Ernst Busch – The sharp breath of reason

An emaciated man, who had just been abused by the Nazis, sits on the edge of a farm near Berlin. Freed. Soon, after this world war, he will be mayor, this lonely little person. “Play the song again!” he asks the Soviet soldiers, who are about to leave. The song about the rolling truck, a scratchy record. Ernst Busch sings about the Spanish Jarama Front. This song! A plaster on wounds that don’t heal. Defiance and prayer. Or like a desperate planting of seeds against the coldest grave, the lack of memory.

The scene comes from Konrad Wolf’s autobiographical Defa feature film “I was nineteen” (1968): the journey of the young German in the uniform of the Soviet Army, from Moscow to Berlin. Wolf included it in his documentary “Busch sings”; we see the director at the scene of the event: This is where he could have met Ernst Busch, who had escaped from the bombed Brandenburg prison. Nazi judges probably only didn’t sentence him to death because they didn’t know his class struggle songs. And the only reason he wasn’t shot by Soviet soldiers pushing towards Berlin was because one of them recognized “Ernsta Busch” in this torn-down and dislocated figure who, in his fear, began to sing. Moscow Trade Union House, the concert, 1935! The course of life and the world follow a law? How often everything is just a coincidence that becomes a saving grace. Brecht came up with a brilliant phrase: “Situations are the mothers of humanity.”

»Busch sings. Six films about the first half of the 20th century” (1981/82) was the last film by Konrad Wolf, who died in 1982; It was shown on GDR television, and now there is a DVD of a two-part theatrical version – the two chapters that Wolf, head of the entire project, directed himself. Only a fragment, because unfortunately the extensive documentary material has created an impenetrable labyrinth when it comes to copyright.

In the accompanying DVD book, Jürgen Schebera portrays the singer; he translates the film’s dramaturgy into a sketch of Busch’s life (“He who sings there knows what he’s singing about”). Assistant director Carmen Bärwaldt, who died a few weeks ago, explains Konrad Wolf’s credo in a detailed conversation with music researcher Carola Schramm. She says the beautiful sentence: “The work also made it easier for me to recognize the difference between good and evil and then saved me from many a low point in the post-reunification times.” Hans-Eckardt Wenzel contributes strong essay literature about anger in art: ” Every rebellion, if it is to be more than an emotion, needs a heaven for which it can long, a firmament that promises more than can be formulated in the moment of indignation.

Part 1, “1935 or Pandora’s Barrel,” edits newsreel reports from a year into a powdered-up German panorama. The fury of the factories. The healing roar of the hordes. Rush and hustle and bustle and the agony of the poor. The reactionary, war-oriented structure of work creates the ant-man in drills and uniform. Busch sings in between as if a steel cable were being stretched: sarcastic, whipping. Fight song, cabaret and lament, from Kästner to Mühsam. Brecht painfully and quietly speaks his bitter, wise poem “To those born afterward.” Busch sings its setting, a compelling Eisler composition.

Brecht, always Brecht. For good reasons. We should remember Martin Walser, who wrote that Christianity in all church versions in the 20th century was only “a lip-praying religion to kill all practical needs. Marxism, on the other hand, seemed to take practice seriously. It is ridiculous, says Walser, “if anyone today, who has his pretty nest on the biceps of bourgeois rule, accuses Brecht of party service. His glorifications of dialectics are hundreds of times over, and they simply mean: Only those who hear are allowed to speak. Only those who learn are allowed to teach.” In this sense, singing is also teaching.

Part 2, “A Dead Man on Vacation,” follows Busch’s journey from Hitler’s Germany to Moscow, Spain and France. Konrad Wolf at the singer’s stations. Escapes that end in Nazi imprisonment. Busch drills Brecht’s question into our minds: “What must have come over people?” In a sequence in the film, sculptor Fritz Cremer shows the death masks of executed resistance fighters; it is his inspiration, this eternal memorial on the wall of his studio.

Hans-Eckardt Wenzel writes that Busch inherits the style of the “buccaneers of the seas,” a rapid energy intertwined “with the earthly conditions.” This voice masters all balances between expressiveness and economy. A sharp breath of reason can be felt, something cutting that cleverly breaks every pathos at its most touching point. Burning like ice. You will always like to listen to this singer if you want to feel what it is like with the sensuality of a plausible thought. These songs are not about kneeling minds, they are biting power, sometimes suddenly an incredibly soft explosion. The material and voice embody the drama of ideas that promises the genre a new awareness of light. Which means that art must aim into the light, into the incorruptible enlightenment of society-created barbarism.

You didn’t have to prescribe anti-fascism to Ernst Busch. The experience did that extensively. As with Konrad Wolf. The film thus reinforces that kindness means struggle and attitude has a price. This 20th century: longing pulled the souls, ideologies drove the spirit, war pushed the bodies. If Busch’s singing were a human being, then this human being, in a spirit that feels for the weak, would be a deeply affected person who sees the heart of the species tearing, the skin is so thin, and behind it the beast always emerges.

The true artist is unhappy. He sees the cracks in the building. He has to go through loss to get to the proclamation. We look at the courageous face of the proletarian struggle, feel the hope in Wolf’s film art – and yet, when we look at the world, we know: the exaggerated enthusiasm of human love must always go through the fire of disappointment. A curse, but: Art creates the strengthening feeling that all pain can be lived and something can be counteracted. Busch’s singing is part of it.

Harrowing scenes: Writer Konstantin Simonov recites his poem “The German”. We see and hear Ernst Busch, and we see and hear other Germans. First bawling, then Russian snow in the mouth. This snow didn’t fall, it started moving, a second front against the fascists, from above. Now the camera scans, for an unbearably long time, a row of Soviet soldiers, young men about to go to the front. It is the coming death that guides the camera. Those eyes that look at you! They don’t blame you, they don’t accuse, but they ask: How does it feel to have been spared? And what does this question do to your life? The answer, like all true historical accounts, does not focus on what was. It aims at what is.

“Busch sings.” Defa theatrical version on DVD. 124 min. Ed. v. Defa Foundation, Ernst Busch Society, Friedrich Wolf Society; Accompanying book Edition Bodoni, DVD and book €34.