Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (2 page)

PART I

A Beginning and an End

CHAPTER
1

Into the Third Reich

I

The exodus from Germany of Jewish and left-wing artists and intellectuals began during the early months of 1933, almost immediately after Adolf Hitler’s accession to power on January 30. The philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin left Berlin for Paris on March 18. Two days later he wrote to his colleague and friend, Gershom Scholem, who lived in Palestine: “I can at least be certain that I did not act on impulse…. Nobody among those who are close to me judges the matter differently.”
¹
The novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, who had reached the safety of Switzerland, confided in his fellow writer Arnold Zweig: “It was too late for me to save anything…. All that was there is lost.”
²

The conductors Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter were compelled to flee. Walter was forbidden access to his Leipzig orchestra, and, as he was about to conduct a special concert of the Berlin Philharmonic, he was informed that, according to rumors circulated by the Propaganda Ministry, the hall of the Philharmonic would be burned down if he did not withdraw. Walter left the country.
³
Hans Hinkel, the new president of the Prussian Theater Commission and also responsible for the “de-Judaization” of cultural life in Prussia, explained in the April 6
Frankfurter Zeitung
that Klemperer and Walter had disappeared from the musical scene because there was no way to protect them against the “mood” of a German public long provoked by “Jewish artistic liquidators.”
⁴

Bruno Walter’s concert was not canceled: Richard Strauss conducted it.
⁵
This, in turn, led Arturo Toscanini to announce in early June that, in protest, he would not conduct at the Bayreuth Festival. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels noted laconically in his diary: “Toscanini canceled Bayreuth.”
⁶

The same public “mood” must have convinced the Dresden Opera House to hound out its music director, Fritz Busch, no Jew himself but accused of having too many contacts with Jews and of having invited too many Jewish artists to perform.
⁷
Other methods were also used: When the Hamburg Philharmonic Society published its program for the celebration of Brahms’s hundredth birthday, it was informed that Chancellor Hitler would be ready to give his patronage to the celebrations on condition that all Jewish artists (among them the pianist Rudolf Serkin) disappear from the program. The offer was gladly accepted.
⁸

The rush to de-Judaize the arts produced its measure of confusion. Thus, on April 1, a Lübeck newspaper reported that in the small town of Eutin, in nearby Schleswig-Holstein, the last concert of the winter season had offered a surprise: “In place of the Kiel City Orchestra’s excellent cellist, John de J., Professor Hofmeier presented a piano recital. We are informed that it has been established that John de J. is Jewish.” Soon after, however, there was a telegram from de J. to Hofmeier: “Claim false. Perfect documents.” On May 5 the district party leader S. announced that the Dutch-born German citizen de J. was a Lutheran, as several generations of his forebears had been.
⁹

The relief felt at not being Jewish must have been immense. In his (barely) fictionalized rendition of the career of the actor and later manager of the Berlin National Theater, Göring’s protégé Gustav Gründgens, Klaus Mann described that very peculiar euphoria: “But even if the Nazis remained in power, what had he, Höfgen [Gründgens], to fear from them? He belonged to no party. And he wasn’t a Jew. This fact above all others—that he wasn’t a Jew—struck Hendrik all of a sudden as immensely comforting and important. He had never in the past estimated the true worth of this considerable and unsuspected advantage. He wasn’t a Jew and so he could be forgiven everything.”
¹⁰

A few days after the Reichstag elections of March 5, all members of the Prussian Academy of the Arts received a confidential letter from the poet Gottfried Benn asking them whether they were ready, “in view of the ‘changed political situation,’” to remain members of the parent Academy of Arts and Sciences, in which case they would have to abstain from any criticism of the new German regime. Moreover the members would have to manifest the right “national cultural” attitude by signing a declaration of loyalty. Nine of the twenty-seven members of the literature section replied negatively, among them the novelists Alfred Döblin, Thomas Mann, Jakob Wassermann, and Ricarda Huch. Mann’s brother, the novelist Heinrich Mann, had already been expelled because of his left-wing political views.
¹¹

