Fleeing the Nazis and thriving in Cairo

For decades, Brigitte Schiffer’s inspiring story was hardly known. But this changed when the German music professor Matthias Pasdzierny unearthed her correspondence with leading western composers while he was working on his thesis about how German composers exiled by the Nazi regime later returned to their homeland. 

In 2017, Pasdzierny published a book in German, containing Schiffer's letters, titled “Es ist gut, dass man überall Freunde hat”. Four years later, he issued another book in Arabic entitled "بريجيته شيفر.. رسائل من القاهرة 1935-1963" (Brigitte Schiffer's Letters from Cairo 1935-1963) focusing on Schiffer's life in Egypt after she had escaped there.

What prompted you to publish Schiffer's letters? 

We found out about her life via her correspondence with famous western composers and professors. These included John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Iannis Xenakis, and many others in the archive of Berlin’s Academy of the Arts. In Cairo, she made her career and became the director of the Higher Music Education Institution for women in 1940. While editing these letters, I also found her string quartet. She later won a composition competition with the piece in 1944 in Cairo, her adopted home. I also discovered that she was the first woman to give a speech, informing the audience on a new kind of Egyptian music at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music in 1950, the most important music festival in Germany at this time. 

Schiffer studied music composition at Berlin’s School of Music in the 1930s, which later became the University of the Arts, where I currently teach. During my research, I tracked down her godson Rolf Hickmann who’s based in London and who gave me a lot of material, including her private collections, scores, and photos.

How did she manage to go from being a persecuted migrant to the head of Egypt's highest music institution within just a few years? 

Schiffer was born in Berlin to a German-Jewish family in 1909. After her father's death, her mother married Curt Oelsner, a Swiss trader in the textile industry. In 1923, they permanently moved to Alexandria, where Schiffer finished her education. 

There she learned a little Arabic, and, importantly, was immersed in the country’s cosmopolitan atmosphere. She returned to Berlin to study musicology and composition in 1930 and two years later attended the 1932 Arab Music congress organised by the Egyptian King Fuad I. There, she met a lot of famous composers, musicologists, and musicians from the Arab countries and also from Europe. Schiffer’s Ph.D. focused on the music in Siwa Oasis in Western Egypt, where she spent two years before writing it up in Berlin in 1934. A year later she moved to Egypt to escape the Nazi regime, introducing contemporary European influences, such as Arnold Schönberg. She taught at the Higher Music Education Institution for women and went on to head it in 1940. 

Schiffer moved to Egypt with her first husband, Hans Hickman, who was active against Nazism and also taught music in Egypt. How did they meet? 

They studied together in Berlin and fell in love. They married in Cyprus in 1938. Together they travelled to the Siwa Oasis, where Hickmann developed a strange theory, viewing Siwa as a loophole or keyhole to Ancient Egypt, a place where you can listen to the music of the Pharaohs. 

During his research into ancient Egyptian Music, Hickmann catalogued the musical instruments in the National Museum in Cairo. 

After the couple separated, Schiffer moved in with Oswald Burchard who had also fled the Nazis, sailing on a private family yacht from Hamburg to Alexandria in 1933. He became an antique dealer and was a well-known figure in Cairo in the 1940s. The South African Nobel prize winner Nadine Gordimer (1923 –2014), even wrote a novel about him. 

Why did Egypt attract Jewish musicians and composers who were persecuted by the Nazis? 

In the 1930s a lot of Europeans had been coming to Egypt. It was cosmopolitan and had lots of colonial structures. When the artists arrived, they encountered structures that resembled those of European cities. Cairo had vibrant quarters where many Jewish and non-Jewish migrants from Germany, Italy, France and the UK lived. 

For a number of years, Schiffer and Burchard ran a cultural salon from a cottage on the banks of the Nile. They kept a guestbook full of photos, drawings, and other entries from their events, parties, and concerts. The designer of the Arabic translation, Katharina Marszewski, used this book as a source for the Arabic book of Schiffer’s letters.

How did foreign musicians influence Egyptian musical education? 

Schiffer’s letters to her German colleagues show how she tried to improve the education system and to build it up in her role as head of the Higher Institute of Education for Women in Egypt, which later became the Department of Music Education at Helwan University. 

During my visits to Cairo, I visited the institute in Zamalek and Schiffer is portraited on the wall of the entrance, the first of a series of photos of former directors. People voiced their appreciation for her work: she was often remembered with great respect and gratitude. 

Meanwhile, her research about Siwa made a lasting impression. Her recordings from the early 1930s remain a precious resource about Egyptian musical heritage. 

After Schiffer left for Egypt, she continued to correspond with her former professor Heinz Tiessen in Berlin. What did you pick up from their letters? 

In the beginning, their letters have to be seen in the light of a master-disciple relationship but over the years a close friendship emerged. Schiffer visited Berlin after 1945 and sought out his updates on the German music scene as well as his advice for building up her institution. 

But their friendship was delicate. Tiessen stayed in Germany and was a professor during the Nazi era while she had to leave because she was Jewish. They couldn’t write to each other for years during the war. In their subsequent letters, they only broach delicate topics of the Nazis and Jewish between the lines. 

Schiffer sought to publish her musical scores in Germany while she was in Egypt. Did she succeed? 

I think she hoped that her string quartet could be published, but it did not happen. Much later, in 2023, we published her string quartet for the first time. 

Schiffer won the compensation case against the German government for damages to professional career in 1960. How did this affect her? 

She described her response to the so-called “Wiedergutmachung” in a letter: “It’s a really weird feeling to see your own life in terms of money.” In her case, finishing the PhD in 1935 paid off, because the West German recompensation system valued university degrees very highly and paid accordingly. 

Heinz Tiessen wrote a reference letter for the case saying that Schiffer was one of his most talented students. He also used their relationship after 1945 in the context of his de-nazification process, using it to suggest he had protected Jewish students during the Nazi time. But at the end of the day, the money that Schiffer got from the Federal Republic of Germany enabled her to start a new life in London after she left Egypt. 

Why did she opt for London instead of Berlin? 

Most of the people who fled to Egypt left soon after the war ended in 1945. Her salon guest book showed a lot of farewell parties for the people who went back to Europe or moved to the US. The buzzing cosmopolitan atmosphere largely vanished. When Gamal Abdel-Nassar, the Egyptian leader (1952-1970) took power, there was an upswell of Arab nationalism. 

This made her life as a German Jewish woman increasingly difficult. In addition, the new Cairo Conservatory, which was built at the end of the 1950s and where Schiffer had been involved at the start, drifted into a more nationalistic and increasingly narrow way of thinking. In this context, teaching music was less interesting for Schiffer. 

When she decided to leave Cairo, around 1960, she had three options: Berlin, London, or Zurich. Her partner, the antique dealer, had to travel a lot, which would have been hard in Berlin during the Cold War era. Plus, there would have been the emotional implication of returning to her former home. Zurich was highly international but wasn’t interesting in terms of new music. So, they moved to London where she became a journalist, chronicling the country’s lively new music scene.