young director dared not tackle this difficult subject alone. Only with the help of the writer and essayist Jean Cayrol, who had himself been deported to the Oranienburg concentration camp and lost his brother there, did the project seem possible to Resnais.

Instead of approaching the subject through identification, which could have sanitized the atrocities, Cayrol and Resnais chose the objectivity of distance. To this end, the director juxtaposed images of present-day Auschwitz with historical material. He emphasized the contrast between the past, when the camp was overflowing with prisoners, and the far less spectacular present. The faded gray or black-and-white of the archival material was juxtaposed with contemporary colour photographs; the mostly still historical images were further contrasted with the new material taken by a moving camera. This separation of material and temporal levels works against the illusion of empathy. Separating elements in this way is a method of distancing, a characteristic of Bertolt Brecht's "epic theatre" in the medium of film. The contrasting visual levels are intended to present the viewer with a contradictory unity.  The two visual levels are further contrasted by their emotional and aesthetic content. The director understood that a flood of horrific images would have a numbing effect. 'If I had done the whole film in black-and-white, then with all these old stones, barbed wire and leaden skies, I would have produced--and this was to be feared--a sort of film-romanticism, which would in no way have corresponded to the theme. The use of the colour and silent sections was to help prevent such an outcome'. 

Resnais and Cayrol deliberately adopted the perspective of a contemporary narrator. The real theme of the film is not the events themselves, but their remembrance and the process of retracing what had taken place so as to resist the prevailing tide of concealment, forgetfulness and repression. The title Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) is to be understood in this sense. It refers to a particular category of foreign prisoners who were detained and deported in the so-called 'Nacht und Nebel-Aktionen' (Night and Fog Operations). Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, took this poetic-sounding expression from Richard Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen. He wished to be just as invisible and untraceable while carrying out his acts of terror as Wagner's Alberich who, in Das Rheingold, dons the stolen 'Tarnhelm' with the words 'Nacht und Nebel--niemand gleich'! '(night and fog--fade from sight'). Cayrol and his brother were imprisoned and deported in just such a Nacht-und-Nebel-Aktion. In 1945, Cayrol summarized his experiences in a book of poetry entitled Poèmes de Nuit et Brouillard. In the film title, this terminus technicus from the language of the Third Reich takes on a new meaning: it signifies the cover-up history used to disguise these atrocities. The artistic colour photography of the present-day Auschwitz, which gives barely a hint of what happened there, alludes to this cover-up. The purpose of the film is to reveal the truth behind the facade.

This was achieved in an unconventional way through music, which Resnais declared to be the most essential component of this multimedia work of art. After Nuit et Brouillard, he continued to work with important composers such as Hans Werner Henze and Krzysztof Penderecki. But music was never again to have such a strong impact on a Resnais film as it did in his documentary about Auschwitz, the montage aesthetic of which owed much to his collaboration with Hans Eisler. Resnais was first confronted with the music of this student of Schoenberg and friend of Brecht in Jean Renoir's film Woman on the Beach (1946). He then studied Eisler and Adorno's book Composing for the Films, in which both authors declared their break with the aesthetics of the Hollywood film industry and argued for a more significant and autonomous role for music in film. When I first tried to contact him," Resnais explained, "it was really like throwing a bottle into the sea, and my hope of reaching him was no greater than that of a shipwrecked man doing the same. Resnais told his producer that the involvement of a persecuted German-Jewish composer would contribute to the film's moral integrity. He later revealed that his production company only allowed him to make this request because it was considered highly unlikely that such a famous composer would agree. So I wrote a letter to Eisler and about eight days later I received a telegram which simply said: "Hello. I am coming. Eisler." I cannot tell you how overwhelmed I was.

Renais was immensely impressed with Eisler's expertise:

From Eisler, I learned so much about my profession and about film music, especially about how to work out a sequence together with a musician; (this includes what needs to be said--very trivial words, free from any sentimentality and all 'literature'--so as to convey to the musician what one wishes). Above all, he showed me how to avoid musical redundancies. Though this is something we all basically know, he nevertheless showed me how to apply music to create something akin to a 'second level of perception,' something additional, contrariwise. For example, one could simplify the music the most during points of high drama and, vice versa, elaborate it significantly at moments when the eyes are no longer engaged. In this way, an equilibrium may be reached wherein the viewer finds a balance between both seeing and hearing. I believe that my particular liking for this kind of balance stems from Eisler. He put me on the right track, so to speak, and clarified all of these concepts for me.

The opening shots of the Polish countryside reveal the remains of the Auschwitz concentration camp, overgrown with grass and flowers by 1955. Eisler contrasts these beautiful colour shots, which do not reveal the camp's former purpose, with a tragic melody for string orchestra. He called it 'A la Funèbre', a reference to 'Marcia Funèbre' from Beethoven's Third Symphony. As Eisler had to complete the score in a very short time, he used some of his previously written stage music for certain parts, as he had done on other occasions. The music of the introductory string prelude was originally composed in 1954 for Johannes R. Becher's Winterschlacht, a play about the German attack on the Soviet Union.

