ZENO ACKERMANN
It may well appear as a self-evident truth that The Merchant of Venice provided an ideal pretext for National Socialist propaganda. In his magisterial study on the Shylock topos, John Gross states that the play ‘enjoyed special popularity from the outset’ of Nazi rule (294). Such notions continue to be influential in the wider cultural sphere. A recent book, in which actor Gareth Armstrong describes his experiences while touring with a solo program on Shylock, provides a dense summary of pervasive clichés concerning the status of The Merchant in Hitler’s Germany. Referring to ongoing anxieties that Shakespeare might have been ‘a Jew-hater,’ Armstrong – who is generally entertaining, perceptive, and well-informed – explains: ‘The Nazis certainly thought he was. They encouraged productions of the play throughout the Reich during the thirties and the war years, and in Vienna, the Gauleiter commanded a performance on the grounds that “every Jew active in Europe is a danger to European culture”’ (46).
In reality, however, the stance of the Nazi bureaucracy and of cultural makers towards the play was much more twisted. Recent scholarship – especially by Thomas Eicher, Jôrg Monschau, Rodney Symington, and Andrew G. Bonnell1 – has pointed out that the beginning of the National Socialist hegemony actually coincided with a notable relegation of The Merchant of Venice on the programs of German theatres. Since the end of the eighteenth century the play had always held an important place in the German Shakespeare canon. According to the performance statistics published in the yearbooks of the German Shakespeare Society,2 The Merchant ranked first among Shakespeare plays in 1927; it held third place in 1928, 1929, and 1931, and fourth place in 1932. By 1941, however, the number of performances would reach an all-time low of three shows, staged in a provincial theatre in Bohemia (annexed to the Reich in consequence of the 1938 Munich Agreement): in the listings for that year The Merchant held twenty-first place, just ahead of The Merry Wives of Windsor. There were still nine new productions during the 1933–4 theatre season, but numbers dropped to usually one or two for the following seasons (Eicher 304). Thomas Eicher attributes these declining numbers to systematic interventions by the administration, claiming that the play was in effect ‘stopped’ (303–8; quote 304).3 Indeed, when Paul Rose, manager of the large private Rose Theatre in Berlin, asked for permission to stage the play in the 1937–8 season, the responsible supervisor in the Propaganda Ministry crossed out The Merchant on Rose’s list – and inserted Othello in its place (Freydank 148, 154 note 24).
Most current studies can be seen struggling with such information: while acknowledging the dramatic drop in performance numbers, they tend to focus on the few productions that actually did take place – in effect raising the impression that, after all, the play was a seminal tool of Nazi propaganda (cf., for example, Bonnell 171–2). And indeed, as a figure or as a stereotype, Shylock certainly was an important reference point both for the self-image of National Socialists and for their anti-Semitic propaganda. According to the protocols of his table talk, Hitler is said to have declared in July 1942 that Shakespeare’s portrayal of Shylock provided a ‘timelessly valid characterization of the Jew’ (Picker 457, entry for 24 July 1942; my translation). It might even be claimed that significant connections existed between the evolution of the Stormtrooper cliché of ‘the Jew’ during the lead-up to Nazi rule and contemporary representations of Shylock on stage. It is also true that there were several high-profile propagandistic productions of The Merchant of Venice. The best known is the 1943 production at Vienna’s Burgtheater, in which Shylock was played by Werner Krauss (see fig. 2.1), an actor who had contributed a number of Jewish stock characters to Veit Harlan’s notorious propaganda film Jud Süss [Jew Süss] (1940). Less well known is the fact that there even were plans for producing a film adaptation of The Merchant: Harlan was to direct and shooting was scheduled to commence in November 1944.4 This might well mean that The Merchant was considered fit to serve as the last stand of Nazi propaganda.
In light of these contradictions, it seems that a new and systematic interpretation of the functions of the play under the National Socialist hegemony and within the context of the Holocaust is called for. Such an interpretation should explain the tensions between the obvious ideological significance of the text and the marked reticence in staging the play. It should also look into the question of when, how, and why this reticence was overcome, so that methodical propagandistic productions finally seemed feasible. Starting from the assumption that The Merchant of Venice was, quite literally, a ‘problem play’ for National Socialist cultural policy, this essay will try to address – provisionally and tentatively – three major questions:
First of all, how was the contemporary reception of The Merchant related to National Socialist anti-Semitism and the Holocaust? In trying to suggest answers, the emphasis will be placed on the period between 1939 and 1945. However, it will also be necessary to consider developments before the outbreak of war and during the Weimar Republic. The second key question, or rather set of questions, concerns the vexing but seminal problem of change and continuity. Was there a decisive break in the play’s reception history in 1933? Did such a break occur later during the National Socialist period? Was the Shylock portrayed by Werner Krauss in the notorious 1943 production at the Vienna Burgtheater essentially different from his interpretation of the role under (Jewish) director Max Reinhardt in 1921? It will not be possible to pursue all of these questions systematically, but they will always be present in the background of the following interpretations. My third question is really a hypothesis, but since it provides a counterpoint to the assumption that The Merchant simply must have been a favourite during the ‘Third Reich,’ I would like to spell it out in the very beginning: How afraid were the Nazis of Shylock? How much ‘Angst’ did Shakespeare’s profoundly ambivalent figure of a thwarted Jewish avenger inspire in the proponents of an eliminatory anti-Semitism?
