Max Brod

I have just been listening to the repeat of Great Lives on Radio 4. The subject was Ludwig Koch, the first person to record birdsong, as he was never reluctant to inform people. That first recording was of a captive shama bird on a wax cylinder via an Edison phonograph given him on his 8th birthday. Having grown up with Koch's sound recordings on the radio, on Children's Hour and The Naturalist especially (the call of the curlew was particularly evocative) I was aware that he was the expert on sound recording of birdsong. However, today's programme brought home how much his privileged childhood had enabled him to pioneer his art but also make a first career of it in Germany until the mid-1930s when, at a natural history conference in Switzerland, he was advised by a contact close to the Nazi party not to return home "because the air in Switzerland is better". Taking the hint, and making use of a British contact, he made his way to London to start a second career from scratch, having to abandon his library of sounds in Germany.

Koch (=cook) was not an obviously Jewish name. Probably the majority of purchasers of his pioneering sound-books did not know of his Jewish, and rich, family background but it is unlikely that the exalted circles in which he mixed, before racial cleansing became official government policy, were unaware. He had early on had a parallel career as a classically-trained singer and was accepted at Bayreuth, the spiritual home of the anti-Semitic Richard Wagner - and actual home of his even more anti-Semitic daughter-in-law, Winfried.  Goering had been an admirer of Koch and even paid for his ticket to attend the conference in Switzerland which provided his means of salvation. Contradictions abound.

Those contradictions reminded me of the case of Max Brod, surely another fit subject for Great Lives. If he is known in the English-speaking world, it is for his friendship with Franz Kafka and his promotion of his fellow Jewish citizen of Prague. However, he was a poet (five published books) - among many other things - and it was a poem, or rather, a reference to a poem, which first made me aware of his name. A-level language students were encouraged (and today's equivalents still are, one trusts) to read as much material surrounding the set books and the culture generally. One such was a survey of German literature (probably this one) by Jethro Bithell, who knew Brod. The poem, (from memory) Paradies Fische auf dem Tisch, was an allusive one and capable of different interpretations, which, Brod told Bithell, was something he was content with. 

Part of the German-orientated literary circle of Prague, Brod was also a translator and lyricist, which comes eventually to the point. He became a close friend of Leoš Janáček, an ultra-nationalist who was capable of taking on board the anti-Semitic Gogol's novel Taras Bulba as the subject of a tone-poem. Their friendship and working relationship must say much about the man.