Missing Paul Robeson in East Berlin the Spirituals and the Empty Archive

Missing Paul Robeson in East Berlin The Spirituals and the Empty Archive

Todd Carmody

You may well ask why Paul Robeson means so much to our people. Why do we have a Paul Robeson committee or a Paul Robeson Archive? Why do our school children learn about him and why is he an inspiration to us on our road to communism? I am not sure that I have the whole answer to these questions. But surely one reason is what we learned from the terrible experiences under fascism. —Frank Loeser, President of East Germany’s Paul Robeson Committee, Ansprache zur Veranstaltung “What Is America To Me,” August 2, 1973, 19:30, Kosmos Theater

In 1965 East Berlin’s Academy of the Arts established the Paul Robeson Archive, honoring a prominent African American singer and activist who visited the German Democratic Republic on but three occasions. Robeson traveled to the GDR twice for state ceremonies in 1960 and again for medical convalescence a few years later. Each of these trips was brief, and during his Wnal stay Robeson saw no visitors and made no public appearances. East Berlin may thus seem an un- likely site for the Robeson Archive; Robeson’s ties to the socialist Ger- man state were not especially strong and never as well established as his links to Britain or the Soviet Union, or even to other Soviet satellite states. But surprising though its location may be, the collection amassed by the East German Academy of the Arts is extensive. Among the academy’s holdings are a handful of private letters and candid photo- graphs, audio outtakes and reading notes—ephemeral traces of an everyday life shaded from the glare of international celebrity. Personal artifacts like these, comparatively rare in the Robeson collection, lend the past a comforting sense of familiarity. They encourage us to imagine the archive qua cultural institution as a space in which distant histories are rendered immediate and where we might, taking the singular object in hand, better grasp the lived experiences of those who have

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come before us. The romance of the archive is this promise of proximity. As Carolyn Steedman writes, “You think, in the delirium: it was their dust that I breathed in” (19). Most of the academy’s holdings, however, offer no such intimacy. The archive in Berlin might best be described, in fact, as a transatlantic paper trail. More bibliography than reliquary, it contains thousands of photocopied newspaper articles, scholarly essays, and popular books. These documents are generally about rather than by Robeson, and most duplicate materials readily accessible elsewhere. While a few of Robeson’s personal papers and belongings made their way to East Ber- lin, most of the materials were obtained by diligent archivists and administrators tasked with tracking down anything and everything written about Robeson.1 Founded not by bequest but by request, the Robeson Archive is thus awash in photocopies and offprints, desk copies and microWlms. The sheer volume of secondary materials gives pause. Why would the cultural arm of the East German government go to such lengths to commemorate an American dissident who was often invited but rarely visited? What purpose could an archive of photocopies serve? Internal memos suggest that preservation and pedagogy were guiding concerns from the start. Claiming in the mid-1950s that “reac- tionary imperialist forces” were endangering Robeson’s legacy, for example, the board charged with “Founding a Committee to Create a Paul Robeson Archive” declared the urgency of “collecting and evaluating the entire documentary record of his achievement” before it was too late (Konzeption).2 As Victor Grossman, director of the archive from 1965 to 1968, would later recount: “The Robesons had been targeted by cold war hatred and racism in the United States, and this archive was meant as a rejoinder” (2003, 176). Initial proposals also called for materials in the archive to be made widely available. Citizens of East Berlin and the environs could visit the collections in person; school Weld trips were an especially high priority. Genossen in other parts of the country were to be reached with traveling exhibitions and museum loans. In each of these instantiations, the archive would seek to “objec- tively document” the career of an important socialist Mitstreiter whose example was to be “made useful for future generations” (Konzeption). Such tendentious claims to objectivity, of course, are emblematic of the disciplinary function of the archival project tout court. Whether

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 11:32:31 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Missing Paul Robeson in East Berlin 3 understood as actual physical spaces or more Wguratively as knowl- edge formations and epistemological regimes, as Ann Stoler notes, archives are always “monuments to particular conWgurations of power” (96). They index not the fullness of history but the narrow principles of selection by which ideology is naturalized. A clear exercise in socialist pedagogy, the Robeson Archive brings this critical touchstone into sharp relief. But insofar as it is Wlled with photocopies and secondary materials, the Robeson collection also points up another touchstone in recent work on the politics of the archive—the centrality of absence. Once freighted with the romance of recovery, for many scholars the archive has of late become synonymous with emptiness, with the silences and gaps we encounter when setting out to retrieve the stories and experiences obscured by ofWcial history. As Anjali Aron dekar suggests, to enter the archive is to be left alone with power; it is to search in vain for the “impossible object” that might exceed the archive’s totalizing grasp. Stephen Best likewise argues that the archival turn in anthropology and literary studies has failed to deliver on the utopian promises of history from below. All too often, Best con- tends, the work of recovery amounts to little more than the “pursuit of degraded fragments” (159). Once feverishly embraced, the archival imperative may thus have brought us to a methodological impasse. No matter how self-reXexive our analyses, and no matter how consci- entiously we foreground the limits of recovery, the archive can often seem but “a repository of absence” (155). The mode of absence one encounters in the Robeson Archive is naturally different from the emptiness that for Arondekar character- izes the colonial archive. Different still are the gaps and elisions that for Saidiya Hartman leave slavery’s only extant archive “an inventory of property, a medical treatise on gonorrhea, a few lines of a whore’s life, an asterisk in the grand narrative of history” (2). Nor does Fou- cault’s gloss on the “infamous” lives effaced from the annals of the past ring exactly true for the celebrated life and career so diligently archived in East Berlin. But despite the clear distinctions to be made between an archive that instrumentalizes celebrity and archives that render invisible those who “played no appreciable role in events or among important people,” Robeson is also absent from his own archive (Foucault, 162). Lost amid the crush of documentary and agitprop prose, Robeson’s story is legible only as a Bildungsroman of socialist

