Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (35 page)

41. Ibid., 303f.

1. See wolf Gruner,
   Widerstand in der Rosenstrasse. Die Fabrik-Aktion und die Verfolgung der “Mischehen” 1943
   (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 2005), 34–84.
   
2. There were 10,000 to 15,000 German Jews that went underground. This num-ber includes 5,000 to 7,000 Berlin Jews. of these, 1,400 survived in hiding. See Beate kosmala, “Zwischen Ahnen und wissen. Flucht vor der Deportation (1941– 1943),” in kundrus and Meyer,
   Deportation
   , 135–159.
   
3. wiener Library, London: P.III.h. (Theresienstadt), erich Simon, Theresienstadt als autarkes Stadtwesen, 13 April 1946, 3.
   
4. See Beate Meyer, “Altersghetto, Vorzugslager und Tätigkeitsfeld. Die Repräsentanten der Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland und Theresienstadt,” in
   Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 2006
   (Prague: Sefer, 2006), 125–151.
   
5. See Meyer, “Altersghetto,” 309f.
   
6. See kárný, “Die Theresienstädter Herbsttransporte 1944,” in
   Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 1995
   (Prague: Academia, 1995), 7–37.
   
7. Leonhard Baker,
   Hirt der Verfolgten. Leo Baeck im Dritten Reich
   (Stuttgart: klett-Cotta, 1982), 415f.
   
8. YVA: 01/51, Moritz Henschel Vortrag (Lecture), “Die letzten Jahre der Jüdischen Gemeinde Berlin,” given in Tel Aviv 13 September 1946, 3.
   
9. In 1933, ca. 35,000 German Jews lived in mixed marriages, in 1939, ca. 20,400, and in 1943, ca. 16,600. At the end of 1944, ca. 12,500 remained. See Beate Meyer,
   “Jüdische Mischlinge.” Rassenpolitik und Verfolgungserfahrung 1933–1945
   (Hamburg: Dölling & Galitz Verlag, 1999), 24–95.
   
10. See Meyer, “Handlungsspielräume,” 63ff.
    
11. For more on the Dresden intermediary ernst Neumark, see Beate Meyer, “Der ‘eichmann von Dresden.’ ‘Justizielle Bewältigung’ von NS-Verbrechen in der DDR am Beispiel des Verfahrens gegen Henry Schmidt,” in
    Deutsche, Juden, Völkermord. Der Holocaust in Geschichte und Gegenwart
    , ed. Jürgen Matthäus and klaus-Mi- chael Mallmann (Darmstadt: wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006), 275–292, here: 279–281.
    
12. See H.G. Adler,
    Der verwaltete Mensch. Studien zur Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland
    (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1974), 354f.
    
13. See Raul Hilberg,
    Täter, Opfer, Zuschauer. Die Vernichtung der Juden 1933–1945
    

    (Frankfurt: Fischer-Verlag, 1992), 125.
    

14. See Hannah Arendt,
    Eichmann in Jerusalem. Ein Bericht von der Banalität des Bösen
    

    (Leipzig: Reclam, 1990), 220, 230f., 239f.
    

15. See also Doron Rabinovicis,
    Instanzen der Ohnmacht. Wien 1938–1945. Der Weg zum Judenrat
    (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000), 423, for the author’s thesis on the Austrian Jewish Leadership.
    
16. See kulka,
    Reichsvereinigung
    , 363.
    
17. See Michael wildt,
    Generation des Unbedingten. Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes
    (Hamburg: Hamburger edition, 2002), 858–861.
    
18. wiener Library, London: P.III.h. (Theresienstadt), 894, Dr. erich Simon Lecture, “Theresienstadt als autarkes Stadtwesen,” 3.
    

