Source: K. Duewell, "Jewish Cultural Centres in Nazi Germany, Expectations and Accomplishments," in: J. Reinharz & W. Schatzberg (eds.) , The Jewish Response to German Culture, From the Enlightenment to the Second World War (Hanover & London, 1985), pp. 294 - 316.
We want to give bread to Jewish artists and performers, thereby enabling them by physical and spiritual support to work as artists again, we want to give to the masters of the word the opportunity to speak to us. Jewish artists should show their work. For ourselves, however, we are preparing a path that we need now more than ever before: to elevate ourselves by enjoying artistic creations in a time that depresses us so deeply . . . We have no wish to restrict our activities to Jewish art, but the authorities require that all the practising artists be Jewish.
No one who becomes a member of our Kulturbund should believe himself to be making a charitable gesture. All of us should know that the good we are doing is for ourselves!'
Dr. Paul Moses, chairman of the Juedischer Kulturbund Rhein-Ruhr , Mitteilungsblaetter, November 1933.
In view of the brutal monstrosities of National Socialist policies toward Jews, it could seem almost a diversion from the main problems to consider the cultural life of the Jews in Germany after 1933. The danger in looking at organised Jewish cultural life in Nazi Germany is that it might seem to confirm the Nazis' assertion that Jews were granted, at least for a while, both a freedom of action and the status of a protected minority. This potential misunderstanding must be cleared up first, and then I shall examine how it was possible for contemporaries to have this impression, at least for a time.
After a short period of complete emancipation under the Weimar Republic 1 , the Jews in Germany faced - seemingly without preparation - the National Socialist take-over in 1933. With their relatively small numbers, their loose community organisation, and soon also as a consequence of their shrinking social contacts with the non-Jewish population, Jews were more deeply affected by the Nazis' extraordinary restrictions than were other social groups. Support from non-Jews was not the rule but the exception. The psychological oppression of this increasingly isolated minority led, however, to a new consciousness of the religious and moral roots of Jewish existence and awakened spiritual counter forces that, operating in this time of injustice and terror, emerged in one of the most impressive of all cultural movements.
When on April I, 1933, the Nazi policy of boycott against the Jewish minority was officially sanctioned, the work of Jewish writers and artists was naturally affected. They were no longer allowed to be members of public orchestras or opera or theatre companies, to have concert agents, or to join artists' clubs or similar organisations. The great age of Elisabeth Bergner, Leo Blech, Ernst Deutsch, Alexander Granach, Leopold Jessner, Otto Klemperer, Fritz Kortner, Fritz Lang, Max Liebermann, Peter Lorre, Ernst Lubitsch, Lucie Mannheim, Grete Mosheim, Max Pallenberg, Max Reinhardt, Joseph Schmidt, Richard Tauber, Ignaz Waghalter, Bruno Walter, Jakob Wassermann, Franz Werfel, and many other fine writers, artists, and performers of Jewish origin seemed to have come to an end.
On the other hand, one of the most remarkable effects of the Nazis' policies of boycott and terror was the founding, that very same year, of the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden . In a way this organisation was a response to the Reichskulturkammer , which had excluded all Jews. Public activity by Jewish artists - though there were still some exceptions - no longer seemed possible. The option of emigration, even for the sake of intellectual opposition to National Socialism alone, was open only to a few, on account of the cost and the difficulties of obtaining a visa from the country of destination. For those Jewish artists, writers, and performers who remained in Nazi Germany, the only option seemed to be to work within the framework of a cultural self-help organisation.
The Kulturbund Deutscher Juden was founded in Berlin by Dr. Kurt Singer, an intendant of the opera in Berlin-Charlottenburg until he was expelled from this position by Nazi boycott legislation. Very prudently did he plan the new organisation. A few months later he recalled:
During those days at the beginning of April when we Jews feared the severe loss of the freedom of movement we were used to, the young director Kurt Baumann came to me with a plan for establishing a theatre and a membership organisation. I had worked out a similar plan and submitted both of them to Rabbi Dr. [Leo] Baeck as a competent judge. After getting his recommendation, I consulted the leading men from Jewish organisations. . . . One committee formulated the constitution; another committee made arrangements for publicity evenings; a third prepared them from the artistic point of view. I submitted the official applications for a license for a Kulturbund Deutscher Juden to various governmental authorities. The decision about the license was delegated by the minister president of Prussia to the Ministry of Education, within which the president of the Prussian Theatre Commission, Staatskommissar [Hans] Hinkel, or his deputy, was to lead the negotiations. Simultaneously I gave reports to the chief of police and to the ministry of Propaganda (here the president of the theatre commission, Ministerialrat [Otto] Laubinger)' 2 .