In voicing such a hypothesis I should be careful to point out that clear-cut generalizations such as ‘the Nazis’ always carry the danger of obscuring the complexity of historical processes. Recent scholarship on National Socialist society and the Holocaust has emphasized the tangled interplay – the tensions as well as the synergies – between various groups and agents whose dispositions, interests, and intentions need to be differentiated.5 In trying to understand the interaction of state and society within the ideological framework of the so-called ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ (‘community of the people’), we should be wary of reducing National Socialist rule in Germany to one-directional acts of domination and control. Rather, it may be helpful to follow Alf Lüdtke in approaching National Socialist rule as a set of ‘social practices.’6
I use the term ‘National Socialist hegemony’ in order to indicate the dialectic of domination and agency that characterized the political, social, and cultural atmosphere of the so-called Third Reich. Such a conceptualization is bound to change our perspectives on the functions of The Merchant within the context of Nazi propaganda. Traditionally, propaganda has often been seen as a simple process of programmed indoctrination, exerted by specific institutions and agreeing to a clear set of intentions. If – and insofar as – National Socialist rule can be regarded as a hegemonic system in the Gramscian sense of the term, however, it is necessary to apply a more open concept of propaganda. According to such a concept, propaganda emerges from complex processes of mediation in which the personal interests and intentions of individual cultural makers are negotiated with – and offer themselves for integration into – the political and ideological programs of the state apparatus. The role of the theatres in National Socialist Germany clearly is a case in point.
The relegation of The Merchant of Venice after 1933 certainly was not due to a general demotion of Shakespeare and his plays. It is true that there was some discussion about whether the works of Britain’s national poet should be allowed to play a pronounced role in German cultural life. Also, it seems that by 1939 the authorities interfered more frequently with the staging of Shakespeare’s plays (a process that actually began some time before the commencement of the war); by April 1941 even a short-lived ‘ban’ on Shakespeare productions may have been in place (Eicher 298–301). Looking at the entire National Socialist period, however, we can see Shakespeare vying with Friedrich Schiller for the place of most often produced playwright (Eicher 297). Indeed, the National Socialist hegemony was able to build on an established discourse of appropriation, according to which Shakespeare’s works had been translated or even transplanted into German culture (cf. Symington). The German Shakespeare Society had long since established so-called ‘Shakespeare-Pflege’ – that is, the ‘culture’ or even the ‘cultivation’ of Shakespeare’s works on German soil – as a national obligation.7
Although it had often been fostered by liberal nationalists such as the eminent Jewish scholar Friedrich Gundolf – whose widely influential study Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist [Shakespeare and the German Spirit] was published in 19118 – the notion that Shakespeare was somehow inherent in German culture was adaptable to reactionary and even racist readings. A good example of how racist tendencies intruded into German Shakespeare scholarship is provided by the admission of Hans F.K. Günther to the executive board of the Shakespeare Society in 1936. Indeed, Günther was not a Shakespeare scholar but the most highly profiled ‘race scientist’ in National Socialist academia. In 1937, the new board member was even allowed to present the inaugural lecture at the society’s annual meeting. He presumed to talk about ‘Shakespeare’s Girls and Women’ from the perspective of eugenics (see Günther; cf. Strobl).
If Shakespeare could be bent to serve the ends of an ideologue as fierce as Günther, why then was The Merchant of Venice at first avoided? Wilhelm Hortmann and Jörg Monschau have suggested that the reticence of theatre managers may have been one reason for the declining performance numbers: expecting that authorities would accept only a radically anti-Semitic interpretation of the issues raised by the play, the less ideologically committed probably abstained. On the other hand, the argument continues, Shakespeare’s play also offered considerable difficulties for those who were intent on promulgating anti-Semitic messages (Hortmann 135; Monschau 1–6; Márkus 148). Jessica’s role in the plot was the most obvious stumbling block; if this role is viewed from a racist perspective the comedy seems to make ‘miscegenation’ part of its dramatic resolution. In 1936 author and translator Hermann Kroepelin approached the theatre department of the Propaganda Ministry (the so-called Reichsdramaturgie) to suggest a solution. He explained that it was certainly impossible to publicly stage and condone an instance of mixing ‘Aryan blood with Jewish blood.’ At the same time, Kroepelin pointed out in his letter, The Merchant was a play ‘that, on account of its other things, we would not like to do without.’ His way out of the dilemma was to have Jessica, at the last possible moment, give in to her father’s pleadings and desist from marrying a non-Jew (qtd in Eicher 304; my translation).
A different solution, preferred by the head of the theatre department, Dr Rainer Schlösser, was to insinuate that Jessica really was Shylock’s non-Jewish foster-child. According to a list of suggested changes (qtd in Eicher 304–8) compiled by the Propaganda Ministry on the basis of the favoured Schlegel translation, all passages referring to Jessica as a Jew or as the daughter of Shylock were to be either dropped or rewritten. However, Schlösser’s version suggests that the union of Jessica and Lorenzo was not the only hurdle that the play presented in the eyes of National Socialist cultural administrators. The adaptation also expunged passages that make the conflict between Shylock and the Christians appear as a conflict between different religious rather than different ethnic or racial groups. Accordingly, Shylock’s determined refusal of Bassanio’s invitation (‘Yes, to smell pork, to eat of the habitation which your prophet, the Nazarite, conjured the devil into! I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following; but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you’ [1.3.27–30]) was cut.
The most drastic change in the Propaganda Ministry’s adaptation was to delete – entirely! – Shylock’s famous monologue in act 3, scene 1. Did Schlösser seek to evade the universalist humanism that can potentially be seen at work in this speech? I believe that there were also different concerns – concerns that relate to the status or stature of Shylock and that take us to the heart of the ambivalent relationships to the play that were at work within National Socialist society. The issue becomes clearer if we turn to the public reception of a production staged exactly at the moment of transition towards the National Socialist hegemony. In September 1932 the Deutsches Theater am Rhein, an illustrious new branch of the Cologne public theatre, was opened with The Merchant of Venice, directed by Fritz Holl with Walther Richter as Shylock. The reviews of the new production remind us about the ideological climate that was in place even before Hitler was installed as chancellor some four months later. Walter Schmits, the reviewer of the Kölnische Zeitung, described Richter’s Shylock: ‘His appearance was repulsive and vermin-like rather than terrible. He had a gaunt, sickly pale and grubby face. His thin beard seemed to have been attacked by an unappetizing lichen. His clumsy, fat body shuffled forward, waddling and staggering on its flat feet’ (qtd in Weisker 210; my translation). In a manner that is characteristic for this kind of review, the short passage boasts such a wealth of descriptive vocabulary that it is almost untranslatable. This exercise in distilling disgust serves an obvious ideological purpose: dwelling on the supposedly repellent qualities of his body, the description radicalizes Shylock’s difference and translates it into the discourse of racism.
