1. The Last Will
Herbert Eimert died on December 22, 1972 in Düsseldorf. He left a will that, among other things, stipulated that all biographical documents be handed over to me after his death. I knew nothing of the existence of such a will; my work sessions with him had not even begun. It was Dr. Marion Rothärmel who told me about the testamentary disposition concerning me after Eimert's death on the day of his funeral, but at first I did not attach any importance to it. It was only after Mrs. Eimert's death (October 16, 1974) that the will was opened (October 31, 1974). A short time later, I received the official notification.
2. The estate
The biographical estate handed over to me consists of 407 letters and postcards written between 1944 and 1972, as well as 22 pictures, mostly in glossy print format, to which I hold the copyright. For this reason, I have not included them. Furthermore, the estate contains no printed music or music manuscripts, no sketches, neither of compositions nor of essays, no scientific works, unpublished works or even attempts at preparatory work, nor any reviews or reports by or about Eimert. This estate has certainly been pre-screened. The discovery that Eimert, for example, wrote only a single biographically important letter in 1958 and received three is implausible. Even if one assumes that Eimert wrote and received most of the letters after 1944 (personal documents prior to that date fell victim to the bombing campaign) and these were no longer in his possession, the number of 407 letters as correspondence, including replies, over a period of just over 25 years is very low and corresponds to an unlikely output of only 16 letters per year. I assume that all sensitive and personal information was removed. Since Eimert used the back pages of broadcasting schedules or notes as carbon copies, officials such as Mr. Plum or Ms. Gail are included in the posthumous honors.
3. Annotated edition
The matter was embarrassing to me for a number of reasons. Composing a biographical essay on Eimert, which might be 20 or 30 pages long and is relatively easy to accomplish, and a biographically supported annotated edition of letters, which is certainly expected and cannot be limited to a catalog- style publication, are two separate things. In the middle of my Wagner and Strawinsky studies in the 1970s, I saw no room for this work for decades to come. Besides, I had no great desire to relive the often unpleasant daily confrontations in the Rhineland of the 1950s and 1960s and to conduct my own research into sources; because with the material that I had been given, the work could not be done. I therefore hesitated for over 20 years before publishing my 'Kleine Monographie über Herbert Eimert' (A Short Monograph on Herbert Eimert) in 1998 on behalf of the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig. It emerged from a lecture to the plenary assembly of the Academy's Philological-Historical Class and grew to 50 pages for the print run due to the necessary annotations. Today it is outdated because some of its conclusions were included verbatim in the present publication. The same applies in part to my accompanying text to the spoken-word recording 'Herbert Eimert', which I included in my Wergo series.
I wrote the new work with interest and love, but not with joy; the subject matter, when one recalls the individual unpleasant episodes, is too burdensome for that. There is something troubling about people like Eimert, who can deny themselves for the sake of the cause, when one steps into their shoes and retraces their hopes and defeats. I was obliged, to reverse a word of Gottfried Keller, to describe a procession in which I had participated for many years. I had to combine the required objectivity for the sake of historical truth with the now secondary and far less important need of presenting my own experiences from my perspective, even if this resulted in some disadvantages for me. The fact that he trusted me, of all people, to write his biography still fills me with trepidation today.
4. Encounters with Eimert
I came to Cologne to study in the summer of 1950 and received my doctorate in the summer of 1954 with a thesis on Strawinsky's compositional technique. The topic of my dissertation angered the majority of leading musicologists and opened the editorial offices of newspapers and radio stations to me. In the winter of 1955, to my own surprise, the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, the successor to the former Kölnische Zeitung, hired me specifically because of my dissertation. On the recommendation of library councilor Prof. Dr. Willi Kahl, I got a job in Cologne as a newspaper critic, focussing on new music, chamber music and church music, and so I sat in a row next to Eimert from that time on. “In a row” is to be understood metaphorically; because if the seats were not occupied, Eimert chose the front rows, I the back. Eimert didn't need to catch one of the last trains to Düsseldorf. He paid no further attention to me, quite the opposite! Dr. Seidler, then head of the chamber music department at Cologne Radio, where I worked as a program designer, had tried to set up his own news magazine and had thus become a thorn in Eimert's side. He nipped t
