Hanns Eisler

Hanns Eisler (6 July 1898 – 6 September 1962) was a German-Austrian composer noted for his Marxist-influenced musical works, long-term collaboration with playwright Bertolt Brecht, and authorship of the East German national anthem Auferstanden aus Ruinen.

Born in Leipzig to a Jewish philosopher father, Eisler grew up in Vienna and served as a soldier in World War I before studying privately with Arnold Schoenberg from 1919 to 1923, absorbing twelve-tone techniques while rejecting pure modernism in favor of functional music for political ends. In the 1920s and early 1930s, he composed agitprop songs, workers' choruses like the Einheitsfrontlied, and operas such as Die Maßnahme (1930), aligning with communist publications including Die Rote Fahne after applying for Communist Party membership in 1926, though he later claimed to have withdrawn.

Hanns Eisler was born Johannes Eisler on July 6, 1898, in Leipzig, Saxony, to Rudolf Eisler, an Austrian-Jewish philosopher and academic, and Marie Ida Fischer, the daughter of a butcher. He was the youngest of three children in a family of Jewish descent, with an older sister Elfriede (born 1895) and an older brother Gerhart (born 1897), the latter of whom later became a prominent communist activist.