However, Schmits’s well-nigh ritualistic incantation of abusive terms also has other – one might say ‘psychological’ – functions. As the reviewer saw it, Richter’s performance divested Shylock of all sympathetic traits and consequently freed the audience from nagging doubts concerning the legitimacy of his destruction: ‘It goes without saying that the court verdict against such a Shylock failed to have the deep effect that a heroic rendering of the role inspires.’ Rather, Schmits continues, ‘one was lead to accept, without a split conscience, the sentence against Shylock as the well-deserved punishment for his mean intentions and character’ (210). Thus, in spite of – or exactly because of – its fierceness, the review betrays a need to manage insecurities concerning Shylock. It not only struggles with an evidently well-established tradition of empathizing with the Jewish outsider as a victim but simultaneously strives to divest him of heroic might and grandeur. Schmits, one might almost be tempted to say, seems to fight an inferiority complex as well as a ‘split conscience.’ Indeed, as my first quotation from the review shows, his main point is that Richter’s Shylock seemed ‘repulsive’ (‘widerlich’) rather than ‘terrible’ (‘schrecklich’). Obviously, Schmits was eager to assure his readers that this Shylock lacked real personal power – that there was nothing to be afraid of.
A review essay in the Shakespeare Society’s yearbook for 1933, published after the beginning of Hitler’s chancellorship, described Holl’s production as ‘a clear commitment to theatre as such, to tradition, to a theatre devoted to culture, to the spiritual values of humanity’ (Weisker 211; my translation). This statement insinuates that the stage was to be regarded as the site of a fight against fundamental cultural threats – threats that Shylock was taken to represent metaphorically or metonymically. However, the reception of Holl’s 1932 production also betrays how powerful Shylock still seemed as an opponent. As I would like to suggest, the nervousness or ‘Angst’ that he inspired in many proponents of National Socialism and in cultural makers who were willing to contribute to the cultural discourses of National Socialist Germany was due less to the general potentials of Shakespeare’s text than to the stage history of the play in Germany, where both Jewish and non-Jewish actors had established a tradition of pronouncedly Jewish Shylocks that were shown to be problematic but powerful personalities.
Alexander Granach – who, interestingly, had played the role in a production directed by Holl at Berlin’s Volksbühne in 1924 – offers a particularly significant example of the tendency to render or adopt Shylock as a Jewish hero.9 Originally from Galicia (then part of Austria, now in Western Ukraine), Granach was born into a Jewish family in 1890, became a student of Max Reinhardt, and soon embarked on an eminent stage and screen career, starring in F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) among many other films. His success continued even after his flight from Germany, which eventually took him to the United States. Significantly, Granach devoted the concluding chapter of his memoirs – published in 1945 by a German exile publisher in Stockholm – to the figure of Shylock both as a theatre role and as a Jewish role model. Granach talks about the injustice done to Shylock and recounts how, as a teenager, he resolved to devote his ‘entire life to slamming this injustice into the face of the world’ (421; my translation). When he first played Shylock at the young age of twenty-nine in a 1920 production at the Munich playhouse, the actor based his performance on a tacit private fantasy concerning the character’s fate after the verdict. Convinced that ‘never can a Shylock alter his faith’ (424), the young actor imagined a character who, immediately after the trial, escapes from Venice. Granach’s Shylock eventually arrives in Ukraine, where he remarries and becomes the progenitor of an entire tribe of Jews: ‘broad-shouldered, hard-working, and hungry for new experiences’ (427). Indeed, Granach imagined himself and other Jewish immigrants from Galicia as descendants of this Shylock. According to this fantasy, some of Shylock’s offspring became actors and ‘discovered their forefather in the work of Shakespeare’: ‘From their parents and forebears they had learned about Shylock’s story of suffering. Now, on account of their kindred heart, they recognized him. And, leaning on Shakespeare’s genius, they played the character of their ancestor in a tragic and partisan [Granach’s expression is ‘parteiisch’] manner’ (427).
As an impressive array of scholars – ranging from Hermann Sinsheimer10 and Edgar Rosenberg to John Gross and James Shapiro – have demonstrated, the figure of Shylock originally evolved as a non-Jewish invention, as an epitome of and a projection screen for the fantasies that an often ignorant majority entertained of Jews and Jewishness. Since the end of the nineteenth century, Jewish actors and directors (such as Jacob Adler in the United States, Maurice Moskovitch in Britain, and Max Reinhardt in Germany) began to make notable contributions to the construction and reconstruction of the Shylock figure. It is evident, however, that their efforts were hampered or defined by the constraints of a non-Jewish discourse of alterity. It therefore seems remarkable that Granach should call on Jews to ‘recognize’ the Shylock figure as a template of Jewish self-definition. Indeed, one might almost be tempted to argue that the strategy of dealing with an increasingly powerful anti-Semitism by means of adopting and appropriating Shylock constituted a bold attempt at a ‘paradoxical intervention’ into the discourse.
