CHAPTER THREE

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Jews in the Nazi Cultural Establishment

GERMAN ANTI-SEMITISM AFTER World War I and well into the 1920s resulted from a wide belief among non-Jewish citizens that through progressive emancipation since the nineteenth century, the Jews had acquired too many liberties, privileges that made them stand out in German society, usurp certain fields of activity, and exploit the Gentiles. A core conviction among a new breed of German anti-Semites in the 1920s was that their objection to Jews, apart from economics, ought to be based on race, not religion. After the dual revolutions, the great French uprising and the Industrial Revolution, of the past century and a half, “race rather than religion now provided the rationale for anti-Semitism,” writes Christopher R. Browning.1 This brand of Jew hatred was “unusually violent in its imagery, and it tended towards violence.” Its protagonists claimed that Jews were over-represented in professions such as finance, law, and medicine, but also in culture and the arts.²

For transparent reasons, extreme right-wing citizens such as followers of the empire-beholden Deutschnationale Volkspartei (German National People’s Party – DNVP), with the incipient Nazi Party eventually overtaking it, after 1918 published evidence attempting to prove the Jews’ predominance particularly in the cultural arena. The Nazis continued to do this well beyond January 1933, as they wanted to generate an anti-Jewish legacy, supported by documentation. In pursuing this goal, they not only exaggerated but falsified facts.

Nazi agitators held that the over-representation of Jews in the Weimar Republic had occurred in all branches of cultural activity, even radio, for which field the electrical engineer and functionary Hans Bredow and his associate Hans Flesch were singled out as influential string-pullers. However, Bredow was not at all Jewish, and Flesch, the brother-in-law of Paul Hindemith, only had one Jewish parent. In modern music, to mention a more significant example, the composer Franz Schreker was suspected of being Jewish (even though this was, again, only half true), a man who had dared to take the place of Wagner as the creator of “pompous and musically wholly impotent stage pieces.” The visual arts, too, were said to have produced a new generation of Jewish painters, “in the shadow of the senior Max Liebermann,” pushing genuine German brushwork into the background. The fact was that next to Liebermann there existed only two Jewish painters of note, Jankel Adler and Ludwig Meidner, who could not come close to that master’s reputation. In film, the Nazis claimed, Jews had directed every other German movie by 1932 and 70 percent of all film scripts were authored by Jews. And in theater, they charged, Jewish directors had been so ubiquitous that non-Jewish actors auditioning for roles had been rejected on account of “looking too German.” German newspapers, too, had been totally “Jewified.” In Prussia, which comprised two-thirds of all German territory, affairs of music, theater, and the press were seen as being regulated from above, in government, by Jews.3

According to scholarly consensus today, and as could have been ascertained at the end of the republic, Jews were strongly represented in the creative arts. But it is equally true that, quantitatively, their alleged over-representation cannot be and could not then be computed. Undeniably, Jewish artists and writers put a stamp on the nation’s culture in terms of quality and originality, because of their extraordinary energy and inventiveness. This was all the more true in cases where Modernist art was involved, because as outsiders from conventional society, many Jews simply took more chances, were open to experimentation, abstract thought and structures, and new impulses. Because the results of their creative labor were often many times more visible than the productions of non-Jews, the public found it easy to smear them with undue charges of monopoly and exclusionary malpractice. Moreover, Jews in Germany tended to live in the large cities, where most of the new culture of the republic originated. Two American historians have recently described these circumstances succinctly, carefully avoiding any hyperbole. In Alan Steinweis’s judgment, Jews in Germany numbered “among the most prominent exponents of artistic modernism in the early twentieth century.” And, as Saul Friedländer has put it, “modernism as such flourished in a culture in which the Jews played a central role.”4

The names of Jewish artists who helped determine the Modernist culture of the republic today are legion. Alfred Döblin, Jakob Wassermann, and Franz Werfel dominated in literature, Arnold Schoenberg and Kurt Weill in music composition, and Erich Mendelsohn, who collaborated with Walter Gropius of the Bauhaus, in architecture. One giant among musicians was Otto Klemperer, who conducted “an unusually wide range of contemporary music,” especially during his tenure at the Berlin Kroll Opera (1927–31). Another eminent conductor was Bruno Walter, who rejected serialism in favor of more traditional fare, but was also among the first champions of Gustav Mahler and “actively sought new music.”

In the visual arts, the Jews stood out not so much as creators, like Liebermann, but as patrons and agents, such as Paul Cassirer and Alfred Flechtheim. In film, Erich Pommer was an influential producer, and Peter Lorre a pioneering actor. Pommer was responsible for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Metropolis (1927), and Lorre starred in M (1931), a movie critical of current society that also featured the non-Jew Gustaf Gründgens; like Metropolis it was directed by Fritz Lang, whose father was Jewish. Other illustrious figures with a Jewish background from film and stage were Alexander Granach, Elisabeth Bergner, Lucie Mannheim, and Fritz Kortner (actually Kohn). A most acerbic and socially critical film analyst at the Frankfurter Zeitung was Siegfried Kracauer, who headed the paper’s feuilleton department and frequently invited the essayist Walter Benjamin to contribute his insights on modern culture and politics. Other perceptive Jewish writers such as Kurt Tucholsky worked for Die Weltbühne, which supplied brilliant commentary on the state of the arts, society, and politics from a left-wing perspective.⁵

On the stage, Leopold Jessner, born in Königsberg in 1878, was a very instrumental Jewish director and producer who influenced both Expressionist theater and cinema. His first film was Hintertreppe (Backstairs) of 1921, inspired by Dr. Caligari, in which a crippled postman (Fritz Kortner) murders the lover of the maid he adores; the lover was played by Wilhelm Dieterle, later of Hollywood fame, and the maid by Henny Porten, whom Hitler came to admire and favor despite her half-Jewish husband. The movie, like its 1920 predecessor, was a showpiece of Expressionism at that time, featuring its typical props, sounds, and scenes: a ringing alarm clock, a wielded axe, a deformed murderer played frighteningly by Kortner, and a spectacular suicidal jump from the roof of a building. With it, Jessner influenced the typically Expressionist style of chamber stage play also used in movie-making. Next to Jessner and Kortner, other non-“Aryans” had large parts in the making of this film: Carl Mayer as scriptwriter, Hanns Lippmann as co-producer (along with Porten), Hans Landsberger as composer of the score, Paul Leni (actually Levi) as art director, and, not least, Wilhelm von Kaufmann – Porten’s husband – as head of production.6

Later, as director of the Prussian State Theater in Berlin, Jessner would produce a set of stairs that made him famous, the “Jessnertreppe,” from which an actor playing Caesar would spectacularly fall to his death.⁷ These stairs served once more as proof of the ingenuity of Weimar artists of Jewish descent, as they worked with Expressionist shapes and content even when that art form was already on the wane. Jessner’s beliefs being staunchly socialist, he was in league with Brecht and Erwin Piscator that theater should instil its audiences with the desire for progressive social change, if not actually revolution. As such, he was a firm believer in the Weimar Republic whose official protection he received, and he performed its favored dramatists: Ibsen, Gorky, and Wedekind. But the combination of socialism and Jewishness that Jessner embodied made him more enemies the longer that republic lasted. Being hounded in speeches and print by conservative and, increasingly, National Socialist enemies, in 1930 he felt pressured to resign from his tenure at the theater that had hired him in 1919, continuing only with difficulty as a freelance director until his untimely emigration, via England and Palestine, to the United States, where he worked in films under assumed names until his death in December 1945.⁸

Extreme right-wing action against German Jews in the culture of the Weimar Republic occurred within the ideological framework that had been set up by the DNVP after 1918, abetted, since 1919, by Adolf Hitler’s Nazis. It was in September of that year that Hitler documented his personal anti-Semitism in a letter, while he was still working for an anti-Semitic military; there are no signs that, previous to the Great War, Hitler had been an enemy of the Jews. What made him change his views is not known, but it is certain that in the fall of 1919 he had already called for nothing less than “the removal of the Jews.”9 In April 1920, Hitler met up with the Munich voice teacher Adolf Vogl and his wife Else, who excoriated “the cultural Bolshevism” of the republic, in particular the music of the Jewish Schoenberg, and hence welcomed the anti-Semitic stance of the ascendant Nazi Party directed against “Hebrew Munich.” (Vogl was later chosen as the vocal coach for Hitler’s half-niece Geli Raubal.)¹⁰ As Hitler developed his own brand of vituperative anti-Semitism, he stated in the pages of Mein Kampf during the mid-1920s that the world war would have taken a different course had “twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew people-destroyers” been subjected to “poison gas.”¹¹ Concomitantly, he named specifically the theater and the press as cultural arenas in which Jews were allegedly dominant, where they lacked “culture-generating power.”¹² Campaigning, as he did in late summer 1930 for the upcoming Reichstag elections, he identified finance and again the press as areas of undue Jewish representation, undoubtedly with the influential Jewish Mosse and Ullstein dailies in mind.¹³

As if on cue, actual attacks from the extreme right against Jewish personalities and cultural institutions – frequently by a combination of DNVP nationalists and Hitler Nazis – increased after Hitler’s release from Landsberg jail, during 1925. In spring of that year a pamphlet appeared in Hamburg, calling for the liberation of the German stage from “the odor of pestilence,” by boycotting theaters as long as Jews were active there.¹⁴ A year later the Munich publisher Hugo Bruckmann planned to issue a calendar, contrasting Jews with Germans, “the size of the Jews according to their number, their property, their influence on the stock market, the press and theater.”¹⁵ Bruckmann and his wife Elsa were directly inspired by Hitler. By that time Jews were craftily clichéd in völkisch writings, for instance in Will Vesper’s play Wer? Wen? (Who? Whom?) of 1927, which depicted them as dishonest pawnbrokers and usurers.16 At the Nuremberg Party rally between August 19 and 21, 1927, among speeches rich in invective against Jews, Gregor Strasser’s stood out, as he railed against “Jews and Jew-servants” contaminating the ultimate will to resistance in “the press, literature and art.”¹⁷ The fiercely anti-Semitic Julius Streicher, Hitler’s Gauleiter in Nuremberg, also attacked the Jews in his standard virulent fashion. He had begun to make lists of Jews in Germany, for instance all of those in Prussia, as well as their institutions, including cultural ones, for further targeting.¹⁸

The discrimination against Jews in cultural activities was amplified further after Alfred Rosenberg had activated his Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur nationwide in 1928. At the end of that year, DNVP deputies in the Prussian Landtag in Berlin, allied with militant Nazis, applied pressure to effect the final dismissal from his Berlin theater of the director Jessner, because, so their reasoning went, “in most other German stages the German spirit has been supplanted by the Jewish spirit.”¹⁹ Under Nazi regional governments of Thuringia, as of 1930, Weimar’s new theater director Hans Severus Ziegler censored all Jewish content.²⁰ Also in 1930, the Nazi sympathizer Paul Fechter, a prominent literary critic, repeated the earlier canard of Jews having displaced German content in art, literature, and theater, and warned of certain reprisals. Similar notes were struck in the last two years of the republic.²¹ During this time, Hellmuth Langenbucher, who would become a literary censor in Rosenberg’s Party offices later, ominously told the grand old conservative man of letters Paul Ernst about his “fight against Jewry and Jewish influence in our intellectual life,” adding that the Jews had not ceased to be “a great danger for our race.” One significant symptom of this was alleged to be that “a Jew could not create German poetry, he could merely write poetry in the German language.” Clearly, the “Jewish Question” had to be solved. But how to get this done? “Neither killing the Jews nor throwing them out of the country is realistically feasible,” mused Langenbucher, “apart from the fact that the first-mentioned action can, naturally, not be on the wish list of any decent person.”²²

ANTI-JEWISH MEASURES

After the Holocaust, the West German actor Axel von Ambesser remarked with apparent compassion that when he had been at the town stage of Augsburg in 1933, five or six of his colleagues were swept out of the theater “by the first wave of anti-Semitism.” One Jewish singer had started wearing a necklace with a small cross to document her loyalty to Gentiles, to the amusement of all her colleagues.²³ His friend, the actress Lil Dagover, sounded more hypocritical when she said that it had been understandable when Jewish colleagues were leaving behind their jobs at German stages, for how could one expect them to continue performing in plays or films in Germany!24 Back in 1936, on a visit to Switzerland, the writer Hanns Johst had sounded more cynical and closer to the heart of the matter when he suggested that German Gentile actors should have rejoiced after the removal of heavy Jewish competition. He had been visiting a cabaret in Zurich and those Jews had played wonderfully. Many of them had been chased out of Germany by the new “Aryan” requirements.²⁵

Saul Friedländer has called to attention that “the cultural domain was the first from which Jews were massively expelled.”²⁶ This confirms our previously expressed contention that the Nazi leaders thought culture was vital in molding their nation, as content for propaganda. At the beginning, the mechanisms by which German Jews from the world of culture were harassed and ultimately dismissed from their positions, were much the same as those used against Jews in other livelihoods, indeed the same as used against left-wingers, liberals, and Modernists. Apart from spontaneous actions usually by the SA, which came under some control only after the Röhm Putsch in summer 1934, new legislation was put in place, to be expanded into a stretch of time, say after 1935, when non-Jews had already been effectively purged. As in the case of left-minded Gentiles, action against the Jews to all intents and purposes began with the Law for the Reconstitution of the Civil Service of April 7, 1933, even though it was foreshadowed by sudden hostile activities, locally or regionally, as early as February and March.

