Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (22 page)

The undercurrent of sympathy for the persecuted Jews must have been significant enough for Goebbels to address it in a speech that month. Goebbels “attacked those of his countrymen who…‘shamelessly,’ argued that the Jew, after all, was a human being too.” According to Robert Weltsch, who at the time was the editor of the
Jüdische Rundschau
, Goebbels’s wrath reveals that a whispering campaign was still going on, indicating some measure of indignation on the part of people whom Goebbels called bourgeois intellectuals. It was these Germans whom the Gauleiter [of Berlin, Goebbels] wanted to warn.”
⁶⁹

It may be difficult to prove how effective Goebbels’s speech was in intimidating the “bourgeois intellectuals,” but it surely had other consequences. In its July 2, 1935, issue, the
Jüdische Rundschau
published an article by Weltsch entitled “The Jew Is Human Too: An Argument Put Forward by Friends of the Jews.” It was a subtly ironic comment on the minister’s tirade, and it did lead to the banning of the paper.
⁷⁰
After a few weeks and some negotiating, a letter written in Goebbels’s name (but signed “Jahnke”) was sent to Weltsch: “The
Jüdische Rundschau
No. 53, dated July 2, 1935, published an article ‘The Jew Is Human Too,’ which dealt with the part of my speech of 29.6.1935 referring to the Jewish question. My refutation of the bourgeois intellectual view that ‘the Jew is human too’ was attacked in this article which stated that not only was the Jew human
too
, but had of necessity to be
consciously
human and
consciously
Jewish. Your paper has been banned because of this article. The ban on the paper will be lifted, but in view of the polemic nature of the article I have to reprimand you most severely and expect to have no further cause to object to your publications.”
⁷¹

Why would Goebbels have taken the trouble to engage in these maneuvers regarding a periodical written by Jews for Jews? As Weltsch explains it, “One has to keep in mind that the Jewish papers were at that time sold in public. The pretentious main thoroughfare of Berlin’s West End, the Kurfürstendamm, was literally plastered with the
Jüdische Rundschau
—all kiosks displayed it every Tuesday and Friday in many copies, as it was one of their best-sellers, especially as foreign papers were banned.”
⁷²
This, too, could not last for long. On October 1, 1935, the public display and sale of Jewish newspapers was prohibited.

During these early years of the regime it was difficult entirely to suppress all signs of the Jewish cultural presence in German life. Thus, for example, a 1934 catalog of the S. Fischer publishing house had a front-page picture of its recently deceased Jewish founder and a commemorative speech by the writer Oskar Loerke on the following pages. The catalog also announced volume 2 of Thomas Mann’s tetralogy
Joseph and His Brothers
as well as books by the Jewish authors Arthur Schnitzler, Jakob Wassermann, Walther Rathenau, and Alfred Döblin.
⁷³

The first anniversary of Fritz Haber’s death was on January 29, 1935. Despite the opposition of the Ministry of Education, and the fact that the date was the eve of the second annual national celebration marking Hitler’s accession to power, Max Planck decided to hold a memorial meeting under the auspices of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the famous Jewish scientist.

A letter sent on January 25 by the Munich party headquarters indicates that the commemoration was also sponsored by the German Society of Physics and the German Society of Chemistry. Headquarters forbade party members to attend, but did not dare, it seems, to rely solely on the argument that Haber was Jewish. The explanation thus included three distinct arguments: “that never before had a German scientist been honored in such a way only a year after his death, and Prof. Dr. Haber, who was a Jew, had been dismissed from his office on October 1, 1933, because of his clearly antagonistic attitude toward the National Socialist state.”
⁷⁴
The special authorizations to attend, which Minister of Education Rust had promised to some of Haber’s colleagues, were never granted. Nonetheless the ceremony took place. A wartime coworker of Haber’s, a Colonel Köth, spoke, and chemist and future Nobel laureate Otto Hahn delivered the commemorative speech. The hall was filled to capacity with representatives of industry and the spouses of the academics who had been forbidden to attend.
⁷⁵

The campaign to cleanse German cultural life of its Jewish presence and spirit had its moments of internal Nazi high drama. In the bitter fight waged between Goebbels and Rosenberg throughout the first months of 1933 for control of culture in the new Reich, Hitler had at first given the preference to Goebbels, mainly by allowing him to establish the Reich Chamber of Culture. Not long afterward, however, an equilibrium of sorts was reestablished by Rosenberg’s appointment, in January 1934, as the “
Führer
’s Representative for the Supervision of the General Intellectual and Ideological Education of the NSDAP.” The struggle with Goebbels resumed, reaching its climax in “the Strauss case,” which lasted for almost a year, from August 1934 to June 1935.

