Edwin spirit

Edwin Ernst Moritz Geist (born July 31, 1902 in Berlin ; † December 10, 1942 in Kaunas ) was a German composer and music writer who was murdered by the Germans in Lithuania .

biography

The years in Germany

What has been found so far about Edwin Geist's life in Germany during the time before his exile is very sketchy. In particular, nothing is known about his musical training. In his diary for Lyda from 1942 he speaks of an early fascination for the stage and opera, awakened by an aunt who sang in a Berlin opera choir. In the years 1924/25 and 1928/29 Geist was active on the public stage for one season each, first as a répétiteur in Stettin , later as Kapellmeister in Zurich . In 1928 he married Alexandra Brodowsky (1910–1999); the marriage was divorced in 1931. The earliest composition that has survived comes from the Zurich period: Three songs for baritone and violin . While none of Geist's compositions, as far as is known, have been printed to this day, he published a number of smaller essays in various music magazines in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In the years since 1933, other songs and an opera that have not survived, Der Golem (the only work by Spirit that is mentioned in Stengels and Gerigk's Lexicon of Jews in music ) were written. In October 1937, Geist was banned from practicing his profession by the Reichsmusikkammer because he was half- Jewish (Geist's father, who died at the beginning of the First World War, was of Jewish origin). Geist was living in Berlin at the time and was working on a musical play entitled The Homecoming of Dionysus , which he finished in February 1938.

Exile in Lithuania

In 1938 or early 1939 he moved to the then capital of Lithuania , Kaunas. In June 1939 he married the second marriage to the Lithuanian-born Jewish pianist Lyda Bagriansky. There was a general work ban for foreigners in Lithuania, but Geist did not prevent anyone from composing here. Important compositions were created in quick succession in the years 1939–1941: a large dance pantomime as an addendum to Dionysus ' return home , three Lithuanian songs , then perhaps his most important work, the Little German Funeral Mass as well as an Antaeos concert overture and two orchestral pieces from Lithuania .

In Kaunas, Geist met the German painter and bookseller couple Max Holzman (1889–1941) and Helene Holzman (1891–1968). Thanks mainly to the notes of Helene Holzman ( This child should live ) and the vivid memories of her daughter, Margarete Holzman (born 1924) in Giessen, the figure and life of Edwin Geist for his Lithuanian years take on clearer contours. Max Holzman published in the publishing house of his bookstore Geists German written treatise Antikes und Modernes in Lithuanian folk song . It appeared in the spring of 1940, a few weeks before the occupation of Lithuania by the Red Army, in the course of which Max Holzman's bookstore was closed and the sale of the books he had published was prevented. For Geist, however, new opportunities seemed to have opened up in the “Soviet year” that followed. His compositional activity increased in intensity, and Helene Holzman's memories speak of a concert in Vilnius and a performance of his music on the radio.

Ghetto and murder

With the invasion of the German Wehrmacht in June 1941 and the systematic persecution and murder of the Jewish population that followed immediately, the period of horror began for the Berlin “half-Jews” too. He could have evaded the order to move to the newly established Kaunas ghetto like all Jews if he had divorced his Jewish wife. He refused, however, and during the first months, which were marked by numerous mass murders, lived with Lyda in the ghetto under miserable circumstances. At the beginning of 1942 she encouraged him to do everything and, if necessary, to arrange a divorce to get out of the ghetto. At the end of March 1942, Geist was actually able to leave the ghetto. However, he delayed the divorce and even tried to make plausible to the German authorities with false claims and forged documents that his wife was not Jewish either, and that she would also have to be released from the ghetto. In a nerve-wracking guerrilla war with the authorities, which he describes in dramatic details in his diary for Lyda , he actually succeeded in getting Lyda free in August 1942. At the beginning of December, however, he was arrested by the Gestapo and on December 10, 1942 in the IX. Fort in Kaunas shot. What caused the SS- Hauptscharführer Helmut Rauca, who was responsible for the action, to shoot Edwin Geist is unclear. In any case, the German authorities did not seem to have seen through the deception to free his wife, because Lyda did not have to return to the ghetto. In early January 1943 she took her own life in the shared apartment in the center of Kaunas in desperation over the disappearance of her husband.

The survival of the works

The fact that Edwin Geist's compositions have been preserved is thanks to the audacity of a Lithuanian violinist, Vladas Varčikas, who, together with a friend, broke into the apartment that had been sealed by the Gestapo after Lydas suicide and dragged away the manuscripts lying around in the apartment that had already been looted to hide them in a safe place. They stayed there until the mid-1960s in Soviet Lithuania an interest in Geist's music and his fate began to stir. This interest found its most concise expression in a play by two Lithuanian authors, Jokubas Skliutauskas and Mykolas Jackevičius , which in some respects greatly alienated historical facts , and in two concerts with works by Geist, which took place in Vilnius and Kaunas in February 1973 . The conductor of this concert, Juozas Domarkas , went on a trip to the GDR a little later and brought a tape recording of his concert and a few manuscripts from Geist as a gift. These works are now in the music department of the Berlin State Library. So for a few years there was a certain interest in Geist's music in the eastern part of Germany, which did not spread to western Germany.