Paragraph 3 of the law called for the dismissal of civil servants of Jewish descent, with one Jewish grandparent enough to give cause. One month’s notice was deemed sufficient, with virtually no financial compensation. Although in 1933 it was stated that exemptions were to be made for World War I veterans, that provision was capriciously handled and soon fell by the wayside. Paragraph 3 was immediately applied to servants of the state, but it was not long after that private contracts were also canceled.²⁷ Even in 1933 the law was complemented by decrees specifically tailored to the cultural domain, such as that for the creation of the Reich Culture Chamber in September 1933, and the Schriftleitergesetz for journalists in October.²⁸ Under such combined pressures and other means of persecution, 37,000 of the altogether 525,000 Jews in Germany had left the country by the end of 1933, more than in any of the following years.²⁹ How many worked in the cultural sectors can only be surmised.

A cultural enterprise that was affected early was the film industry. By July 1933, it had gotten rid of its Jewish employees, Ufa being concerned as the largest company.30 In Bayreuth, too, Winifred Wagner had to let Jewish artists go, with the exception of just a few, who could not be replaced immediately; they left in 1934.³¹ Wilhelm Furtwängler tried to save Jewish members of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, chiefly the famous violin concertmaster Szymon Goldberg, but by 1935 that body of musicians was totally “Aryanized.”³² Eminent members of the Prussian Academy of Arts, such as the (half-Jewish) composer Franz Schreker and the architect Erich Mendelsohn, in so far as they had not yet resigned voluntarily, were kicked out starting in the spring of 1933.³³ A similar fate befell Jewish staff members of museums and their patronage societies, galleries, and professional organizations, such as that for German architects.³⁴ Often, considerable amounts of money were in play, as in the case of Berlin’s Ullstein publishing house. The assets of the owners, the Ullstein family, were expropriated, with nominal amounts being paid to them; hundreds of Jewish workers were let go.³⁵

The Nuremberg Race Laws of September 15, 1935, exacerbated the foregoing pseudo-legislation and its consequences for Germans with Jewish roots. They enlarged on the definition of who was to be counted as Jewish by re-specifying who was a full, half, or quarter Jew and laying the foundations for further treatment of those people in a civic context. For the time being, Jews with at least three grandparents, counted as full Jews, were to be most disadvantaged in German society, with the half Jews less so and quarter Jews near a fine dividing line. For example, it would now be impossible for a full or half Jew (the latter a Mischling ersten Grades) to hold any kind of employment by “Aryans” in the Reich, whereas quarter Jews usually lost employment in the state or municipal bureaucracy, but often could carry on in privately owned businesses. Sometimes the upper echelons decided who could stay.³⁶ This is why, in the cultural area, the professor of German literature Richard Alewyn, with one Jewish grandparent, was dismissed from Heidelberg University in August 1933, and why the composer Carl Orff, with the same status, hid details of his ancestry.³⁷ While Orff was self-employed, he was always on the lookout for a possible position with a conservatory or theater.³⁸ Stage director Jürgen Fehling, however, also a quarter Jew, was kept on at the Prussian State Theater because it came under the auspices of Göring, who next to Hitler wrote the race rules.

The Nuremberg decrees also added a sexual dimension by prohibiting marriage and intimate relations between Jews and “Aryans.”39 This would make it easy for National Socialists to put pressure on artists to divorce their Jewish wives, as did actors Gustav Fröhlich and Heinz Rühmann, notwithstanding the quality of their marriages before the separation.⁴⁰ It also enabled National Socialists to go after Jewish artists who were living in common law with Jews of the other sex, an additional piece of chicanery imposed on the already careworn non-“Aryan” community. For this reason Germany’s most popular actor Hans Albers saw his fiancée, the actress Hansi Burg, move to Britain, and the pre-eminent soprano Frida Leider saw her violinist husband Rudolf Deman move to Switzerland. Both united with their partners only after 1945.⁴¹ Jewish “race defilers” (Rassenschänder) who had slept with Gentile partners could easily be sentenced in a court of law and sent to a concentration camp, men more so than women.⁴²

Hence by the fall of 1935, about 200,000 Germans with mixed parentage were still living in the Reich, as opposed to some 450,000 full Jews, with three or four Jewish grandparents and confessing the Mosaic faith.⁴³ The race laws were received by non-Jewish Germans with equanimity because they seemed to put a definitive end to the impulsive storm-trooper injustices of the SA that had characterized the early phase of the Nazi regime. Even some Jews tended to take that line, although they could hardly be comfortable with how things were in German society, including the creative sector. However, it is interesting to note that only 21,000 Jews left Germany in 1935, 25,000 in 1936, and 23,000 in 1937; the end of 1935 and beginning of 1936 marked the months in which Jews were actually returning from abroad to Germany.⁴⁴

In the wake of the Nuremberg laws, German Jews who adjusted themselves and perhaps were now enjoying the institutionalized cultural offerings of the specially formed Jewish Culture League, took many of the following anti-Semitic measures in their stride. Some went so far as to avail themselves of the services of plastic surgeons, such as those offered by the Jewish firm of Adelheim in Berlin-Charlottenburg (where many assimilated, affluent, Jews lived); it claimed to fix noses, ears, face, and breast irregularities. “Sagging lower eyelids will be removed, without a trace, in 4 days,” ran the advertisement.⁴⁵ But in the cultural sphere, the pace of active discrimination against Jews accelerated. By 1937, Goebbels was intent on cleansing cultural establishments of all full Jews, if any were left, as well as half Jews and quarter Jews, the latter of whom were termed “mixlings of the second degree” (Mischlinge zweiten Grades). He was also keen to put pressure on Jews who were married to “Aryans,” who hitherto had still been privileged.46

By the spring of 1938 things were stirred up again, because after the Anschluss of Austria an additional 190,000 Jews had come under Nazi rule.⁴⁷ These included many Eastern Jews, all of the Orthodox faith and many with the attending visible accouterments such as caftans, long beards, forelocks, and side-locks. Instantly, Austrian Jews were treated much more harshly as they came into contact with the new rulers (as the 2015 film Woman in Gold has shown explicitly), with some having to clean the sidewalks of Vienna with toothbrushes or their bare hands, supervised by SA or callous Hitler Youths, and others being carted off to German concentration camps without due cause.⁴⁸ At the end of June, Goebbels showed himself determined to continue the legalistic path of accretive measures against the Jews, while he was aware that, for instance in Berlin, storm-trooper-like excesses had again been triggered by Party agencies, against governmental guidelines.⁴⁹

By November 1938, Goebbels had conspired with Hitler to stage a coup against the German Jews that was to look like a spontaneous, popular event. It was around the time when Leni Riefenstahl was in Hollywood to make good weather for herself and the Nazis – and was snubbed, marking the beginning of her decline.⁵⁰ What happened on November 9 and 10 decreased Germany’s standing abroad yet further, and became known as Kristallnacht. The SA was ordered to stage scenes of destruction involving the smashing of Jewish shops and burning of synagogues all over the country, but chiefly in Berlin and other large cities. Otto Jung, heir to a vineyard in Rüdesheim and multitalented on the piano as a connoisseur of both classical music and jazz, was passing through Cologne by train when he viewed much of the damage in the morning of November 10. “What brutality,” he thought, what sort of people would do this, was anything like that within the law? After the pogrom, tens of thousands of male Jews were taken, if only for a few weeks or months, to concentration camps. These activities were fully supported in the coordinated German press, including the one-time internationally respected, bourgeois papers, such as the Frankfurter Zeitung and Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, and falsely represented as a consequence of outrage by the Volksgemeinschaft against the Jews.⁵¹

Apart from the economic and psychological deprivation suffered by Jews during this terrifying protracted, multiple pogrom, the most momentous change in their lives was in the cultural arena, because from that time on they were prohibited from visiting cultural venues or places of entertainment that could have provided solace. Included in these were theaters, cinemas, concert and ballet performances, public lectures, cabarets, museums, fairs, conference halls, sports and bathing facilities. Also, Jewish children were now excluded from attendance in German classrooms, while drivers’ licenses were confiscated from Jews on December 3, and their automobiles seized without compensation – just to make certain they remained immobile.52

Kristallnacht marked a watershed in the lives of German Jews because by now they had to realize that the Nazi regime was following systematic steps to have them marginalized and perhaps eliminated, the latter in the context of a war that few, “Aryans” or Jews, could visualize concretely at that time. Hence many Jews now sought to emigrate. In an ongoing process of oppression until October 23, 1941, when Himmler officially forbade emigration,⁵³ ranging from the prohibition of pets to the banning from public transportation, the decimation of Jewish cultural life exacerbated the pain resulting from economic and social opprobrium. By November 19, 1941, Jews had been excluded from the general welfare system. On December 8, Jewish scholars who had attained special authorization to use university libraries had this privilege canceled. Classes at university for Jews were curtailed, and in the following months all radio receivers had to be surrendered; they would go to the Wehrmacht at the front.⁵⁴ In January 1939, Hitler allowed his intention to destroy the Jews to show more clearly than ever before when he stated publicly: “Today I want to be a prophet again: If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe again succeeds in precipitating the nations into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and with it the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”⁵⁵

THE JEWISH CULTURE LEAGUE

In May 1933, Axel Freiherr von Freytag-Loringhoven, who sat in the Reichstag for the Deutschnationale Volkspartei, which had formed an alliance with the Nazis for government under President Hindenburg in January, said in an interview with a Vienna newspaper that it might be possible to solve the “German Jewish Question.” Without wanting to judge the overall quality of the Jews as a “foreign tribe,” said the baron, he would have to insist that they henceforth be barred from meddling in matters of “our state and our culture.” But as proper compensation, the Jews should be allowed a measure of “cultural autonomy.” Officially designated as an “alien people,” Jews should administer their own cultural affairs, albeit under German government supervision, yet funded by state subsidies. In proportion to their numbers, German Jews might even be allowed to hold public office. Such a situation would protect them before the law (and, as the baron hinted, avoid spontaneous anti-Semitic outbursts such as recent SA actions), and their secured status would guarantee for them, and for Germany, the respect of the entire world. However, there could be no doubt whatsoever that they would permanently have to “distance themselves from German life.”56

