The Third Reich at War
Page 72
The Third Reich’s record of producing new music of its own was far from convincing. Richard Strauss was undoubtedly the best-known German composer during the Third Reich, but the Nazis took particular exception to the fact that his son had married a woman whom they classified as Jewish. In 1938, when Austria, where he and his family were domiciled, was incorporated into the Reich, stormtroopers specifically targeted his Jewish daughter-in-law Alice in the pogrom of 9- 10 November 1938, harassing her mercilessly and raiding her house. Strauss’s protests and his good relations with Baldur von Schirach, the Regional Leader of Vienna, a personal friend of the Strauss family through his upbringing as the son of a theatre director in Weimar, bore some fruit, but the composer was unable to prevent Alice’s grandmother from being deported to Theresienstadt. Strauss drove up in his limousine to the camp gates, where he grandly announced: ‘I am the composer Richard Strauss.’ Sceptical guards turned him away. The grandmother died, along with twenty-five other Jewish relatives of Strauss’s daughter-in-law. Meanwhile, at Goebbels’s prompting, the Gestapo raided Alice’s home and took her off to interrogation with her husband, whom they put under pressure to divorce her. He stood firm. Repeated letters from the composer to Himmler and others failed to achieve clarity about the inheritance that he wished to pass on to his half-Jewish grandsons. Strauss was still the most frequently performed living opera composer in Germany in 1942, but he lived under straitened circumstances, he was no longer - unlike some other prominent musicians - privileged by the regime, and he had to contend with the constant threat to the life of his daughter-in-law and his grandsons.154
The true nature of the composer’s relationship with the regime was brutally revealed at a meeting of leading composers with Goebbels on 28 February 1941, at which Strauss attempted to persuade the Propaganda Minister to rescind a recent decision to reduce copyright payments to serious composers in favour of rewarding the writers of more frequently performed light music like that of Hitler’s favourite Franz Leha’r, whose work Strauss dismissed out of hand, with something like their full income. Goebbels had an incriminating sentence from Strauss’s letter to his librettist Stefan Zweig of 17 June 1933, criticizing the regime, read out loud, then shouted at Strauss: ‘Be quiet, and take note that you have no idea of who you are and who I am! Leha’r has the masses, you don’t! Stop babbling about the significance of serious music! This will not revalue your stock! Tomorrow’s culture is different from that of yesterday! You, Herr Strauss, are of yesterday!’155 In 1943, Strauss got into further trouble because he refused to accommodate evacuees in his home. When he refused again the following year, Goebbels tried to have his operas banned. He was overruled by Hitler. But the composer’s eightieth birthday in June was studiously ignored by the regime and the Party. He had become something of an unperson.
The second most popular German composer in the concert-halls, Hans Pfitzner, fared little better. Curmudegonly and self-pitying, he complained in March 1942 that the regime was behaving as if he did not exist, ‘and it’s not a good sign for this Germany that important positions are filled by men of decidedly inferior character and intelligence and nobody looks to me for them even once.’156 He found sympathy not in Germany but in occupied Poland, where Regional Leader Greiser awarded him the Wartheland Prize, worth 20,000 Reichsmarks, and General Governor Frank invited Pfitzner to conduct a special concert of his own and other music in Cracow in May 1942. Invited again the following year, he was so pleased that he wrote a special six-minute ‘Cracow Greeting’ for the occasion. Pfitzner survived the war, dying in an old people’s home in Salzburg in 1949, at the age of eighty.157 More successful by far was Werner Egk, who had won Hitler’s approval during the 1930s for work that echoed Nazi ideological themes, even if it was written in a distinctly modern style. His opera Peer Gynt was played in numerous German opera houses in 1939-40, in Prague in 1941 and at the Paris Opera in 1943. By this time Egk was heading the composers’ division of the Reich Music Chamber and earning 40,000 Reichsmarks a year. A new stage work, Columbus, could clearly be understood as drawing a parallel between the European conquest of America and the creation of the German empire in the east. In February 1943 he wrote in the Racial Observer that he was confident that Germany would win the war, achieving after it was over a ‘marriage