Low, haunting piano notes filled the Hampton Room at Scripps College as listeners held their breath. After a slow, building introduction, the music escalated into a march as Lan Adomian’s rousing operatic voice sang stories of the working class. After a breath, the speaker, Veronika Eberhart, switched off the tiny record player and assumed her place behind the podium.
This past Wednesday, Feb. 4, Eberhart, a multimedia artist, gave a talk co-hosted by the European Union Center of California (EU Center) and Scripps’ German Department Chair Professor Kevin Vennemann. Following the talk, Kaya Savelson SC ‘26 and Ella Attisan SC ‘26 moderated a Q&A.
“[Eberhart is an artist] from Vienna, whose work moves between visual art, film and archival research, and often focuses on the afterlives of political histories and modernist culture,” Vennemann said.
EU Center Director Professor Corey Tazzara described their motivations for inviting Eberhart, noting that her art aligns with the EU Center’s interest in Europe’s connection with the United States.
“The Center does not focus solely on the EU in the strict sense, though much of our programming is squarely in that domain, but as a Center for the history, culture and politics of Europe writ large — including its many entanglements with the United States,” Tazzara said.
Eberhart’s talk focused on the works of Hanns Eisler, a German-Austrian composer, and the political consequences of his compositions during the Red Scare period, which started in 1917 and continued until 1957.
During the Cold War’s Red Scare period, the government targeted any suspected communists with blacklisting, investigations, loyalty oaths and, in some cases, deportation.
As an artist, Eberhart uses various mediums — including sound, image and text — in her international political exhibitions. Although she explores her artistic voice through vastly different forms, she remains somewhat steady in her themes. Primarily, she focused on the interconnection of politics and musical expression.
At the beginning of her talk, Eberhart described how she discovered her research topic purely by chance. While spending 2019 and 2020 working at the Mak Center for Art and Architecture, Eberhart visited where Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler — two of her favorite composers — lived and found old records of their songs in the library.
“I thought the material is all there, so why not work with it?” Eberhart said.
Eberhart explained that Eisler was a devout Austrian-Jewish Marxist who, in 1938, fled the encroaching Nazis in Europe. During his exile in the United States, he infused his musical compositions with political meaning.
“He believed music was a powerful political tool, not decoration, but a means of education, mobilization and solidarity,” Eberhart said. “He combined elements of classical and popular music to create works intended for the working class. For him, texts and music were inseparable and carriers of political meaning.”
Eberhart recounted how, at the start, Eisler and Brecht were received with praise for their compositions in Hollywood. Most notably, their collaboration on the 1943 film score for “Hangmen Also Die” earned Eisler an Academy Award nomination.
Yet, soon after, Eisler would become one of many European intellectuals under FBI investigation by the FBI for being too left-wing and a potential Soviet agent. From her podium, Eberhart read the transcripts of Eisler’s interrogation by the House Un-American Activities Commission (HUAC), describing the way they scrutinized a series of recordings he’d made with a small New York record label.
“At the time, the phonograph record was seen as a revolutionary medium,” Eberhart said. “In Europe, leftist magazines described it as a way of bringing political songs into homes, meeting halls, factories and farms, places where people had, as they put it, forgotten how to sing.”
During Eberhart’s talk, she played five recordings of these compositions and commented on the relevance of each. One standout was “In Praise of Learning,” a song encouraging the working class to educate themselves in preparation for a revolution.
Eberhart described how this song was a perfect representation of the very loaded political songs that characterized Eisler’s work. After his investigation by HUAC, he was deported in 1948 and relocated to East Germany, where he wrote their national anthem.
“It feels very out of time to talk about music in a political sense, and at the same time very contemporary nowadays with pop music,” Eberhart said. “We have a lot of examples in the U.S., but also in Brazil or somewhere where music still has a strong role in transporting political meanings.”
Eberhart ended her talk with a parting message for students about the importance of Eisler’s story.
“Eisler’s case shows that political fear does not disappear. It mutates,” Eberhart said. “What was once called communism is today, friends, extremism or disruption. So the questions, I think, remain the same: who is allowed to sing or even to be heard?”
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