Robert Gilbert. Eine zeitgeschichtliche Biografie by Von Christian Walther (review)

The lyricists behind our classic pop songs are generally unknown or forgotten. Robert Gilbert (pseuydonym of Robert Winterfeld, 1899–1978) wrote the words to enduring songs like “Das gibt’s nur einmal” and “Durch Berlin fließt immer noch die Spree,” and he penned lyrics for Weimar-era film musicals such as Die Drei von der Tankstelle or Der Kongress tanzt, as well as operettas and stage musicals, most famously Im weißen Rössl (1930), which went around the world and is still performed today. The son of operetta composer Jean Gilbert, Robert on occasion also composed his own melodies. While he produced songs on the assembly line for the entertainment industry, the engaged communist Gilbert also wrote powerful agitprop lyrics and political cabaret material under the pen-name David Weber in conjunction with composer Hanns Eisler (“Das Stempellied,” “Auf den Straßen zu singen”). The most curious thing about his early career is how he was able to produce such polar opposites simultaneously. In his first years of exile, he published antifascist poetry in émigré journals under the pseudonym Ohle. After emigrating to America, a period of hopelessness and isolation, he moved in 1949 to Switzerland and reclaimed his (West) German citizenship in 1957. In addition to writing for Munich’s cabarets and publishing several volumes of verse, Gilbert enjoyed acclaim and fortune for his translations of Broadway musicals, from My Fair Lady to Annie Get Your Gun, Hello Dolly! and Cabaret. Now he rejected communism and satirized his former ally Brecht, and eventually turned away from politics altogether. Among his correspondents were Hannah Arendt, the wife of his best friend, whose papers in the Library of Congress contain hundreds of pages of his letters and manuscripts; she wrote the Afterword to a 1972 volume of his poetry. Gilbert’s own papers are now held in the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, and the book at hand is based on a thorough exploration of these archives.

The question of how to write a biography lies at the heart of this study, which documents a palpable struggle to find sense in the diverse and disjointed material that survives. Christian Walther repeatedly notes the gaps in our historical memory and the incomplete archival records, which reflect the turbulence of migration, war, exile, and the passage of time. An original letter from Brecht, which Gilbert displayed in a television interview but which is missing from the archives of his papers along with other important materials, and thus may still be in the possession of Gilbert’s apparently rather erratic widow, recurs as a key image of the narrative. Many details can no longer be reconstructed with certainty, such as the circumstances of Gilbert’s October 1938 escape from Austria to France with stops in Berlin and Cologne to secure papers. Walther also finds himself grappling with the published memoirs of Gilbert’s daughter (Marianne Gilbert Finnegan, Memories of a Mischling: Becoming an American, 2002), which he discovers to be riddled with half-truths and errors, albeit not intentional falsifications. Through the surviving documents, Walther reconstructs personal stories including Gilbert’s difficult private and working relationship with his ex-wife, his alcoholism and depression during his late years, and his dys-functional son’s tragic life. Unfortunately, these many bits and pieces can veer to the irrelevant and lose track of the core story, as in a lengthy passage on the possible dating of his first popular song, a long account of Arendt’s funeral (at which Gilbert could not be present), or a recounting of the Weimar film industry’s marketing strategies for their songs.

Even granted that this dissertation (FU Berlin) was undertaken in the field of Communication and is not a literary study, it is disappointing that Gilbert’s texts receive no meaningful evaluation, though many are reprinted in excerpts or in their entirety. A reader may well wonder, for instance, how Gilbert succeeded at transplanting the American musical to the German language. Walther liberally...