Fracture

by Philipp Blom

  Some exiles thrived, particularly those already famous as literary stars, such as Thomas Mann, Brecht, Feuchtwanger, and Werfel. But for those starting out in their careers, a new country and, more especially, a new language meant many difficult years. One of the young hopefuls was twenty-six-year-old Hans Keilson, a medical student from northern Germany who had been earning money on the side as a jazz trumpeter; his first novel, Das Leben Geht Weiter (Life Goes On), had recently been accepted by the prestigious S. Fischer publishing house. It was published in spring 1933, but the author had little opportunity to enjoy the fact. Persecuted as a Jew, as a “subversive” writer, and as a jazz musician, he was forced to leave Berlin on the urgent advice of his publisher, who told him simply, “Machen Sie, dass Sie rauskommen—get out of here.” Keilson escaped to the Netherlands, where he lived under an assumed identity, eventually joining the Dutch resistance movement. After the war, Keilson would establish an outstanding reputation as a psychiatrist, treating Jewish children who had returned from the Nazi camps. He would receive no literary recognition, however, until decades later.

  A Society in Lock Step

  HUNDREDS OF CAREERS and private lives were broken or at least derailed in similar ways, and by no means only those of writers. In an ever-widening cultural campaign, the Nazis targeted prominent individuals in all arts and sciences and other socially influential fields, their goal nothing less than a total Gleichschaltung (compulsory coordination) of all German culture, high and low, including many aspects of ordinary daily life.

  In Berlin, one institution had already felt the brunt of “healthy German feeling” four days before the book burning of May 10. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research was a trailblazer in sociology and in the investigation of sexual identities; it represented the scientific vanguard of the traditionally tolerant and permissive atmosphere in the capital city. Hirschfeld himself had taken the risk of openly declaring his homosexuality. He owned a library of some twenty thousand volumes on all aspects of sexuality, as well as a vast collection of photographs, forty thousand interviews and letters, and a large array of sexual ephemera, such as contraceptive devices, sex toys, and fetish objects. With forty full-time employees conducting research and offering advice, his institute had become a place of pilgrimage for medical and social scientists, and for homosexuals.

  On May 6, 1933, some one hundred students of the Hochschule für Leibesübungen (Academy for Physical Education) assembled in military formation in front of the villa housing Hirschfeld’s collections. Accompanied by appropriately martial music, they stormed the building. Breaking down doors and pushing aside everything and everyone in their path, they destroyed documents, smashed furniture, pictures, and other items in the collection, and stole whatever remained that they deemed “morally suspect.”

  Demanding to see Hirschfeld, the young Nazi activists were informed that he was abroad on a speaking tour, and suffering from malaria. They seemed almost pleased at the news, laughing that the illness might well kill him without help from them, so they would not have to trouble themselves with hanging him or beating him to death. In lieu of the original, they took a bronze bust of the founder and later used it to adorn the book burning on the public square in front of the opera house. Later on the same afternoon, SA men staged another raid, removing a further two truckloads of material from the institute. Hirschfeld himself recovered from the malaria, but he never returned to Germany. He tried to establish a new headquarters for the institute, first in Paris and then in Nice, where he died two years later of a heart attack.

  Existential Choices

  IN APRIL 1933 a new Law for the Reestablishment of the Status of Civil Servants facilitated the elimination of Jewish, leftist, and otherwise suspect state employees from ministries, city halls, courts of law, and university teaching and research posts. In the famous university of Göttingen, which housed one of the finest scientific faculties in the country, two-thirds of the physicists and mathematicians either were sacked or resigned, among them the Jewish physicists Max Born and James Franck, the latter a Nobel Prize winner who had laid the foundations for Göttingen’s international reputation in his field. The two men went abroad, Born to Cambridge and his friend and colleague Franck to Baltimore and then Chicago, where he would later participate in the Manhattan Project to produce the first atomic bomb.