Plans for the cultural centre were supported by the leading representatives of Jewish cultural life, and the board of honorary chairmen included Leo Baeck, Martin Buber, Arthur Eloesser, Leonid Kreutzer, Max Liebermann, Max Osborn, Franz Oppenheimer, and Jakob Wassermann.
This new organisation to aid Jewish artists in Berlin soon served as a model for similar cultural centres in other parts of the Reich. In autumn 1933 the Juedischer Kulturbund Rhein-Ruhr ( Freunde des Theaters und der Musik e.V .), was founded in the great industrial Rhenish-Westfalian area, where fifty thousand Jews still lived in the administrative districts of Cologne , Duesseldorf , and Arnsberg. Its first chairman was Dr. Paul Moses, and next to the Berlin Kulturbund , it was the most important cultural centre in Germany 3 . In addition the Kulturbund Rhein-Main in Frankfurt maintained its own philharmonic orchestra of about fifty members, and the Hamburg Kulturbund had its own theatre and travelling company 4 . By 1935 Jewish cultural centres had been founded in Breslau and other towns. In this time of increasing economic and social troubles, they became important economic factors. Together they maintained three theatre ensembles (Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne), one opera (Berlin), two philharmonic orchestras (Berlin, Frankfurt), one cabaret stage, one school theatre, and a few choirs and ensembles in which a total of twenty-five hundred artists made a modest living. Until 1938 nearly six hundred artists and almost the same number of support staff, plus three hundred artisans, mechanics, and additional assistants, were permanently engaged by the Jewish cultural centres in Germany, and they were the greatest single factor in the provision of work for Jewish people in Germany under Nazi rule.' 5 Almost seventy thousand Jewish people in about a hundred towns attended Kulturbund performances 6 . Along with the Jewish communities and the sixty Jewish weekly newspapers, journals, and other periodicals still published in 1935, which had a total circulation of 350,000, the cultural centres were among the greatest intellectual and economic forces in Jewish life in Germany.
The Berlin Kulturbund was the largest, employing, up to 1938, more than two hundred people-soloists and supernumeraries as well as technical and supplementary personnel and an administrative staff of ten. In 1933-34 its annual expenses reached six hundred thousand Reichmark. 7 The Juedischer Kulturbund Rhein-Ruhr, which grew out of efforts of the Koelner Zentralstelle fuer juedische Wirts to include support for artists among its activities 8 , had five thousand members by the summer of 1935. Monthly dues were only Reichsmark 2.50. During the first six months of its performances, 1934-35, it employed more than three hundred people, a great number of whom had regular appointments, reported the center's Mitteilungsblaetter 9 . In the 1935-36 season, thirty-five artists were engaged for appointments of six months or a year, and forty-six others had appointments for less than six months, mostly in connection with the travelling theatre. Seventeen clerical workers and five manual workers had regular appointments, and ninety additional assistants were hired for shorter periods in the towns the Theatre Company toured. Altogether 191 people were employed. At the centre of the Kulturbund's activities were the theatre performances in Cologne and in ten other towns in the Rheinish-Westfalian area where it had local affiliations: Aachen, Bochum, Bonn, Duisburg, Essen, (Gelsenkirchen, Krefeld, Wuppertal, and, from 194-35 onwards, also Dortmund and Dueren.
The emphasis of the Kulturbund Rhein-Ruhr's activities lay in the theatre, the director of which was Willibald Fraenkel-Froon. In November 1933, he opened the Kulturbund stage with a performance of the tragicomedy Sonkin and her Haupttreffer by Semen Juschkewitsch, a play that had already had great success in Max Reinhardt's staging. In the November/December 1933 issue of the Mitteilungsblaetter, Fraenkel-Froon described the aims of his efforts:
The goal of our stage is to bring joy and the courage to face life to all by letting them participate in the eternal values of poetry or by discussing the problems of our time, but also by showing light hearted pieces and not rejecting them. We intend to keep up the connection with the German Heimat and to form, at the same time, a connecting link with our great Jewish past and with a future that is worth living' 10 .
