Music behind Barbed Wire. A Diary of Summer 1940 by Hans Gál (review)

It is July 1940. Following the German invasion, the French government moves to Vichy. Sark surrenders, giving Germany control over all British Channel islands. The Battle of Britain has begun. In Douglas, on the Isle of Man, on 27 July, Hans Gál writes his shortest diary entry of the summer: ‘I have just behaved like a hysterical old maid. On the promenade, in front of all the people, in the presence of Gross, I had a crying fit when I opened the telegram, Hanna’s telegram. God be praised, the boy is in Canada! No details, no explanation. But he is safe!!!’ What had happened? Amidst the wartime fear of German invasion, a toxic blend of xenophobia and conspiracy theories that immigrants might covertly prepare the ground for Nazi invasion had resulted in the Churchill government’s decision to arrest and intern over 27,000 Austrians, Germans, and Italians resident in Britain. Among those ‘enemy aliens’ were Gál and his eldest son, Franz, who found themselves deported to different locations. After a few days in confinement in Edinburgh, Gál was transferred to a transit camp in Liverpool’s Huyton district, from where, after some four weeks, he was further deported to a sealed-off area on the promenade of the Isle of Man’s capital. Communication with loved ones was near impossible, and Gál endured weeks of uncertainty about the fate of his wife and two sons. The younger son, Peter, and Gál’s wife, Hanna, were spared internment and deportation (children and women being exempt). Franz, 17 years old, was less lucky. Where was he? Rumours trickled through to the Douglas Camp that large numbers of internees were further deported to Canada and Australia. Was Franz one of them? And what if he was one of those killed when the Arandora Star was bombarded and sunk by German U-boats on her way to Canada? Finally, relief: yes, Franz was in Canada, and he was alive.

Stories such as this one abound in times of war. Such is the number of those displaced as a direct result of the Second World War that one might perhaps shrug off individual casualties as mere footnotes to the grander narratives of countries in battle. After all, did not Gál and his son survive? Did not Britain provide shelter to the Jewish refugees, whose fate would no doubt have been much grimmer had they remained in Vienna, where, following Gál’s dismissal as Director of the Mainz conservatoire, the family had moved in 1933? After the Austrian Anschluss in 1938, the Gáls found themselves forced to migrate again. Gál’s connections might have suggested the United States as a possible destination, but Donald Tovey brought Gál to Edinburgh with the potential of a permanent position at the University there (which he eventually occupied from 1945 until his retirement in 1955). Again, scholars researching the stories of migrants like Gál will find much familiar territory here: Hans Gál, formerly successful Weimar Republic composer, displaced, in British exile, one of over 27,000 deported enemy aliens. And yet, as this new translation of Gál’s internment diary reminds the reader so powerfully, no history writing can charter such numbers, and none can do justice to the stories, each of them unique, that form the fabric of this displacement.

The diary covers the entirety of Gál’s internment, from 13 May 1940 to the day of his release, on 27 September. Gál’s worries for his son Franz form only one of several strands that permeate the diary as a whole. Knowing the German original well, I was astonished how gripped I was by the prose. The quality of the translation is evident by how well it retains the urgency of the German. There are Gál’s...