by Philipp Blom
As always, refugees found it hard to obtain legal papers. Those who had entered the country without personal documents could find themselves in an impossible position if they were formally expelled or ordered to leave France within twenty-four hours, as many were: without passports, they could not legally return across the border, and their enforced stay was frequently interpreted as defiance of the law. The unfortunates who found themselves in this legal vacuum were often imprisoned for the “crime” of refusing to obey a legal order, only to be expelled again after they had served their term—a vicious circle from which only an intercession by influential friends or a charitable organization could rescue them. Everyone, however, was at the mercy of the préfecture de police and its officers, who might be persuaded to be lenient if moved by their conscience—or possibly a discreetly passed envelope. The situation was temporarily eased in 1936 under the leftist Popular Front government of prime minister Léon Blum, a man sensitive to the plight of those who had lost their homes.
Emigration made people frighteningly vulnerable. Many of those coming to Paris were intellectuals who found themselves terribly reduced in their new home by the loss of their native language, their central professional asset as well as their most important social one. Many were consequently forced to live off charity. By 1941, organizations such as the Comité d’Assistance aux Refugiés would be paying out 2.5 million francs (some $24 million in today’s money) every month to the increasingly desperate emigrants. Jewish charities with various ideological orientations from Zionist to Orthodox also did much to help.
Professionals such as doctors, engineers, and lawyers could not practice their professions without having passed the relevant French examinations; other skilled and unskilled workers were forced into the shadow economy, if they could find work at all. The nostalgic evocations of emigrant cafés filled with cultivated men and women who had nothing to do all day other than read the papers and debate politics contained some truth, but many of those reading and debating were in fact enduring the enforced idleness of unemployment
Some of those who had lost their country and their livelihood were determined not to let their culture slip away, and those of the German diaspora in particular sprang into action to create intellectual hubs and cultural centers, and to provide a degree of sanity in the often desperate situations in which they found themselves as emigrants. In 1933, there were four German-language theaters and cabarets in Paris, as well as an émigré symphony orchestra and a choral society. The Freie Deutsche Universität (Free German University) offered courses taught by distinguished professors without charge; lecture series were organized, and when in 1934 the International Anti-Fascist Archive announced the foundation of a library that was to comprise all books burned by the Nazis the previous year, it received donations of more than twenty thousand volumes within only a few weeks.
Professional writers had often lost their income together with their German publishers, a situation that was critical especially for those novelists, poets, and journalists who were not already famous and wealthy. Exile publishers tried to step into the breach, and did manage to publish a series of important works, while emigrants’ newspapers offered paltry fees in line with their authors’ usually desperate financial situation. Some four hundred different German-language newspapers and magazines were published regularly (though not always for long) during the 1930s in Paris alone; the Pariser Tagblatt sold fourteen thousand copies a day. Its editor in chief was Georg Bernhard, a social democratic journalist and politician who had been a Reichstag (parliamentary) deputy and, before that, the editor of Berlin’s prestigious Vossische Zeitung. In 1933, having opposed Hitler in parliament and knowing that his arrest was imminent, Bernhard had fled. Having worked all his life for democracy in Germany, he was embittered by his exile. When he met the globetrotting Count Harry Kessler he vehemently told him that he would never again set foot in “that country,” and that he no longer regarded himself as a German. Bernhard was as good as his word and died ten years later in New York.
Amsterdam was another important destination for emigrants. Some ten thousand German Jews came there after 1933, hoping to survive in a safer and more tolerant culture with a face not too different from what home had been like. Among them was the Frank family from Frankfurt, whose little daughter Anne would reach a sad, posthumous fame through the diary she wrote while in hiding. With thirty-five thousand refugees arriving in the Netherlands and most of them heading for Amsterdam, the local bookseller and publisher Emanuel Querido established a branch of his firm to publish works written in German by exiles from the Nazis; he also founded Die Sammlung (The Collection), a journal for a wider group of literary exiles. Both from a humanitarian perspective and from a financial one, the latter proved a winning proposition.