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awakening; his celebrated baritone echoes rather monotonously as the voice of ideological clarity, even or especially in the archive’s care- fully annotated musical division. Emptied of their slavery meanings by ideologically doctrinaire explanatory notes and prefatory materials, the African American spirituals with which Robeson made his name and through which he later deWned his anticolonial politics likewise ring hollow. Despite the breadth of its holdings, in other words, the Robeson collection exempliWes the empty archive of recent critical discourse, a paradox redoubled by the very kinds of documents amassed in East Berlin—box after box of secondary materials, photocopies, and reprints that cannot help but call absent originals to mind. And yet these same documents also suggest that we rethink our approach to the absence at the center of the archive as such. In the Robeson Archive, absence does more than point up the constitutive limits of the archival project. Absence is here neither a byproduct of power alone nor merely further evidence that reading against the archival grain has run its methodological course. Rather, the Robeson Archive actually cultivates absence as part of its political mandate, balancing “objective” documentation with a pedagogy of desire. East German citizens were taught about Robeson’s career; but they also learned to “miss” Robeson. The absent original in the archive of photocopies, we might say, was the performer himself. As the collection’s holdings bear witness, Robeson cut a decidedly melancholic Wgure throughout East German public culture. From typescripts of invitations that Robeson received but politely declined, to the wistful liner notes that accompa- nied Eterna reissues of his LPs and pensive newspaper accounts of his travels elsewhere, the archive is Wlled with materials that betray a certain longing for Robeson to visit the GDR. The structure of the archive mirrors this affective relation, diligently amassing and Wling away secondary materials that serve as a placeholder for the ever-absent star. All archives are, of course, in some sense placeholders, collating the textual residue of lives and events that can never be fully recreated or reinhabited. But the Robeson collection wears its heart on its sleeve. It is as if housing his archive was the next best thing to hosting Robeson. But what did Robeson’s longed-for presence signify within East German public life? Might the process of substitution illustrated in Fig- ure 1, taken at the archive in 1981, speak to broader cultural impulses? In the image’s clockwise composition, Robeson’s face indexes an originary

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 11:32:31 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Figure 1. At the Paul Robeson Archive, April 1981. German Federal Archive, image number 183-Z0414-148.

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presence that the newspapers, books, and index cards seek to reproduce. Placed neatly on the table, the scissors in turn point up the archive’s cut-and-paste instrumentality. Robeson is here an object of both celebration and surveillance. This scene might easily have taken place at the East German Stasi or even at the FBI, which tracked Robeson’s movements from 1941 onward. And yet this image also communicates a certain excitement about Robeson. Circled around the singer’s clippings, the archivists resemble a community of fans or even a scrap- booking club. Nor is this an exclusive group; the camera angle, giving us a seat at the table, invites participation. There is, in fact, something adolescent about this scene, as the bureaucratic task of documenting Robeson’s comings and goings shades over into a culture of fandom: the prospect of meeting Robeson in person hangs tantalizingly in the air. (The GDR, it should be pointed out, was at the time of the archive’s founding only sixteen years old.) What this photograph stages, in other words, is a mode of archival discipline that is both coercive and coaxing. Absence is here at once something to be overcome, in the name of preserving the “entirety” of Robeson’s work, “das gesamte Schaffen,” and something to be cultivated—in the interest of the citizenry’s sen- timental (re)education (Loeser, 1973). Against this cultural backdrop, in what follows I reconsider the issues of emptiness raised by recent scholarship on the archive by exploring how absence deWned Paul Robeson’s celebrity in East Ger- many. As we will see, the peculiar nature of the Robeson Archive was consistent with the singer’s fame more often in the GDR. Whereas Robeson’s image is generally associated with the spectacles of raced embodiment and sheer presence manufactured by Hollywood and Broadway, in East Germany Robeson’s popularity was also a product of lack. The singer seems to have entered the East German cultural imagination as always absent and yet always on his way. Exploring this dialectic of presence and absence and seeking an answer to the question raised by my epigraph—why did Robeson mean so much to the GDR?—this essay argues that Robeson’s celebrity was called on to authenticate the GDR’s founding ideology of antifascism. A corollary of this historicist argument is the methodological claim that we have yet to recognize the variety of ways in which absence is at stake in the archive. In recent work on the politics of the archive, absence consistently marks the limits of disciplinary power; beyond those totalizing

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 11:32:31 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Missing Paul Robeson in East Berlin 7 bounds, scholars reluctantly concede, there may be nothing left worth recovering. But absence can nonetheless be continuous with and even cultivated by archival discipline. The empty archive, in other words, is no less a monument to power than the archive that would never admit of lack. While surveying the cultural history of Robeson’s celebrity in East Germany, this essay focuses in particular on Robeson as a performer of African American spirituals. Created by generations of slaves in the U.S. South and popularized by white and black writers alike from the waning years of the Civil War onward, the spirituals have long been thought of as a musical archive of slavery. Across the otherwise varie- gated and often contentious body of writing on the spirituals, one Wnds a consistent emphasis on presence, historical proximity, and evidentiary value. And yet the cultural reception of these songs was equally marked by anxieties about loss, absence, and historical remove. Plac- ing Robeson in this longer history of archival ambivalence suggests that the performer’s East German celebrity, predicated as it was on lack, is not as anomalous as it may seem. Indeed, taken in this context, Robeson’s fame in the GDR has much to tell us about how to read absences hiding in plain sight. To that end, I begin by recounting in broad strokes the cultural reception of African American spirituals and their relation to the historiography of slavery. I then consider how Robe- son’s concert performances approached the spiritual as “folk music” in ways that reframe the dialectic of historical proximity and archival absence as a question of “universal embodiment.” A Wnal section asks what became of Robeson’s spectral celebrity when he Wnally did visit East Berlin.