However, Granach was certainly not the only protagonist of such a strategy. Arnold Zweig’s description, published in 1928, of the Shylock played by Jewish actor Rudolf Schildkraut in Max Reinhardt’s famous 1905 production, appears to tie in with Granach’s Shylock fantasy:
You will not be allowed to spit into his beard with impunity. It is not a good idea to first mistreat and provoke him, and then to fall into his hands … To pay back injuries point by point, this is what he is a man for … Schildkraut’s Shylock smells of onions and garlic – and this is a meal and a smell at least as good as slaughtered pigs and goat kids cooked in their mothers’ milk … The right of self-defence clearly is on his side, and he has a tremendous vital power that allows him to strike back even in situations when other types would have long since made an ideal of their serfdom. This is why Rudolf Schildkraut, fidgeting, portly, throaty, has been one of the most potent fascinations and shocks on the German stage. (Zweig 178–9; my translation, cf. Marx, ‘Die drei Gesichter Shylocks’ 179)
Zweig’s description probably constitutes an appropriation of the highly influential performance offered by Schildkraut.
During the 1920s, however, Fritz Kortner quite consciously tried to play the kind of Shylock that Zweig described (see fig. 2.2). In an unpublished essay entitled ‘Shylock,’ Kortner later spoke of his striving to express the character’s ‘ethical vehemence’ and ‘volcanic’ energy (qtd in Critchfield 47, note 1; my translation). In his memoirs the actor also commented on the differences between his conception of the role and that of director Jürgen Fehling, as they surfaced during rehearsals for an important 1927 production of The Merchant of Venice: ‘He, the Aryan with a slight blotch in the generation of his grandparents, wanted to reconcile, emphasizing the individual’s tragedy and cutting out the other implications of the play. I, the blotch-less full Jew, wanted to settle the score, exposing the un-Christian hate [of the Christians], and the corruption behind the colourful and carefree façade’ (Kortner 379; my translation).
In 1929 Kortner himself became the victim of a campaign that activated common prejudices against Jews for the ends of theatre politics. When Hilde Körber (the wife of Veit Harlan, who would later direct Jew Süss) accused Kortner of sexual harassment, reactionary newspaper journalists and politicians tried to use the scandal to destabilize the position of both Kortner and his mentor Leopold Jessner, then manager of the Berlin State Theatre. Having cleared himself of the allegations, it was in the role of Shylock that Kortner, after an interval of several weeks, returned to the stage. This seems to have been a deliberate choice: according to Peter Marx, Kortner had purposefully proposed a rerun of Fehling’s production of The Merchant (‘Eine Ohrfeige’ 88). The significance of Shylock as a (precarious) reference point for Jewish self-definition in opposition to the rising tide of anti-Semitism is also indicated by an essay published by Jewish author Ernst Simon in 1929 under the title ‘Lessing und die deutsche Geschichte’ [Lessing and German History]: in light of the decaying Jewish-German symbiosis, Simon called on Jews to take Shylock rather than Nathan as a role model.
Writing after the Second World War, Günther Rühle emphasized the function of theatre in Germany as an institution for defining national and social self-images. ‘The language and the gestures of the stage,’ Rühle claimed, ‘have had a definitive influence on the social life of Germany, where it has been easier to activate the stage for intellectual and political causes than in any other country’ (12; my translation). During the first third of the twentieth century Jewish actors had sometimes quite successfully ‘activated’ the stage – and, specifically, the role of Shylock – in order to assert the presence of Jews in German culture and to counter the theatricality of National Socialist politics with a different kind of theater.11 This, I would argue, is why the notorious Nazi weekly Der Stürmer [The Stormtrooper] ‘spat fire’ (Kortner 379) at Kortner’s impersonation of Shylock – and why this Shakespearean character continued to inspire a certain ‘Angst’ in the proponents of National Socialism even (or perhaps especially) after their rise to supremacy in Germany.
Both Jewish and non-Jewish actors had contributed to the evolution of Shylock as a staging ground for theatrical figurations – and fictions – of difference. However, it was the actual Jewishness of some among these resilient Shylocks that caught and occupied the imagination of the Nazis. As Richard D. Critchfield observes, ‘the name Kortner and Shylock became inseparable in Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda. If Hitler was Germany and Germany was Hitler … then in the eyes of the Nazis Kortner was also Shylock and Shylock was Kortner’ (51). Shylock had acquired profoundly ambivalent significations and functions: as a figuration of difference he simultaneously unsettled and ratified the fantasies of the Nazis. This is why the administrators of National Socialist cultural policy were so cautious about allowing Shylock to appear on the stage – and, at the same time, it is why they were so eager to make him serve their ends.
Two weeks after the November Pogroms of 1938 an article in the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei / National Socialist German Workers’ Party) newspaper Völkischer Beobachter [The People’s Observer] reminded readers of Kortner’s Shylock in Fehling’s 1927 production. Although the article claimed that Shylock was the only role in which Kortner had truly succeeded – supposedly because he had in fact played himself – it also denounced the production for presuming to emphasize the faults of the Christians rather than those of the Jew. The article concluded: ‘How quickly the German people’s good nature has led them to forget such ghosts of the past! If the Germans are only now solving the Jewish question, it is the settling of an old account’ (qtd in Critchfield 52, note 4; my translation). Critchfield refers to these pronouncements in order to point out the connections that they establish between Kortner’s Shylock during the Weimar Republic and the present persecution of Jews and the ‘future genocide’ (52). Indeed, if the Nazi authorities were showing a conspicuous reluctance to face Shylock on the boards of the theatres, the text from the Völkischer Beobachter proposes persecution and murder as the appropriate response to the provocation allegedly offered by Kortner’s interpretation of the role. It is against the background of such bewildering semantic regressions – resulting in a destructive jumble of ‘Angst’ and triumphalism, figuration and fact, theatre and reality – that the stage history of The Merchant of Venice during the Second World War must be viewed.