between idealistic politics and realistic art’.158 By contrast the stock of Carl Orff, whose Carmina Burana had been a sensational success on its first performance in 1937, went down during the war. His opera The Wise Woman, first performed in February 1943, was received with much less enthusiasm. Was it for such culture, asked a critic after the work opened in Graz in March 1944, that German soldiers were sacrificing themselves at the front? At the second performance the local Nazis turned up and greeted the piece with a chorus of whistling. But Orff’s later claims that the opera was a bold act of resistance to Nazi tyranny lacked all plausibility: the libretto’s denunciation of tyranny and injustice was put in the mouth not of heroic figures but of a chorus of villains and good-for-nothings, and was clearly intended to be understood ironically.159
In the end, little music of any value was composed in Germany during the war years. The most powerful compositions came from an entirely different source: the Jewish composers imprisoned in Theresienstadt. Besides Viktor Ullmann and Kurt Gerron, many other inmates wrote and performed music in a variety of genres during the brief years of the camp’s existence. Some of the most moving of these compositions were by Ilse Weber, who wrote both music and lyrics and sang them, accompanying herself on a guitar, as she did her night rounds in the children’s ward of the camp hospital, carrying out her duties as a nurse. Born in 1903, Weber had worked as a writer and radio producer in Prague before her deportation in 1942. Her husband and younger son were in the camp with her; they had succeeded in getting their older son to safety in Sweden. The popular songs of Zarah Leander and Lale Andersen spoke of the time when friends, relatives, partners and lovers would see one another again: Weber’s songs harboured no such illusions:
Farewell, my friend, we have come to the end
Of the journey we took together.
They’ve found me a place on the Poland express,
And now I must leave you for ever.
You were loyal and true, you helped me get through,
You stood by my side in all weather.
Just feeling you near would quiet every fear,
We bore all our burdens together.
Farewell, it’s the end; I’ll miss you, my friend,
And the hours we spent together.
I gave you my heart; stay strong when we part,
For this time our farewell’s for ever.160
The warm simplicity of her settings was never more moving than in her lullaby ‘Viegala’, which she reportedly sang to children from the camp, including her son Tommy, as she accompanied them voluntarily into the gas chamber at Auschwitz on 6 October 1944: ‘Viegala, viegala, vill: now is the world so still! No sound disturbs the lovely peace: my little child, now go to sleep.’161
V
Theresienstadt and other camps and ghettos did not, it was thought, present suitable subjects for the German painters and sculptors who were at work during the wartime years. Heroic war was what Goebbels and the Reich Chamber of Culture wanted artists to depict.162 The fourth Great German Art Exhibition, opened by the Propaganda Minister in 1940, devoted a number of rooms to war art, and battle scenes now took pride of place amongst the 1,397 works by 751 artists displayed in the show. War, as one commentator noted, ‘is a great challenger. German visual arts have met the challenge.’163 Opening the 1942 exhibition, Hitler reminded his listeners that ‘German artists too have been called upon to serve the homeland and the front.’164 Those who visited the exhibitions mounted during the war years, or saw newsreel reports on them in the cinema, could admire pictures such as The Flame-Throwers by Rudolf Liepus, Sniper Aiming a Rifle by Gisbert Palmie’, or Lookout on a U-boat by Rudolf Hausknecht. Forty-five official war artists were ap
pointed by a committee under Luitpold Adam, who had already served as a war artist in 1914- 18; by 1944 there were eighty artists on his staff. The artists were attached to units of the armed forces, they were paid a salary, and their paintings and drawings became the property of the government. Special touring exhibitions of their work were sent round Germany to demonstrate the undiminished creativity of German culture in time of war. The artists themselves, indeed, were regarded as soldiers: ‘Only a soldier-like character,’ as one commentator remarked in 1942, ‘filled with intense feelings, is able to transmit the experience of war in artistic form.’165