It was not until the publication of Helene Holzman's notes in 2000 and an initiative initiated by Jokubas Skliutauskas in Lithuania that his musical play The Homecoming of Dionysus was performed for the first time in Vilnius on the occasion of Geist's 100th birthday (director: Wladimir Petrowitsch Tarassow ; musical director : Juozas Domarkas). Since then, music by Geist has been played and broadcast on the radio on several occasions in Lithuania, Germany and the USA. The first commercially available CD with his music was released in June 2007.

Musical works

All compositions are preserved in the form of manuscripts that Edwin Geist himself made, mostly as fair copies. None of these works have so far appeared in print. A complete catalog of works can be found on edwin-geist.de.

• 1928: Three songs (daybreak; image; through the night)
• 1933: Choir of the Dead ; Reaper's song
• 1933: The strange evening
• 1936: I find you in all of these things
• 1938: The homecoming of Dionysus
• 1939: Apollonian-Dionysian dance pantomime
• 1940: Three Lithuanian songs (heavy evening; sea ballade; dynamics of spring)
• 1940: Small German funeral mass - Requiem (choir of the dead to the living; dance of death; fugato; chorus of the living to the dead)
• 1941: Antaeos
• 1941: From Lithuania (introduction; fugal march)
• 1942: The dance legend
• 1942: Cosmic Spring

Fonts

• Broadcasting movie record. Significance and role of electrical musical instruments. In: Melos 12th year, 1932, pp. 49-52.
• The artistic tasks of electrical musical instruments. In: Funk. The weekly radio journal . Issue 20, May 13, 1932, pp. 77-78.
• Delay situation in Wagner's works. A contribution to dramatic and epic opera. In: Signals for the musical world , Berlin, 92nd year 1934, No. 13/14, pp. 196–199.
• The meaning of the folk song. In: Signals for the musical world. Berlin, 92nd year 1934, No. 34/35, pp. 473-474.
• Shape and style. Alban Bergs Wozzeck. In: Signals for the musical world , Berlin, 93rd year 1935, No. 1/2, pp. 2–3.
• From the Lithuanian folk song. In: Schweizerische Musikzeitung , Zurich, vol. 79, issue 1, January 1939, pp. 4–6.
• Opera crisis? In: Schweizerische Musikzeitung , Zurich, vol. 79, issue 5, March 1939, pp. 107–110.
• The Volksoper. In: Muzikos Barai , Kaunas, April 1939.
• About the Latvian folk song. In: Lietuvos Aidas [Lithuanian Echo], Kaunas, October 23, 1939.
• Ancient and modern in Lithuanian folk song . With a foreword by Vladas Jakubenas, Kaunas, Pribačis 1940.
• For Lyda. Diary 1942. Ed. By Jokubas Skliutauskas. Vilnius, Baltos Lankos 2002.
• "I count the days every hour ..." Diary for Lyda. March - August 1942. Presented by Reinhard Kaiser. Berlin, AB-Die Andere Bibliothek GmbH & Co.KG 2012.

Sound carrier

1. Recording of a concert with works by Edwin Geist
   1. From Lithuania
   2. I find you in all these things, heavy evening, sea balade, dynamics of spring
   3. Antaeos
   4. Small German funeral mass
   5. Apollonian-Dionysian dance pantomime
2. Three songs
   1. breaking Dawn
   2. image
   3. Through the night
3. Edwin Geist (1902–1942): Chamber music and songs ( ISBN 978-3-936168-45-7 )
   1. The strange evening.
   2. I find you in all of these things
   3. Three songs (daybreak, image, through the night)
   4. Cosmic spring
   5. Three Lithuanian Songs (Heavy Evening, Sea Ballade, Dynamics of Spring)

Sources and literature

• Helene Holzman “This child should live”. Records 1941–1944. Ed. By. Reinhard Kaiser and Margarete Holzman, Schöffling, Frankfurt am Main 2000.
• Reinhard Kaiser (Ed.): "I count the days every hour ..." Diary for Lyda. March - August 1942. AB-Die Andere Bibliothek GmbH & Co.KG, Berlin 2012 ISBN 978-3-8218-6246-0 .
• Mykolas Jackevičius, Jokubas Skliutauskas: Aš Girdžiu Muzika. Triju dalui dokumentine kronika su prologu ir epilogu [I listen to music. Three-part documentary chronicle with prologue and epilogue], play, Vilnius, Vaga 1973.
• Reinhard Kaiser : Unheard of salvation. The search for Edwin Geist , Frankfurt am Main, Schöffling 2004; review
• Avraham Tory: Surviving the Holocaust. The Kovno Ghetto Diary. Edited by Martin Gilbert , Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1990.
• Eva Weissweiler: Eliminated! The Lexicon of the Jews in Music and its Murderous Consequences. Dittrich, Cologne 1999 (with a reprint of the Lexicon of Jews in Music ).

Web links

• edwin-geist.de
• Literature by and about Edwin Geist in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ute Nawroth, A Little Joy in Everyday Library Life . In: FORUM MUSIKBIBLIOTHEK 26 (2005), pp. 302f.
2. ↑ Jutta Lambrecht on info-netz-music ; accessed on October 14, 2014