Rosenberg opened hostilities in a letter addressed to Goebbels on August 20, 1934, in which he warned that the behavior of Richard Strauss, the greatest living German composer, president of the Music Chamber of the Reich, and Goebbels’s protégé, was threatening to turn into a major public scandal: Strauss had made an agreement that the libretto of his opera
Die schweigsame Frau
(The silent woman) would be written by “the Jew Stefan Zweig,” who, Rosenberg added, “was also the artistic collaborator of a Jewish emigrant theater in Switzerland.”
⁷⁶
At stake was not only ideological purity: Rosenberg was searching for any possible way of undermining Goebbels’s dominant position in the domain of cultural politics.

Goebbels, who had just received Hitler’s acquiescence to the performance of Strauss’s opera in the early summer of 1935 in Dresden, lashed out at the pompous ideologue: “It is untrue that Dr. Richard Strauss has let a Jewish emigrant write the text of his opera. What is true, on the other hand, is that the rewriter of the text, Stefan Zweig, is an Austrian Jew, not to be confused with the emigrant Arnold Zweig…. It is also untrue that the author of the text is an artistic collaborator of a Jewish emigrant theater…. A cultural scandal could develop as a result of the above-mentioned points only if in foreign countries the matter was treated with the same lack of attention which you display in your letter, which is hereby answered. Heil Hitler!”
⁷⁷

The controversy soon became more shrill, Rosenberg in his reply reminding Goebbels of the protection he was granting the Jewish theater director Curt Götz and the difficulties he was thereby causing National Socialist directors. The parting shot was aimed at Goebbels’s support of modern, even “Bolshevist,” art, particularly the artists belonging to the avant-garde group Der Sturm.
⁷⁸

Unfortunately for Goebbels in the spring of 1935 the Gestapo seized a letter from Strauss to Zweig in which the composer explained that he had agreed “to play the role of President of the Music Chamber only to…do some good…and prevent greater misfortune.” As a consequence Strauss was dismissed from his post and replaced by Peter Raabe, a devoted Nazi. Because of Zweig’s authorship of the libretto,
Die schweigsame Frau
was banned after a few performances.
⁷⁹

The total cleansing of the Reich Music Chamber of its Jewish members took more time, however, than Goebbels had hoped—and announced. Goebbels’s diaries repeatedly record his determination to achieve the goal of complete Aryanization. The battle was waged on two fronts: against individuals and against tunes. Most Jewish musicians emigrated during the first three years of Hitler’s regime, but to the Nazis’ chagrin, it was more difficult to get rid of Jewish tunes—that is, mainly “light” music. “[Arguments] that audiences often asked for such music,” writes Michael Kater, “were refuted on the grounds that it was the duty of ‘Aryan’ musicians to educate their listeners by consistently presenting non-Jewish programs.”
⁸⁰

Moreover, as far as light music was concerned, intricate commercial relations between Jewish émigrè music publishers and partners who were still in Germany enabled a steady flow of undesirable music scores and records into the Reich. Music arrived from Vienna, London, and New York, and it was only in late 1937, when “alien” music was officially prohibited, that Jew hunters could feel more at ease.
⁸¹

Goebbels’s Herculean task was bedeviled by the all but insuperable difficulty of identifying the racial origins of all composers and librettists, and by the dilemmas created by well-known pieces tainted with some Jewish connection. Needless to say, Rosenberg’s services and related organizations, and even the SD, were unavoidable competitors in that domain. Something of the magnitude of the challenge and of the overall atmosphere can be sensed in an exchange of letters of August 1933 between the Munich branch of Rosenberg’s Kampfbund and the Reich Division of German Theaters in Berlin. The Munich people wrote on August 16:

“The Jewish librettists and composers have over the last fifteen years set up a closed circle into which no German author could penetrate, however good the quality of his work. These gentlemen should now be made to see the other side of the coin. A defense action is necessary because in foreign papers hate-filled articles have already been published saying that in Germany things would not work without the Jews.