War artists employed a variety of techniques, and some of them painted landscape scenes that were a world away from the realities of war. Franz Junghans’s Sunset on the Duna River (1942), for example, was almost abstract in its use of colours merging into one another over the flat and featureless landscape. Olaf Jordan’s Two Russian Prisoners of the Germans portrayed its subjects with some sympathy and compassion, while Wolfgang Willrich’s sketch of a Bavarian villager serving on the Eastern Front showed more of the peasant than the soldier in his rough, humorous features. But the great majority of the war artists’ paintings depicted optimistic scenes of heroic soldiers gazing defiantly at the enemy, manning their machine-gun posts, or leading the troops onwards with gestures that implicitly included the spectator, and thus the whole German people, in their invitation to join the assault. The paintings of one of the most popular war artists, Elk Eber, whose work was endlessly reproduced in propaganda magazines, ‘had’, as an obituary in the Racial Observer noted in 1941, ‘basically only one theme: the soldierly, heroic masculinity of our time’.166 Eber’s The Dispatch Courier was a particular favourite, often shown on postcards: it showed a steel-helmeted soldier, his rifle slung horizontally across his back, rushing heroically out of a foxhole, determination mingled with enjoyment of his role stamped on his features. Whatever they depicted, however, the war artists made sure to avoid displaying the horrors of battle. There were no wounded, no dead bodies, no soldiers with missing limbs, there was no blood, no suffering, indeed almost no real violence at all in their works. The contrast to the gut-wrenching pictures painted by anti-war German artists in 1914-18 was noted with approval. The new work was eminently suitable for use in schools, it was agreed. ‘Show the pupils the pictures of soldiers painted by Erler or Spiegel,’ remarked one commentator, ‘compare them with the vulgar and horrid works by Dix or Grosz. Every pupil will recognise immediately what decadent art is . . . The strength of the real artist is in his blood, which leads him to heroism.’167
The leading German artist of the war years, however, was not a painter but a sculptor. Arno Breker had already created a number of monumental, aggressive and militaristic figures before the war.168 His European reputation was considerable. In 1941 Hitler persuaded a group of French artists, including Andre’ Derain, Kees van Dongen and Maurice Vlaminck, to visit him in his studio. One of their number, the director of the ’cole des Beaux-Arts, wrote on his return in glowing terms of the way in which ‘a great country honours its artists and their work, its intellectual culture and the dignity of human existence’.169 Breker seemed the ideal subject for a major retrospective, which was held in April 1942 not in Berlin but in occupied Paris. Jean Cocteau wrote a fulsome introduction to the catalogue, praising him as a worthy successor to Michelangelo.170 Knowing his high standing with Hitler, prominent Nazis vied with each other for his friendship, and he was on good terms not only with Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels but also with Heinrich Himmler, who discussed with him commissions to adorn various premises of the SS with his work. In April 1941 Breker was appointed Vice-President of the Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts. He played a key role in Speer’s plans for the reconstruction of Berlin, and Speer set him up with what was virtually a factory to produce his sculptures, bas-reliefs and other three-dimensional objects, subsidizing it with vast sums of money. Hitler told his companions at dinner one night that Breker deserved an income of a million Reichsmarks a year, and Martin Bormann gave him a tax-free honorarium of 250,000 Reichsmarks in April 1942. Hitler and Speer paid for the refurbishment of his castle near the river Oder, where Breker advertised his privileged status by displaying his collection of paintings by L’ger, Picasso and other artists officially regarded as ‘degenerate’ on the walls. The German ambassador in Paris put the confiscated house of the Jewish cosmetics manufacturer Helena Rubinstein at his disposal, and Breker spent a good deal of his substantial income on buying up works by Rodin and other artists as well as quantities of fine wines, books and perfume.171