Apart from serving as fulsome testimony to the anti-Semitism of the German nationalists short of being Nazis, the scheme of Freytag-Loringhoven, who was a well-known Jew hater, demonstrates the extent to which the new rulers, as a government, were willing to go early in the regime in order to marginalize the Jews. Already in June, Hans Hinkel, a former Angriff manager who had been charged by Göring and Goebbels with the “de-Jewification” of German culture, after talks with representatives of the Jewish community in Berlin, the Reich’s largest, was about to set up a Jüdischer Kulturbund, a Jewish Culture League. It would be staffed by Jewish artists and financed by the Jews themselves – beyond the more generous recommendation by Freytag-Loringhoven of state assistance – and, by producing works of cultural significance, was to benefit Jewish audiences exclusively. Hinkel served in the League’s administration as the representative of Göring and Goebbels, while on the Jewish side Dr. Kurt Singer took charge. He was nothing less than a Renaissance man, a neurologist with expert knowledge in music and an accomplished conductor in his own right: in the final days of the Hohenzollern empire he had founded the well-regarded Berlin Physicians’ Choir, and until recently he had been an Intendant at the Städtische Oper of Berlin, which Goebbels then had usurped for his own purposes under the label of Deutsches Opernhaus. Jewish notables such as Leo Baeck and Martin Buber were called upon to serve on the honorary presidium of the League. Specially coopted members would pay 2 to 3 marks monthly to help with the financing. Some 2,000 artists and auxiliary personnel, including non-German and baptized Jews, were invited to apply for membership as active performers, but in the end no more than 200 were hired. The season opened with Lessing’s 1779 play Nathan der Weise, in a dedicated Berlin theater on October 1, and two weeks later the new Jüdischer-Kulturbund-Orchester gave a concert, under the conductor Michael Taube.57

In the following months, regional culture leagues were established on the Berlin model in the area of Rhine and Ruhr, with a seat in Cologne, and Rhine-Main with a seat in Frankfurt. Smaller institutions were then founded in Hamburg, Munich, Breslau, Kassel, and other locations, so that by March 1935 Nazi administrators organized altogether forty-six associations under a Berlin-led umbrella union, the so-called Reichsverband der jüdischen Kulturbünde (Reich Association of Jewish Culture Leagues), shortened to Jüdischer Kulturbund. Adherence to this overarching union by all the individual Kulturbünde was to be mandatory, while non-Jews were to be barred. Of those leagues, the Berlin local remained the largest; it had 20,000 active and passive members by early 1934, whereas the one in the small Prussian town of Küstrin had merely twenty-four.⁵⁸

Pronouncements by Jewish functionaries at the time gave rise to the belief that Nazis and Jews were equally responsible for the founding of these organizations. It was held that the Jüdischer Kulturbund would give Jews an opportunity to reflect upon their national and cultural origins, on the question of assimilation with non-Jewish Germans or their difference from, or likeness to, eastern European Jewry. There was talk about a great new beginning, which would require, in Dr. Singer’s words, “strength, energy, endurance, and time.”⁵⁹ But these were glib phrases, designed to please or at least placate the Nazi rulers, for Singer’s friends knew very well that the Nazis were the true originators of this scheme, notwithstanding the degree of cooperation by individual Jews, whatever their motivation.

As for the Nazis, the reasons for their actions were transparent. First, potential social unrest among Jews as a result of sudden and severe economic displacement could be contained by providing a new source of income, at least for some of those who were connected to the cultural establishment, and they could then act as models for others. After all, approximately 8,000 Jewish writers, musicians, and artists had been expelled from the German work force already during 1933. This held true even if, ultimately, it was not the “Aryans” but other Jews, passive League members, who were forced to provide for those artists. Significantly, one prerequisite for being hired as a Kulturbund artist in Berlin in 1933 was acute financial need; the honoraria paid to solo artists, though comparatively low, turned out to be barely sufficient for subsistence. At least at first. In Frankfurt, for example, performers received 20 marks per appearance. It was in line with this policy that in April 1938 the Promi decreed that only those Jewish artists could be taken on who were League members and had no other regular income. Even with SS troops standing by, the regime did not wish economic discontent among disadvantaged Jews to erupt into revolt.60

Second, from a propaganda perspective outside Germany, the Kulturbund ranked highly. If Jews could be shown to have some sort of cultural autonomy, the Nazis would be able to claim that generosity, not oppression, was the guiding principle of Jewish policy, no matter how severe foreign charges of anti-Semitism were. This was the official tenor of pronouncements by Goebbels, Hinkel, and their minions.⁶¹

And third, the cultural ghettoization of Jews anticipated their physical ghettoization, and later facilitated tighter policing: creating open, porous ghettoes enabled future transportation to eastern liquidation camps, in this case for Jews from the Bildungsbürgertum.⁶² This complemented the incremental eviction of Jews from the individual culture chambers (RKK) spearheaded by Goebbels and Hinkel since their foundation in the fall of 1933, subsequent to the creation of the Jewish cultural organizations. Significantly, as managing director of the RKK, Hinkel played a key role in both ventures. And it was not by accident that many Jewish artists, upon being ejected from or formally withheld entry into the Reich Culture Chamber, were routinely told to seek possible employment by the Jüdischer Kulturbund.⁶³

Not to be deceived, the harsh judgment of Herbert F. Peyser, an astute music critic at The New York Times, was very much to the point when he wrote about the Kulturbund in December 1933: “Like everything else in the ‘new’ Germany, it exists by the sovereign permission of the Hitler despotism. Its workings are hedged about by hairbreadth rules and drastic conditions the slightest infraction of which would mean instant dissolution. Reports of its activities are ruthlessly barred from all public prints except a few Jewish journals devoted to the special interests of their coreligionists.”⁶⁴

Predictably, as the individual examples of suffering Jews have shown, the authorities meted out capricious and cruel treatment to those German Jews who tried to remain in the mainstream of a national culture they had helped to create and been accustomed to for decades. In an area of cultural endeavor painfully circumscribed by the new rules regarding “Jewish” content, the Jewish Kulturbund planners had to exercise self-censorship to abide by the official guidelines, had to seek Hinkel’s or his underlings’ approval for any schedules, and always risked SS or Gestapo penalties for infractions.65 Whenever something went wrong, the regime was wont to punish the Jews. For instance, when in February 1936 Wilhelm Gustloff, the Nazi representative in Switzerland, was murdered in Davos by the Croatian Jew David Frankfurter, the entire Kulturbund was totally immobilized by way of reprisal, on Goebbels’s orders, for several weeks. Moreover, in November of that year a revue by the Kulturbund artist Leo Raphaeli planned for Hamburg was abruptly canceled for no apparent reason. After Kristallnacht on November 9–10, 1938, all Kulturbund activities were again suspended until Goebbels saw fit to order the Jews back to work in theaters and concert halls, for fear of inciting an international backlash.⁶⁶

That November, not many Jewish artists were able to comply with that ruling, as a great number had been sent to the camps. Furthermore, their audiences had also dwindled. And Kulturbund events never having been a money-making proposition to begin with, their producers found it increasingly difficult to break even as the passive membership, the audiences, diminished year after year. This was due to emigration, pauperization, incarceration, natural death, and sometimes the murder of Germany’s Jews. Periodic reminders, as they went out to musicians, to pay up and stay active as supporting members, had little effect. In any event, the 50,000 Jews organized in culture leagues throughout the Reich by 1936–7 constituted little more than 10 percent of all Jews then still living in the country.⁶⁷

The various pogroms of November 1938 signaled the beginning of the end for the Jüdischer Kulturbund. For Jews to be ordered back to producing drama, films, literature, music, or artworks now was much more difficult than it had been in 1933, even under pressure, but still of their own free will. It taxed the Jews’ morale. The Nazis’ aim of keeping the Jews locally centralized for purposes of control was still paramount; hence, lacking actors and musicians, the reopened leagues were now reduced to showing films or, in the larger cities, the occasional solo recital, poetry reading, or debut by a string quartet. The Gestapo dissolved the Kulturbund nationally on September 11, 1941. When the deportation of German Jews to the European East began in earnest by October 14 of that year, the idea of a Jewish Culture League had become obsolete.68

By the beginning of 1939, when approximately 233,000 Jews were still living in Germany, the Jewish Culture League was active in music, theater, lecturing, film, and publishing.⁶⁹ The Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt was being printed, which after Kristallnacht had replaced all other Jewish newspapers and was tightly controlled by Goebbels. But publishing books was more difficult and virtually stalled, because the ever smaller circle of Jews became poverty-stricken and so they had other things on their minds than contemporary literature. In cinema, German and foreign films could be shown, but they too were firmly censored. Already in late December 1938 the American film drama In Old Chicago by Henry King (1937) had been offered. In February 1939 in Hamburg, the film musical Tarantella (1937) with Jeanette MacDonald was featured, at the cinema in the Jewish community building in the Hartungstrasse. German films were some of those made by the production companies Terra Film, Tobis Film, and Ufa. In Hamburg, from February 28 to June 25, 1939, fourteen films were shown in a total of sixty-nine sittings, for a total of 15,768 patrons. With tickets for sale between 0.60 and 2.00 marks, up to 1,500 marks could be earned per film, which was considered a better than reasonable return. From this point on, to the extent that theater, opera, and even concert music receded in the overall program of the Kulturbund, film and lectures gained in importance.⁷⁰

In the Kulturbund theater of the new Nazi regime, the first play Nathan der Weise of October 1, 1933, had set a mood, for while it breathed the spirit of the Enlightenment and counseled tolerance and friendship, indeed “harmonious unity between Christian, Jew, and Muslim,” this was exactly the aura the Gestapo wished to dispel. In a self-censorial gesture, therefore, the Kulturbund-generated program guide asked the audience to forgo political discussions in or near the theater, lest the wrath of the authorities descend upon the Jews.⁷¹

In fact, the Nazis favored Eastern Jewish stage plays (because they were regarded as the essence of Jewishness) or, second-best, those by assimilated German or Austrian Jews such as Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig. However, as can also be demonstrated in the case of music, German Jewish audiences were little interested in specifically Jewish authors and their microcosmic Jewish themes, with their pronounced predilection for Eastern Jewish shtetl scenarios, notwithstanding a certain revival of specifically Jewish cultural forms in the Weimar Republic.72 Hence the works of Mendele Mocher Sforim (born in Belarus) or Sholem Aleichem (born in Ukraine) did badly, as the audiences, certainly in Berlin, still preferred visiting German public theaters as long as they were able to. However, Shakespeare could be staged as could Molière, as well as the non-Jewish Modernists Klabund and Kaiser; the Hungarian-Jewish Ferenc Molnár was a great favorite. One after the other, Goethe’s plays and works of the Romantic era were forbidden, as Promi and Gestapo intensified their pressure.⁷³

From the beginning but against heavy odds, it was music that was paramount in the Kulturbund’s overall program; in combination, operetta, opera, and concerts commanded the largest number of performances and, especially in the case of opera, used up the bulk of the budget.⁷⁴ Some of the Kulturbund’s musicians were outstanding; in Berlin the conductors Joseph Rosenstock and, after his departure – first to Tokyo, then to New York – Hans Wilhelm (later William) Steinberg, excelled, aided by Kurt Singer’s own choir, and so did Michael Taube’s chamber players. Berlin also had soloists such as the pianist Leonid Kreutzer and the contralto Paula Lindberg, who mostly sang cantatas and oratorios but could also perform in opera.⁷⁵ Neither were Hamburg and Frankfurt lacking in fine talent, the former city being the home of contralto Sabine Kalter and the latter that of pianists and composers Rosy Geiger-Kullmann and Professor Bernhard Sekles, Paul Hindemith’s teacher.⁷⁶ Stuttgart had the eminent pedagogue and choirmaster Karl Adler, and in Mannheim for a few months Sekles’s former student, Kapellmeister Max Sinzheimer, coordinated musical activities for the region. “The ‘business’ here at least keeps me going,” Sinzheimer wrote to Carl Orff in early 1934. “I do planning and directing and fancy myself as some sort of Jewish Generalmusikdirektor.”⁷⁷