The Spirituals and Slavery’s Archive

The archive of slavery has not always been empty. As Best observes, the modern historiography of slavery has traditionally been “struc- tured around a logic and ethic of recovery” that presupposes an abun- dance of evidence waiting to be discovered (157). These assumptions Wrst took root in the 1960s and ’70s when scholars began to prioritize sources left by slaves over the written accounts of slaveholders and their apologists. Seeking to restore slaves to center stage as historical

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actors in their own right (rather than passive victims of larger social forces), the “new social historians of slavery” boldly reconstituted the archive. As John Blassingame noted in The Slave Community (1972), the goal was now to provide a picture of the “‘inside half’ of the slave’s life,” and doing so meant looking for documentary evidence in the auto- biographical writings of fugitive slaves, in material artifacts of daily life under slavery, and in Wrst-person testimonies collected after the institution’s demise (367). Researchers also placed particular emphasis on the spirituals. W. E. B. Du Bois famously claimed that these songs bear “the articulate message of the slave to the world” (1989, 207); the new social historians took Du Bois at his word, stressing the documentary value of the spirituals for rewriting the history of slavery from the slave’s point of view. As Blassingame conWdently noted, “the relationship of the spirituals to the slave’s actual experience” could be use- fully parsed with close scrutiny and “a careful study of themes” (140). The spirituals, in other words, had become an important archive of slavery. The new social historians were not, it turns out, the Wrst to approach black religious music as historical repository in this manner. Aboli- tionist and former slave Frederick Douglass promoted the spirituals as both a documentary resource and a medium of social protest as early as the mid-nineteenth century. Every tone of these “songs of sorrow,” Douglass declared, “was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains” (58). There could be no clearer evidence that slaves were far from contented with their lot, as slavery’s apologists maintained. The evidentiary link between the spirituals and slavery that Douglass championed would continue to resonate well after Emancipation, and during the late nineteenth century the spirituals emerged as a key African American expressive form and a Wxture of U.S. popular culture more broadly. The white missionaries whose early transcriptions and commentaries set the tone for the songs’ popularity consistently emphasized the spirituals’ nearness to slave life, as did later African American writers like James Weldon Johnson. In his preface to The Book of American Negro Spirituals (Johnson and Johnson) and in poems such as “O Black and Unknown Bards,” John- son celebrated both the spirituals’ astounding survival into the twen- tieth century and their ability to communicate the thoughts and feelings of the men and women who created them.3

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But if the spiritual was widely celebrated for its presumed nearness to slavery and its apparent evidentiary value, the cultural reception of these songs was also marked at every stage by anxieties about loss, absence, and historical remove. As popularly understood and fêted, the spirituals were thus a fundamentally ambivalent archive of slavery, a point borne out by the iconographic celebrity of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers. Composed of former slaves and free men and women, the Jubilee Singers famously raised more than $150,000 for their alma mater on three unprecedented international tours in the 1870s. In explicit opposition to blackface minstrelsy, the Jubilees cultivated an aura of seriousness and gravitas with a program comprised largely of spirituals, and they met with near universal acclaim wherever they performed. As Paul Gilroy notes, audiences abroad were enraptured by the “proximity to the unspeakable terrors of slave experience” that these concerts seemed to offer (72). In the words of a German minister from the period, “These are not concerts which the negroes give; they are meetings for ediWcation, which they sustain with irresistible power” (Marsh, 95). Comments like these, typical in their reverent enthusiasm, propose the body as both the spiritual’s ori- gin and the site of its impact. “Authentically” rooted in Wrst-hand experiences of slavery, that is, the spirituals seemed to speak directly and “irresistibly” to the listener’s senses. For missionary Gustavus Pike, the experience of listening to the Jubilees even involved the crossing of corporeal boundaries: “The rich tones of the young men as they mingled their voices were so beautiful and [touching],” he wrote, “that I scarcely knew whether I was ‘in the body or out of the body” (quoted in Ward, 153). As Daphne Brooks has argued, the affective responses and “out of body” experiences elicited by the Jubilee Singers give the lie to popular assumptions about the spirituals’ relation to slavery and to slave experience. While the Jubilees kindled effusive empathy from audiences who understood them as “literally embodying the epic past” of American slavery, written accounts of their performances consistently give more attention to the effects of the songs than to either the songs or the performers themselves (Brooks, 297). In reviews we learn a great deal about how concert-goers were “touched” or enthralled; listening was commonly described as an experience of religious awakening and spiritual transcendence. We learn much less, however, about how the

