Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (20 page)

their head, the opportunity finally to demand a 100 per cent ‘Jew-free’ cultural

life;
53
it was the ‘Jewish question’, still unresolved in spite of all efforts to the contrary, that according to this view stood in the way of a truly homogeneous

‘German culture’. In fact it was only after the pogrom of November 1938 that this

cleansing process came to an end with the abolition of the last admission regu-

lations for Jewish artists, as well as with the removal of the last Jewish cultural

enterprises.
54

However, that certainly did not mean an end to the efforts to achieve the

Entjudung of German cultural life. This was because the controlling cultural

political institutions—the Propaganda Ministry, the Reich Chamber of Culture,

‘The Rosenberg Bureau’, the Party Censorship Board, and others—had, following

the watchword of Entjudung or ‘removal of Jewish influence’, created an instru-

ment that could be deployed almost at will, to take action against unpopular

artistic trends, predominantly against representatives of modern art, and could

open up the culture industry to artists close to the Party.
55
This process had still not come to an end with the removal of the Jews: as late as 1942, for example, a

National Socialist author recorded the continuing after-effects of ‘unworldly and

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83

Jew-lovers lost to their own kind (artvergessen)’, who had continued the Jewish

‘demolition work’ even after the assumption of power, and had to be hunted down

as ‘slaves’ and ‘comrades’ of the Jews.
56
The new ‘German’ culture could only arise out of a far-reaching cleansing process, permanently dissociating itself from

‘foreign’ influences that had already penetrated far into the German Volk.

The fact that the ‘first major German art exhibition’ showing Nazi-inspired

art, in 1937, was opened at the same time as the propaganda exhibition ‘Entar-

tete Kunst’ (degenerate art), and in the same place, in Munich,
57
reveals the complementary function that the Entjudung of the culture industry and the

construction of a ‘German’ culture had: the new ‘German’ art was not explicable

in its own terms, but needed a constant reference to the negative example of the

‘degenerate’ trend in art. Although the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition showed

primarily non-Jewish artists, in his speech at the Reich Chamber of Culture’s

annual congress in

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1937

Goebbels significantly singled out the exhibition as a

striking example of ‘how deeply the pernicious Jewish spirit has penetrated

German cultural life’—a striking example, in fact, of the usefulness of the idea

of the Verjudung of art as an all-purpose weapon against unpopular trends

in art.

The programmatic guidelines for German film, published by a Nazi cultural

functionary in 1934, make it clear how ‘German character’ was to unfold on screen

through the removal of actors ‘of non-German descent’: ‘Of particular importance

for the education of all Germans into national consciousness will be the depiction

of the German character in film. National German film should show the German

Volk people of its own kind, whose characters and motives it understands, whose

words are addressed to it from the soul. Hence the law requires the actors to be of

German descent. In future, therefore, actors will appear on the screen in whom the

German will see his own race embodied, and who teach him to love and honour

his nation. German people, German atmosphere, German disposition, German

spirit must make their mark on film. Then it will help to fulfil the great task of

German art in holding up to the German Volk a mirror of its soul.’
59

What is particularly interesting about this quotation in our context is the fact

that the removal of actors ‘of non-German descent’ (and other measures for the

Entjudung of the film industry) should have formed the preconditions for the

intended ‘German character’ of film. But in what concrete way did this ‘German

character’ find expression in the individual film productions?
60
The great mass of films, aimed at the light entertainment of the audience, avoided depicting their

protagonists as emphatically ‘German’, but tried on the contrary—not least by

employing a series of non-German stars—to match the international standard of

film entertainment.
61
Those films which did risk emphatically ‘German’ themes generally did so by placing their ‘German’ or ‘Germanic’ heroes opposite comic-ally caricatured ‘foreigners’, whether they were Jews, Slavic ‘sub-humans’,

or Englishmen or Frenchmen identified as Western and decadent (meaning:

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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

Jewish-influenced).
62
The characterization of the ‘German’ could not occur without a constant reference to the ‘non-German’.

The most important change in the repertoires of German theatres after 1933 was

due to the fact that Jewish and politically undesirable contemporary dramatists,

who had previously written almost 40 per cent of plays performed, now disap-

peared almost completely, making way for National Socialist and völkisch authors,

who now dominated repertoires with a share of almost 60 per cent—also to the

detriment of foreign dramatists, whose share also fell. The Entjudung of theatre

repertoires—the banning of plays written by Jewish authors or those reflecting the

‘Jewish-liberalist’ spirit of the Weimar Republic, was thus the immediate precon-

dition for the conquest of the theatre by authors close to National Socialism.
63

National Socialist architectural theorists did their best to distance ‘German’

architecture from a ‘degenerate’ international or modern architecture described as

‘Jewish’ or ‘culturally Bolshevik’. Jewish speculation had led to the abandonment

of ‘blood-and-soil-bound’ building methods and thus to the deracination of

architecture.
64
‘The architectural non-culture, which was propagated under the slogan “New Objectivity”, and carried out even in the face of its unanimous

rejection by the people, was nothing but an attempt to remove the cultural value

of the German Volk’s specific homeland and impose Jewish cultural Bolshevism

upon it.’
65

The intended Renaissance of ‘German architecture’ was linked with the terms

Volk, organism, homeland, family, blood, and soil, even though no solid archi-

tectural programme could have developed from it.
66

The increasing penetration of everyday life by a Nazi-inspired aesthetic, in areas

such as advertising, fashion, and design, for example, was also impossible without

a constant polemic against the travesty of a ‘Judaized’ (verjudet) everyday culture.