As mentioned above, the performance numbers for the play reached an all-time low in 1941. By that point, however, the stage had already been set for a return of The Merchant. In July 1940 the head of the Propaganda Ministry’s theatre department presented his suggestions for an adapted version to Goebbels. In his memorandum for the minister, Schlösser explained:
In agreement with previous instructions, The Merchant of Venice has been kept from Berlin theatre programs during the past years. In the meantime, however, a couple of stages in other places have tested out, with my permission, a slightly adapted version … which creates the impression that Jessica is not the Jew’s daughter but merely his foster-child … Accordingly, I do not see why we should continue to prevent performance of this classic in Berlin, in particular since skilful productions would actually be able to support our fight against the Jews. (qtd in Eicher 308; my translation)
Within three days Schlösser had the minister’s approval. Berlin’s privately owned Rose Theatre, which had originally planned to produce The Merchant in the 1937–8 season, was eventually given permission, but the production premiered only in August 1942. At that point the genocide that had begun simultaneously with the war had long since reached Germany: as of September 1941 German Jews were forced to wear the yellow badge and the first deportations from Berlin (and other major cities) took place in October of the same year.
Other than the show at the Rose Theatre (the only production of The Merchant in Berlin during the National Socialist period), during 1942, the play was also staged at the municipal theatres of Görlitz and Göttingen. Indeed, while it would be wrong to claim that the implementation of the Holocaust in Germany was accompanied by an actual wave of Merchant productions, it remains a fact that the number of performances rose significantly: while there were only three shows in 1941, the figure for 1942 (72) represents the highest number since 1933, taking The Merchant back to fourth place in the Shakespeare Society’s ranking. Such data certainly would not support claims that Shakespeare’s comedy had turned into a mainstay of National Socialist propaganda. Rather, these figures are significant for suggesting that, in the context of the genocide, the play yet again seemed possible.
In his memorandum to Goebbels, Schlösser had suggested that the amenability of The Merchant depended on the skill shown in producing the play (‘bei geschickter Darstellung’). But what constituted a ‘skilful rendering’ of Shakespeare’s comedy? The eminently successful12 and relatively well-documented production by the Rose Theatre may serve as a first example (see fig. 2.3). Considering the history of the production, it is more than probable that Schlösser’s adaptation of the play was used. Indeed, a contemporary review spoke of Jessica as Shylock’s ‘adoptive daughter’ (qtd in Bonnell 157). Throughout, there was evidently a strong emphasis on Shylock’s Jewishness and on the fundamental otherness of that Jewishness. According to one reviewer, the Shylock scenes evoked a strong ‘Ghetto atmosphere’; apparently, settings included the interior of a synagogue (qtd in Endriss 177). Actor Georg August Koch – an active party member and professed anti-Semite (cf. Bonnell 159–61; Rischbieter 86) – did not forsake the opportunity to achieve ‘strong effects through his articulation and facial expression’ (Papsdorf, Stahl, and Niessen 133; my translation).
Koch’s performance included the traditional gesture of actually whetting his knife on the sole of his shoe (Endriss 179). Simultaneously, spectators were invited to identify with the Venetians. As one review pointed out, in the trial scene parts of the audience were brought ‘close to actively participating in the events on stage’ (qtd in Endriss 178; my translation). However, the frequently repeated anecdote that Paul Rose placed extras in the auditorium who hissed and swore at Shylock during act 4 (Wulf 281; referred to by Bonnell 156 and Monschau 68) is hard to substantiate. It may well be a myth, based not only on a misreading of the review in the Völkischer Beobachter13 but also on a misleading conception of the complex workings of anti-Semitic ideology and propaganda during the National Socialist period.
Indeed, I would suggest that arousing outright anti-Jewish aggression was not the main propagandist function of the production. The Rose Theatre’s Shylock was evidently meant to be comically, rather than threateningly, ‘other.’ That the production clung to the old tradition of providing the Jewish character with a long reddish beard (Bonnell 157; cf. Endriss 178) may have been intended as an outward signal for the firm containment of this Shylock within the sphere of comedy. The yearbook of the Shakespeare Society commented: ‘In his Merchant of Venice at Berlin’s Rose Theatre, Paul Rose openly displays his inclination towards comedy, or even towards commedia dell’arte. The play was rendered as a confrontation between clever people rather than as a struggle between law and mercy’ (Papsdorf, Stahl, and Niessen 133; my translation). In his pioneering study Shakespeare on the German Stage, Wilhelm Hortmann picks up on the notion of commedia dell’arte in order to claim that, in terms of propagandistic efficacy, the Rose production must have been a surprisingly muted undertaking (135 note 41). Indeed, if the stylization of commedia dell’arte would not admit the portrayal of Shylock as a heroic figure of tragic grandeur, neither would there be room for his demonization in the manner of Jew Süss or similar propaganda efforts. But this does not mean that Paul Rose’s show was not a ‘skilful’ production according to the requirements of the regime. In the case of The Merchant, the most important propagandistic task was not to demonize but rather to downsize Shylock. It is telling that the Völkischer Beobachter headed its review of the Rose production ‘Shylock at Carnival Time’ (Grundschöttel).
In line with the more straightforward mode of propaganda that the party newspaper espoused, Wilhelm Grundschöttel’s review was actually slightly critical of the production’s mixed tone. As Grundschöttel explained, Rose – ‘holding on to the principles of comedy’ and ‘generously providing caprioles’ – had ‘run the danger of obscuring the meaning and thoughts of the poet’ (my translation). From today’s viewpoint, however, it is important to understand that, according to the ideological economy of the so-called ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ (‘people’s community’), seemingly ‘innocuous’ gestures of degradation and exclusion were at least as significant as explicit instigations to murder. Indeed, Paul Rose’s staging of the play did not refrain from allusions to the palpable contemporary reality of persecution, segregation, and deportation. Bonnell points out Wolfgang Znamenacek’s set design for Shylock’s house: ‘a small booth-like structure with a pointed-arched window and marked with a yellow star of David on top’ (157). I would like to follow Bonnell in reading this as a deliberate allusion to the so-called Judenhäuser – that is, the practice of evicting Jews from their apartments and forcing them to live in specially designated – and increasingly overpopulated – buildings. Since concentrating the victims in such houses constituted a preparation for eventual deportation and murder, the Rose production may actually be interpreted as linking Shakespeare’s comedy to the elusively implied reality of the Holocaust.