Among Querido’s contributors were stars such as Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway, André Gide, Lion Feuchtwanger, Aldous Huxley, and Jean Cocteau, as well as authors whose names had previously been known mainly in the German-speaking world, such as the poet Stefan Heym and the novelists Jakob Wasserman, Max Brod, and Joseph Roth, the last of whom demonstrated in a letter to fellow writer Stefan Zweig, also in exile, that he saw the situation with desperate lucidity: “By now you will have realized that we are drifting toward great catastrophes. Disregarding the private ones—our literary and material existence is destroyed—the situation will lead to another war. I would no longer give a penny for our lives. It has been brought to pass that barbarism rules. Do not deceive yourself. Hell reigns.”14 Querido, himself Jewish, still managed to help many exiled writers. He would eventually die at the hands of the Nazis in the Polish concentration camp Sobibór in 1943.
Quotas of Survival
MOST OF THE JEWISH AND OTHER REFUGEES who stopped in Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Prague, and other continental European destinations felt that their journey was not yet at an end, and many wanted to reach the United States. The US immigration authorities, however, had domestic politics in mind and were determined to deter and if necessary deport all immigrants who did not bring sufficient economic assets with them. Moreover, there was a clearly anti-Semitic set of priorities at work in the approval process for potential new citizens.
The Immigration Act of 1924 had already done much to effectively limit Jewish immigration by setting low quotas for central and eastern Europe, the regions in which most Jews in Europe were living, while privileging “northerners” from Germany and Scandinavia. By 1933, however, most German immigrants were Jewish, and the US authorities became noticeably more reluctant to grant visas to German nationals. In the period 1933–1940, during which 211,000 German Jews could have been issued immigration visas under the quota fixed in the 1924 act, only 100,987 were actually issued documents. When two compassionate US politicians, the Democratic senator Robert F. Wagner and the Republican representative Edith Rodgers, sponsored a bipartisan bill making it possible to admit fifteen thousand Jewish refugee children on a visa waiver, their initiative was opposed by colleagues who scoffed that the “cute Jewish kids” would eventually become “ugly Jewish adults.” The bill did not survive the committee stage. Presumably, many of the children concerned did not survive, either.15
Among those fortunate enough to get the desperately sought visas were the Freudenheims of Berlin, a thoroughly assimilated German Jewish family. Hans Freudenheim was a cultured and wealthy man, a manufacturer of exotic wooden veneers to be used for upmarket furniture and keyboard instruments; the renowned concert piano firm Bechstein was one of his best customers. Proudly Prussian in his work ethic, Freudenheim had served on the Western Front, where he had been awarded the Iron Cross, a distinction that led him in the early 1930s to believe that he and his family would remain safe from Nazi persecution. He was, in fact, the very model of a middle-class German: a successful businessman, conscientious citizen, determined democrat, and highly educated man, with a small library of his own and an annual subscription to the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. The family’s Jewis
h identity consisted of little more than family ties to Orthodox relatives in Bohemia. After the passing of the Race Laws in 1935, however, Freudenheim understood the seriousness of the situation and decided to flee with his family. In 1937, they finally got American visas through the personal intervention of Admiral Claude Bloch, a distant cousin.
Bloch’s was an unusual Jewish success story. Born in Kentucky to first-generation immigrant parents, he had chosen a military career and had advanced to the rank of four-star admiral; he was the highest-ranking Jewish officer in the American armed forces and, after 1938, commander in chief of the US fleet. His guarantee that his relatives, whom he had never met, would not become charges of the state made it possible for them to obtain emigration papers.
The Freudenheim family packed their bags on the same evening they received the papers and left Berlin in the morning for Paris, from where they planned to travel on to the United States. But when they arrived in the French capital, they quickly found themselves part of the intense cultural life of the emigrant community, which reminded them of Berlin, the home city they were already missing. It seemed possible that they could make a life in Paris. Hans’s son Herbert, then seventeen years old, would later recall days spent sauntering down the Champs-Élysées, admiring the local girls and the elegant shop windows, all the while dreaming of becoming a proper Frenchman.