Chapter Seven

J
ew ish
C
u Lture in a
m
odern
G
hetto

Theater and Scholarship Among the Jews of Nazi Germany

R

Michael Brenner

Just a few weeks after the Nazis had come to power, an impressive call for tolerance and an appeal to grant Jews equal rights could be heard on a Berlin stage. Those demands stemmed from the pen of a non-Jewish German, a true “Aryan” in the Nazi definition. He could hardly be dismissed, for he was one of Germany’s greatest writers and philosophers—and he had been dead for 150 years. The capital of the new Nazi state must have been a rather awkward stage for Gotthold ephraim Lessing’s enlightened play
Nathan der Weise
(
Nathan the Wise
). It was hardly dangerous, however, to disseminate enlightenment ideas among the audience at this play, for this audience did not have to be convinced of the equality of the Jews. It was an exclusively Jewish audience listening to exclusively Jewish voices. The performance of
Nathan the Wise
was the first major production of the kulturbund deutscher Juden (Cultural League of German Jews), the organization founded to provide Jewish artists, musicians, and actors with work, and to provide Jewish audiences who could no longer attend regular theaters with entertainment.
¹
In 1935, the Jewish leadership was obliged by the Gestapo to rename the kulturbund deutscher Juden the Jüdischer kulturbund (The Jewish Cultural League), as the Nuremberg Laws no longer recognized the existence of
German
Jews. By 1935, there were some thirty-six different branches of the kulturbund (usually known in its abbreviated form as, simply, the “kubu”) throughout the German Reich, with over 70,000 members in total. Clearly, the kubu was for many their only real possibility of attending cultural events.

The kulturbund was perhaps the most blatant symbol of Nazi Germany’s cultural ghettoization of Germany’s Jewish community. Jews performed before exclusively Jewish audiences, with the exception of the notorious Gestapo spy in attendance at these performances. In addition to plays like Lessing’s
Nathan the Wise
, there were concerts, operas, and recitals. Some of the musicians had been, or were to be-come, major figures in twentieth-century music. From 1934 to 1936, for instance, the director of music in the Berlin kulturbund was Hans wilhelm Steinberg. Steinberg emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1938 where, under the name william Steinberg, he later be-came the resident-conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony orchestra (1952–1976), and music director of the Boston Symphony orchestra (1969–1973).

of course, there were also other cultural enterprises that came into existence or were strengthened as a result of this ghettoization. In Nazi Germany, Jews expanded their adult education programs, strengthened their youth movements, and restructured their publishing activities. The Schocken publishing house, founded shortly before the Nazis came to power, launched its
Schocken Bücherei
, an innovative series of small paperbacks on essential Jewish topics. It was a kind of reader’s digest of Judaism for a largely assimilated audience that had suddenly been confronted with its Jewishness after 1933. Jewish newspapers continued to be published in Nazi Germany, although censorship by the Nazi state obviously became an increasingly threatening reality.

while the writings of Jewish authors were, on 10 May 1933, burned publicly and increasingly purged from German libraries, Jewish publishing houses were allowed to print kafka, and Jewish theaters in Nazi Germany were the only places where Lessing’s
Nathan the Wise
could be performed. This last blossoming of Jewish cultural activities in times of persecution might seem a paradoxical development. It was, however, the logical consequence of the Nazi policy of separating Jews from non-Jews. Nazi authorities were willing to tolerate, and to some degree even support, Jewish culture, as long as it promoted the regime’s goal of complete segregation of Jewish and non-Jewish Germans.

However, for those Jewish Germans who had been part and parcel of Jewish cultural life as it had developed in Germany over the century and a half following the enlightenment, a flourishing period had clearly come to an end. Many of the artists, musicians, actors, and writers who had turned the 1920s into a golden age of cultural creativity left Germany in the 1930s. They include such prominent figures as

