An Aesthetic Hybridity: Walter Kaufmann’s Refuge in India during the Nazi Period

This chapter focuses upon Walter Kaufmann, the composer of the All India Radio signature tune composed in 1936, whose biography illustrates some of the transcultural and identity issues faced by other refugees or exiles. Kaufmann was born in Carlsbad, Austro-Hungary in 1907 and set sail for Bombay in 1934. He brought out his wife Gerty Kafka, the niece of Franz Kafka, to India, where they spent the Second World War years until 1946. Kaufmann ended up as a professor or ethnomusicology at Indiana University in the United States. More than many other German-speaking exile in India, Kaufmann managed to negotiate the cultural differences between his European background and Indian culture by harmonizing his life through music and interweaving East and West. While his story is unique, the strategies he used to survive, the networks he manipulated, and the cultural syntheses he pursued exemplify familiar migrant patterns. This chapter shows how Kaufmann survived in an Indian context as an assimilated Jew, while his longing for Western culture never ceased. His ability to transcend Orientalism and produce an “aesthetic hybridity” was remarkable. It is plausible that this hybridity is connected today to what I have called “the Kaufmann revival” in a globalized era.