  Though, like the prominent writers, eminent scientists such as Franck found help and new appointments with relative ease, junior colleagues faced greater difficulties. At Berlin University, biologist Wilhelm Feldberg was working in his laboratory at the Institute of Physiology when he was called into the office of the director, who gave him a copy of the new law to read, saying, “You’re a Jew. You have to be out of here by midday.” Feldberg, until then a valued faculty member, protested that he had only just begun a new series of experiments. “Well then,” replied his superior, “you’ll have to leave by midnight.”5 At thirty-two, Feldberg was at the beginning of his career; he began the difficult negotiations for legal emigration and the search for a job abroad.

  From Britain, Feldberg and several thousands of other scientists were helped by Sir William Beveridge’s Academic Assistance Council, founded by famous researchers such as physicist and chemist Sir Ernest Rutherford and physiologist J. S. Haldane as an answer to Hitler’s “pogrom of the intellect.” Among those the organization supplied with money, hope, and jobs were art historians Ernest Gombrich and Nikolaus Pevsner, chemist Max Perutz, and philosopher Karl Popper. In October 1933, Beveridge organized a support rally in London’s vast Albert Hall, and the venue was sold out. More than five thousand people came to hear Albert Einstein and other eminent exiles speak in defense of academic liberty and intellectual and cultural freedom.

  While the Gleichschaltung of all cultural and intellectual life disrupted the lives and careers of some of Germany’s most talented writers and scientists, it also created opportunities for others. The students who had so enthusiastically organized and participated in the book burning were next in line to fill many of the newly created academic vacancies, thus turning the sciences as well as the humanities into a purely German concern. There were even attempts to lay the theoretical groundwork for an ideologically pure German physics and mathematics that could function without the contributions of Jewish scientists. From his exile in Britain, Albert Einstein remarked to the sculptor Jacob Epstein that a hundred German professors had recently condemned his general and special theories of relativity, adding, “Were I wrong, one professor would have been enough.”

  But not all who were threatened left Nazi Germany, nor did all of those who had the choice to leave. At seventy-four years of age, the great theoretical physicist Max Planck felt that he was simply too old to start life anew elsewhere; he stayed in Berlin, encouraging other scientists to do the same. Planck’s loyalty was to the now superseded ideal of a Prussian polity, similar to that in which he had lived and worked for most of his career. Werner Heisenberg, preeminent among the younger generation of German theoretical physicists, also opted to continue his career under the Nazis. It is still a matter of debate whether Heisenberg later helped or hindered the government in Berlin in its desire to procure an atomic bomb, but his decision to remain caused a deep rift with many of his colleagues, most notably his former mentor, the Dane Niels Bohr.

  Intellectuals and scientists who, like Heisenberg, opted to remain in Nazi Germany often went into what the writer Erich Kästner called “internal exile,” a kind of Siberia of the soul. Kästner was no longer allowed to publish; his decision to stay owed much to the wishes of his mother, with whom the lifelong bachelor had a close connection. Kästner did manage to work under pseudonyms; several of his film scripts were to bring him into closer contact with the regime than he would later care to admit. But his literary reputation was never to recover from this period of almost total obscurity, and despite the fact that his greatest ambition, and his highest reputation, was for his adult fiction, he became known as the
author of Emil and the Detectives and other books for children—books so popular that even the Nazis exempted them from their blacklists.

  A more complex case is that of the great composer and conductor Richard Strauss. Sixty-nine years old when Hitler came to power, he almost immediately offered his services to the regime, making it known that he would be pleased to accept an appointment as president of the newly founded Reichsmusikkammer, the compulsory professional body to which all musicians were obliged to belong in the course of the general Gleichschaltung of cultural life. Strauss was certainly not a committed Nazi. He despised the brownshirts and their plebeian tastes in music; fin-de-siècle cosmopolitan that he was, he had no sympathy with Nazi ideology. Focused on his art, Strauss had little interest in politics and looked down on simplistic ideas of Aryan purity. His two favorite librettists, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Stefan Zweig, were of Jewish or partly Jewish descent (Hofmannsthal had a Jewish grandfather), as were many of his friends and his daughter-in-law.