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Jubilees experienced these songs or even about how they performed them. Rather than sovereign and self-conscious artists, the singers are repeatedly represented as vessels through which the terrible sounds of slavery are made to echo. Insofar as they were taken to embody the fact and experience of slavery, then, the Jubilees were spectacularly present wherever they performed. Their songs were understood as archiving and indeed bodying forth the very core of life under slavery, a life that many of the performers had only recently left behind. And yet because they were also considered mere conduits for the spirituals—a musical form whose ultimate meaning, it seems, could only be registered on the bodies of white listeners—the Jubilees were also en- tirely absent. The interplay of presence and absence and anxieties about the concert spiritual’s relation to slavery were also central to African Ameri- can assessments of folk culture from the turn of the century forward. Not only did black intellectuals debate whether the popularity of performers like the Fisk Jubilee Singers had silenced the spirituals’ more radical voicings of protest and dissent. Many also wondered whether the increasing commercialization of black religious song had altogether obscured the spirituals’ origins in slave culture. Du Bois inXuentially weighed in on both questions. In the Souls of Black Folk (1903), he claimed that the “sorrow songs” embodied the vital continuity between an emergent black modernity and a fading slave past. And yet Du Bois also lamented how popular culture had begun to blur the line between the spirituals and blackface minstrelsy that made such continuity fea- sible. Indeed, Du Bois’s pioneering work was not only to excavate and explicate a canon of slave music for the dawning century. It was also to differentiate that canon and its claim to documentary relevance from the culturally ubiquitous iconography of minstrelsy. Later writers continued to Wnd the popularity of the spirituals trou- bling, and many had little use for Du Bois’s cautious optimism. Nov- elist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, for example, took exception with Du Bois’s ennobling account of the “sorrow songs,” arguing that the concert spiritual was more Wrmly rooted in the pathos of Broad- way than in the anguish of slavery. “There never has been a presenta- tion of genuine Negro spirituals to any audience anywhere,” Hurston provocatively claimed (870). “Real” spirituals were communal and rit- ual performances, collaborative and improvisatory affairs that could

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 11:32:31 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Missing Paul Robeson in East Berlin 11 not be reproduced on command or for an audience of nonparticipants.4 Scholars have tended, of course, to read Du Bois and Hurston in opposition, with Du Bois arguing “for” and Hurston “against” the concert spiritual as a genuine cultural form. But the two writers may have more in common than not. Both seek at base to preserve the relation between the spirituals—however deWned—and slavery. For each writer, cultural stewardship requires delineating and safeguarding these songs’ origins in slave culture in the face of the homogenizing forces of modernity. Barring such care, songs that might otherwise make distant pasts present register only loss, inadequacy, and absence. The spirituals, both Du Bois and Hurston fear, could with neglect be reduced to empty archives. Such was the legacy that Paul Robeson inherited when he began to make a name for himself as an interpreter of the spirituals at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1925, already an acclaimed presence on Broadway, Robeson famously became the Wrst vocalist to pre sent a program exclusively comprising songs composed and arranged by African Americans, with the spirituals chief among his repertoire. (The Jubilees included traditional Christian hymns in their performances.) As the music critic of the New York World described it, Robe- son’s concert was a cultural “turning point, one of those thin points in time in which a star is born and not yet visible—the Wrst appearance of this folk wealth to be made without deference or apology” (quoted in Decker, 35). Robeson garnered similar praise when he took to concert stages abroad. Consider, for example, a poster advertising a performance that Robeson gave in Berlin in 1930 with famed pianist and arranger Lawrence Brown. Echoing the praise lavished on the Jubilees some Wfty years earlier, promoters sought to build an audience for Robe- son and Brown by glossing the cultural signiWcance of the spirituals:

These songs are not actual “compositions,” but rather naïve-ecstatic expres- sions of a childlike-primitive sensibility and, as such, perhaps the only music that can be spoken of in any scientiWc sense as American folksongs. Recalling various biblical episodes, these songs seek solace from the tribulations of everyday life and renewed belief in divine justice and love. Sorrow and hope are thus intertwined in these songs, which also speak of hope and transcendence, of the belief in the coming day of freedom— a freedom for all people on earth. (Paul Robeson (Baß))5

As with the earlier Fisk recitals, German audiences framed Robeson’s performances of the spirituals as the spontaneous expression of emotion

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rather than musical craft. And like the Jubilees before him, Robeson is made to embody a tumultuous past. We have come some distance, though, from slavery itself; the spirituals now bear witness to “the tribulations” of an “everyday life” that is hinted at but never speciWed and the transcendence of which promises heavenly solace but obscures the longing for political emancipation expressed in these songs. Emp- tied of their slavery meanings, the spirituals become melodies of universal suffering that can be “scientiWcally” classiWed as American folk music. Taking the stage in Weimar Berlin, Robeson thus shoulders a considerable burden. To some his performance bears witness to past hardships and their transcendence; for others he is hard proof of the arrival of American culture as an object of scholarly inquiry. For both of these imagined audiences, the spirituals are at best evocative of slavery. Slave culture, in fact, seems present only in its absence, in its “transcendence.” In subsequent years, Robeson would develop his own understanding of the spirituals’ transcendence, preferring to speak about the “universality” of the slave songs and placing them “in the tradition of the world’s great folk music.” Disillusioned with both Hollywood and Broadway, from the mid-1930s onward Robeson increasingly devoted himself to concert performances. On stage, an expanding repertoire kept pace with the singer’s outspoken politics and his well-publicized efforts to connect the domestic Wght against Jim Crow with labor and anticolonial struggles abroad. A typical concert would segue from a spiritual (“Deep River”) to a Russian folksong (“The Song of the Volga Boatman”) to “St. Louis Blues” to “Kaddish” to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” to a Chinese children’s song to an American folksong (“John Henry”) to a militant labor theme (“Joe Hill”) to a Broadway standard to a recitation from Shakespeare’s Othello (Bernstein, 356). As Kather- ine Anne Baldwin points out, Robeson’s concerts in this way intermixed the particularist and the internationalist (191). They also created a space in which racially mixed, progressive audiences might negotiate the contingent forms of community made possible by the “common undertone” uniting all folk musics. Indeed, as Robeson explains in his autobiography, Here I Stand (1958), his goal on stage was to curate “a world body—a universal body of folk music” that might illuminate “the universality of mankind [and] the fundamental relationship of peoples to one another” (Robeson, 115).

