Biography
Hanns Eisler (also credited as Hans Eisler) was a German-Austrian composer. Born in Leipzig in 1898, he studied in Vienna with Arnold Schoenberg and later settled in Berlin, where he began a long collaboration with Bertolt Brecht.
He wrote scores for numerous films, including Hangmen Also Die! (1943), None But the Lonely Heart (1944), The Woman on the Beach (1947) and Night and Fog (1956). Owing to his Jewish background and communist convictions, he lived in exile during the 1930s and 1940s, working in Europe and the United States before returning to East Germany in 1948. There he composed the national anthem of the German Democratic Republic. He died in East Berlin in 1962.
