Best known for his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht, composer Hanns Eisler also set nineteenth-century German poetry to music that both absorbs and disturbs the Lieder tradition. This book traces Eisler's art songs (German: Kunstlieder) through twentieth-century political crises from World War I to Nazi-era exile and from Eisler's postwar deportation from the United States to the ideological pressures he faced in the early German Democratic Republic. His art songs are presented not as an escape from the "dark times" Brecht lamented but rather as a way to intervene in the nationalist appropriation of aesthetic material.

The book follows a chronological arc from Eisler's early Morgenstern songs to his Lied-like setting of Brecht's 1939 "To Those Who Come After" and his treatment of H