In a parliamentary address of January 1939 Hitler claimed that ‘international financial Jewry’ (‘das internationale Finanzjudentum’) would be to blame for the coming war, predicting that this conflict would result in ‘the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe’ (qtd in Verhandlungen des Reichstags 16). If Jews had thus been defined as Germany’s real enemy, the Rose production, staged at a time when the fortunes of war could be seen to be changing, was eager to suggest that this enemy, at least, was already as good as vanquished. Accordingly, a strong emphasis was placed on act 5, evoking the aftermath of conflict and the felicitous reconstitution of society. As Grundschöttel’s review in the Völkischer Beobachter noted approvingly, the show ended in a fairy tale atmosphere:
The ending with the idyll of the three loving couples on the terrace, bathed in moonlight, is then steeped in the mood of a summer night, to which [Engelbert] Humperdinck’s background music, ceremoniously played on the theatre’s newly enlarged organ, was quite well suited; and, in tune with this mood, a mute Puck with a tail, accompanied by four elves, led the play off the stage. (my translation; cf. Bonnell 156–7)
It is evident, then, that the Rose production made bold to combine quite heterogeneous moods and elements. How such stylistic eclecticism connected to the contradictions of National Socialist ideologies and to the immediate historical context of war, deportation, and genocide will become clearer as we turn to the other high-profile staging of The Merchant of Venice in this period: Lothar Müthel’s production at the Vienna Burgtheater, which premiered in May 1943.
Before a fabulous salary helped to coax him to Vienna as director of the prestigious Burgtheater, Müthel had been a member of Gustaf Gründgens’s ensemble at the Berlin State Theatre. Shortly after the war, German Shakespeare scholar Ernst Leopold Stahl claimed that Müthel – who joined the NSDAP in May 1933 – had ‘never in any way been a proponent of National Socialist party or art doctrines’ (Stahl 709; my translation). Indeed, the director clothed his compliance with the ideological demands of the hour in the mantle of aesthetic historicism. Two days before the premiere, he published an article in the Neues Wiener Tagblatt in which he meticulously expounded on his artistic principles. The thrust of the argument was that the new production would restore Shakespeare’s original intentions. During the previous decades, Müthel explained, Jews had exerted their ‘influence’ in order to ‘expand’ Shylock into ‘a leading and even tragic character.’ In contrast to this vogue, however, Shakespeare had really intended him as a ‘dangerous and cheating buffoon,’ an ‘idiot with evil intentions’ (qtd in Monschau 75–8; my translation).
Müthel referred to 18th-century German actor August Wilhelm Iffland as a historical model of how Shylock ought to be performed on stage. In his memoirs, Werner Krauss would use this lead in order to play down his part in the Vienna production (see fig. 2.4), declaring that he had merely followed Müthel’s wish to play Shylock in the manner of Iffland – a wish that the director had allegedly supported with several books from the national library.
Moreover, Krauss implied that his rendering of the role in 1943 had not been much different from the interpretation he had previously offered under (Jewish director) Max Reinhardt (208–9). Theatre critic Herbert Ihering, an admirer of Krauss, was willing to grant him this point: ‘In 1943 at the Burgtheater,’ Ihering wrote, ‘Krauss repeated his Shylock with the same comical drift but without the evil ferocity which he had displayed in 1921. In Vienna, Krauss played Shylock as an odd and funny lout who, in the trial scene, fails to grasp why the Doge and the judge should have anything against him’ (Ihering 60; my translation and emphasis). As descriptions of Krauss’s outward performance at the Burgtheater, these observations may actually be pertinent. They fail to take into account, however, the fact that the comical deflation of Shylock’s power – as well as the containment of the horror of his destruction – were actually the main requirements of Nazi propaganda at this particular moment in history.14 Siegfried Melchinger – who would become a highly influential theatre critic and theatre scholar after the war – published an enthusiastic review of the Vienna production. Writing in the same newspaper in which Müthel had pronounced his dramatic principles, Melchinger fully ratified the director’s claims, calling the production ‘less a new interpretation of Shylock than the restoration of the drama as a work of art.’ In particular, the review stressed Müthel’s truthfulness to the text. As Melchinger professed, the director had ‘changed not a syllable and made hardly any cuts’ (my translation). At first sight, it may seem surprising that the surviving prompt book for the Burgtheater production confirms this latter claim: apart from minor omissions that kept open the possibility that Jessica is not really Shylock’s daughter, not too many changes had been made in the Schlegel translation; in contrast to the Propaganda Ministry’s suggestions (see above), Shylock’s great monologue was left untouched.15
In fact, it is likely that the ideological value of The Merchant of Venice as performed at the Burgtheater in 1943 did not really depend on the massive propagandistic interventions that most of the later commentators seem to have taken for granted.16 Rather, the particular ideological strategy with which Müthel complied consisted in appropriating a seemingly authentic version of Shakespeare’s work into the social and historical context of a Vienna whose Jewish inhabitants had recently been expelled or deported. In such an environment, seemingly unobtrusive shifts in articulation and accentuation were probably sufficient to make an Elizabethan comedy sanction a totalitarian politics of deportation and murder.
According to Melchinger, the production not only presented the play in the proper format of comedy but also did justice to its ‘fairy tale’ qualities. Thanks to these features, Melchinger argued, Müthel managed to integrate the heterogeneous elements of the play into a convincing whole. To describe this feat of integration, the reviewer used the term ‘Bindung,’ which can mean ‘binding together’ as well as ‘tying down.’ Melchinger wrote: ‘The laughter is carried from one sphere to the next. When Shylock appears, there is no longer the merest hint of seriousness. And even Shylock’s merriness does not stick out in comparison to that of the other characters. Here, too, everything remains bound to the centre of the play’ (my translation and emphasis). Jörg Monschau offers an interesting – and, I believe, pertinent – interpretation of the ideological subtext inherent in Melchinger’s essay: ‘By “Bindung” Melchinger really meant drowning out Shylock. This was realized by the seamless, inconspicuous, and collective transition from general mirthfulness to the group derision of an involuntarily comical clown, who was still the enemy but had somehow lost the stature of a serious opponent.’ As Monschau observes, this stance indicates a shift from previous anti-Semitic propaganda: ‘What Melchinger describes as the gist of the performance already smacks of the arrogance of the victor’ (Monschau 80; my translation).