Thus the control of advertising
67
by the Nazi state (via the ‘Advertising Council of German Commerce’ and the almost complete monopolization of advertising by

the Party) went hand in hand with a material and stylistic Entjudung and

Verdeutschung (Germanization) of advertising. Advertising, according to the

compulsory guidelines of the Advertising Council, must be German ‘in spirit

and expression’.
68
What the ‘German character’ of advertising might have been was never properly explained; attempts to give the guidelines concrete form or

even encode them in a law were fruitless. Instead, officials restricted themselves to

the contrast between ‘respectable’ German advertising and supposedly Jewish-

dominated ‘Anglo-American commercials’, although without being able to

develop a particularly Nazi style of advertising.

One effort to adapt the everyday look of the ‘Third Reich’ to National Socialist

ideas was the propagation of ‘Aryan-style fashion’. Under this slogan the National

Socialists throughout the whole of the Reich set up associations and organizations

which—supported by strident journalism—were supposed to organize fashion in

a uniform manner, encourage export, destroy the exemplary function of Paris, and

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85

above all exclude Jewish fashion designers.
69
At the same time, however, it remained entirely unclear what was supposed to be specifically ‘German’ about

the new style: in fact, ‘Aryan-style fashion’ was more or less exhausted in the

struggle against the ‘Jewish ready-made’, which was represented as the gateway of

international, above all French fashion. The complete Entjudung of the ready-

made industry was depicted as the precondition for the realization of a ‘German’

fashion, and the polemic against ‘alien’ fashion did not stop even after successful

Aryanization.
70
The slogan of Entjudung became a substitute for the lack of creativity of ‘Aryan’ fashion designers—and in the end it gave National Socialist

fashion functionaries crucial controlling functions in the fashion industry.

Even in the design of functional objects and furniture, the regime’s attempts—

we might think, for example, of the ‘Beauty of Work’ office of the German Labour

Front—to attempt an autonomous design style remained substantially unsuccessful;

official declarations distanced themselves from avant-garde visions such as those

developed in the ‘Jewish’ Bauhaus, but design remained to a large extent trapped

in the functionalistic design of the Weimar era.
71

The various examples have demonstrated that the Entjudung and racial ‘cleans-

ing’ of German society was a process that went far beyond the mere removal of the

Jews and other unwanted ‘foreigners’ in the different areas of life. In fact it was a

much more comprehensive process: as the homogeneous, entirely German Volks-

gemeinschaft could not be brought about in a positive way, either conceptually or

in practice, the National Socialists fell back on imposing it negatively, through

permanent differentiation, distancing, and liberation from an apparently omni-

present and omnipotent enemy.

Rhetorical as this process of dissociation remained, the above examples have

demonstrated that it affected practically all areas of life and by no means stopped

with the actual exclusion of Jews, but remained a lasting theme during the Nazi

period. Behind the phase of Entjudung there lay a very real claim in terms of

political power: the imposition of the Nazis’ claim to total power.

The Emergence of a Jewish Sector as a

Consequence of the Politics of Repression

The segregation policy promoted on a massive scale in 1935—as a consequence of

that year’s anti-Semitic campaign—and then again after the end of the Olympic

Games from the end of 1936 had profound consequences for the everyday life of

the Jewish minority. In so far as such generalizations are possible at all, in the

years 1935 and 1936 any private contact still existing between Jews and non-Jews

seems largely to have been severed. Numerous reports and memoirs make it clear

that the whole range of everyday relationships seems to have been affected by it:

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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

children stopped playing together; the members of youth cliques dispersed; polite

gestures such as everyday greetings ceased to be exchanged; neighbours stopped

talking to each other; visits to each other’s houses and communal visits to pubs

became a thing of the past; those friendships and love affairs that still existed fell

apart; even the joint participation of Jews and non-Jews in funerals became rarer.

Segregation was imposed through an interplay of government departments, the

Party apparatus, police, and Gestapo, which was able to rely on the energetic

support of the populace.
72
Of course, isolation tended to be more prevalent in smaller towns, where Jews had already become too frightened to go into the streets

and had become completely isolated, than it was in the anonymity of the big cities.

This strengthened the progress of migration from the countryside to the city and

worsened still further the precarious life of those impoverished, isolated Jews in

the countryside.
73

The many consequences of persecution for the life of the Jews themselves

cannot be pursued here in every last detail. The consequences for family life and

the relations between the sexes, the increased focus upon Jewish culture and a

more intense religious life as well as strategies of resistance and survival developed

by the various Jewish organizations are themes that have been extensively dis-

cussed in the literature.
74
Here we will merely attempt to provide an overview of Jewish self-organization under the immediate pressure of persecution and locate

that self-organization within the history of Judenpolitik.

The economic consequences of the increasing ‘creeping’ exclusion of many

Jews from the economy, which set in at the end of 1936 after the ‘boycott’ had

already considerably undermined their economic situation, were particularly

grave. The considerable reduction of economic possibilities as a consequence of

exclusion now led to characteristic relocations of Jewish economic activity, for

example to their heightened activity as salespeople (until that profession came

under greater pressure from the authorities late in 1937), or the relocation of

businesses to homes and thus to typical poverty careers.
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