Max von Schillings, the new president of the Prussian Academy, put pressure on the “Aryan”
^*
novelist Ricarda Huch not to resign. There was an exchange of letters, with Huch in her final retort alluding to Heinrich Mann’s dismissal and to the resignation of Alfred Döblin, who was Jewish: “You mention the gentlemen Heinrich Mann and Dr. Döblin. It is true that I did not agree with Heinrich Mann, and I did not always agree with Dr. Döblin, although on some matters I did. In any case I can only wish that all non-Jewish Germans would seek as conscientiously to recognize and to do what is right, would be as open, honest and decent as I have always found him to be. In my judgment he could not have acted any differently than he did, in the face of the harassment of the Jews. That my resignation from the Academy is not motivated by sympathy for these gentlemen, in spite of the particular respect and sympathy I have for Dr. Döblin, is something everyone who knows me, either personally or from my books, will recognize. Herewith I declare my resignation from the academy.”
¹²

Living in Vienna, the novelist Franz Werfel, who was Jewish, perceived things differently. He was quite willing to sign the declaration, and on March 19 he wired Berlin for the necessary forms. On May 8 Schillings informed Werfel that he could not remain a member of the academy; two days later a number of his books were among those publicly burned. In the summer of 1933, after the establishment of the Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer, or RKK), and as part of it, of the Reich Association of German Writers, Werfel tried again: “Please note that I am a Czechoslovak citizen,” he wrote, “and a resident of Vienna. At the same time, I wish to declare that I have always kept my distance from any political organization or activity. As a member of the German minority in Czechoslovakia, resident in Austria, I am subject to the laws of these states.” Needless to say, Werfel never received an answer.
¹³
The novelist possibly wanted to ensure the German sale of his forthcoming novel,
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh
, a story based on the extermination of the Armenians by the Turks during the World War. The book was in fact published in the Reich at the end of 1933, but finally banned in February 1934.
¹⁴

Albert Einstein was visiting the United States on January 30, 1933. It did not take him long to react. Describing what was happening in Germany as a “psychic illness of the masses,” he ended his return journey in Ostend (Belgium) and never again set foot on German soil. The Kaiser Wilhelm Society dismissed him from his position; the Prussian Academy of Sciences expelled him; his citizenship was rescinded. Einstein was no longer a German. Prominence and fame shielded no one. Max Reinhardt was expelled from the directorship of the German Theater, which was “transferred to the German people,” and fled the Reich. Max Liebermann, at eighty-six possibly the best-known German painter of the time, was too old to emigrate when Hitler came to power. Formerly president of the Prussian Academy of Arts, and in 1933 its honorary president, he held the highest German decoration, the Pour le Merite. On May 7 Liebermann resigned from the academy. As the painter Oskar Kokoschka wrote from Paris in a published letter to the editor of the
Frankfurter Zeitung
, none of Liebermann’s colleagues deemed it necessary to express a word of recognition or sympathy.
¹⁵
Isolated and ostracized, Liebermann died in 1935; only three “Aryan” artists attended his funeral. His widow survived him. When, in March 1943, the police arrived, with a stretcher, for the bedridden eighty-five-year-old woman to begin her deportation to the East, she committed suicide by swallowing an overdose of the barbiturate Veronal.
¹⁶

As peripheral as it may seem in hindsight, the cultural domain was the first from which Jews (and “leftists”) were massively expelled. Schillings’s letter was sent immediately after the March 1933 Reichstag elections, and publication of Hinkel’s interview preceded the promulagation of the Civil Service Law of April 7, which will be discussed further on. Thus, even before launching their first systematic anti-Jewish measures of exclusion, the new rulers of Germany had turned against the most visible representatives of the “Jewish spirit” that henceforth was to be eradicated. In general the major anti-Jewish measures the Nazis would take from then on in the various domains were not only acts of terror but also symbolic statements. This dual function expressed the pervasive presence of ideology within the system: Its tenets had to be ritually reasserted, with the persecution of chosen victims as part of the ongoing ritual. There was more. The double significance of the regime’s initiatives engendered a kind of split consciousness in a great part of the population: For instance, people might not agree with the brutality of the dismissals of Jewish intellectuals from their positions, but they welcomed the cleansing of the “excessive influence” of Jews from German cultural life. Even some of the most celebrated German exiles, such as Thomas Mann, were not immune, at least for a time, from this kind of dual vision of the events.