This hopeful situation was suddenly ended when Herbert’s father realized that Jews in France might soon be no more protected from the Nazis than they had been in Germany itself. He had thought himself safe behind the Maginot Line, the huge series of bulwarks and concrete forts with multistory subterranean installations constructed after the First World War as a defense against future German attacks. He soon recognized, however, that this protective wall stopped at the Belgian border, leaving France itself vulnerable to exactly the route of attack the German army had chosen in 1914. Only a dividing line of water could keep his family safe from Hitler, he decided. Freudenheim and his family moved to London, taking with them nothing more than what they could carry. When they arrived in the British capital, the total family funds amounted to £6.
The Freudenheims established themselves in northwest London, the new home of many German Jewish refugees. As in Paris, there were German cafés, restaurants, bookshops, and grocers, as well as clubs and newspapers. Destitute but not despairing, the Berlin businessman set about providing for his family, first by buying white cabbage, salt, and old wine barrels to make sauerkraut, a German delicacy then unavailable in London, and later, with that trade developing briskly, purchasing surplus wines from the cellars of great country houses and becoming a wine dealer, an occupation for which his previous wealthy existence and the many dinners he had enjoyed in fine restaurants stood him in good stead.
For his younger son, Herbert, the adjustment to yet another big city was at first not so successful. Though he spoke French, he had no English; London seemed gray and depressing to him, and he resented his father’s unbroken German patriotism and inflexible Prussian manner. When he found his father’s Iron Cross, he felt so angry that he went to flush it down the toilet. Freudenheim saw what his son was about to do, and he fished the medal out, then slapped the defiant young perpetrator—the only time that he had done so. “The Emperor was an officer and a gentleman!” he cried.16
Of All the Gin Joints in All the Towns in All the World
FOR SOME GERMAN REFUGEES, the only help came through family connections, such as that of the Freudenheims to their distant American uncle. For others, it helped to be famous. Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and the now almost forgotten bestselling novelist Lion Feuchtwanger had no problem being accepted and finding their feet abroad. Many of these either had jobs waiting or needed none, being independently wealthy.
For actors, composers, directors, and others in the film industry, the only way of ensuring an American visa was an invitation from Hollywood, a document guaranteed to convince the immigration authorities. This was not easy to procure, but it did provide a way out for a great number of artists, sometimes on spurious contracts. Their careers, though, more often than not suffered serious interruptions, from which some never recovered. For actors, the new language often proved an insuperable barrier, and some artists who had been revered at home were reduced to playing bit parts or small character roles.
One Austrian actor who chose to emigrate rather than being forced out was Paul Georg Julius, Freiherr von Hernried, Ritter von Wassel-Waldingau. As long-winded aristocratic names were little help in the theater, the actor was known professionally simply as Paul von Hernried. He had been doing well, making a good career as an actor with legendary stage director Max Reinhardt, and working in film as well. After the 1934 civil war in Vienna, with the Austrian fascists taking power, Hernried emigrated in 1935 to England.
Working in a different language onstage and in films proved difficult, and he was reduced to playing small roles, mostly—ironically—as Nazi officers. His great chance came only after his move to Hollywood in the early 1940s. There he was offered the role of the heroic resistance fighter Victor Laszlo in a new movie set in North Africa among desperate emigrants, unscrupulous criminals, and corrupt local officials. For easier pronunciation among English-speaking audiences, the studio changed his name from Paul von Hernried to simply Paul Henreid; the 1942 movie was entitled Casablanca.
The cast of this legendary evocation of high passion and the desperate scramble for visas among very different people, all rendered equal in their exile, illustrates the impact that the flight from Nazi Germany had on Hollywood during the 1930s. The American leading actor, Humphrey Bogart, and his love interest, the Swedish Ingrid Bergman, were exceptions, as were director Michael Curtiz—born Manó Kertész-Kaminer in Budapest, he emigrated to Los Angeles in the 1920s—and the composer of the score, Vienna-born Max Steiner, another early arrival in Hollywood. Apart from these willing exiles, the emigrant community in Rick’s Café was real enough. The cast had been selected with authenticity in mind, particularly regarding the patrons’ appearance and accents. In this respect, the casting agents uncovered an embarrassment of riches, finding actors whose personal stories often matched those of the characters they played. Paul Henreid proved perfect as Laszlo, Bogart’s rival in love.
