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 mu
sicals 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
Section II 112 (the Jewish section) of the SD also had its eye on Jewish musicians, dead or alive. On November 27, 1936, it noted the fact that in the hall of the Berlin Philharmonic, the cast for a bust of “the Jew Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy” still remained among the casts of famous German composers. As the performance of music by Jewish composers had been forbidden, the note concluded, “the removal of the cast is absolutely necessary.”88 Sometime later the section noticed that a Jewish bass singer, Michael Bohnen, had “recently appeared again in a film.” To inform his addressees about Bohnen, the anonymous agent of II 112 quoted the singer’s biographical entry in the Encyclopedia Judaica.89
What would have been the use of cleansing all unseemly Jewish names from the German world of art if the Jews could camouflage their identity by borrowing Aryan names? On July 19, 1935, as a result of the case presented by Gürtner in his complaint against Der Stürmer, Frick (who had started to battle against name changes in December 1934) submitted a draft proposal to Hitler that Aryans who bore names commonly considered to be Jewish would be allowed to change them. Generally, Jews would not be allowed to change names unless their name was a source of mockery and insults; in that case another Jewish name could be chosen.90 On July 31, from Berchtesgaden, Lammers conveyed Hitler’s agreement.91 Frick did not rest with that, and in a communication of August 14, raised with Gürtner the possibility of compelling the descendants of Jews who in the early nineteenth century had chosen princely German names to revert to a Jewish name; this was done, he wrote, on the demand of a Reichstag member, Prince von und zu Loewenstein.92 It seems that no decision was reached, although Secretary of State Hans Pfundtner at that time ordered the Reich Office for Ancestry Research to prepare lists of German names chosen by Jews since the emancipation.93 Soon, as will be seen, the strategy was to change: Instead of being forced to abandon their German-sounding names, the Jews would have to take additional—and obviously Jewish—first names.
Hans Hinkel moved to Goebbels’s ministry in 1935 to become one of the three supervisors of the Reichskulturkammer. Soon afterward, an unusual title was added to those he already bore: Special Commissioner for the Supervision and Monitoring of the Cultural and Intellectual Activity of All Non-Aryans Living in the Territory of the German Reich.”94 The new title was accurate to the extent that Hinkel, apart from his repeated cleansing forays in the RKK, could now boast of having gently prodded the various regional Jewish Kulturbünde to abandon their relative autonomy and become members of a national association with its seat in Berlin. The decisive meeting, in which the delegates of the Kulturbünde were told in very polite but no uncertain terms that Hinkel considered the establishment of one national organization to be highly desirable, took place in Berlin on April 27 and 28, with Hinkel’s participation and in the silent presence of Gestapo representatives.
Hinkel was speaking to the Jewish delegates “in confidence,” he said, and any disclosure of the meeting could lead to “unpleasantness”; the decision to form a national organization would really be left to the delegates’ “free choice,” but the only way of rationally solving a host of technical problems was to establish a single organization. Kurt Singer, who at Hinkel’s behest had convened the meeting, was strongly in favor of such unification and seemingly at one with State Secretary Hinkel. He and Singer so briskly managed the meeting that at the end of the first session (the only one Hinkel attended), Singer was able to declare: “I hereby make the official announcement to the State Secretary and to the gentlemen of the State Police that the creation of an umbrella organization of the Jewish Kulturbünde in the Reich was unanimously agreed upon by the delegates present here.”95
In a 1936 speech Hinkel restated the immediate aim of Nazi cultural policy regarding the Jews: they were entitled to the development of their own cultural heritage in Germany, but only in total isolation from the general culture. Jewish artists “may work unhindered as long as they restrict themselves to the cultivation of Jewish artistic and cultural life and as long as they do not attempt—openly, secretly, or deceitfully—to influence our culture.”96 Heydrich summed up the utility of centralization in slightly different terms: “The establishment of a Reich organization of Jewish Kulturb¨nde has taken place in order to allow easier control and surveillance of all the Jewish cultural associations.”97 All Jewish cultural groups not belonging to the new national association were prohibited.
IV
From the beginning of 1935, intense anti-Jewish incitement had newly surfaced among party radicals, with discontent and restlessness spreading among the part
y rank and file and SA members still resenting the murder of their leaders the year before. Lingering economic difficulties, as well as the absence of material and ideological compensations for the great number of party members unable to find positions and emotional rewards either on the local or the national level, were leading to increasing agitation.
A first wave of anti-Jewish incidents started at the end of March 1935; during the following weeks, Goebbels’s Der Angriff thickened the pogrom-like atmosphere.98 An announcement by the Ministry of the Interior of forthcoming anti-Jewish legislation and the exclusion of Jews from the new Wehrmacht did not calm the growing unrest.
The first city to witness large-scale anti-Jewish disturbances was Munich, and a carefully drafted police report offers a precise enough description of the sequence of events there. In March and April, Jewish stores were sprayed nightly with acid or smeared with such inscriptions as JEW, STINKING JEW, OUT WITH THE JEWS, and so on. According to the report, the perpetrators knew the police patrol schedule exactly, and could therefore act with complete freedom. In May the smashing of window panes of Jewish shops began. The police report indicates involvement by Hitler Youth groups in one of these early incidents. By mid-May the perpetrators were not only attacking Jewish stores in broad daylight but also assaulting their owners, their customers, and sometimes even their Aryan employees.
On Saturday, May 25, the disturbances took on a new dimension. By midafternoon the attacks had spread to every identifiably Jewish business in the city. According to the police, the perpetrators were “not only members of the Party and its organizations but also comprised various groups of a very questionable nature.” In the late afternoon there were clashes outside the central railroad station between police and a crowd of around four hundred people (mainly Austrian Nazis who were training at the SS auxiliary camp at Schleissheim); soon there were other such encounters in other parts of the city. At about six o’clock a crowd tried to attack the Mexican Consulate. Among those arrested there proved to be SS men in civilian clothes. It was not until about nine in the evening that some measure of order was reestablished in the Bavarian capital.”99
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