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Scholars have pointed out the rather idiosyncratic nature and ulti- mately Western bias of Robeson’s theory, which somewhat arbitrarily proposes the pentatonic scale as a universal feature of folk music across the board. Following Robeson’s argument in essays like “A Universal Body of Folk Music” indeed means taking the author at his word and trusting the evidence of what Robeson calls his “pentatonic ears.” It is unsurprising, of course, that Robeson’s writing on the subject does not bear close scrutiny; Robeson was a committed enthusiast but not a trained ethnomusicologist. Inconsistency and imprecision aside, however, Robeson’s understanding of folk culture crucially pivots away from the spectacles of raced embodiment that had deWned both his career as a Hollywood icon and the longer cultural trajectory of the spirituals. In the 1920s and ’30s, Robeson’s image was dominated by the visual focus on his body (in Wlm, theater, and photography). The reception of the spirituals from the earliest performances of the Fisk Jubilee Singers onward is likewise a history of spectacle, whether of the black performers on stage or the white audiences visibly “touched” by their songs. In describing folk culture as a “world body” or a “universal body,” then, Robeson subtly replaces the visual spectacle of race with the provocative notion of aural embodiment. And yet this shift is for Robeson not merely one of medium or from visual to auditory modes of signiWcation. Rather, Robeson’s writings on folk culture are principally interested in the kind of collectivity produced. The aural body is for Robeson the mode of collectivity produced by musical performance—the audience brought together and into collaboration when disparate musical traditions are placed in paratactic relation and the shared work of listening for the “common undertone begins.” Folk music, in other words, is a relational rather than a substantive category. The spirituals with which Robeson Wrst won recognition as a concert singer take on new meaning in this context. Understood as folksongs and inserted into the internationalist montage created by Robeson’s concert performances, the spirituals bear witness to more than the history of African American slavery. These songs are made manifest not primarily as documentary evidence or cross-generational testimony; nor is their power or presence for Robeson bound up in any exclusive way with their origins in slavery. Rather, the spirituals become resonant within and as part of the “world body” of folk music. Their testimo- nial value as such is both archival and proleptic, gesturing backward

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toward a “universality of mankind” that is yet to come but that might be anticipated by and through the contingency of performance. In Robe- son’s later concerts, then, the archive is only empty when the spirituals are taken by themselves, and when the particular history they index is not allowed to resonate with and against the histories that echo through other folk traditions.

Dya s without Paul Robeson

Though perhaps not immediately apparent, Robeson’s theories of the “universal body” of folk culture and montage-like set lists engage with the same issues of presence and absence that have deWned the cultural life of the spiritual since Douglass’s early pronouncements. But whereas Douglass understands presence as documentary or evidentiary value, Robeson Wnds plentitude by means of comparison, solidarity, and performance. Indeed, we might think of the aural presence that Robeson ascribes to folk music in terms of Jill Dolan’s utopian performative: those “small but profound moments in which performance calls the attention of the audience in a way that lifts everyone slightly above the present, into a hopeful feeling of what the world might be like if every moment of our lives were as emotionally voluminous, gener- ous, aesthetically striking, and intersubjectively intense” (5). Yet there is also a certain irony in Robeson’s emphasis on presence during the late 1940s and early 1950s, the period also leading up to the founding of the Paul Robeson Archive in East Berlin. For just as he began to focus on the universally present, “whole body of folk music,” Robe- son had himself become culturally synonymous with absence. A brief historical interlude is then in order before we consider Robeson’s East German celebrity. By the mid-1940s Du Bois could with little exaggeration declare that Robeson was “the best known American on earth, to the largest number of human beings. His voice is known in Europe, Asia, and Africa, in the West Indies and South America and in the islands of the seas” (quoted in Balaji, 374). Within the decade, however, Du Bois’s remarks would become true in ways that he may not have anticipated. Robe- son, famed star of Hollywood and Broadway and legendary concert singer, would soon be known abroad only by his voice; the performer

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 11:32:31 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Missing Paul Robeson in East Berlin 15 renowned for his charisma on stage and for his imposing political presence on the international scene would Wnd himself unable to leave the United States for most of the 1950s. As a consequence of controver- sial antiwar remarks he made in Paris in 1949, the State Department revoked Robeson’s passport and essentially put him under what the Soviets would later call “continental arrest” for some eight years. Thus began for Robeson a period of forced absence from internationalist politics and culture. Robeson, however, endeavored to be present to his allies abroad as best he could. Barred from traveling out of the country to perform, Robeson gave regular “concerts-by-telephone” for supporters around the world, from coal miners in Wales to textile workers in Manchester. His taped messages of peace and solidarity likewise traveled around the globe. Perhaps most famously, in 1952 Robeson also performed at the Peace Arch Park in Washington State to thirty thou- sand Canadians gathered on the other side of the border. The German Democratic Republic was in good company in declar- ing its support of Robeson during this period and urging the United States to take him off its no-Xy list. Coordinated campaigns launched simultaneously from England and the United States sent petitions, letters, and cables to the State Department to protest Robeson’s continu- ing conWnement. Messages in support of Robeson also arrived from all corners—from, among many others, Charlie Chaplin, Sylvia Town send Warner, and Ivor Montagu, as well as from peace groups in Uru- guay, Austria, Israel, South Africa, Iraq, and Finland. If the overall tone of these missives was one of outrage, however, the governing affect in East Germany was by contrast that of melancholia. Consider, for example, a music review from 1956 that appeared in the party-controlled Berliner-Zeitung. Here we Wnd Robeson’s case discussed in language at once diplomatic and intimate.