In addition to Becher's drama, Eisler's inspiration for this instrumental setting was probably a Shakespeare text, Horatio's monologue from Hamlet: Eisler's later published song 'Horatio's Monologue' is a setting of this music coupled with the corresponding Shakespeare text. The composer probably took Shakespeare's text for his song from another source, Karl Kraus's Weltgericht. In this book, Kraus quotes the very lines from Hamlet that Eisler was to use, but in relation to the aftermath of the First World War. Just as Kraus conceived of Horatio's monologue as an appeal to expose the transgressions of the First World War, Eisler related it in a similar way to the Second World War: the monologue is the hidden subtext of his prelude music in Winterschlacht and Nuit et Brouillard.

The director Manfred Wekwerth recalled heated discussions about the music during the first rehearsals of Winterschlacht, during which Brecht and the others finally understood Eisler's explanation of the music. After all, there had been both victory and defeat at Stalingrad. In the prelude to Becher's drama, a few soldiers are shown scattered across the stage. The music then suggests that these solitary figures are part of a collective, the remains of a gigantic, defeated army. The orchestral prelude to Nuit et Brouillard serves a similar dramaturgical function: the music reminds us that these now deserted landscapes were once populated by millions of people. Like a dramaturgical counterpoint, the music alludes above all to what is not explicitly shown. At the same time, it suggests what is not explicitly heard: this is another context in which the Shakespeare text is revealed.

Resnais juxtaposed the colour landscape shots with archive footage. The black and white images show people, even marching Nazi troops - the perpetrators. A traditional film composer would probably have accompanied these images with a pompous march or the 'Horst Wessel-Lied', albeit altered in a sinister way. Eisler, however, eschewed such clichéd depictions of terror. He accompanied the propagandistic scenes of a parade on the occasion of the 'Reichsparteitag' in Nuremberg with thin pizzicati and, as the camera panned to Hitler and Himmler, added a high, chirpy violin melody. 

Eisler linked his musical adaptation of Horatio's monologue to the Second World War in Winterschlacht and to Auschwitz in Nuit et Brouillard. But the text was to have further connotations for him. The overriding theme was the collapse of a tyranny in which the perpetrators create their own undoing, or, as Shakespeare described it, 'purposes mistook fall'n on the inventors' heads'. Although Eisler's 'XX. Parteitag' from his final work, Ernste Gesänge, he had already addressed the subject in his song 'Horatios Monolog'. It is alluded to in his musical setting of Karl Kraus' Printemps Allemand, which he subtitled on the occasion of the XX. A sketch of the 'Horatios Monologue' can be found on the same page of the manuscript. The reckoning with the Stalinist past was a necessary condition for a socialist future, for a 'German Spring'. The composer underlined a single sentence from Kraus's poem, a deep sigh: 'Was hat die Welt aus uns gemacht'.

As part of his film music aesthetic, Eisler avoided stock methods of musical illustration and outbursts of emotion. For him, this did not necessarily mean the renunciation of emotions but rather the attempt to elucidate their origin. For the gruesome documentary shots of gas chambers and piles of corpses, he composed a deliberately unsentimental music, which contradicted the expectations of the regular studio musicians. According to Resnais,

I recall the astonishment around us as we recorded his music. As you know, when a piece of music is recorded, the corresponding film segment is simultaneously projected in order to see if the orchestra plays in synch. At times, the technicians believed that when certain footage was projected, really gruesome footage, the thirty-two musicians assembled in the recording room would make an all-out effort. But Eisler simply said: 'No, this is a small piece. We've got one flute, one clarinet, and that's all.' One could sense a certain uneasiness in the studio. The people were really stirred up: the usual rules were no longer valid.

Through his thin-voiced lyrical music, the composer sought to create a sense of detachment from the overwhelming power of horror. Whereas the string orchestra serves to 'populate' the empty landscape in the prelude, the small chamber orchestral and even soloistic instrumentation accompanying the scene with the piles of corpses serves to focus attention away from these to the individual lives that they represent. As the almost tender melodic lines suggest, each of these corpses was an individual in his or her fullest humanity. Eisler resisted convention not only in his treatment of dynamics and sonority, but also in his expression. 'The more horrible the scenes, the more friendly the music', recalled Resnais. 'Eisler wanted to show that human optimism and hope could even exist in a concentration camp'.

Adapted for World ORT by Albrecht Dümling and translated by Richard Nangle. From Dümling, Albrecht. "Eisler's Music for Resnais'‘Night and Fog’(1955): a musical counterpoint to the cinematic portrayal of terror." Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 18, no. 4 (1998): 575-584.