VOICES FROM THE PITCH-DARK NIGHT

It had been a frustrating dinner for a rookie foreign correspondent. I had invited an impeccably connected ex-government insider to one of Bonn's best restaurants, hoping he would tell all about Germany's strategic intentions.

The dinner was splendid, the wine flowed freely, but the information remained dammed up. We left the hilltop inn and settled into his new BMW for the ride back to town. The engine started and suddenly the car filled with sorrowful song, an almost overwhelming harmony, six men crooning in a long-lost style, but with an immediacy that shocked me.

At song's end, I asked what we were listening to, and my dinner guest lit up: "The Comedian Harmonists," he said, tears glistening on his cheeks.

For more than an hour we talked about this sextet of German musicians -- three Jewish, three not -- who were beloved national celebrities from the late 1920s until 1935, when half of the Harmonists were forced to emigrate. In that hour, I learned more than I had in our previous dozen meetings. In that hour, I made a friend and received a gift.

The gift of the Comedian Harmonists has been a private one for decades. Bootleg tapes got passed from hand to hand. Whispers told of old men living in bitter retirement in California, Berlin and New York. Fans marveled at the singers' ability to imitate a virtual orchestra of instruments. The occasional academic or documentarian searched archives for old clippings and vinyl discs that might bring the legend to life. In the 1970s, German filmmaker Eberhard Fechner made a mammoth, 3 1/4-hour documentary -- on view during this week's Washington Jewish Film Festival -- that told the group's tale in extreme but riveting detail.

Now, suddenly, the Comedian Harmonists are back. The last survivor of the sextet, 97-year-old Roman Cycowski, died in November in Palm Springs, just months before two Broadway-bound musicals and a feature film will tell the Harmonists' story to Americans.

The musical "Harmony" is pop anthemist Barry Manilow's debut as a Broadway composer. It won weak reviews in California and is being rejiggered for the big time. "Band in Berlin," the other musical, focuses on Cycowski's life and features the Hudson Shad sextet, a New York singing group that has made a career of re-creating the Harmonists' sound.

The movie, "The Harmonists," has been racking up prizes all over Europe and will make its Washington debut at the Jewish Film Festival Saturday and Sunday before being released nationwide by Miramax early next year. "The Harmonists" is German director Joseph Vilsmaier's bittersweet tribute to the Germany that could have been, the country that might have evolved from the magic of Berlin in the '20s.

"The story of the Comedian Harmonists is the story of Germany, with its Jewish history," says Vilsmaier, whose previous films include "Stalingrad" and "Brother of Sleep." "In the 1920s, Berlin was the world capital of art and music and culture, not Paris. And it was because of the incredible number of Jewish artists there."

For many Germans born after the war, the music of the Harmonists evokes a time that never was, but might have been. "It's about betrayal, loss of innocence," Vilsmaier says. "In our lives, everything is inevitably about German history."

The three productions tell the story of six young German men -- five singers and a piano player -- who took their country, and much of the Western world, by storm in the early 1930s. They sang Cole Porter and German cabaret tunes, Duke Ellington and Dvorak, comic opera and German folk songs. They could achieve a crystalline a cappella purity one moment, then mimic an entire orchestra with their elastic voices.

The Comedian Harmonists, modeled after a popular American group called the Revellers, soared beyond the traditional forms of the barbershop singers. The founder, Harry Frommermann, could imitate trumpets and clarinets and strings so faithfully that audiences often gasped as the curtain was raised to reveal five singers where an orchestra had been heard.

By 1930, the Harmonists -- the name was bestowed upon them by a German producer who thought an English moniker would add a certain cachet -- were making three records a week, selling out the Berlin Philharmonic's hall for weeks on end, packing them in across Australia, America and Europe.

The mournful, sweet sounds of Frommermann and the other two Jewish singers -- two of them sons of cantors -- blended with the lush bass of the German who became the group's unofficial leader, Robert Biberti, and the delicate tenor of the Bulgarian Ari Leschnikoff.

But when the Nazis won power in 1933, the Harmonists' distinguishing characteristic became not their artistry but their heredity. At first, the criticism was aimed at the group's repertoire: too much non-German music, party cultural officials said. But the show went on; the group even performed on occasion for the SS.

Yet as the Harmonists' repertoire shrank, word that three of the group were Jews began to spread. On a concert tour in the United States, the Harmonists were a huge hit -- they sold out Radio City Music Hall for 13 weeks running -- and the Jewish members were tempted to remake their lives in the New World. But at Biberti's urging that Nazism was a fleeting phenomenon, they returned home.

