For the past year or so, I have been working on a book that centres around the career of the German rocket engineer Wernher von Braun. He was, in his time, among the most celebrated of scientists, and one of the most controversial.
As the designer of the Saturn V launch rocket, and as a long-term advocate for the idea of rocket-propelled space travel, he was arguably the central figure of the Apollo moon landings.
He was also a former Nazi, a high-ranking SS officer who designed and built the V2 rockets on which Adolf Hitler had pinned his hopes for turning the second World War around in his favour.
He was smuggled into the US after the war, along with many top Nazi scientists, by an American government who saw a Cold War arms race on the horizon.
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When I tell people that I am writing about Von Braun, perhaps the most common reaction is to ask whether I have heard the song about him by the US satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer.
Von Braun has been if not exactly forgotten then semi-successfully airbrushed out of the popular memory of the moon landings. He is now, somewhat perversely, almost as famous for being the satirical subject of Lehrer’s song as he is for being an architect of the US space programme.
The song, which Lehrer first performed on the television show That Was The Week That Was in 1965, is a brilliantly witty evisceration of Von Braun, whose reputation had by then been expertly rehabilitated by the US government with the enthusiastic assistance of a fawning media.
(Before the space programme got going, Von Braun was already a familiar face on television and in magazines, presenting a starry-eyed vision of a spacefaring American future.)
Lehrer’s virtuoso performance of the song Wernher von Braun is on YouTube. I highly recommend watching it, as I have countless times over the past couple of years, and several more since learning of Lehrer’s death, at age 97, last weekend.
Everything about the song from his twinklingly melodious piano accompaniment, cleverly structured around Haydn’s melody for the German national anthem, to his air of mordant sophistication is a delight, but its effervescent irony belies a dark and morally serious message.
“Don’t say that he’s hypocritical/Say, rather, that he’s apolitical,” Lehrer croons, before shifting to a jokey German accent: “Vunce ze rockets are up, who cares vere zey come down?/Zat’s not my department, says Wernher von Braun.”
The beauty of many of Lehrer’s songs is their almost impossibly graceful balance of darkness, cleverness and a kind of literate silliness.
Listen, for instance, to the sheer comic relish with which he delivers, in the manner of a Revival-era hymn, his bleak prognosis for human survival in another Cold War-era satirical classic, We Will all Go together when We Go.
Or his jaunty, old Broadway style ode to recreational avian assassination, Poisoning Pigeons in the Park: (“When they see us coming/the birdies all try an’ hide/But they still go for peanuts/When coated with cyanide.”)
Probably Lehrer’s most enduringly popular number is The Elements Song, a joyful, ingenious recital of the table of chemical elements, set to the propulsive melody of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Major-General’s Song from The Pirates of Penzance.
Although it lacks the mordant wickedness of his best work, it’s arguably a key to understanding his lineage, and his influence, as a comic songwriter.
When Daniel Radcliffe performed an a cappella version on The Graham Norton Show – prefacing it by introducing Lehrer, correctly, as “the cleverest and funniest man of the 20th century” – it led to his being cast as ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic in the parody biopic Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.
Although his influence can be charted from Yankovic to Randy Newman and The Simpsons, from Flight of the Conchords to Bo Burnham, the cultural figure with whom I most associate Lehrer has always been the US novelist Thomas Pynchon.
Von Braun has his role here, too, in that both artists had the former SS Sturmbannführer’s number, at a time when their countrymen still viewed him as a hero with a merely regrettable past.
Pynchon’s sprawling masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow is set towards the end of the war, and the V2 rocket is at its centre: one of its numerous plot strands concerns a sexually prolific American soldier whose erections predict the exact locations of the rocket’s targets.
Pynchon’s fiction is filled with characters breaking out into song and dance numbers, many of whose comic lyrics might well have come from Lehrer’s subversive pen.
Although he was somewhat less uncompromising about it than the famously reclusive Pynchon, Lehrer also retreated, in his way, from public life.
By the mid-1960s he was a regular fixture on US television and was touring internationally, playing to packed concert halls in Australia and New Zealand. But he never particularly relished playing live and despite his affable stage presence was borderline indifferent to the admiration of his fans.
In 1972 he in effect abandoned his musical career, which had in any case only ever been a sideline, a spectacularly successful one though it was.
Lehrer was, by trade, a mathematician; early in his career he had worked as a researcher with the Atomic Energy Commission at Los Alamos and he went on to teach at MIT and the University of California, Santa Cruz.
He performed his music only very rarely from the 1970s on. The Vietnam War, he said, had made it much harder to be funny about serious things. “Political satire,” as he memorably put it, “became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Prize.”
Despite his withdrawal from show business, Lehrer was always happy for his music to be used by other artists. Perhaps inevitably, his song The Old Dope Peddler – a queasily saccharine ode to the street narcotics retail business – proved a seductive source for rap producers.
When representatives for the US rapper 2 Chainz contacted Lehrer to request sample clearance, Lehrer was delighted. “As sole copyright owner of The Old Dope Peddler,” the then-85-year-old songwriter and retired academic wrote, “I grant you motherf***ers permission to do this. Please give my regards to Mr Chainz, or may I call him 2?”
In 2020, Lehrer – who had never married and had no children – made the unusual decision to relinquish the copyright on his own songs altogether, releasing them officially into the public domain. It was the last, and perhaps most lasting, act of subversion by a unique and ingenious artist.