After Sonkin, the plays performed in 1933 and 1934 included Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Stell a and Carlo Goldoni's Mirandolina, Henry Bernstein's Der Dieb, James Briedie's comedy Tobaias und der Erzengel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Dance Kobold, Raoul Auernheimer's Die grove Leidenschaft, Arthur Schnitzler's Die einsame Weg, and a drama by a young writer from Cologne, Julius Wolffsohn, entitled Joseph Ben Matthias 11 . Besides the plays, there were poetry evenings with Ludwig Hardt, Otto Bernstein, and other distinguished masters of recitation, and lectures by Leo Baeck, Kurt Blumenfeld, and Martin Buber. David Carlebach, Joseph Carlebach, Adolf Kober, Benedikt Wolf, and other rabbis also gave talks, mostly through co-operative arrangements with the Vereinigung juedisches Lehrhaus in Cologne 12 . In addition there were concerts of chamber music and piano and vocal recitals by soloist of the first rank. In 1935 the so-called Kleinkunst performances included the star performance of the famous diseuse Dela Lipinskaja. But the theatre dominated the activities of the Kulturbund Rhein-Ruhr up to its dissolution in 1958.
On the principles that should guide a Jewish theatre program, the Kulturbund Rhein-Ruhr largely supported the position of Julius Bab, the highly esteemed dramaturgy in Berlin, who expressed his opinion in the Israelitisches Familienblatt that a repertory exclusively Jewish as a matter of principle (grundsaetzlich nur j ue disches) would be neither desirable nor possible.
We do not want to set up a new ghetto. Through our work we want to keep the German Jews in vital contact with the great life of Western culture in which they have become so deeply rooted over one and a half centuries! And therefore: Lessing, Mozart, and Shakespeare! But there is another side that is just as right and proper: because we exist within this Western sphere of culture as a community in which the performances are given only by Jews and for Jews, there are also duties of a special kind, and we have to pay special regard to the work of Jewish writers who today have no place elsewhere (even if their works have no special Jewish content). We have to pay regard to them as much as to all creative works of intellectual worth that deal with subjects of special Jewish interest . . . Therefore it will not cease to be a German theatre, a stage within the Western cultural tradition' 13 .
Some months previous, despite the oppression of Nazi censorship) under the direction of Staatskommissar Hinkel, there had been a sharp discussion within the Jewish community about the work of the Berlin Kulturbund - some even called it an internal Jewish Kulturkampf. The Kulturkampf was fought much more vigorously over the repertory of the theatre than over the program of operas and concerts 14 . The preliminary result of the discussion was the acceptance of the line of reasoning Bab later formulated. But this line of reasoning was only a compromise, and it was questioned, from time to time, by the Juedische Rundschau and other Zionist publications 15 .
Moreover, the Nazis in 1934 prohibited the Jewish cultural centres from performing the works of Friedrich von Schiller and the German romantics, and in 1936 they also banned performances of Goethe's works and those of other classical German writers. These restrictions were next extended to the performance of music; in 1937 Beethoven was forbidden, and immediately after the Anschluss with Austria, Mozart, too, was no longer allowed to be played in the cultural centres.
It had long been clear, however, that the Nazi policy of restriction would render performances of "German music" increasingly difficult 16 . In May 1934 the head cantor of Wuppertal, Hermann Zivi, had tried to come to terms with the question of whether there was such a thing as "Jewish music." In the Mitteilungsblaetter of the Kulturbund Rhein-Ruhr he pointed to the amalgamation of the musical tradition of the synagogue with the traditions of music in the different host countries in which Jewish communities had emerged:
In the East they sing in a melancholy manner, as do the Slavic and oriental people; in the West they sing in another way, and this is also true in the synagogue. The question as to whether there is such a thing as "Jewish music" must be answered in the negative. If the Jews one day become permanently established, and live in compact communities unmolested by oppression and compulsion, then, with spiritual peace, they might also gain the strength to develop in this native country a music of their own that has grown up in the soil of Jewry' 17 .