Two interrelated difficulties chronically plagued all musical endeavors. One was that the better the performing artists, the greater the likelihood that they would emigrate, as music is not bound by language. Hence the Kulturbund began to lose ranking musicians as early as 1933; none were ever replaced. From Berlin, Kreutzer went to the United States, and the Hungarian-born violinist Ödön Partos returned to Hungary; in 1934, Taube left for Palestine. The singer Beatrice Freudenthal emigrated to America from Hamburg in 1936, and a year later Hamburg’s music critic and composer Robert Müller-Hartmann sought refuge in Britain. By 1938 few professionals were left, one exception being the bass singer and composer Wilhelm Guttmann, who was to die while performing in Berlin in early 1941. Ludwig Misch, a Berlin critic, conductor, and music teacher, in 1936 considered founding a music school in order to educate recruits, but because of the high rate of emigration by musicians, this venture was doomed from the start. Misch himself instructed groups of pupils in what functioned as ghetto “Jewish schools” in the capital, obviously with some positive results, for the last survivor of one class (all the others had perished) thanked him in 1965, recalling that “during that dark period, when we were excluded from concerts and every enjoyment of art was denied us, you introduced us young people to music and awakened in me personally a great love for music, which did not desert me in the war years to come and ever again thereafter.” Misch himself survived during the Third Reich as a forced laborer, because he had an “Aryan” wife.78

In order to alleviate the dual problem of attrition and recruitment shortages, Kulturbund leaders sought to hire Jewish stars from abroad, which would have the added effect of acting as a magnet for some of the more jaded concertgoers. A favorite was the bass Alexander Kipnis of Berlin opera and Bayreuth fame, who had emigrated to the United States in a timely move during 1933 but, cutting short a European tour, was back in the capital in 1934. Thereafter, he appeared annually in various German cities until, three weeks before Kristallnacht, he gave what appears to have been a final recital under the roof of Karl Adler’s Stuttgart Kulturbund.⁷⁹ Sabine Kalter, now a resident of London, performed in Berlin in the spring of 1937 and then in Hamburg that winter, with songs by Mendelssohn, Mahler, and Dvořák, as well as arias by Handel.⁸⁰ The violinist Carl Flesch also traveled from London to his former abode of Berlin, but by the summer of 1936 these journeys had become too difficult. The Gestapo had to authorize each visit, and Flesch’s basic honorarium of 1,200 marks could no longer be paid due to an ever-decreasing German-Jewish audience. With the explanation that “time is money,” this star performer resolved to decline all further invitations to perform in Germany.⁸¹

With the possible exception of Berlin during the early years of Nazi rule, Flesch’s fee would have been an impossible amount to raise for any of the satellite culture leagues. For apart from having to remunerate their own artists, however modestly, they also attempted to subsidize other causes, such as charity for needy Jews, artists, and even out-of-work physicians. In Berlin a separate orchestra was organized for the newly unemployed (such as businessmen who had once learned to play an instrument as a hobby), and a studio was dedicated to younger composers. Several times the leagues suffered an unexpected loss of money, as when performances were indiscriminately canceled by the Gestapo.82

Complicating things further were progressively severe rulings regarding the thematic content of programs the culture leagues sought to adopt. The German censors wanted exclusively Jewish music for exclusively Jewish audiences. But that was difficult to achieve, for, just like the Nazis, the Jews were discovering that “Jewish music” was not an artistic genre in and of itself. Had not Schoenberg himself written to Albert Einstein in 1925 that to his knowledge, at present, “a Jewish music” did not exist? Therefore, derivative definitions were used: libretti written by Jewish authors, a storyline from the Old Testament, or the works of any Jewish composers or those baptized Jewish, among whom Mendelssohn remained dominant. Significantly, the very first concert of the Kulturbund in October 1933 included works by Handel, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky, and from then on combinations of Jewish and non-Jewish content were common. (Some Nazis thought Handel was compromised by his love for England and biblical themes; others, like Alfred Rosenberg, disagreed, claiming that despite his Messiah, Handel had been a heathen.) Of the thirty-nine orchestral pieces and oratorios staged by the Berlin league up to February 1938, nineteen were composed by Jews; similar ratios obtained for Frankfurt and Breslau, and probably for other places.⁸³

Just like their colleagues from the theater, Jewish musicians practiced self-censorship when they excluded the works of Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Carl Maria von Weber, thought to be proprietarily German. In any event, the Promi had already decreed Wagner and Strauss off limits, along with Hitler’s declared favorite Anton Bruckner, from the start. In 1936, after the inception of the Nuremberg Race Laws, the playing of Beethoven by Jews was proscribed. In May 1937, Hinkel berated Jews for performing Beethoven and Mozart, so the latter was ruled unplayable in 1938. Bach and Brahms fell by the wayside during 1937, and Kristallnacht in November 1938 finally spelled doom for Handel and Schumann. Throughout these proscriptions, foreign composers, including Jews, remained on the authorized lists until the end, but in the last few months of the Kulturbund Jews were irrevocably forbidden from performing works by German composers.84

Ironically, Arnold Schoenberg, the composer thought by Nazi experts such as Hans Severus Ziegler to epitomize Jewish culture, was just as unpopular among German-Jewish music audiences as among “Aryans.” Only rarely were works of that icon of modern music performed anywhere – by Erich Itor Kahn early on in Frankfurt, in Berlin in 1934 to celebrate the composer’s sixtieth birthday, in Hamburg in 1935, and again in 1937. These remained isolated events, however, dedicated mostly to Schoenberg’s earlier, conventionally harmonic works, especially Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night, 1899). Ludwig Misch, the most influential Berlin diaspora critic, led the way; he disliked Schoenberg, whose music had shown “only slight resilience in our living times.” Lesser modern composers of the Mosaic faith, such as Karol Rathaus, fared even worse.⁸⁵

Instead, the works of contemporary but, by international standards, hardly memorable Jewish composers, often local celebrities, were featured, including the likes of Max Kowalski and Ludwig Rottenberg, Hindemith’s father-in-law, in Frankfurt, and Jacob Schönberg or Gerhard Goldschlag in Berlin. Apart from the usual Handel with his Old Testament motifs, Yiddish and Hebrew synagogue compositions, some artfully contrived, were presented, to mixed receptions.⁸⁶ Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, not a Jewish work by any stretch of the imagination – despite its libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte – was the Kulturbund’s first opera production, in late 1933. It was followed, in April 1934, by an opera with a genuinely Jewish plot, Verdi’s Nabucco, which was succeeded a couple of weeks before the November 1938 pogrom by Die Pioniere, hailed as the first truly Jewish opera, a Zionist-inspired Eastern-Jewish-Palestinian stage work by Jakob Weinberg. This pianist and composer, who had been born in Ukraine in 1879, had moved to Palestine in 1922; he was fond of contemporary Jewish themes and attempted to use melody and harmony as found in Jewish religious and folk tunes.⁸⁷

As if things were not already complicated enough, even the Jewish and other non-German productions sometimes did not go smoothly. Once Mahler’s song cycle, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, was arbitrarily dis-allowed for Jewish audiences by a new censor in Hinkel’s central office. It turned out that this ill-informed man liked Mahler so much that he thought the composer could not possibly be Jewish, so he put him on the index of forbidden works. No sooner had this mistake been discovered than it was corrected. And there was a particularly sordid incident involving Wilhelm Strecker, the powerful publisher of B. Schott’s Musik in Mainz. After the Berlin Kulturbund had requested permission to mount Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat, Strecker did not wish to go along with this, lest Stravinsky, whose “Aryan” reputation was shaky in some Third Reich circles, suffer at the hands of fanatical Nazis. Strecker informed Stravinsky: “If you permit the Jewish Kulturbund to perform it, your enemies will gleefully term you, as well as your art, ‘Jewish,’ spoiling everything we have managed to nurture.” To avoid the performance – and to avoid telling why – Strecker planned to charge the Jews a higher fee than they were able to afford for the work. Fortunately for the Kulturbund, the publisher later went back on this. Of many that could be cited, this was a particularly stark example of how Gestapo, Promi, and private “Aryan” interests conspired to make the Jews suffer.88

As part of the general downfall of the Jüdischer Kulturbund, the retrenchment of its music divisions was most visible because these had been proportionately the largest and most significant. To be sure, despite the occasional musical highlight, there had always been deficiencies, such as the chronic shortage of wind players and an over-representation of string players.⁸⁹ Hence the orchestras of Hamburg and Munich consisted mainly of string sections, a problem Hamburg attempted to solve by joining forces with its Frankfurt counterpart, which regularly took to the road.⁹⁰

The creeping failure of the culture league’s musical productions was disheartening to sympathetic observers, but not to the cynical manipulators in Goebbels’s and Hinkel’s wake. Frankfurt had to give up its accomplished orchestra at the end of the 1935–6 season, mostly for lack of funds. Throughout the Reich music performances decreased by 26 percent, compared to an overall decline in artistic activities of 20 percent in the period from September 1936 to September 1937.⁹¹ By June 1939 the Berlin Jewish opera had been disbanded, even though a scaled-down opera choir, now renamed “chamber choir,” continued to present Mendelssohn, Monteverdi, and Eastern Jewish and Hebrew chants and hymns. What was left of the Berlin orchestras and singers congregated for the last time, for a Verdi celebration in July 1941. When the end came, with all other activities already canceled, Nazi functionaries redistributed Kulturbund instruments to SA and SS units; pianos went to Nazi welfare organizations and Wehrmacht sanatoriums. Confiscated phonographs and records were recycled, the latter in the form of bakelite for the German record industry, to service the war effort.92

What happened to the Jewish leaders of the Culture League? The first artistic director, Dr. Kurt Singer, eventually left Berlin for Holland where he was caught when the Nazis overran the country. After deportation to Theresienstadt, he died in the camp of an illness. The last important director, Dr. Werner Levie, a Dutch citizen, also went to Holland after the League’s demise, but again was caught by the Nazis, so that eventually he died from internment in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, just after the liberation. At the Kulturbund in Berlin, the main Jewish staffers were arrested and then released, freed to await the fate of other Jews in the capital. Some of the leading artists, so it is reported, who had earned some kind of priority standing with the Nazi authorities, wrote up lists of Jews for the Gestapo, to delay their own deportation.⁹³ Who these individuals were, whom they spied on, and whether they ultimately saved themselves has not been recorded.

ANTI-SEMITISM IN THE NAZI ARTS

As Jews were living in Germany up to and beyond that point in October 1941 where emigration was closed to them, they were at risk from German citizens who were constantly influenced by anti-Semitic messages in the media. Those media – books, movies, journals, newspapers, or radio – were instruments of entertainment and, simultaneously, vehicles of manipulative propaganda, in keeping with Goebbels’s broader objective. Propaganda worked best where it used entertainment, high or low, as a thin disguise.