Many fans in Europe and Asia eagerly await a visit from Paul Robeson, the great American Negro singer; Washington, however, afraid of this pow- erful voice of truth and protest, has for years denied the artist the right to leave the country. There is one thing, though, that Washington can’t pre- vent: that Robeson’s voice should make its way to us by other means. By radio and on record. Fans of the modern LP can now own an entire Robe- son concert on a 25cm record. (“Robeson-Konzert”)6

The controversy caused by Robeson’s persecution, which Du Bois would call “one of the most contemptible happenings in modern history,” was

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of course useful fodder in the cold war (396). For East Germany, a Xedg- ling state whose future in the early 1950s was far from certain, allying itself with Robeson and against the United States was a means of both bolstering its international visibility and suppressing dissent at home. And yet a shift in tone halfway through this passage also suggests that the singer’s internal exile found purchase in the cultural arena as well. If the restoration of Robeson’s passport was a top priority for East German ofWcials, “the modern LP” promised average citizens a much quicker Wx. It is important to keep in mind, of course, that both voices here—the foreign policy insider who opens the conversation and the melancholic consumer who answers—belong to the party. In this review we glimpse in miniature what historians have described as the government’s saturation of public life in the GDR. And while it is unsurprising that such a review would carry ideological undertones, it is remarkable that Robeson’s absence calls forth not a pedagogy of anger or indignation but a pedagogy of desire. As this blurb makes clear, East German citizens were expected to miss Robeson—and to buy his records. Pensive advertisements and wistful accounts of Robeson’s activities in the United States proliferated in the GDR throughout the mid-1950s. As Cultural Minister Heinz Willmann would later reXect, Robeson seemed in his absence uncannily present.7 A sixtieth birthday celebration thrown for Robeson, but without his being present, is emblematic of the performer’s almost spectral fame. The evening’s program included choral performances of Robeson’s material and ofWcial remarks com- mending his political engagement. The focal point, however, was the ghostly presence of Robeson himself. The photograph placed center stage at East Berlin’s Friedrichstadtpalast seems an odd choice (Figure 2). Robeson isn’t pictured singing, as one might expect for a musical gala. Rather than ventriloquize the sounds emanating from the chorus placed directly beneath him, Robeson stands resolutely mute. Nor is he shown actively “bridging the oceans separating the peoples of the world,” as the photograph’s German caption would suggest. Cropped in the back- ground, the bridge itself seems less an obvious symbol for border- crossing solidarity than simply a massive, immovable structure meant to draw attention to those same qualities in “Big Paul,” as he was affec- tionately known in the GDR. If Robeson’s supporters elsewhere were protesting for the singer’s right to travel, the iconography of resistance

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 11:32:31 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Figure 2. Sixtieth birthday celebration for Robeson at East Berlin’s Friedrichstadtpalast, 1958. From Tage mit Paul Robeson (1961).

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in East Germany focused more intensely on the sheer enormousness of Robeson’s stature. Why would there have been such an insistence on Robeson’s presence despite his absence in East German public culture? We can begin to answer this question by looking closely at how the time that Robe- son actually spent in East Germany was represented in the popular press. The singer’s Wrst visit to the GDR was in June of 1960, when he participated in a two-day press event sponsored by Neues Deutschland, the ofWcial organ of the Communist Party. Thrilled Wnally to host him in the Xesh, the government’s preparations paid particular attention to Robeson’s body itself. East German ofWcials commissioned a spe- cial bed to be built, tailored to the singer’s large frame, and assigned Robeson both a private doctor and a personal bodyguard. The latter, a small man, sought to assure Robeson that he was up for the job by tell- ing the singer, “Never mind, Paul, I can just cover your heart” (Duber- man, 483–87). Robeson would return to East Berlin for a more extensive visit later that year, receiving among other awards an honorary doc- torate from the Humboldt University. Following the ceremonies Robe- son gave a brief musical performance from a balcony overlooking Unter den Linden, triumphantly announcing to the crowd gathered below that he was theirs in solidarity—and now in person. Both of these brief events were documented in a commemorative booklet published later that year as simply Days with Paul Robeson (Tage mit Paul Robeson; Figure 3). Having spent so many days without Robe- son, the cultural arm of the East German government was eager to hold onto and share remembrances of the time it was Wnally able to leverage with the star. Some thirty pages long, Days with Paul Robeson includes a short biography of its subject and a lengthier discourse on his signi- Wcance for the socialist struggle. In addition to quotidian propaganda and dramatic photography, the publication also includes a great deal of material on the history of the GDR and ascribes to Robeson a con- spicuous place within the nationalist narrative it gradually unfolds. The singer’s story becomes the story of East Germany’s genesis. As draft materials make even clearer, Robeson’s celebrity proved useful for authenticating the GDR’s founding ideology as an antifascist state.

Paul Robeson visited the German Democratic Republic in 1960. He was the guest of friends who had left Germany during the fascist regime and lived as emigrants in the United States and England. Having himself

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 11:32:31 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Figure 3. Days With Paul Robeson (Tage mit Paul Robeson) (1961).

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experienced fascism in Germany in 1934 and three years later, when he gave his great talents to the cause of the anti-fascist struggle in Spain, Robeson came to our Republic to celebrate with us the eleventh anniver- sary of the founding of our state. He noted with satisfaction our desire to live in peace and friendship with all the peoples of the world. At that time, he was awarded with high honors by our State for his lifelong devotion to the struggle against discrimination, for peace and humanism. (Bögelsack)