But in the following number of the Mitteilungsblaetter Joachim Stutschewsky, a Viennese cellist and collector of music, contradicted Zivi's claims. Stutschewsky asserted that twenty-five years before no one would have talked of "Jewish music," but an important change had taken place. He mentioned the names of Joseph Achron, Ernest Bloch, Alexander Krein, Levin Milner, Brandmann, Michail Gnessin, and Lazare Ssaminsky, and included his own name, too. For a long time we had many Jewish musicians, concert artists, composers of operas and symphonies, but no Jewish music. Today we have Jewish musicians who also compose music of their own kind out of their deepest personal being and who, striving for a new inner centre, are creating a Jewish art of music.' 18 Here again there are two diametrically opposed opinions, and a new Kulturkampf seemed to be getting under way.
The editors of the Mitteilungsblaetter, therefore, in August 1934 asked Oskar Guttmann, a connoisseur and academic teacher of music, for a final opinion. Guttmann altered the basic question a little: did there or does there exist a Jewish music? He gave an affirmative reply to the first part of this question, but to the second he asserted
Today there no longer exists a Jewish music. Stutschewsky has totally confused the music Jews have composed with Jewish music. Certainly we have great Jewish composers, and indeed many of them have broken through the "latent Orientalism" [Heinrich] Berl described in his suggestive book Das Judentum in der Musik. Here the Jewish sentiment is strong and genuine. Bit will not develop so quickly. Perhaps a new Jewish music will come from a new permanent culture. Let us hope and wish so. And, for the time being, above all let us hear what Jewish musicians play and compose, though they may not yet create things as "Jewish" as we might dream of' 19 .
To the editors of the Mitteilungsblaetter it seemed obvious that with this answer the discussion was not yet over. But it was also clear that they did not want to prolong controversial debate on this problem because the daily, basic difficulties of the Kulturbund's cultural work were so urgent as to require all their effort. Therefore, the editors restricted themselves to a short concluding remark:
The answers of the three commentators are widely divergent and differ so much that one can see how difficult it is to comply with the request for concerts of Jewish music. Without defining our attitude regarding this subject, we share Dr. Guttmann's opinion in demanding that for the time being Jewish composers, especially, should be given a hearing. But beyond this we believe that with concerts by orchestras which consist of Jewish musicians we are serving in the best way the interests, if not of Jewish music, at least of Jewish performance of music' 20 .
This was the principle according to which in 1934 the Juedischer Kulturbund Rhein-Main in Frankfurt founded its orchestra, which had great success in the Rheinish-Westfalian towns as well.
References:
1. For discrimination existing in the time of the Weimar Republic, see, as standard literature: Fritz Marburg, Der Antisemitismus in der Deutschen Republik (Vienna, 1931); Werner E. Mosse and Arnold Paucker, eds., Entscheidungsjahr 1932: Zur Judenfrage in der Endphase der Weimarer Republik , 2d ed. (Tuebingen, 1966); Arnold Paucker, Der juedische Abwehrkampf gegen Antisemitismus und Nationalsozialismus in den letzten Jahren der Weimarer Republik , Hamburger Beitraege zur Zeitgeschichte, vol. 4 (Hamburg, 1968); George L. Mosse, Germans and Jews: The Right, the Left, and the Search for a 'Third Force' in Pre-Nazi Germany (New York, 1970); Hans-Helmut Knuetter, Die Juden und die deutsche Linke in der Weimarer Republik, 1918ΓÇô1933 (Duesseldorf, 1971); Werner E. Mosse, ed., Deutsches Judentum in Krieg und Revolution, 1916ΓÇô1923 , Schriftenreihe wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts, vol. 25 (Tuebingen, 1971); Hans-Joachim Bieber, 'Anti-Semitism as a Reflection of Social, Economic and Political Tension in Germany, 1880ΓÇô1933,' in Jews and German Jews from 1860 to 1933 , ed. David Bronson (Heidelberg, 1979), pp. 33ΓÇô77. For the increasing importance of Zionism at the end of the Weimar Republic, see also Jehuda Reinharz, ed., Dokument zur Geschichte des deutschen Zionismus, 1882ΓÇô1933 , Schriftenreihe wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts, vol. 37 (Tuebingen, 1981).