  But for the Nazis, the appointment of Germany’s most famous composer, with his glittering international reputation, was a great publicity coup. Classical music—traditionally one of the most effective assimilation vehicles for the rising Jewish bourgeoisie since the days of Felix Mendelssohn—had a particularly strong Jewish presence, and the exodus of orchestral musicians, teachers, and soloists, not to mention “decadent” atonal composers and jazz musicians, had left gaping holes in German musical life. This created career opportunities for ambitious young “Aryan” musicians such as the young conductor Herbert von Karajan, then still musical director at the municipal theater in Ulm. He wasted no time enlisting in the National Socialist Party in 1933, a tactical move that quickly turned to his advantage: two years later, Karajan became the youngest musical director of a major orchestra in Germany.

  The Nazi regime wanted stars to demonstrate to the world that German music was still thriving after the massive bloodletting it had sustained. It needed to show that it remained where it belonged, where Beethoven and Wagner had placed it: at the summit of civilization. The stars, however, refused to come. Some were Jewish, some were politically on the left, and some, such as conductor Fritz Busch, were simply disgusted with the system; all refused to perform in Hitler’s Reich. German music could nonetheless boast the great Berlin Philharmonic orchestra, still under its legendary (and arguably politically naive) conductor, Wilhelm Furtwängler, and also the tacit support of the grand master of late Romanticism, composer Richard Strauss.

  Why did Strauss agree to enter into a pact with a power he knew to be diabolical? It may be that he regarded it as necessary to secure the large audiences, frequent programming at the best theaters, and collaborations with the finest orchestras, singers, and conductors, and so on that his works had long enjoyed. The reason he himself lobbied for the position of president of the newly created Reichsmusikkammer was that he wanted to protect German music, and its musicians, many of them Jewish, against the worst of the barbarism. It is likely that these reasons were conflated and that Strauss was happy to accept the agreeable results for his own music that his public service brought in its train.

  Strauss’s political career in Nazi Germany was as short-lived as it was ill-conceived. In 1935, exasperated by the “Aryan” librettists foisted upon him by the Nazi authorities, he wrote an impassioned letter to Stefan Zweig, by then already in exile. Such was the composer’s frustration that he expressed his feelings without any political or ideological subterfuge: “Do you seriously think that Mozart composed consciously ‘Aryan’ music?” he wrote. “For me there are only two categories of people; those who have talent and those who don’t, and for me the Volk exists only from the moment when it becomes a public. Whether it consists of Chinese, Upper Bavarians, New Zealanders or Berliners is all the same to me, as long as they have paid the full price for their tickets.” He was keeping his position “to do good and to prevent worse, simply out of an artistic sense of duty.”6

  The letter was intercepted by the Gestapo. Goebbels forced Strauss to resign as president of the Reichsmusikkammer almost immediately, “for health reasons.” But instead of quietly retiring to his splendid Bavarian country house, Strauss appealed to Hitler himself: “Trusting in your high sense of justice, I most humbly request, my Führer, that you receive me for a personal word.” Hitler did not think it necessary to reply.

  If the old composer had donned a Nazi uniform in the service of art, the forty-nine-year-old philosopher Martin Heidegger was more genuinely engaged with National Socialist ideology. It is impossible to do justice to his notoriously complex and often obscure thought in a few sentences, but one important aspect of Heidegger’s thought is the desire to shed the Uneigentlichkeit or inauthenticity of the modern world into which we are thrown without our choice, and to reach a realm of authentic being and selfhood.

  Heidegger’s most important philosophical inspirations were pre-Socratic philosophy, early Christianity, and the nineteenth-century poet Friedrich Hölderlin—nothing the theoreticians of National Socialism could have identified with. At the same time, the philosopher believed that fascism contained elements of an answer to one of his most pressing questions. His intellectual search for authenticity, often conducted in a secluded mountain hut, appeared to be mirrored in the Nazis’ demand for a return to a genuine peoplehood, a Volk of blood and soil, not manipulated by the soulless mechanisms of modernity.

