Anneliese Landau's life in music - Lily E Hirsch

This book introduces readers to a woman who truly persisted. Anneliese Landau pushed past bias to earn a PhD in musicology in 1930. She then lectured on early German radio, breaking new ground in a developing medium. After the Nazis forced the firing of all Jews in broadcasting in early 1933, Landau worked for a time in the Berlin Jewish Culture League (Jdischer Kulturbund), a closed cultural organization created by and for Jews in negotiation with Hitler's regime. But, in 1939, she would emigrate alone, the fate of her family members tied separately to the Kindertransport and to the Terezn concentration camp.


Landau eventually settled in Los Angeles, assuming duties as music director of the Jewish Centers Association in 1944. In this role, she knew and worked with many significant historical figures, among them the composer Arnold Schoenberg, conductor Bruno Walter, and the renowned rabbi and philosopher Leo Baeck.


Anneliese Landau's Life in Music offers fresh perspective on the Nazi period in Germany as well as on music in southern California, impacted as it was by the many notable migrs from German-speaking lands who settled in the area. But the book, the first to study Landau's life in full, is also a unique story of survival: an account of one woman's confrontation with other people's expectations of her, as a woman and a Jew.


Lily E. Hirsch is the author of A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany: Musical Politics and the Berlin Jewish Culture League.