kurt weill, Bruno walter, otto klemperer, elisabeth Bergner, Lion Feuchtwanger, and others. Those who stayed behind were increasingly isolated. The most famous case was probably that of the painter Max Liebermann. As President of the Prussian Academy of Arts between 1920 and 1932, he was not only the most celebrated German painter of his time, but had also risen to a public position that no other Jew had ever achieved in Germany, with the possible exception of the ill-fated foreign minister, walther Rathenau. In 1933, Liebermann resigned as honorary president of the Academy. He soon became a member of the honorary board of the kulturbund and was active in the Berlin Jewish Museum, which opened its doors, ironically, a few days after Hitler had been appointed Chancellor. Liebermann became increasingly intrigued by the notion of Jewish art in his later years, and turned again to a biblical motif for one of his last paintings:
The Return of Tobias
. In a letter that Liebermann sent to the mayor of Tel Aviv, Meir Dizengoff, and to the Hebrew national poet, Haym Nahman Bialik, on 28 June 1933, he expressed the profound feeling of illusion that assimilated Jews, such as himself, had shared their whole lives: “Like a horrible nightmare the abrogation of equal rights weighs upon us all, but especially upon those Jews who, like me, had surrendered themselves to the dream of assimilation . . . As difficult as it has been for me, I have awakened from the dream that I dreamed my whole life long.”
²

Liebermann died in 1935. His funeral reflected the growing isolation of German Jewry. only two non-Jewish friends, the physician Ferdinand Sauerbruch, whom Liebermann had portrayed in 1932, and the artist käthe kollwitz dared to attend the ceremony at the Schönhauser Allee Jewish cemetery. one might just imagine how the funeral of the former President of the Prussian Academy of Arts might have looked in better times. At least Max Liebermann died a peaceful death, unlike his widow Martha, who committed suicide when the deportation order reached her in 1943.

Much has been written in recent years about this unwanted revival of Jewish culture.
³
I would like to deal here very briefly with one aspect of this subject, the theater, which received considerable attention, and in more detail with another aspect much neglected so far, namely, the work of Jewish historians in the years between 1933 and 1939. There can be no doubt that the kulturbund staged an impressive number of plays in the 1930s, provided unemployed actors with a chance to perform, and hungry audiences a way to enjoy culture within a society where they faced more and more restrictions. The kulturbund’s theater

was confronted with the difficult task of satisfying the audience’s need for German and european theatrical performances that they had been accustomed to seeing and, at the same time, of adding a Jewish experience for a community returned by force to its Jewish roots. The main dramaturge, Julius Bab, stressed this twofold task: “we will create a Jewish stage, which, at the same time, will be a German one.”
⁴
In the beginning, this double function was still possible, but by 1938, no non-Jewish German or Austrian authors or composers could be staged or performed by a Jewish organization. More and more east european Jewish plays were produced, plays that were often translated from the Yiddish originals; moreover, under the leadership of Herbert Freeden, a more Zionist presentation of Jewish life was soon adopted. Still, the most successful play in the 1936–1937 season was neither a Yiddish classic nor a play about Zionist pioneers, but instead was Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. Indeed, some 80 percent of all plays produced in the Berlin kulturbund were by non-German authors.

The most intensely debated question surrounding the evaluation of the kulturbund may be summarized in very simple terms: was the kulturbund good or bad for the Jews? opinions have been divided both among contemporaries as well as later historians. on the one hand, Herbert Freeden’s judgment, both as a key player in and historian of the kulturbund, stressed its positive function. He maintains that its activities were a means of spiritual resistance against increasing ghettoization. Most scholars have tended to agree with his position. Thus, Rebecca Rovit concluded her essay on the theatrical performances of the kulturbund with the statement: “Such community cohesion appears to have strengthened the actors’ resolve to use their art to provide both themselves and their audiences with insight and comfort amid extraordinary and extreme circumstances.”
⁵
on the other hand, already occurring in the 1930s were German-Jewish critics making derogatory comments about the compliance with which the kulturbund responded to the cultural ghettoization of the Jews. one critic observed: “The German Yids were ordered to found a ghetto theater and cultural associations—and they do it . . . The kulturbund is truly an opportunity to say
nebbich
.”
⁶
Modern historians, especially eike Geisel and Henryk Broder, continued along this line in their 1992 exhibition on the kulturbund. By continuing their cultural activities, the kulturbund activ-ists may have contributed to the notion that life under unacceptable conditions was possible, and thus may have discouraged more German Jews from emigrating.
⁷