According to such an interpretation, there was a direct and real connection between the genocide and the Vienna production. Contrary to ordinary expectations, however, the most important link was not in the accentuation of the familiar clichés of the demon Jew (though many reviewers certainly sought and found these clichés in Krauss’s interpretation of Shylock).17 Rather, the connection between the Holocaust and the Burgtheater’s production of The Merchant of Venice consisted primarily in the degree to which that production built on and ratified the pastness of the Jewish presence in Austria and Germany. Not even the most indifferent member in the audience could have been unaware of the disappearance of Vienna’s 200,000 Jewish inhabitants. Up to the end of 1941 many had been able to emigrate; almost all of the remaining 60,000 Jews were deported between October 1941 and October 1942. Judging from Melchinger’s review, expulsion, deportation, and genocide shimmered through the surface of the Burgtheater production with the irreversibility and the intangibility of archetypes. It seems incredible that Melchinger should have spelt out these connections – but it is difficult to read the following sentence in any other way: ‘Behind the Jew we can see the wicked man of the fairy tale, the unearthly maneater, the bogey man, who, just like the witch, will finally have to be shoved into the oven’ (Melchinger; my translation).
During the Second World War theatre was one of the truly important devices of cultural policy on the home front, but it was also a means for keeping up the morale of fighting troops, and it served as a tool for cultural pretension in occupied territories. Due to the memoirs of Inge Stolten, a member of the Minsk German Theatre, we know of a production of The Merchant of Venice that premiered there in September 1943, at the time when the so-called German Ghetto in Minsk was being liquidated. Stolten comments: ‘I was in the place where that was being realized which Hitler, Himmler, and their coterie had planned such a long time ago: the “final solution of the Jewish question”’ (87; my translation).18 In fact, the program notes for the production claimed ‘contemporary relevance’ for the play, stating that ‘we in the East experience the Jewish-Aryan race problem more immediately than the people back home’ (qtd in Stolten 85–6). Stolten, who mentions that a bomb went off during one of the shows (100–1), does not describe the production in detail. I think it unlikely, however, that its primary function was to increase the audience’s hatred of Jews. Rather, it may be assumed that the performance was devised to offer German administrators and Reichswehr men – as well as the ‘well-behaved SS officers,’ each of whom, Stolten surmises, ‘might himself have taken part in the murders’ (86) – a modicum of emotional relief in the context of ongoing killings and deportations. In such a context the ‘romance’ aspects of the play – the scenes of social reconstruction in a Belmontian realm of music and female beauty that follow on Shylock’s sudden exit – must have been of particular relevance. Like Müthel’s production at the Burgtheater several months earlier, The Merchant in Minsk was probably less an instigation to genocide than a veiled acknowledgement and simultaneous displacement of the murders committed while Shylock trod the boards of the theatre.
Following an order by Goebbels, all German theatres shut down by the end of August 1944.19 Only a few weeks later Veit Harlan contacted the Propaganda Minister to discuss a film version of The Merchant of Venice.20 The role of Shylock was to go to Werner Krauss, who had played Shylock at the Burgtheater and with whom Harlan had already collaborated in the production of Jew Süss. As Bonnell points out, ‘[i]t is perhaps a comment on Joseph Goebbels’ priorities as Nazi Germany approached total defeat that he embraced this concept’ (167). It is indeed startling to find a propaganda apparatus bent to churn out lavish film productions even after defeat had become inevitable. More interesting, however, is the question of why The Merchant was chosen as the basis for such a terminal effort. As plans for The Merchant project were being finalized, Harlan was completing Kolberg, a film set during the time of the Napoleonic Wars, about a besieged town that held out against all odds. Such a story might have served to spur on Germans to desperate acts of resistance, but Shakespeare’s play is hardly suited to similar ends. It is possible that the Merchant film was intended to communicate a kind of legacy that the faltering Nazi empire was to leave behind. If so, Shakespeare’s problematic comedy must have been intended not as a call to arms but as a pretense to some sort of victory. Indeed, the film project seems to corroborate my argument that the place of The Merchant within the psycho-ideological economy of the so-called Volksgemeinschaft was significantly different from that of the film documents (such as Jew Süss or Der ewige Jude [The Eternal Jew]) that tend to determine our understanding of National Socialist anti-Semitism. Rather than paving the way to segregation and murder, the propagandistic efficacy of National Socialist Merchant productions presupposed the Holocaust as both an ‘open secret’ and a fait accompli.
This essay emerged from a research project headed by Professor Sabine Schülting at Freie Universität Berlin. Under the title ‘Shylock und der (neue) “deutsche Geist,”’ the project investigates the German reception of The Merchant of Venice from 1945 to the immediate present. Our focus is on the functions of the Shylock figure within German discourses of remembrance. See the project website at http://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/v/shylock/.
1 On the reception of Merchant in National Socialist Germany, see esp. Eicher 302–8; Monschau 19–25 and 68–87; Symington 244–51; and Bonnell 119–69. See also Márkus 148–54; Hortmann 134–7; Endriss 170–80; Ledebur 213–18; Drewniak 250–1; and Wulf 280–3.
2 See the section ‘Theaterschau: Statistischer Überblick’ in the various volumes of the Shakespeare Jahrbuch. These reports generally refer to the year preceding publication. From 1942 to 1945, however, publication of the yearbook was interrupted. The 1946 issue contains the statistics for 1941 and 1942; there are no statistics for 1943 and 1944.