“In the Deutsches Theater in Munich, the operetta
Sissy
is presently being performed (text by [Ernst] Marischke, music by [Fritz] Kreisler). Kreisler expressed himself in Prague in a most denigrating manner about our Führer. We have expressed a sharp protest against performance of the work, also with the Reich Central Party Office of the NSDAP, to the attention of Party comrade Hess. As we now hear, Director Gruss of the Deutsches Theater is ready to take the work off the program if another work can be found to replace it. We would be grateful to you if you could recommend another such work. It would have to fit a musical-type of performance, as the Deutsches Theater is actually a variety theater and has a concession for musicals only.”
⁸²

By August 23 the answer of the Division of German Theaters was on its way to Munich: The relevant Berlin people already knew about
Sissy
and were probably dealing with it. But other things had to be set straight: In the Munich letter, Franz Lehar and Künnecke had too quickly been cleared of any Jewishness: “Things are not yet clear, as the librettists of both these composers are almost all without exception Jews. I intend shortly to publish a list of all the operettas whose composers and librettists are not Jews.”
⁸³
In December of the same year the Division of German Theaters in Berlin received another query from the Munich Kampfbund branch about the Jewishness of Franz Lehar, Robert Stolz, Hans Meisel, Ralph Benatzki, and other composers. Again, the librettists surfaced with regard to Lehar, Stolz, and Benatzki (the other composers were Jews).
⁸⁴
Hitler, it should be mentioned, was particularly fond of the Lehar operetta
The Merry Widow
. Was the librettist of the most famous of Lehar’s pieces by any chance a Jew? And if so, did Hitler know it?

Writing to the Prussian theater council on March 9, 1934, Schlösser cited “the joke about [Meyerbeer’s opera]
The Huguenots
: Protestants and Catholics shoot at each other and a Jew makes music about it. Given the unmistakable sensitivity of the wider population about the Jewish question, one has, in my opinion, to bear such an important fact in mind.” Schlösser adopted the same attitude toward Offenbach, but mentioned that, owing to contradictory (official) declarations on this issue, a theater in Koblenz had “dug up no fewer than three Offenbach operettas.”
⁸⁵

All in all, however, the confusion of the new regime’s culture masters did not stop the de-Judaization of music in the Reich. Jewish performers such as Artur Schnabel (who had emigrated soon after the Nazis took power), Jascha Heifetz, and Yehudi Menuhin were no longer heard either in concert or on the radio; Jewish conductors had fled, as had the composers Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill, and Franz Schrecker. After some early hesitations, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Offenbach, and Mahler were no longer performed. Mendelssohn’s statue, which had stood in front of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, was removed. But that was far from the end of it: Händel’s Old Testament oratorios lost their original titles and were Aryanized so that
Judas Maccabeus
turned into
The Field Marshal: A War Drama
or, alternatively, into
Freedom Oratorio: William of Nassau
, the first version rendered by Hermann Stephani, the second by Johannes Klöcking. Three of the greatest Mozart operas,
Don Giovanni, Le Nozze di Figaro
, and
Così fan tutte
, created a special problem: Their librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, was of Jewish origin; the first solution was to abandon the original Italian version, but that did not help: The standard German performing version was the work of the Jewish conductor Hermann Levi. There was a last way out: A new translation into purer, nonpolluted German had to be hastily prepared. The new German translations of Da Ponte’s libretti of
Figaro
and
Così
were by Siegfried Annheiser, a producer at the theater in Cologne, and by 1938 they had been adopted by seventy-six German opera houses.
⁸⁶
To cap it all, two major encyclopedias of Jewry and Jews in music,
Judentum in der Musik A-B-C
and
Lexikon der Juden in der Musik
, were to ensure that no mistakes would ever be made in the future. But even encyclopedias did not always suffice:
Judentum in der Musik
was published in 1935; after the Anschluss, however, the new masters of Austria were astonished to discover that there were Jews in “Waltz King” Johann Strauss’s extended family, and his birth certificate disappeared from the Vienna archives.
⁸⁷