Music or secondary media with music content could serve such purposes. Platitudes about Jews and music were spread, to be ingested by the general population that did not have the means or desire to check message content for the truth. Hence it was said that German film and operetta had created situations of musical chaos in which “the unchained ghetto collided with Valhalla” and “department store instincts led a general attack against German culture.”94 When this was written, in 1934, the Hitler Youth produced a songbook with anti-Jewish chants, such as: “Germany, awake from your evil dreams/Deny foreign Jews a place in your empire.”⁹⁵ And there was an SA song originating among Austrian illegal Nazis that told of “Judah’s tumbling throne.”⁹⁶ Certain anti-Semitic clichés had to be upheld, best by repetition; thus it was proclaimed that every Jewish musician in Germany had the right to rent a concert hall privately, in which to produce “atonal music.”⁹⁷ In the long-established Zeitschrift für Musik, Gustav Mahler was maligned as the antithesis of German music, and Bernhard Sekles was disparaged in connection with “Negro blood” – a crude reference to the innovative jazz seminar he had founded at Frankfurt’s Hoch’sche Konservatorium in 1928.⁹⁸ Another renowned journal, Die Musik, concurred, adding that the Germans, the most musical, nay most cultivated people on earth, did not need to be taught in an area that was dominated by “Jews and foreigners,” by “Negroes and Orientals.”⁹⁹ As on other cultural platforms, anti-Jewish polemics reached a zenith in the music world around the time of Kristallnacht in 1938 when Goebbels repeated his invective that Jewry and German music were mutually exclusive opposites and the fight against Jews, which Wagner once evoked, had to be redoubled. Others polemicized anew against Mahler, Schoenberg, and their consorts; and about the Salzburg Festival, which had recently been conquered for the Reich, it was remarked that here a totally Jewish phenomenon had to be “Aryanized” from the ground up.¹⁰⁰

As far as music was concerned, anti-Semitic venom appears to have been spread equally, regardless of whether it was through low or high culture: the Jews of jazz, a Paul Abraham or Leo Fall of the operetta, and the Nazis’ classical-music signature Jews Mahler and Schoenberg were evenly maligned. In the visual arts, as has been noted, an anti-Jewish campaign found it difficult to target the few German Jews who were painters or sculptors. Although an identification of “Expressionism” with “Jews” was attempted during the Expressionism debate up to 1937, it failed to take hold. In literature, there seems to have been a parting of the ways in that sophisticated authors, writing for the educated elite, totally avoided the subject of Jewish issues, whereas mass-market writers such as Hans Zöberlein and Edwin Erich Dwinger aligned themselves with the raucous anti-Semitism (Radau-Antisemitismus) of the early storm troopers and allowed it to linger beyond the SA’s demise in 1934, by offering rough-cut negative clichés of Jews. A number of books for adolescents by Julius Streicher’s companion Ernst Hiemer, a former primary-school teacher, was in the same groove, as he urged them, on the verge of adult Party service, to consider Jews like animal pests such as grasshoppers damaging a German farmer’s crops. Hiemer’s message was unabashedly eliminationist in 1940 when he stated about drones threatening virtuous bees that after the application of pest control “they were vanquished. They were killed or chased off.”101 Because Goebbels disagreed with the crudity if not the spirit of such recommendations, as late as May 1943 he was hoping for “a series of anti-Semitic novels” from reputable authors, even if they were not as obviously National Socialist as run-of-the-mill Party writers.¹⁰²

One might indeed ask why authors such as Ina Seidel, Ernst Wiechert, Hans Carossa, Werner Bergengruen, or Wilhelm Schäfer did not openly engage with the “Jewish Question,” which had been on everyone’s mind at least since 1918. That they were not anti-Semites is hardly a credible explanation, for if they had not been outright Nazis even before 1933, they had been German-völkisch, deutschnational. Until 1933 and its subsequent dissolution, the DNVP had been known for its strong affinity with anti-Semitism, only in a more armchair fashion, with the racial argument toned down. German-völkisch nationals were without exception anti-democratic; conversely, the Jews were seen as the main force behind democracy.¹⁰³ One explanation could be that for those authors, ignoring the “Jewish Problem” entirely was tantamount to a resolution of the issue at a higher, abstract, plane: since Jews, especially assimilated Jews, were not treated positively as being a full and natural part of the German people, their absence in narrative made them stand out, as it were. One might therefore say that Jews were being slowly and elegantly obliterated by a purposeful passing over; those writers did not soil their hands. In this context it is interesting to note that Ernst Wiechert was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp on the order of Goebbels in 1938. In his case it is often believed that this was because he resisted the regime, presumably because of its anti-Semitic policies, among other noble reasons. Yet such was not the case. He was incarcerated for a couple of months as an educational measure, so Goebbels had decided, not because of what he had published, but because he had protested against the captivity in Sachsenhausen of Martin Niemöller. This former U-boat commander and anti-Semitic leader of the Confessing Christians had been an avid Nazi before 1933 and had since come to resent Hitler, not because he was, perhaps, anti-Christian, but because Hitler had threatened the institutional independence of the Confessing Church. The deeply religious Wiechert (most DNVP members had been practicing Protestant Christians) entirely sympathized with Niemöller.104 Again, there is nothing to be found about Jews in the republican agrarian still-life he painted in his novel Das einfache Leben; but a careful reading about the circumstances of Captain von Orla’s wife suggests that she, a cocaine addict, had fallen in with the perverted city crowd, the perversion having been accomplished – this was standard fare among conservatives – by the Jews.¹⁰⁵

In the cruder literature, German Jews were portrayed according to preconceived stereotypes. Prefacing those was the theme of Jews who had benefited from World War I by staying behind the lines and engaging in political and economic corruption: that Jews had shunned combat at the Western and Eastern Fronts was a deep-seated prejudice.¹⁰⁶ In due course, many popular books described the Jews as the furtive rulers of Germany after the war – active in politics of the state, the economy, the banks, the universities, art, and culture. Jews were pictured as continuing to profit illicitly from the trade with left-over army provisions and materiel, by driving up interest rates and causing and benefiting from the huge inflation of 1919–23.¹⁰⁷ Complementarily, the Jews of the First Austrian Republic were also defamed.¹⁰⁸

Much of this anti-Semitic propaganda of course had the effect of preaching to the converted. Some of the writers here, like Dwinger and Herbert Volck, were veteran Freikorps fighters, and tens of thousands in their target group, notably in the SA, SS, and as inactive former imperial army soldiers, were one-time comrades. As most Freikorps fighters had come into contact with Eastern Jews during combat in Upper Silesia, Poland, or Latvia, describing signifiers such as caftans and side-locks derogatorily in great detail guaranteed a mass of readers on the extreme and mostly under-educated Nazi flank.¹⁰⁹ The next-favorite ploy was to portrait Jews as mountebank brokers of agrarian products and cattle in the countryside – the German expression “Viehjude,” cattle Jew, was ingrained – as was the image of the lowly Jew as the door-to-door small-time wheeler-dealer, perhaps peddling used buttons and suspenders.¹¹⁰ Jews were further pictured as saboteurs of the German civic order on call from Moscow, and every historic clash between the SA and Communists was characterized as having been instigated by Eastern Jews who were Soviet agents.111 In line with such interpretations were gory accounts of Russian secret-service Jews, often as oppressors of the Swabian or Mennonite Soviet minorities in the south-central Soviet Union.¹¹²

Luridly, many authors placed emphasis on physical features customarily ascribed to Jews by hateful bigotry. A half-Jewish aristocrat was depicted by Anne Marie Koeppen in Michael Gnade as born with “black, kinky hair”; he had “thick pursed lips” and an “oriental nose.” After sexual intercourse with “Aryan” women, his sperm would consequently produce Jews with the very same features, ad infinitum.¹¹³ (Koeppen’s book conformed to the lessons of the highly successful post-war novel, Die Sünde wider das Blut (The Sin against the Blood   ) by the early Nazi Gauleiter Artur Dinter, which enthused hordes of racists and right-wing eugenicists.)¹¹⁴ According to Tüdel Weller’s Rabauken, the Berlin Wannsee beach was populated by creatures with “spongy faces” and “hair like great apes.” All Jews had “hooked noses.”¹¹⁵ In Otto Paust’s Nation in Not (Nation in Peril, 1936) the evil Jew was Herr Silberfisch, “a heavy, thick-set man with curly hair,” speaking “foreign German” and attempting to impress a Gentile girl.¹¹⁶ The veteran Freikorps fighter Hans Zöberlein, in his novel Der Befehl des Gewissens (The Command of Conscience, 1937), had the “Aryan” lovers Hans and Berta shockingly confronted with Eastern Jews: “Across the street, which Hans and Berta are walking along in reflective silence, suddenly tramps a noisy mob of Yiddish-mumbling Eastern Jews, with their suitcases and packets. Obviously, a fresh transport from Galicia has just arrived at the station, disgorging its louse-infested, greasy contents into town. And here comes the riff-raff, with smeary, long caftans and flattened round hats, under which gush out long ringlets, framing the cheeks of smirking faces, with their trash bags over arms or shoulders – they are chipper, as if this had always been their home.”¹¹⁷

One of the most damaging accusations against Jews has always been the sexual one. However much detractors thought inappropriate Jewish sexual behavior was grounded in the Old Testament (citing especially the sexual exploits of ancient Jewish kings, namely David or Solomon), in the Weimar Republic they locked on to the alleged role Jews played in the flourishing sex business, chiefly brothels and the white-slave trade, in the demi-monde culture of nightclubs, cabaret, and light operetta, and in the perpetration of what they called pornography in literature, citing Schnitzler, Sternheim, or Wedekind. Hence one of the main fictions presented in Nazi literature after 1933 habitually was the Jews’ uncontrolled lust and their concentration on the insemination of young “Aryan” women, by any means of seduction, as a ritualistic goal. This accorded with Dinter’s classic pattern in The Sin against the Blood. Starting with Jews in the ancient world, Werner Jansen described “Hebrews” gathering at a food emporium in Egypt, “where the dancers come as a bonus.”118 The Jewish real-estate agent Knopfstein, wrote Edith Countess Salburg in her novel Eine Landflucht (Flight from the Land, 1939), had little else on his mind during the 1920s except seducing small-town German maidens.¹¹⁹ In Gerhard Lorenz’s novel Unrast (Unrest, 1943), Isaak Veilchenduft’s obsession was the republican-era premiere of a revue called “A Thousand Sweet Little Leggies.”¹²⁰ No Jewish political commissar in the Soviet Union, readers were reminded by novelists Karl Hans Strobl and Horst Slesina, forgot after 1917 to avail himself of the prospects for sex with Volga German farm girls. The officer Brodski even wanted to time-share someone’s wife, but for the knockout by an enraged, strong Volga German man.¹²¹ In Otto Paust’s Menschen unterm Hammer (People under the Hammer, 1939) a slutty but attractive German girl in the Third Reich appears who has become the groupie of a Jewish lawyer, hanging around for his public appearances in the law courts and serving as his concubine at whim.¹²² Hans and Berta in Zöberlein’s Der Befehl des Gewissens of 1937, two years after the Nuremberg laws, correctly sized up Berlin’s Wannsee swimming scenario according to Nazi criteria: it was a hunting ground used by adolescent male Jews to catch German girls. Berta hit the nail on the head: “These Jew pigs are ruining us, contaminating our blood.” And: “It’s scary to think that German girls just don’t get it.”¹²³ Goebbels closed public bathing facilities for Jews at around this time.

In his novel Rabauken (1938), Tüdel Weller used the figure of his Jewish Dr. Singer once again to illustrate the Jew’s sexual appetite for beautiful German girls, but also his intellectual ability for arcane abstraction and his capacity for camouflage. It takes the young German hero Peter, a former Freikorps fighter, several encounters to find out Singer’s true “race,” particularly since Singer appears to reason like an “Aryan.”¹²⁴ Other völkisch authors used these and other alleged properties of Jews to construct within their plots a “Jewish Question,” which was then argued for and against and won, naturally, by the racially conscious Nazi protagonist in the narrative. A “Jewish Question” had to be solved especially among the young, to lead irreversibly to Adolf Hitler, his movement, and the new state. Goebbels’s propaganda machine wanted the arts to deal with important Jewish issues in such a creative way.125

Almost certainly because for Goebbels literature could not portray the Jews convincingly at more sophisticated educational and social levels, he decided, starting in the immediate pre-war era, to render the “Jewish Question” in film, which would attract a larger audience. There is evidence that Goebbels had come to that conclusion by the time of Kristallnacht in November 1938; the fight against Jews was paramount in his mind, and he ordered German film companies to start conceiving anti-Semitic movies.¹²⁶ Hitler’s threatening January 1939 speech accelerated this development. The first of three such films of considerable significance was Die Rothschilds, based on a plot by the well-positioned writer Mirko Jelusich and directed by Erich Maschneck. Structurally, this also marked a change for the film industry as a whole, for until 1940 films had not yet been very closely tied to current events, but this was now changing markedly with the urgencies posed by war. Jews and war: What greater urgency was there now than the one presented by the problem of Jews in a Europe under arms? This would be the principal theme in future of Goebbels’s newly minted weekly, Das Reich.