Breker was far from being alone in his avid pursuit of paintings, sculptures and other cultural objects in the occupied countries. Indeed, he was heavily outclassed in this respect by Hitler and G̈ring. Both were wealthy men by the time the war broke out.172 Hermann G̈ring owned ten houses, castles and hunting lodges, all provided and maintained at the taxpayer’s expense. In all these locations, and particularly in his vast and ever-expanding principal hunting lodge at Carinhall, named after his first wife, G̈ring wanted to display artworks, tapestries, paintings, sculptures and much else besides, to emphasize his status as the Reich’s second man. G̈ring spent large sums of money on acquiring cultural objects of all kinds, using whatever means he could.173 By contrast, Hitler himself made a point of avoiding ostentatious displays of personal wealth, preferring instead to accumulate an art collection for public use. Hitler had long planned to turn his home town of Linz, in Austria, into the cultural capital of the new Reich, even drawing sketches for the new public buildings and museums he hoped to construct there. Linz would become the German Florence, with a comprehensive collection above all of Germanic art housed in a range of purpose-built galleries and museums. Berlin, too, had to have art museums suitable for its new status as the coming capital of the world. On 26 June 1939 Hitler engaged the services of an art historian, Hans Posse, a museum director in Dresden, to amass the collection he needed for this purpose. Posse was provided with almost limitless funds, and by the middle of the war he was acquiring art objects from all over German-occupied Europe, amassing an almost incredible total of more than 8,000 by 1945. Armed with full powers from Hitler, he was able to outbid or outmanoeuvre other agents, such as Kajetan Mühlmann, who were working for G̈ring, or for other major German museums, or indeed for themselves. By December 1944, Posse and the man who succeeded him shortly after Posse’s death from cancer in December 1942, Hermann Voss, director of the Wiesbaden Museum, had spent a total of 70 million Reichsmarks on buying for the Linz collection. Not surprisingly, dealers used by Hitler and Posse, such as Karl Haberstock, made considerable profits out of their business.174
This spending spree did not take place in normal art market conditions. Many countries for example had rules and regulations controlling the export of art treasures, but during the war Hitler was easily able to ignore them or brush them aside. Moreover, the high prices offered in many cases for the old German Masters he wanted for the Linz Museum were not quite what they seemed, at least not from 1940 onwards, since the Germans fixed exchange rates with the French franc and other currencies in occupied countries at rates that were extraordinarily favourable to the German Reichsmark. But in many cases it was not necessary to spend any money at all. Artworks had already been confiscated from German-Jewish collectors in large quantities, especially after the pogrom of 9-10 November 1938, allegedly for ‘safe-keeping’; they were registered and subsequently appropriated by the German state. A precedent had been set in March 1938 with the invasion of Austria. Here as in other occupied countries, Jewish emigrants had to leave their assets behind if they emigrated, to be taken over by the Reich. After the conquest of France in 1940 the property of citizens who had fled the country also fell to the German Reich; the same applied eventually to all Jews deported to Auschwitz and other extermination camps in the east from every occupied country in Europe, offering widespread opportunities for plunder.175
Looting ex
tended far beyond the expropriation of the Jews when the Nazis invaded countries inhabited by people they regarded as subhuman, uncultured Slavs. Already during the invasion of Poland, German troops ransacked country houses and palaces for cultural objects of all kinds. Soon, however, the despoliation of Poland’s cultural heritage was put on an organized basis. Kajetan M̈hlmann, who had previously carried out similar duties in Vienna, was put in charge of the process. By the end of November 1940 the registration was complete, and Posse arrived to select prime specimens for the Leader. He was followed in due course by art museum directors from Germany, anxious for their share in the spoils. Quarrels broke out, as Hermann G̈ring tried to obtain pictures for himself while Hans Frank objected to the removal of prize loot from his headquarters. Perhaps this was not such a bad idea, however, since Frank had no idea of how to display or preserve Old Masters, and was once reprimanded by M̈hlmann for hanging a painting by Leonardo da Vinci above a radiator. Private collections were ransacked as well as state museums, and the vast collection amassed by the Czartoryski family, including a Rembrandt and a Raphael, was systematically despoiled.176 Meanwhile Hans Frank was busy decorating his headquarters with looted artworks, and shipping trophies back to his home in Bavaria. When American troops arrived there in 1945, they found a Rembrandt, a Leonardo, a fourteenth-century Madonna from Cracow, and looted vestments and chalices from Polish churches.177