3 It seems, however, that only a limited number of concrete cases of intervention against planned productions of The Merchant are actually documented.
4 See the more detailed discussion of the film project at the end of this essay.
5 See Frank Bajohr, ‘Vom antijüdischen Konsens zum schlechten Gewissen: Die deutsche Gesellschaft und die Judenverfolgung 1933–1945,’ Frank Bajohr and Dieter Pohl, Der Holocaust als offenes Geheimnis: Die Deutschen, die NS-Führung und die Alliierten (Munich: Beck, 2006) 15–79. See also Peter Longerich, ‘Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!’ Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933–1945 (Berlin: Siedler, 2006).
6 Cf. Alf Lüdtke, ‘Funktionseliten: Täter, Mit-Täter, Opfer? – Zu den Bedingungen des deutschen Faschismus,’ Herrschaft als soziale Praxis: Historische und sozial-anthropologische Studien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1991) 559–90.
7 See Ruth Freifrau von Ledebur, Der Mythos vom deutschen Shakespeare: Die Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft zwischen Politik und Wissenschaft 1918–1945 (Köln: Böhlau, 2002). (Eds.: For the influence of this book on Japanese appreciation of Shakespeare see Ryuta Minami’s essay in this volume.)
8 There is a persistent cliché that Gundolf, who taught German literature at Heidelberg, was the admired teacher of Joseph Goebbels, perhaps even the supervisor of his dissertation. While it is an intriguing fact that the paths of Goebbels and Gundolf crossed, there is little evidence for such close contact. Goebbels’s diaries speak only of a single meeting; he saw the professor in his office, apparently intending to discuss a possible dissertation. It seems that Gundolf declined, so Max Freiherr von Waldberg – another Jewish professor – supervised Goebbels’s work. For these facts, see Michael Petrow, Der Dichter als Führer? Zur Wirkung Stefan Georges im Dritten Reich (Marburg an der Lahn: Tectum, 1995) 69–71. For the argument that Gundolf can be seen as a sort of mediator between Stefan George, on the one hand, and National Socialist cultural politics, on the other, see Franz Leschnitzer’s ‘George-Gundolf-Goebbels,’ which was published in Moscow in 1934 (Internationale Literatur 4.4: 115–34).
9 I am indebted to Professor Irmela von der Lühe (Freie Universität Berlin) for alerting me to Granach and his autobiography.
10 Significantly, Sinsheimer had completed his original manuscript in 1937, that is, prior to his flight from Germany. The text actually passed the censor and, if the approaching war had not halted the project, might have been printed for circulation in Germany.
11 This perspective can also be applied to Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942). On the film and its references to Merchant, see Elisabeth Bronfen, ‘Man wird weder als Frau noch als Jude geboren: Was wir von Lubitsch über den Kaufmann von Venedig lernen können,’ Shylock nach dem Holocaust: Zur Geschichte einer deutschen Erinnerungsfigur, ed. Zeno Ackermann and Sabine Schülting (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011) 201–17.
12 As of the end of 1942 the Rose production had reached fifty performances – clearly more than any other Shakespeare production of that year (see statistics in Shakespeare Jahrbuch 80/81 [1946]: 113–21).
13 The passage ‘and Paul Rose had the voice of the people rise from the gallery, with outraged cries and hisses’ (Grundschöttel; my translation) does not refer to the audience on the balconies of the theatre but to the Venetian populace placed on a gallery on stage. (For information on the stage setting of this production, see Endriss 178.)
14 Cf. Habicht: ‘[E]ven Werner Krauss’s impersonation of the Jew in Müthel’s notorious Viennese production of 1943 did not differ substantially from the one he himself had played under Max Reinhardt in the twenties. But it did now create a macabre effect deriving from the context of organized anti-Semitism and the holocaust’ (117).
15 I am indebted to Ludwig Schnauder (University of Vienna) for providing me with a copy of the prompt book from Müthel’s production. Cf. Ludwig Schnauder.
16 See, for example, Oliver Rathkolb, Führertreu und gottbegnadet: Künstlereliten im Dritten Reich (Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1991), who has argued that the Burgtheater production constituted nothing less than a brutal ‘ideological (i.e. anti-Semitic) rape of the original text’ (162; my translation).
17 The most notorious quotation comes from Richard Biedrzynski’s 1944 book Schauspieler, Regisseure, Intendanten: ‘And then, suddenly, as if it were an uncanny shadow, something revoltingly alien and astonishingly repellent drags itself across the stage: a marionette jingling its ducats, wearing a black gaberdine and a garishly yellow synagogue shawl – the Shylock of Werner Krauss’ (qtd in Wulf 282; my translation).
18 On occupational politics and the Holocaust in Belorussia, see Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999); see especially 738, on the Minsk production of The Merchant.
19 Due to the theatrical activities of German prisoners of war, Goebbels’s order was not the end of the stage history of The Merchant in the context of the war. Bonnell has information on a production organized in September 1944 at Tatura Camp 3 in Victoria, Australia. Apparently, the program notes contained racist quotations by Alfred Rosenberg and Hans F.K. Günther (Bonnell 165–6; 221 note 252). See also Krystyna Kujawińska-Courtney’s contribution to this volume, which discusses a 1943 production by Polish officers in a prisoner-of-war camp at Murnau, Germany, in 1943.
20 On the film project, see Bonnell 167–9 and Harlan 199–205. See also Dorothea Hollstein, Jud Süss und die Deutschen: Antisemitische Vorurteile im nationalsozialistischen Spielfilm (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1983) 175–82. In contrast to Bonnell and Holstein, Harlan suggests that the idea of producing a film version had come from Goebbels. Characteristically, Harlan spells out the dialectics of National Socialist propaganda in order to place himself firmly on one side of the issue and Goebbels on the other: while the director would have liked to produce a harmless comedy, it is claimed, the Propaganda Minister ‘absolutely wanted a horrifying representation’ (203; my translation).
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