In The Rothschilds, the ideological Ufa filmmakers attempted to view the Jewish-race issue through the prism of time, by examining the internationally plutocratic Rothschild family. “The path of the Rothschild bank serves as a proxy for the path of Jewry during the last 150 years,” wrote Das Reich’s reviewer Jürgen Petersen. The Rothschild name would evoke the specter of international finance-dictatorship, war speculation, and influence-peddling in political decision-making, he maintained. Purportedly, the British banker Nathan Rothschild had made millions by manipulating the London stock exchange with early, unexpected (false) news of Napoleon’s victory at Waterloo in 1815. The film paralleled an earlier stage play by the Nazis’ favorite Eberhard Wolfgang Möller, which in turn inspired it.¹²⁷ Once the protagonist Rothschild had made his fortune at the stock exchange, he had become complicit as a wheeler-dealer in cahoots with shady British politicians and military leaders, for the real victors at Waterloo had been the Prussians under Marshal Blücher, argued the film along with Petersen. All told, this movie, which opened in Berlin during July 1940, persuasively demonstrated for Petersen “the criminal basis of Jewish power.” Particular credit was ceded to the impersonators of the Jews – the actors Erich Ponto, Carl Kuhlmann, Albert Lippert – but also to lesser, younger players, such as Bernhard Minetti, as Napoleon’s sinister chief of police.128

The film turned out not to be popular in Berlin, possibly because the Jew Rothschild was victorious in the end – a finale with which Goebbels certainly could not be happy. Its run was therefore cut short, but also because another film in the making was about to open, one that should not be rivaled by a movie of lesser rank. That film was Jud Süss, directed by Veit Harlan and starring any number of excellent German actors.¹²⁹ After World War II, because of the explosive nature of its plot, several among those actors insisted they had participated in the film against their will, notably Harlan himself, Ferdinand Marian (who played the Jew Süss), and Werner Krauss (who simultaneously posed as Rabbi Löw and other Jewish characters). But if anyone, it was only Marian who appeared credible in this regard. It is known that he got vehemently drunk after having been pressed into the role by Goebbels, that he demolished furniture in a rage – and that he most probably took his own life after the war, as he drove his car into a tree in October 1946, in what many saw as bitter remorse.¹³⁰

The film was based on several earlier poetic adaptations of the biography of the historic Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, whose tragic fate during the early eighteenth century could easily elicit sympathy. In the film the Jew Süss travels from Frankfurt to Stuttgart to serve as Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg’s finance secretary. Süss collects the taxes of the population and governs them harshly, while catering to every personal whim of the tyrant, including the procurement of mistresses. When Süss himself wishes to marry Dorothea, the daughter of Counsellor Sturm, she refuses him; she is already engaged. The plot thickens when Faber, the fiancé, is tortured, an oppositional burgher hanged, and Süss rapes the blond “Aryan” woman, who thereupon drowns herself. (This was one of several “drowning” roles the Swedish actress Kristina Söderbaum, Harlan’s wife, played in Nazi films, wherefore the people baptized her “Reich Water Corpse.”) After the duke’s sudden death from debauchery, the rebel leaders of the enraged people of Württemberg have the Jew tried, condemned for having had sex with a Christian woman, and strung up in a church steeple.¹³¹

The Frankfurter Zeitung’s Carl Linfert judged that the “moral aim” of this story, as shown by the Nazis on the screen, had been to identify the Jew as the exponent of evil incarnate, in particular to demonstrate the creepy insinuations of assimilated Westernized Jews who at the core had remained Eastern Jews – insinuations into the völkisch fabric of the German people in order to exploit them.132 Karl Korn of Das Reich concurred, in as far as “this great film project” had come to grips with the, often ignored, difference between Western and Eastern Jews and, at the same time, their organic interdependence, the acute dangers of which the German people constantly had to be alerted to.¹³³

To the same extent that Goebbels had shown himself delighted with the making of the movie, lauding Harlan throughout the filming accordingly and calling the finished product “a really big hit of genius,” it turned out to be a great success with German audiences throughout the Reich, starting in September 1940.¹³⁴ Everyone praised the narrative, direction, and technical execution, and the acting. The film was thought to be so horrifyingly realistic that in cities such as Leipzig, Karlsruhe, and Dortmund the question was posed whether youths under legal age should be allowed to see it. In a German population of seventy million, over twenty million did watch the movie from 1940 to 1943.¹³⁵

Jud Süss was fiendishly aligned with way stations on the Nazis’ incremental anti-Semitic policy path since 1933. The physical separation of Jews in a historic Stuttgart ghetto reflected the legal split between Jews and “Aryans” by the force of the civil service law of April 1933 that had destroyed the livelihood of potentially employable Jews through the cancellation of their job qualifications. Süss’s ravishing of Dorothea Sturm signified what was declared to be a crime after the Nuremberg race legislation of September 1935, namely Jews having sexual relations with “Aryan” Volksgenossen. The upheaval of the Gentile masses against Süss and his compatriots that led to his imprisonment paralleled and in retrospect legitimized the alleged revolt of the German people against synagogues and Jewish stores during November 1938. Süss’s terrifying execution, showing a criminal in an act of non-defiance trapped in a cage on a church steeple, rope around his neck, portended death to all Jews, as the extermination of Jews in conquered Poland had already begun and Berlin’s Jews were slated for deportation to eastern killing sites one year hence. A sub-theme here was the message provided by Süss himself, as he refused to convert to Christianity, that a Jew would always be a Jew, no matter what religion he adhered to. This was in line with the Nazi zealots’ argument that perceived differences between Eastern, assimilated and, indeed, baptized Jews, were in practice meaningless, as a Jew always remained a Jew. Immutability of race was the literal meaning of the Nuremberg laws.136

Imparting such striking similes with realistic force, the film constituted ideal propaganda, fit for the schooling of future executioners. Hence it was shown for training purposes to the SS in German concentration camps and after 1942 also in Auschwitz, where, according to SS witnesses later, it inspired a still harsher treatment of inmates. In Berlin, demonstrators chanted after the film was shown: “Chase the Jews from the Kurfürstendamm!” and Hitler Youths in Vienna almost stoned to death an old Jew.¹³⁷ “The population,” judges Peter Longerich, “by and large was motivated to accept the ‘Jewish policy’ of the regime, in large pre-conceived campaigns, which followed upon one another in waves.” Thus the film Jud Süss was a constituent element in the “step-by-step radicalization” of anti-Semitic persecution, which Longerich and other historians have been able to delineate.¹³⁸

And so was a third film, Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jud). It originated more or less concomitantly with Jud Süss and The Rothschilds, namely after Kristallnacht, and the reason for not one but three anti-Jewish films at that time has often been discussed by film historians. Contrary to some beliefs that there was a functional relationship between them, especially between Jud Süss and The Eternal Jew, they did not develop in any common technical or organic context, for this is nowhere discussed by the authorities, including Goebbels himself. Rather, they came about as a matter of policy to craft three somewhat different films for, possibly, different audiences, with all of them hewing to the new, sharpened, anti-Semitic policy directives, each appearing for a premiere more or less around the start of the new war. If The Rothschilds was the least vituperative of the films, Jud Süss made its anti-Jewish arguments blunter, and The Eternal Jew aimed to accomplish, in the guise of a documentary, with even more firmness what its two predecessors had already thematized: that the Jews were evil, threatening the Germanic racial community by plots of intrusion, and therefore had to be eliminated.

Hence to a certain degree Bill Niven’s judgment that The Eternal Jew was “a documentary version of Jew Süss” makes sense, although exactly because of its “pseudofactual evidence,” which was not to come across as “pseudo” for the spectators at all, it was to be a much harder-hitting picture.139 Thematically, it was grounded in the “Eternal Jew” exhibition that had been opened in Munich in November 1937, and was the result of a combination of several film types: documentaries from recent newsreels, excerpts from German and American feature films, especially filmed scenes of Polish Jews in certain surroundings and committing certain actions. It also, for contrast, included allusions to German high culture such as examples of “Nordic” art and snippets of music by Johann Sebastian Bach; there was suggestive narration and exhortation; effective use of color by transmuting spurned Expressionist artifacts from the “Degenerate Art” exhibition to merely black and white; and the clever use of the filmic technique of dissolve: Jewish characters melding in and out of one another – hence the metamorphosis of the caftan-clad, side-locked Orthodox Eastern Jew with his yarmulke into the urban Western, assimilated businessman in Berlin, clean-shaven and wearing bespoke suits of the finest cloth. Showing the “metamorphosing” of the Polish ghetto Jew at several stages was of the utmost importance to the Nazis, as this once again drove home their argument that Jews were out to infiltrate the German master race until they looked, talked, acted, and smelled like it. To depict the Jews’ original state more convincingly, the filmmakers had brought in direct comparisons with subhuman species, with insects and especially rats; at one point, the movie is crawling with rats. This was over and beyond what the two preceding films had been attempting to do, and the overpowering effect was not lost on Albert Brodbeck, the film critic of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, as he commented that the faces of various Jews, captured on film traversing recently conquered Polish roads, could “not very well be compared with other human faces.”¹⁴⁰ The horrible nadir of the film came at the end when shechita, the kosher slaughtering of animals, forbidden in the Reich since April 1933, was shown, with a cow as an infinitely suffering creature and streams of blood. The idea here was to demonstrate the habitual, inherited, cruelty of Jews but also, metaphorically, to suggest that their eternal, universal aim was to enslave the whole of mankind.¹⁴¹ The truth is that shechita was invented to spare slaughtered animals pain, as the jugular artery was cut quickly.¹⁴²

Goebbels was entirely pleased with the outcome of the filming, after the movie had opened on November 28, 1940, at Berlin’s Ufa-Palast, yet it was not popular with the general public.¹⁴³ Lest this be mistaken for a humanitarian streak among the Volksgenossen, it should be emphasized that the viewers’ objections were anchored in aesthetics, not morality. They especially thought that the depiction of rats was overkill and felt physically sickened after watching the final scenes with the kosher butchers. Audiences in Munich, Halle, Königsberg, and Berlin appreciated the “factual information” – that Jews were responsible for the highest rates in crime, notably prostitution; that Jews played such a predominant role in the United States; that eastern ghettoes were this filthy – but they tired of being overwhelmed by the Jews’ acts of cruelty, especially to animals, and by their disgusting appearance. The people’s main argument against the film, which even the security service of the SS (SD) appeared to sympathize with, was that Jud Süss had already told Germans a lot and that it was redundant to overstate the obvious.144 If this was indeed the reaction, Goebbels could rest assured that one way or another, using any one of the three films made thus far, the regime leaders had taught their lessons well. The floodgates to the Final Solution could well be opened, with not too many citizens wondering why the Jews were disappearing from the streets. Preferentially, it was in locations of Poland – where Jews were to be annihilated en masse, and where Wehrmacht and SS troops were stationed – that this film appeared in public cinemas.¹⁴⁵

In the old German Reich, rather than films and literature, it was the press and, with it, radio that kept the campaign against the Jews going, a campaign that increasingly targeted Jews living outside of Germany after the war had begun. After all, a campaign against German Jews would become increasingly unnecessary after the start of the Polish operation. Before September 1939, the press, in shaping anti-Semitic content, oriented itself loosely around current events involving German Jews, including the staggered proscriptions. The prominent Kölnische Zeitung started it off in May 1933 by publishing an open letter by the renowned poet Rudolf Binding (who thought nothing of cohabiting with the Jew Elisabeth Jungmann) to the French Nobel laureate Romain Rolland, in which Binding attempted to accentuate Germany’s singularity in its incipient fight against Jews: “Many key positions in science, art, and the economy in Germany were occupied by Jews, and they exploited this in such a way that they supported only their tribal compatriots, disregarding an equality of races themselves.” This was after Rolland had lamented the Reich’s racism, also in the Kölnische Zeitung. According to Binding, those German-Jewish efforts were abetted by “elements from the East,” taking advantage of Germany’s impotence and poverty, and these developments had not even stopped after Hitler’s taking of power because Jewish writers beyond Germany’s borders fell in line.146 By fall, regional broadsheets like the Augsburger Postzeitung hailed the advent of the Schriftleitergesetz by pointing to an abuse Jewish journalists had practiced in the past, citing “freedom of the press.”¹⁴⁷ Meanwhile, the top radio executive Eugen Hadamovsky reminded his listeners that the broadcasting system was in the process of liberating itself from “the salons of Jewish literati and stock market Jews,” amongst whom mass communication on the airwaves had originated.¹⁴⁸