The kind, chubby waiter was S. Z. Sakal, born Gerö Jekö in Hungary to a Jewish family, who had fled in 1940. In a poignant irony, the dastardly Major Strasser was played by Conrad Veidt, who, as a fierce opponent of the Nazis, had turned his back on his German homeland in 1933. Curt Bois, the pickpocket, had left Berlin in 1934; the croupier, Marcel Dalio, born Israel Moshe Blauschild, had been forced out of his native Paris; another Austrian was Helmut Dantine, who had briefly been imprisoned in a concentration camp before being able to travel to the United States, and who was more than credible as the desperate young lover whom Rick (Bogart) allows to win some money.
And there were others, all of them refugees themselves, getting by on small Hollywood parts: Louis V. Arco (from Vienna), Trude Berliner (from Berlin), Ilka Grüning (from Vienna), Richard Ryen (born Richard Révy, from Hungary), Ludwig Stössel (from Austria), and, as the desperate and sinister Signor Ugate, the famous Peter Lorre, born László Löwenstein. Lorre had risen to the summit of his profession in Germany in the 1920s, particularly after his role as a murderer in Fritz Lang’s celebrated M, only to be forced to flee; in his adopted country, he found himself locked into the half-sinister, half-comic character role of the bug-eyed villain.
As the situation in Europe grew ever more dangerous, desperate would-be emigrants, unable to obtain visas for preferred destinations such as the United States, proved willing to go almost anywhere that seemed safe. Another branch of the Freudenheim family set out on an odyssey involving seven countries, finally arriving in the Uruguayan capital, Montevideo. Eleven-year-old Fritz Freudenheim drew a map of the whole journey, chirpily entitled “From the Old Homeland to the New!”
South America became an important emigrant
destination. People whose lives and careers in Berlin, Munich, or Hamburg had done little to prepare them for thriving in their new homelands nevertheless often proved well able to adapt. Others sought refuge elsewhere. In 1935 the Marburg philologist Erich Auerbach emigrated to Istanbul, where he would write, much of it from memory, his timeless masterwork of literary criticism, Mimesis. The Viennese philosopher Karl Popper fled as far as it was possible to flee, becoming a lecturer at the then Canterbury University College in Christchurch, New Zealand. Here he was to pen his most influential work, The Open Society and Its Enemies.
Perhaps the most extraordinary, because furthest removed culturally, of all places of exile was Shanghai, the legendary city of commerce, vice, and urban sophistication. At that time, the city had no visa provisions at all. “The last place in the world we could go was Shanghai,” remembers one émigré. Until late 1938 and the Germany-wide pogrom of Kristallnacht, so called because of the thousands of windows of Jewish businesses and homes that were smashed during the night of November 9–10, only about fifteen hundred Jews had made the long journey to Shanghai. Afterward, their number would increase tenfold. The newcomers were lucky to find that some members of the resident Sephardic community, whose ancestors had arrived with Russian traders in the nineteenth century, were not only wealthy but also prepared to help. Still, life was uncertain, and living standards remained basic for thousands of refugees, who were frequently too hard up to afford a strudel at one of the delicatessens of Shanghai’s “Little Vienna,” or even a coffee at one of the immigrants’ Kaffeehäuser.
Berlin in the Levant
AMONG ALL THOSE WHO SOUGHT REFUGE from Nazi Germany, one option was open only to Jews. Ever since the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which the British foreign secretary had stated that “His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” the Zionist cause in Europe and beyond had been gaining in momentum.17 After 1918, through years of increasing nationalism, anti-Semitism, and strife, Palestine had come to be seen by many Jews as a viable option, or even as an absolute historical necessity; others rejected it with equal vehemence.