  Unquestionably the philosopher’s infatuation with the black-shirted men of action was intensified by the fact that his partisanship—he joined the Nazi Party in 1933—did no harm to his career. In that same year, he became chancellor of Freiburg University, where he already held a professorship. In his inaugural speech, he spoke of “the march that our people have started toward their future history” and “the power of the deepest conservation of the forces of soil and blood.”7

  One month later, in June 1933, Heidegger declared before a student organization that German research must not surrender to liberal cosmopolitanism. On the contrary: “We must fight against this in the spirit of National Socialism, which must not be suffocated by humanizing, Christian ideas.” In the new university, studying would once again become “a daring act, no refuge for cowards. Those who do not prevail in the fight remain on the ground . . . because the fight . . . will be long. It will be fought with the forces of the new Reich, which Chancellor Hitler will bring into existence. A hard generation will fight this fight.”8

  Heidegger wanted nothing less than to reorganize the German university system as a series of training grounds for the future leaders of a dominant people strictly obedient to its own great Führer. But relations with the Party leadership soon soured. They had been looking for a figurehead, not a meddling reformist with too many ideas and an infuriating tendency to express his thoughts in impenetrable neologisms and endless subordinate clauses. Heidegger’s enthusiasm was philosophical, but he was no political zealot. Appointed university chancellor just two days before the nationwide book burning of May 10, he forbade any event of this kind to take place at his university. In this he was one of the few university leaders to do so, but his decision was in any case without consequences, as on the day in question it was raining heavily. Though opposed to book burning, the philosopher-chancellor was content to support the regime otherwise, blocking the appointment of scholars he deemed ideologically unreliable.

  After only one year, Heidegger resigned and went back to his mountain hut. He himself would later claim to be embarrassed by the whole episode, that he had had a temporary lapse of judgment, and that he would henceforth adopt a position of “intellectual resistance.” But he was seen wearing a swastika lapel pin during a visit to Italy, and was heard expounding on the deeper truth of National Socialism even shortly before the outbreak of the war. In obtuse philosophical language, he vacillated, making oracular statements that could be interpreted as sympathetic to or critical of Germany’s new masters.

  Heidegger’s moral cowardice deeply
disappointed one of his most gifted students and a former lover, Hannah Arendt. Having corresponded with her erstwhile teacher even after their relationship had ended, she broke contact with him completely in 1933, devoting herself to helping refugees who were Jewish like herself. Arendt was arrested by the Gestapo and questioned for several days. It is not certain whether Heidegger knew about her arrest; in any case he did not intervene on her behalf at any point as she was preparing to emigrate, first to Paris and then to Palestine.

  Dr. Croce Goes Home

  THE PHILOSOPHER HEIDEGGER was only one of scores of intellectuals who initially felt that fascism might be an answer to the seemingly intractable problems of a time that lacked strong political leadership, had no credible values and perspectives, and was struggling economically. The erosion of values and the apparent lack of an alternative to the Manichaean struggle between communism and fascism were preoccupations for a great many intellectuals at this time. Another philosopher living in a fascist country, who also was initially hopeful that a strong leader might change things for the better and chose not to emigrate even when the situation became desperate, the Italian Benedetto Croce, reached a very different conclusion from Heidegger.

  Croce, who was sixty-seven in 1933, was a singular figure in several ways. As a seventeen-year-old he had lost his parents and only sister when an earthquake destroyed the family home; Croce himself had been trapped in the rubble for hours. Perhaps this severing of strong ties had created an early sense of autonomy, for he proceeded to cut other affiliations, most significantly with the Catholic Church. Independently wealthy, he did not seek a university career, preferring to pursue philosophical projects at his home in Naples.