This passage artfully interweaves Robeson’s biography with both a timeline of the European left and a history of the GDR. But while Robe- son’s career is clearly meant to establish continuity between the antifascist struggles of the 1930s and the subsequent founding of the socialist East German state, this narrative also positions Robeson as an ideological screen. Missing from this account of German fascism is any mention of the Holocaust, much less an acknowledgment of complicity. Indeed, Robeson’s celebrated presence blots out this inconvenient history altogether and suggests, in keeping with the GDR’s founding mythology, that fascism’s real victims were German communists—those “friends” of Robeson’s “who had left Germany during the fascist regime and lived as emigrants in the United States and England.” Robeson’s story in this way perpetuates what the historian David Bathrick calls “the Marxist- Leninist master narrative about the rise and fall of Nazism,” a narrative that depended upon “a kind of substitute mourning in lieu of a more far-reaching ‘working through’ of the crimes of the Third Reich” (12). The suggestion in Days with Paul Robeson that the singer’s presence would have been ideologically desirable is borne out by what that booklet frames as the highlight of Robeson’s visit—his musical performance outside of the Humboldt University. For this occasion, the culmination of what was to be his most extended stay in the GDR, Robeson chose to sing “John Brown’s Body” and “Ol’ Man River,” the former a Civil War hymn and the latter a Broadway spiritual that Robeson had trans- formed into a signature protest piece over the years by famously rework- ing its racist lyrics. Both songs are about bodies and motion, Wtting for Robeson’s much-anticipated arrival in East Germany. But “John Brown’s Body” provides a particularly apt Wgure for the vexed ideological work that Robeson’s presence, even in his physical absence, was made to perform. The song famously commemorates American abolitionist John Brown, who was executed as a traitor after leading an unsuccessful raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859.

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John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave; His soul’s marching on!

Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! his soul’s marching on!

The stars of the heaven they are looking kindly down. His soul’s marching on!

They will hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree! As they march along!

Now, three rousing cheers for the Union; As we are marching on! (quoted in NoW, 126)

Buried in obscurity in the Adirondacks, John’s Brown’s body was res- urrected by this popular tune, which caught Wre during the Civil War. Union soldiers, its melody on their lips, celebrated the power of the body as it disappeared, “a-mouldering in the grave,” to produce political resolve—“three rousing cheers for the Union” (Nudelman, 639– 41). Robeson’s performance of “John Brown’s Body” in the GDR could not but have been freighted with the history of the song’s earlier performance. And sung from a balcony in East Berlin to an audience of party ofWcials and public citizens who had for years eagerly anticipated his visit, “John Brown’s Body” dramatizes the instrumental conditions at the root of Robeson’s East German celebrity. Though he was not yet dead, Robeson’s body had itself become a locus of political community, providing continuity of message, purpose, and history in the East German state. When performed alongside “Ol Man River,” however, a spiritual that in Robeson’s rendition pointed to the erasure of black suffering in the United States, “John Brown’s Body” did more than deliver up, at long last, the body as ideological lynchpin. Robeson’s performance of these two songs in tandem also highlighted how one history of presence can be used to overshadow and obscure another.

Many Happy Returns, Paul Robeson

Robeson’s performance in front of Humboldt University in 1960 would be remembered among the highlights of the singer’s time in the Ger- man Democratic Republic. In the years to follow, events organized by the Robeson Committee—honoring the singer’s round birthdays and

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underscoring the lasting relevance of his career—would frequently in- voke the brief concert that had been so greatly anticipated and which had been so long coming. Philosophy professor Frank Loeser, for example, opened a 1973 roundtable entitled “What Is America To Me?” by reminding audience members of Robeson’s “unforgettable” performance some thirteen years earlier and promising that “we will see and hear him once again” (Loeser 1973). Loeser was referring to a Wlm clip to be screened later that day, but his choice of phrase echoes with the same melancholia that colors much of the committee’s otherwise dryly bureaucratic internal communications during this period. Might Robe- son come to visit again? That same year, plans for a celebration in honor of the singer’s seventy-Wfth birthday would likewise suggest inten- tions that went beyond commemoration from afar. The theme pro- posed for this event was “Many Happy Returns, Paul Robeson,” with the colloquial phrase printed in English on the event programs. While a common birthday salutation in British English, the phrase “many happy returns” may also betray the committee’s wishful thinking. Over the years, however, and certainly by the time of Robeson’s Wnal visit to the GDR for medical convalescence in 1963, it would become increasingly clear that the ailing singer’s days of international travel were numbered. Indeed, the press conference announcing the founding of the Paul Robeson Archive in 1965 seems to have been a mournful affair. Speaking for the Robeson Committee, Loeser stressed that the singer’s legacy was in danger of being lost for posterity. Not only was Robeson in ill health, but his reputation and standing in the United States had never recovered from his blacklisting during the previous decade. With these circumstances in mind, Loeser declared, Robeson himself had given the committee permission to begin tracking down the “entirety of his work” (Loeser 1965). A few years later, however, press releases and ofWcial publications would ascribe Robe- son a far more active role in the archive’s history. The catalog printed for a 1968 exhibition in honor of the singer’s seventieth birthday (Paul Robeson), for example, claims that “Paul Robeson honored the socialist German Democratic Republic with the request to build an archive” that would reXect their shared beliefs in “antifascist struggle” and opposition to “racism and revanchism” (Vorwort). As in the promo- tional booklet Days with Paul Robeson, in this narrative of the archive’s founding Robeson is integrated into the GDR’s founding mythology;