In 1935, the Reich Chamber of Music declared the Harmonists a "non-Aryan" group, and placed their music on the "decadent" list. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels accused the Harmonists of "Jewish-Marxist bawling."

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The Harmonists decided that the three Jews had to emigrate. The other three remained in Germany. The six decided that each trio could continue using the Harmonists name; each would recruit new members and seek to sing on. The parting was, on the surface, amicable. In fact, the bitterness would never fade.

"Neither group -- neither the emigres nor us -- ever achieved the same standards again," Biberti told documentary maker Fechner. "Because the personal ties were no longer there."

The group that stayed in Berlin hired three Aryans and even though the Nazis required them to change their name to the Meistersextett, they had a full schedule. But the sound was different -- harsher, crisper, clearly suffering from the loss of the original members. The Meistersextett sang on stages festooned with swastikas. They were banned from using music by Jewish composers, librettists or publishers. "Those three conditions virtually excluded all the major international hits," Biberti said.

After a couple of years of success in the reflected glory of the original Harmonists, the German group disintegrated. Pianist Erwin Bootz quit to head a cabaret group, and Leschnikoff and Biberti fell out, squabbling over money and power. The Gestapo eventually began a campaign of harassment against the singers.

In 1941, the group was permanently banned. A letter from the Reich music authority called the singers' work "unsuitable for boosting the combat morale of the German people." All copies of the Harmonists' films were destroyed. Their records were smashed.

Vilsmaier's movie ends abruptly with the breakup of the original Harmonists, but their continuing story is the highlight of Fechner's documentary.

After the war, Bootz ended up directing musicals. Biberti tried but failed to re-create the group and then retired as a bitter but proud curator of the Harmonists' past. And Leschnikoff returned to his native Bulgaria, where he lived out his years in abject poverty.

The three Jewish members, meanwhile, were buffeted by war and genocide even in their distant exile. In 1935, they emigrated, first to Vienna, where they found three new partners and enjoyed popular world tours. Their sound was more playful and charming than the original Harmonists, but it lacked the gravity and precision that had established the first group as a serious musical endeavor.

After Hitler occupied Austria in 1938, the Harmonists left for Australia and then the United States, playing to sold-out halls.

But in 1940, after Poles murdered Cycowski's father, the singer suddenly quit. "I have to fulfill my promise to my father," he said. Although he had not set foot in a temple for 20 years, he became a cantor at a Los Angeles synagogue.

The Harmonists in exile broke up. Tenor Erich Collin, despite a letter of recommendation from Albert Einstein, drifted in and out of unemployment, finally landing at an aircraft factory. Frommermann was soon drafted into the Army; he would eventually serve as a translator at the Nuremberg trials, then work at the U.S.-run radio station in occupied Berlin, RIAS.

It was there that Biberti applied for work. As luck would have it, the American officer who handled Biberti's application was his former friend, Frommermann. Application rejected.

Frommermann and Collin repeatedly tried to start new versions of the Harmonists; neither succeeded. Their groups were, as Cycowski said, "a copy of a copy." Frommermann ended up miserable in New York, a factory worker, a taxi driver, a salesman. Only in the last 15 years of his life did he find happiness, returning to Germany, where he sang and composed once more, even recording a performance of "Flight of the Bumblebee" in which he played every instrument in the orchestra -- all with his voice.

The appeal of the Harmonists' story is exactly their tragic ending, Vilsmaier says. "There are great Hollywood films that only Hollywood can make," he says. "Then there are all these films made from psychological surveys -- based only on what the public wants, a good ending, two hours, have a drink and forget it. But I want films that maybe five hours or one or two days later I think about. I want a bad ending, because the world is not good and the world will not become good. That is history, the history of Germany, of the world. Comedy, and then tragedy, and yes, a little nostalgia for a time I didn't know."

The Harmonists have an almost religious authority over their audience in Germany, even today. Although no film of their performances survives, their voices on disc are a visceral reminder of a moment before the abyss, an experience of elevation that involved Germans and Jews together, singing, making money, making happiness in a place that was about to go stark raving mad. To hear a Sound Bite from this group, call Post-Haste at 202-334-9000 and press 8171. CAPTION: Then, there were six: The Comedian Harmonists, from a documentary playing at the Washington Jewish Film Festival. ec CAPTION: The Comedian Harmonists got top billing in prewar Berlin. ec

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