Proprietary Nazi newspapers had a field day manufacturing stories around new “Aryan” paragraphs, which limited civil freedoms for German Jews. For example, Das Schwarze Korps in the spring of 1935 welcomed the closing of the Berlin cabarets Katakombe and Tingel-Tangel as Jewish artists fell victim to the employment bans. After the pronouncement of the Nuremberg laws later that year, which claimed to have created the tools for identifying Jewish sex crimes and their perpetrators, Julius Streicher’s obscene tabloid Der Stürmer serviced the old cliché of male Jews as predators by reporting about the alleged exploitation of a nineteen-year-old, pregnant, “Aryan” housewife. Its message to non-Jews was that “the Jew” had, once again, revealed himself as the creature he always was: “the devil in a human shape.”¹⁴⁹

Bourgeois newspapers printed copy on cue. The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung in Berlin hailed the permanent removal from the theater of Max Reinhardt and Leopold Jessner and, around the time of the Munich “Degenerate Art” exhibition in summer 1937, the Münsterischer Anzeiger gratefully acknowledged the eradication of “the cliquish Jewish press” and “the shameless art dealers and their protégés.”¹⁵⁰ In November of that year the DAZ readily endorsed the recently opened exhibition in Munich, “The Eternal Jew,” which, the pronouncedly Nazi newspaper Westdeutscher Beobachter rejoiced a few weeks later, had drawn 150,000 visitors.¹⁵¹ In March 1938 came the Austrian Anschluss. In future, celebrated the formerly professional trade organ Börsenblatt des Deutschen Buchhandels, the new territory would benefit from the “blessings of anti-Jewish legislation” and from the cleansing of all regional culture of all Jews.¹⁵² After Kristallnacht toward the end of November in that year, both press and radio intensified their anti-Semitic attacks.¹⁵³

The allegedly international character of Jews in the aggregate “World Jewry,” as it had already been dramatized in the films The Rothschilds and The Eternal Jew, would become the main object of a Nazi analysis of the “Jewish Question” in the German press throughout World War II. In the Reich itself, there were only 250,000 Jews left by September 1939, and they would soon be made to disappear. Consequently, both Hitler and Goebbels concluded that “anti-Jewish propaganda aimed toward the outside world ought to be substantially reinforced.”154 Among others, this was one of the reasons why the weekly newspaper Das Reich was founded in May 1940, for in his lengthy editorials, usually repeated over the radio, Goebbels could acidly engage with what he visualized as Jewish problems, reaching an educated audience in Germany as well as many interested foreign readers.¹⁵⁵

Among the first such articles was a very poignant one entitled “Mimicry,” which appeared in the July 20, 1941, edition of Das Reich, a few weeks after the Wehrmacht’s invasion of the Soviet Union. With it Goebbels established the tenor of future anti-Semitic attacks by emphasizing the chameleon character of the Jews, their ability to adjust to every situation. One would have to be very experienced to catch them at their game of camouflage, for they would pose behind many masks. With respect to the current crusade, the world had to be reminded that it had been the Jews who had raised the specter of Bolshevism, and that gratitude was due to the Nazi Reich for combating them. However – this would become a refrain – Goebbels also railed against the plutocratic Jews of London and Washington, said to be allied with the Jewish Bolsheviks. This was the extended family of the Rothschilds, these were the second cousins of those Jews in the Polish ghettoes, shown in The Eternal Jew. “They are the same Jews, who, on either side, whether openly or in disguise, set the tone and loudly hold sway . . . they practice mimicry.”¹⁵⁶

American, British, and especially Soviet Jews remained the subject of rhetorical abuse in Goebbels’s lead pieces during the next few months, while German military fortunes were in the ascendant. True to the rules of effective propaganda, stereotypes were associated with each territory and themes were repeated time and again. In the Soviet Union, Jews were said to be immediately behind Stalin and the rest of the Communist leadership and to be particularly active as controllers of the secret police. In Britain and the United States, some Jews were cabinet members such as Leslie Hore-Belisha in London, others were advisers to Roosevelt and Churchill and invariably, they were said to be following merely their plutocratic instincts. They were controlling politics for the sake of their own wealth. In the western hemisphere, German-Jewish emigrants were standing behind the enemy governments, in fact they were said to be responsible for fanning the flames of armed conflict in the first place.157

These very issues were addressed in the most malicious article Goebbels was ever to publish in Das Reich, “Die Juden sind schuld!” (“The Jews are at Fault!”), on November 16, 1941. For the regime, this was the highly important culminating moment of anti-Semitic policy, as the emigration of German Jews had just been proscribed and the yellow Star of David on Jewish clothing introduced. For the Jews, this meant an existential turning point: perdition or survival, since evacuation to the East was a certainty, barring a miracle. There was a hint of physical elimination at the end of the article, where Goebbels mentioned the necessity of “finally having to be done with them,” but their eventual murder was not alluded to until May 1942, when Goebbels’s Angriff announced that the war would end “with the extermination of the Jewish race.”¹⁵⁸ Goebbels himself reiterated this when a few weeks later he wrote in Das Reich about “the extermination of their race in Europe.”¹⁵⁹

After the German defeat at Stalingrad and in the expectation of invasions by the Western Allies in early February 1943, Das Reich in barely hidden desperation continued to harp on the same well-used themes, but in shriller tones. The Jews were natural scapegoats. Three weeks after the epochal disaster Goebbels maintained that the Jews of the western plutocracies had created the conditions which led to the most recent catastrophe with the prospect of further dangers.¹⁶⁰ To provide a picture of Jews in America in sharper relief the newspaper’s correspondent in neutral Portugal, Margret Boveri, an admirer of Ernst Jünger, in May 1943 published an article entitled “Landscape with a Double Bottom,” dealing with “the influence and deception by American Jewry.” (At that very time, American troops were threatening the Vichy Caribbean island of Martinique, and German radio was broadcasting torrents of anti-Jewish diatribes, and the Auschwitz death mills were running at high speed.) In the article, Boveri instructed the Reich’s readers about “the core of the Jewish problem in the United States,” the “strong positions of power” held by American Jews in every sector, and the resultant “anti-Semitic currents” in the country. She detailed negative qualities of the American Jews to the point where anti-Semites in Nazi Germany would have to recognize close, unsavory, similarities, and talked about the divisions between assimilated and unassimilated Jews, emphasizing the antagonisms against Eastern Jews in central Europe. Perfidiously mentioning personalities such as Henry Morgenthau, Jr. (treasury secretary), Samuel Rosenman (presidential adviser), and Felix Frankfurter (supreme court justice), she appeared to provide insider details regarding the domination of President Roosevelt by Jewish cliques, just as Minister Goebbels had intimated. Her article ended with a word about the “decaying influence” of Jews throughout American society. For the cognoscenti who would habitually read Das Reich, Boveri possessed especial credibility, for her mother, though unloved by her, was a native-born American.161

Goebbels emulated Boveri when in November 1943 he printed a polemic against Jews in Britain. He repeated the legend of Jewish war guilt and insisted that among the British people presently, anti-Semitism was unstoppable.¹⁶² But on the whole, Das Reich became more defensive in its anti-Jewish stance, probably in the knowledge that it was moot to rant against a people now in the process of total obliteration. Curiously, one last anti-Semitic piece was by Carl Linfert, who had earlier commented on German art and written a positive review of Jud Süss. His was a critique of the Jews’ alleged role in more recent European history and their unchangeable character as a foreign body. The essence of anti-Semitism anywhere in Europe, Linfert wished to remind his readers, lay in the Jews’ cultural incompatibility with whatever was their host country. Jews who themselves were incapable of cultural achievements had been caught in the attempt to insinuate themselves into the culture of others. The outstanding question currently was, wrote Linfert in January 1945, a few months before the Nazi Reich’s collapse, whether the foreign body would survive, or the organism this body had infested. That was said to be a struggle not even yet near its climax.¹⁶³

HUMAN TRAGEDIES

The gradual radicalization of anti-Semitic policy, including the use of the Kulturbund as a manipulative instrument, would call for many victims. One of them was the sixty-four-year-old journalist Theodor Wolff, a brilliant stylist and editor-in-chief of the Berliner Tageblatt at the Jewish Mosse publishing empire. He was also a co-founder of the liberal post-war German Democratic Party (DDP); hence Wolff had been on the Nazis’ blacklist from the beginning. He traveled to Zurich in March 1933, and, after having been rejected for residency, in December he went from there to Nice. When the town had become Italian after Mussolini’s invasion of southern France in 1940, Wolff was arrested by the Fascist administration in May 1943 and handed over to the Gestapo. He spent time in Dachau and Sachsenhausen concentration camps before dying from his injuries in a Jewish hospital in Berlin, supervised by the SS, later that year. Already in May 1933, his writings had fallen prey to the student book burnings.164

There were not that many Jewish visual artists still living in Germany in the 1940s; nevertheless, Otto Freundlich was one the Nazis caught up with in 1943, after he had left his homeland. The thirty-year-old had moved to Paris in 1908 and there was drawn to the Cubists – Picasso and Robert Delaunay among them. Freundlich hailed Picasso as “one of the first to liberate painting from the slavery of perspective.” He himself became a devotee of the two-dimensionalist canvas. Even so, as of 1910 he also produced sculpture, for example Man’s Head and Woman’s Head. By 1914, he had fallen in with left-wing and pacifist groups and after World War I became an admirer of the Soviet Union. Back and forth in France and Germany, he was in France after 1924, as a German but hating his country. The Nazis had seized upon his work by 1937, when they showed one of his watercolors at the “Eternal Jew” exhibition, which they opened in Munich in November and sent around Germany through 1939. In 1937, also, Freundlich’s Head, another watercolor, was included in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition, and when the exhibition guide was printed, it was his sculpture, Der Neue Mensch (The New Man), which was used as the cover illustration. After the invasion of France in 1940, Freundlich was interned by the French as an enemy alien but escaped, and with his wife he was able to hide in the eastern Pyrenees. There he continued to draw, to paint, and to write. But in March 1943 he was arrested by the Vichy police and, via the Drancy concentration camp, sent to the Maidanek extermination camp in Poland, where he died at the age of sixty-five.¹⁶⁵

As much as Jewish painters were under-represented in the German art world, Jewish actors were over-represented in cinema and on the stage. And the older a Jewish actor was, the smaller were his or her chances of escaping the clutches of the Nazis. The biography of Lilli Palmer helps to illustrate this. She was the daughter of a Jewish surgeon in Berlin. Barely nineteen years old, she was supposed to have her debut in a Darmstadt stage play in spring of 1933, directed by Arthur Maria Rabenalt. As Palmer tells it, Rabenalt and the theater director got wind of the fact that the local SA was planning to sabotage the performance during opening night, because a Jew was taking part. Rabenalt frantically tried to inform the SA chief that Palmer was in order because of her father’s World War I record (which, by the stipulations of the April civil-service law, did not apply to a suspect’s children). It was only at the last moment that the SA chief could be reached and a band of storm troopers in the first row during the show was observed to remain quiet. A few days later the aspiring actress took a train to be with her sister in Paris; her international acting career started from there.166

Fate was less kind to Walter Weinlaub, but he was already older, born in 1901 in Upper Silesia. Having made it through the Depression at the end of the republican era, he founded a small theater in his home town of Kreuzburg. Already in January 1933, SA troopers were disrupting the performances, until Weinlaub was beaten and almost stabbed to death. He managed to leave town overnight, staying in Amsterdam, Prague, and London, before landing in Hollywood, where, under the name of Wicclair, he struggled to resume his calling against many odds.¹⁶⁷