A non-Jew, though married to one, Mann was away from Germany when the Nazis came to power, and he did not return. Writing to Einstein on May 15, he mentioned the painfulness to him of the very idea of exile: “For me to have been forced into this role, something thoroughly wrong and evil must surely have taken place. And it is my deepest conviction that this whole ‘German Revolution’ is indeed wrong and evil.”
¹⁷
The author of
The Magic Mountain
was no less explicit months later, in a letter to his one-time friend, the ultranationalist historian of literature Ernst Bertram, who had become a staunch supporter of the new regime: “‘We shall see,’ I wrote to you a good while back, and you replied defiantly: ‘Of course we shall.’ Have you begun to see? No, for they are holding your eyes closed with bloody hands, and you accept the ‘protection’ only too gladly. The German intellectuals—forgive the word, it is intended as a purely objective term—will in fact be the very last to begin to see, for they have too deeply, too shamefully collaborated and exposed themselves.”
¹⁸
But in fact much ambiguity remained in Mann’s attitudes: To ensure the continuing publication and sale of his books in Germany, he carefully avoided speaking out against the Nazis for several years. And, at the outset, some Nazi organizations, such as the National Socialist Students Association, were careful about him as well: Thomas Mann’s books were not included in the notorious May 10, 1933, auto-da-fé.
¹⁹

Mann’s ambivalence (or worse), particularly with regard to the Jews, surfaces in his diary entries during this first phase: “Isn’t after all something significant and revolutionary on a grand style happening in Germany?” he wrote on April 4, 1933. “As for the Jews…. That Alfred Kerr’s arrogant and poisonous Jewish garbling of Nietzsche is now excluded, is not altogether a catastrophe; and also the de-Judaization of justice isn’t one.”
²⁰
He indulged in such remarks time and again, but it is perhaps in the diary entry of July 15, 1934, that Mann expressed his strongest resentments: “I was thinking about the absurdity of the fact, that the Jews, whose rights in Germany are being abolished and who are being pushed out, have an important share in the spiritual issues which express themselves, obviously with a grimace, in the political system [Nazism] and that they can in good part be considered as the precursors of the anti-liberal turn.”
²¹
As examples, Mann mentioned the poet Karl Wolfskehl, a member of the esoteric literary and intellectual circle around the poet Stefan George, and particularly the Munich eccentric Oskar Goldberg. There is some discrepancy between such expressions as “an important share,” “in good part,” and “the precursors of the anti-liberal turn” and these two marginal examples.
²²
He went further: “In general I think that many Jews [in Germany] agree in their deepest being with their new role as tolerated guests who are not part of anything except, it goes without saying, as far as taxes are concerned.”
²³
Mann’s anti-Nazi position was not to become clear, unambiguous, and public until early 1936.
²⁴

Mann’s attitude illustrates the pervasiveness of split consciousness, and thus explains the ease with which Jews were expelled from cultural life. Apart from a few courageous individuals such as Ricarda Huch, there was no countervailing force in that domain—or, for that matter, in any other.

Hitler certainly had no split consciousness regarding anything Jewish. Yet, in 1933 at least, he deferred to Winifred Wagner (the English-born widow of Richard Wagner’s son Siegfried, who was the guiding force at Bayreuth): “Amazingly,” as Frederic Spotts puts it, that year Hitler even allowed the Jews Alexander Kipnis and Emanuel List to sing in his presence.
²⁵

II

Three days before the Reichstag elections of March, the Hamburg edition of the Jewish newspaper
Israelitisches Familienblatt
published a telling article under the headline
HOW SHALL WE VOTE ON MARCH
5?: “There are many Jews,” the article said, “who approve of the present-day right wing’s economic program but who are denied the possibility of joining its parties, as these have, in a completely illogical way, associated their economic and political goals with a fight against Jewry.”
²⁶