2. Kurt Singer, 'Vor der Premiere des Kulturbundes,' Central-Verein Zeitung , September 28, 1933, no. 37, Beilage 2. See also the recollections of Kurt Baumann in Juedisches Leben in Deutschland , ed. Monika Richarz, vol. 3, Selbstzeugnisse zur Sozialgeschichte, 1918ΓÇô1945 (Stuttgart, 1982), pp. 313ΓÇô22.
3. Herbert Freeden, Juedisches Theater in Nazideutschland , Schriftenreihe wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts, vol. 12 (Tuebingen, 1964), pp. 53ff. For the Juedischer Kulturbund Rhein-Ruhr, see also Kurt Duewell, Die Rheingebiete in der Judenpolitik des Nationalsozialismus vor 1942: Beitrag zu einer vergleichenden zeitgeschichtlichen Landeskunde (Bonn, 1968), pp. 132ΓÇô40. Another regional example was treated by Erwin Lichtenstein, 'Der Kulturbund der Juden in Danzig, 1933ΓÇô1938,' Zeitschrift fuer die Geschichte der Juden 10 (Tel Aviv, 1973): 181ΓÇô90. For figures about the whole Kulturbund organisation in Germany, see Herbert Freeden, 'A Jewish Theatre under the Swastika,' in Leo Baeck Institute Year Book I (1956): 159ΓÇô60. I am grateful to Dr. Ernst Lustig, Wolfenbuettel, for a large number of references to the work of the Jewish cultural centres.
4. Freeden, Juedisches Theater , p. 25.
5. Ibid., pp. 25ΓÇô26.
6. Ibid., p. 4.
7. Ibid., pp. 22ΓÇô23.
8. Juedische Rundschau , October 17, 1933, cited in ibid., p. 53.
9. 'Zusammenschluss der juedischen Kulturbuende Deutschlands,' Mitteilungsblaetter des juedischen Kulturbundes Rhein-Ruhr (hereafter Mitteilungsblaetter ), June 1935, p. 4, and October 1936, p. 4. See also materials in the Archives of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York, esp. the Julius Bab Collections.
11.The program for the following years contained: Franz Grillparzer's Esther , Heinrich Heine's Almansor , Pedro Cald├ëron's Absalons Locken , Jean Baptist Molière's Streiche des Scapin , George Bernard Shaw's Der Arzt am Scheidewege, The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, Johann Nestroy's Titus Feuerfuchs , and two lighter entertainment numbersΓÇôAdler's Drei Herren im Frack and Garais's Der Fall Jadin Grandais . For later, Miss Selby by Ervine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Clavigo , William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night , Gerhart Hauptmann's Michael Kramer , Georg Hirschfeld's Hosea , and Israel Zangwill's comedy Der Koenig der Schnorrer were planned. Some were not performed, however, for reasons that cannot be precisely determined.
12.See also Ernst Simon, Aufbau im Untergang: Juedische Erwachsenenbildung im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland als geistiger Widerstand , Schriftenreihe wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts, vol. 2 (Tuebingen, 1959).
13.Julius Bab, 'Warum Nathan der Weise?' Israelitisches Familienblatt 36, no. 2 (1934): 12, as quoted in Mitteilungsblaetter , February 1934, p. 3.
14.Freeden, Juedisches Theater , p. 4.
15.For Bab's considerations and for the opening performance of Nathan the Wise by the Berliner Kulturbund theatre, 150 years after Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote the play, see Juedische Rundschau , July 25, 1933, no. 59; and October 4, 1933, nos. 79/80.
16.Freeden, Juedisches Theater , p. 46, quotes a letter of November 19, 1934, from the NSDAP-Gauleitung Berlin, in which performances of Beethoven's music by the local Jewish Kulturbund were sharply criticised: to see our magnificent Beethoven in such dubious company' was intolerable and even more tactless' if the Jewish Kulturbund performed Fideolio' with an all-Jewish cast'ΓÇôwhereas there was no alternative open to the Kulturbund according to the regulations.
17.Hermann Zivi, 'Gibt es eine juedische Musik?' pt. I, Mitteilungsblaetter , May 1934, p. 4.
18.Joachim Stutschewsky, 'Gibt es eine juedische Musik?' pt. 2, ibid., June 1934, p. 4.
19.Oskar Guttmann, 'Gibt es eine juedische Musik?' pt. 3, ibid., August 1934, p. 7.