The actors Julius Seger from Munich and Eugen Burg from Berlin had neither the youth nor the resources to leave Germany for their own safety. Seger was already in his fifties when he was dismissed from the Munich Kammerspiele in 1933. Here he had been a popular mainstay in minor roles, as on other Munich stages, for a stretch of thirty-odd years, interrupted only by service at the front. By 1941, Seger was assigned to a forced-labor detail in Upper Bavaria by the authorities. In 1942 he was taken to the Theresienstadt camp, until two years later he arrived in Auschwitz where he was killed.¹⁶⁸ Burg was born Eugen Hirschburg in 1871 in Berlin; he converted to Protestantism, calling himself Eugen Burg. He was the father of Hans Albers’s girlfriend Hansi Burg. A veteran of many stages, including the Deutsches Theater in New York, Burg had made his first silent movie in 1915, the comedy Robert und Bertram, also starring Ernst Lubitsch. Later Burg starred with many famous German actors, such as Otto Gebühr and Olga Tschechowa, and not so famous ones, like a young Marlene Dietrich. He also played Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s master detective. In the 1920s he had helped to train Hans Albers, with whom he filmed several movies toward the end of the republic. But that happened also to be the end of Burg’s own movie career; in 1933 he was suspended from all work. The Nazis caught him as he was attempting to flee the Reich and in January 1943 he was sent to Theresienstadt. Despite Albers’s intervention, Burg, already nearly blind, was murdered by camp guards in November 1944.169

Jewish writers at first sight seem to have done better than journalists or actors, for many were self-employed. As one looks to well-known figures such as Franz Werfel, Stefan Zweig, and Lion Feuchtwanger, it is clear that they had the means to emigrate. But they did so at great risk and with almost no prospects of thriving abroad, as writing in the German tongue was all they knew. A writer who freelanced but also worked for the stage was Edgar Weil, who was at the Munich Kammerspiele. After the police had detained him, he departed for Amsterdam in 1933, with his author wife Grete following two years later. Still, after their invasion of the Netherlands and after Grete had managed to escape, the Nazis transported Weil to Mauthausen concentration camp, where, like Seger, he was murdered.¹⁷⁰ Rudolf Frank also wrote for the theater, besides being a stage director, critic, and writer of feuilletons. Born in 1886 in Mainz as a descendant both of Jacques Offenbach and Heinrich Heine, he worked in Berlin and there was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933. Because he knew Otto Laubinger of Goebbels’s Culture Chamber, he was released, after which he stayed with his family on minimum subsistence until 1936, when he decamped for Vienna. From there he made it to Switzerland in 1938, but until 1945 remained at risk of being deported.¹⁷¹ While in Berlin’s Moabit prison Frank had briefly encountered Erich Mühsam, the satirist and critic, who was a friend of Heinrich Mann, Feuchtwanger, and Wedekind – an anarchist and, for the Nazis, the epitome of Jewish depravity. In 1930, Mühsam had premiered a play in Munich that excoriated a National Socialist assumption of political power. Two years later Goebbels warned that Mühsam was the type of enemy who would immediately be arrested after the Nazis seized power. So it comes as no surprise that the fifty-four-year-old writer was apprehended on the very day of the Reichstag fire, February 27, 1933. The SA and SS kept him in custody, torturing him brutally, before they hanged him in the latrine of Oranienburg concentration camp in July 1934.¹⁷²

One older writer got away, probably because he was very famous. He was Alfred Mombert, a Heidelberg jurist with many creative interests, who had dedicated himself to geography and ethnology, philosophy and religious studies. His volumes of poetry included Der himmlische Zecher (The Heavenly Boozer, 1909) and Der Held der Erde (The Hero of the Earth, 1919), which reminded admirers of the work of Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan George. Mombert had to serve in the war after 1917 and lost much of his fortune during the post-World War I inflation. In 1928 he was elected a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts, but was forced out again in May 1933. By 1934, all his books had been prohibited. Still, not reading the signs on the wall, the nationalist Mombert was one of those Jews who thought that their work was “German” enough to lift them above suspicion; he, like the others, totally misinterpreted the Nazis’ true intentions. This hubris caused him to remain in Heidelberg, until on October 22, 1940, along with other Jews from Baden, he was deported to the camp in Gurs, southern France. Influential friends, among them Hans Carossa, intervened with the authorities, and a Swiss acquaintance, Hans Reinhart, finally secured for him a Swiss entry visa, which guaranteed the cancer-ridden poet a safe passage to the Idron-par-Pau sanatorium. Mombert died on April 8, 1942, in Winterthur, at the age of seventy.173

Among Jewish musicians in the Third Reich several managed to move beyond the Nazis’ reach, because music has a universal audience and so they could be engaged outside Germany. Arnold Schoenberg and Kurt Weill, Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer certainly were the most famous, and among the first to be able to leave. The Hamburg contralto Sabine Kalter also knew this when she was considering leaving the city opera, because she had been tainted by anti-Semitic cartoons already in 1930. However, instead of letting her go right after the civil-service law of April 1933, the opera intendant Albert Ruck kept her on for a couple more years because of her immense popularity with the music-loving elite, while the authorities just stood by. In January 1935, however, under mounting threats, the forty-five-year-old Polish-born singer seized the occasion for a permanent engagement in London and left the Reich forever.¹⁷⁴

Stars of higher forms of culture were afforded better opportunities for engagement elsewhere than purveyors of lower entertainment, who often were economically more at risk. Germany had many Jews working in dance-band, cabaret, and varieté ensembles, and some of those also traveled internationally. Among them were the Weintraub Syncopators, originally an amateur schoolboy band of five in 1924, who together mastered a considerable number of musical instruments. They were the true pioneers of jazz in Germany. Its leader Stefan Weintraub himself excelled on piano, drums, guitar, xylophone, vibraphone, celesta, and ukulele. When in 1927, Friedrich Hollaender decided to use the Syncopators in his revues, they were catapulted to fame. While Hollaender played the piano, Weintraub switched to drums. In 1930 they were briefly featured in Josef von Sternberg’s film Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel), for which Hollaender had written the score. In February 1933 they performed in Berlin’s Wintergarten, but began a tour in March first to Prague, then Switzerland and Denmark. When they played in Rotterdam in September, they decided not to return to Germany. They were dispersed internationally, with Weintraub settling in Australia, trumpeter Adi Rosner in the Soviet Union, and composer Franz Wachsmann in Hollywood; there Wachsmann changed his name to Waxman, to become a world-famous movie composer, eventually winning two Academy Awards.175

With so many outstanding German-Jewish artists leaving Germany, it is no wonder the Nazi authorities were complaining about a lack of local talent. Another was the trumpet player Sigmund Petruschka, who had performed with his band Sid Kay’s Fellows in Berlin’s large entertainment complex Haus Vaterland since the late days of the republic. Dismissed there after the law of April 1933, he continued mainly as a composer and arranger, in 1935 shaping Theo Mackeben’s tango “Speak Not of Faithfulness,” played at the Berlin press ball in the spring, under the auspices of Minister Goebbels. Thereafter, ostracized from the Reich Music Chamber, Petruschka worked for Berlin’s Jewish Culture League, even producing an exclusively Jewish record label, Lukraphon, which sold records only to Jews. Illicitly, Petruschka kept on creating arrangements for other “Aryan” clients, until January 1938 when he finally managed to leave for Palestine.¹⁷⁶

How precarious things could become for artists even with merely a partial Jewish background is shown by Heinz (Coco) Schumann’s example. Schumann’s father Alfred was an “Aryan,” a carpenter with a World War I record who converted to Judaism for the sake of his Jewish wife Hedwig. Her father, Louis Rotholz, was the proprietor of a beauty salon in Berlin’s Scheunenviertel (Barnyard Quarter), where the poverty-stricken Jews lived, many Orthodox and originally hailing from the European East. Coco, born in 1924, grew up in the Mosaic faith in the Scheunenviertel. He characterizes it in his memoirs: “The Barnyard Quarter had a prickly atmosphere for roaming around. It was a poor but lively place where everyone had to see how he would get through the day.”177 Immediately after Kristallnacht, Coco tried his skill at his uncle Arthur’s drum set, which he had left behind after fleeing from his hair salon on Alte Schönhauser Strasse. Inspired by the legendary Weintraub Syncopators, by 1940 Coco was servicing several of the clubs open for Wehrmacht soldiers around the Kurfürstendamm in various combos, casually switching to guitar. Jazz was neither officially forbidden nor expressly permitted; it was silently tolerated due to popular demand and for the sake of the armed forces’ morale. By September 1941, Coco was compelled to wear the yellow Star of David, because he had celebrated bar mitzvah and because both his parents were counted as Jews, but he surreptitiously put it in his pocket. “My blue eyes and Berlin wise-guy talk did not fit the stereotype of the typical Jew,” so he reminisces.¹⁷⁸ After Goebbels’s proclamation of total war in February 1943 the SS conducted a raid on Rosita Bar, Coco’s gig, looking for deserters and minors. An SS man stood at the bandstand, clapping his hands in enthusiasm. This brought out the devil in Coco. “I stood up and said, ‘Actually, you have to arrest me!’ He looked bewildered. ‘Why?’ ‘Well, I’m a Jew, I play swing and I’m a minor.’ He laughed out loud and could not stop laughing at this stupendous joke. The entire bar roared with him.”¹⁷⁹ However, in March 1943, Coco Schumann was accused of failing to wear the Star of David, performing forbidden music, and seducing “Aryan” women. He was sent to Theresienstadt and from there to Auschwitz. There he survived because at the selection ramp, the SS camp physician Josef Mengele had chosen him for a work detail as a plumber. Yet he ended up playing a guitar left behind by condemned Gypsies, in one of the bands put together for the pleasure of the SS. On April 30, 1945, the day of Hitler’s suicide, Coco Schumann and a few other musicians who had survived, after a harrowing death march found themselves in Bavarian Wolfratshausen, just before their final liberation by the Americans. Music had saved his life.¹⁸⁰

In the end, the fate of Jews connected with German culture was no different from that of Jews in other walks of life, the same measures of discrimination and death applying to all. But there were differences of nuance. In the Third Reich, there was no Jewish equivalent of the Kulturbund in other human activities, say for those who worked in finance or former government employees. From the Gestapo’s point of view, the early corralling of “culture Jews,” as the Nazis derogatorily called them, made sense in view of subsequent annihilation logistics, but why they should have been singled out has still not been satisfactorily explained. To be sure, their visibility in a Nazi-controlled organization did grant the Jews opportunies for showcasing their skills, for so many of them were talented musicians, filmmakers, writers, and visual artists. Their talent could be, for certain Jews, a lifeline, insofar as they might be known abroad and therefore given a chance to emigrate. The most accomplished of them, such as Sabine Kalter and Sigmund Petruschka, actually did emigrate. They were the lucky ones. By contrast, Jewish physicians, for instance, did far worse because they were driven out of their profession by their own “Aryan” colleagues before the requisite legislation was in place.181 This treatment was perhaps balanced out several years later, because these doctors had a greater chance of survival in concentration and extermination camps such as Auschwitz, where they were needed for medical duty (for example, to prevent epidemics that would also harm SS personnel).

What is so significant after a review of Kulturbund activities is that, first, apart from the logistical numbers, it was used as an instrument of chicanery by the Nazi administrators, for instance in the wake of Kristallnacht, so that even Jews who were easily placated at first must have become suspicious of Nazi intentions. Second, the sudden end of the Culture League in the fall of 1941 does point to strategic Nazi planning, as it signifies a high degree of synchronization between “Judenpolitik,” the running of the war, and the calculated application of cultural activities for Germans in Germany. It was in September of that year that the Wehrmacht had come to the end of a long streak of military good fortune and, with a doomed march on Moscow in progress, to the beginning of its eventual demise. With the Jews finally out of the way, what was believed to be German culture could now be applied even more unabashedly to propaganda – propaganda content that would segue into a flood of lies by the time the Nazi leadership had nothing more to hold on to.