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 11:32:31 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Missing Paul Robeson in East Berlin 23 the singer’s longed-for presence provides historical and ideological cover. And as such, positioned as a stand-in for Robeson himself, the Paul Robeson Archive seems the epitome of archival discipline. Indeed, in a photograph of the 1968 exhibition that I have not been able to reproduce here, we may well glimpse what the historian Mary Fulbrook has called “the induction of a Marxist-Leninist world-view [that] began in kindergarten, and could not be escaped, in the guise of compulsory weekend schools, evening courses, and comparable activities, even in adult life” (131). Making their way through an exhibition documenting Robeson’s long career, from his breakout role in the Lon- don production of Emperor Jones in 1928 to his long-awaited visit to the GDR in 1960, the men and women in this photograph seem less than enthusiastic. Their faces betray little immediate interest in Robeson, and stiff body language likewise suggests that these “fans” are present as much to be seen (dutifully fulWlling their obligations as citizens of the socialist East German state) as to learn about Robeson. And yet this scene may stage more than the emptiness of the disciplinary archive. The face of a woman standing to the left of the frame and directly meeting the camera’s gaze, for example, registers a canny distance from the ideological impulse so clearly driving the exhibition. Her hands grasp a copy of Robeson’s Amerikanische Ballade, an LP that appeared in 1967 on the East German Eterna Label and that in its selection of materials reXects the same principles of polyglot montage that Robe- son adopted on stage. The record intermixes spirituals with Russian and Hungarian folksongs and concludes with Robeson’s militant rec- lamation of “Ol’ Man River.” Clutched in what seems to be wariness about if not deWance of the exhibition’s efforts to deWne a normative body politic, Robeson’s record is an interruptive presence here. Its open and paratactic arrangement of songs from different folk traditions calls into being a mode of collaboration and co-presence that is opposed to the spectacle of discipline staged here. And in this regard, Robeson’s record may provide a means of rereading the emptiness in the GDR’s Paul Robeson Archive itself. For just as Robeson’s theories of the “universal body of folk music” presume that the spiritual’s evidentiary value becomes manifest only in relation to other songs of struggle and suffering, the materials housed at the Academy of the Arts may exceed the limitations of the archival project only once the work of listening for the “common undertone” is allowed to begin.

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Todd Carmody is a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University.

Notes

1. The Academy of the Arts also reached out to Robeson’s friends and col- leagues. Victor Grossman, who was director of the archive from 1965 to 1968, told American historian Herbert Aptheker, “What we want is—everything possible! Tapes, records, Wlms, letters, documents, clippings, article[s] and books or maga- zines, posters, programs, reminiscences, photos and works of art—anything related to the Robesons” (Grossman 1965). These and similar appeals to Robeson’s personal acquaintances, however, seem to have yielded relatively little. The vast major- ity of the archive’s holdings comprises not reminiscences or correspondence but journalistic and academic accounts of Robeson’s career. Acquisition continued in this manner well into the 1970s and was little affected by competing efforts to catalog Robeson’s life and work. When Paul Robeson Jr., for example, founded an archive in New York after his father’s death in 1973, the East German Academy of the Arts was promptly in touch. Provisional arrangements were made straight away for photocopies of everything that entered the American collection—materials subsequently deposited at Howard University’s Moorland Spingarn Research Center—to be sent to East Berlin. While there is little indication that these plans were ever set in motion, they illustrate the peculiar nature of the archival venture undertaken by the Academy of the Arts. In East Berlin, comprehensiveness trumped all other considerations. 2. Presumably drafted after Paul Robeson’s 1960 visit to East Berlin with his wife, Elsanda Robeson, this document attributes the initial idea for the Robeson Archive to university professor and party ofWcial Albert Norden. “At a farewell party for Paul and Eslanda Robeson, comrade Professor Norden shared his thoughts about the extraordinary importance of Paul Robeson’s work and struggle. He emphasized in particular the power of the example Robeson set for East German youth and the necessity of educating them in his spirit. ‘We must,’ he said, ‘explain his work and struggle to our young people and preserve his memory for the coming generation.’ Comrade Professor Norden’s thoughts gave rise to the idea of forming a committee to create a Paul Robeson Archive, with the goal of collecting and evaluating the entire documentary record of his achievements, so that these priceless materials do not go lost and can be made useful for future generations” (Konzeption). Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own. 3. More recently, the sociologist Jon Cruz has argued that the “discovery” of the spiritual brought about not only a new way of thinking about African Ameri- can culture and its relation to the history of slavery but also the “modern spirit of cultural interpretation” itself. 4. The form popularized on the concert stage was “based on the spirituals” (870) but would be more properly categorized as “neospirituals,” a designation that for Hurston signaled how these later performances “ironed out” (870) the dissonance

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and “jagged harmony” (870) and regularized what were never truly songs but rather “unceasing variations around a theme” (869). 5. “Diese Lieder sind nicht eigentlich ‘Kompositionen,’ sondern vielmehr naiv-ekstatische Äußerungen eines kindlich-ursprünglichen Gemüts, und als solche vielleicht die einzige Musik, die im wissenschaftlichen Sinne als amerikanische Volkslieder angesprochen werden kann. In stets neuen biblischen Beispielen suchen diese Lieder Trost von den Prüfungen des Alltags und neuen Glauben an die gött- liche Gerechtigkeit und Liebe. So wohnen in diesen Gesängen Trauer und Heiter- keit dicht nebeneinander, und deutlich spricht stets aus ihnen die Hoffnung und Erlösung von allem Irdischen, der Glaube an den Tag der Freiheit—einer Freiheit für alle Menschen auf Erden.” 6. “Paul Robeson, der große Negersänger aus Amerika, wird von seinen vie- len Freunden in Europa und Asien sehnlich erwartet; aber die Washingtoner Regie- rung, diese mächtige Stimme der Wahrheit und des Protestes fürchtend, verweigert dem Künstler seit Jahr und Tag das Ausreisevisum. Eines allerdings kann man in Washington nicht verhindern: dass Robesons Stimme auf anderen Wege zu uns dringt. Durch das Radio, oder auch durch die Schallplatte. . . . Die Freunde der modernen Langspielplatte haben nun Gelegenheit, ein ganzes Robeson-Konzert auf einer 25-cm-Platte zu besitzen.” 7. “When I met Paul Robeson in 1960, I felt I had known him for years, that I had seen him some nine years earlier. . . . In reality, though, things were different” (Willmann, 371–72).

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