by Michael Haas
[Göring:] ‘It is impossible to build a Reich that is both large and glorious if groups within our nation are reduced to slavery. With a cowed people, or where millions feel themselves to be excluded, it is not possible to inspire a country to historic deeds.’ The Allgemeine Deutsche Zeitung, a paper from the political right, expresses the fear that the new Reich is being built on feelings and instincts and not, as with previous governments, on reason: ‘It can only lead to intolerable uniformity of Germany's political and intellectual life, a feat that the rest of the world would gaze upon with open mouths. In our opinion,’ [the ADZ] continues, ‘this contributes just as little to the work that still needs to be done during these dangerous times as playing lovey-dovey to Hitler's enemies from earlier days.’ [The ADZ] goes on to despair of the cowardly resignation, the byzantine lack of tact in all dealings and the total absence of cultivation and civil courage. The appeal of Furtwängler, however, reminds us that there is still to be found within the German people the bravery that does not quake at the foot of the thrones of kings. It would be a true blessing if it were on these foundations of past ideals that a country's history was being inspired.54
Goebbels represented a more nuanced and ambivalent view, that the public should decide for itself if it liked atonal, dissonant music, just so long as it was not of Jewish authorship. To this end, Erich Kleiber conducted Alban Berg's Lulu Suite at Berlin's Staatsoper in December 1934. During the Nazi years, more stridently modernist music was occasionally tolerated; even more rarely – as with Klenau's opera Michael Kohlhaas – it would be promoted as part of Goebbels's propaganda attempts to portray National Socialism as progressive.
Who's a Jew?
The removal of Jews and their works from the repertoire meant breaking countless contracts which would have led to costly court actions. To circumvent this, a law called ‘The Re-establishment of the Professional Civil Service’ was passed on 7 April 1933 barring Jews from any publicly subsidised position unless they could prove that they had fought on the front in the First World War – an exception that enabled the Jewish composer and conductor Leo Blech to remain in his position as Music Director of the Berlin State Opera Unter den Linden until 1937. This law hit orchestras, opera houses and theatres particularly hard, and it was in direct response to this that Furtwängler addressed his appeal to Goebbels on 12 April. The Städtische Oper in Berlin-Charlottenburg, the venue for many of Berlin's most important premieres such as Schreker's Der Schmied von Gent, Weill's Die Bürgschaft and Gál's Die heilige Ente, lost its founding music director Ignaz Waghalter, its conductor Fritz Stiedry, its assistant conductors and pianists Berthold Goldschmidt and Kurt Sanderling, and its chief administrator, Rudolf Bing. Waghalter fled first to Czechoslovakia, then to the United States. Carl Ebert and Bing resigned and moved to England, where they took on the management of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera. Goldschmidt followed in 1935 in the mistaken belief that Ebert would be able to find him a position, and hopeful that, following a BBC broadcast of Berg's Wozzeck, he might find opportunities no longer afforded to modern Jewish composers in Germany. Kurt Sanderling took the courageous decision to go the Soviet Union, where he miraculously avoided the purges of 1938 and later became one of Shostakovich's closest associates.
Much stricter legislation would soon come into force. The notorious ‘Nuremberg Laws’ were announced at the Nazi Party Conference in Nuremberg in September 1935. The laws were designed to protect German blood and prohibited ‘inter-racial’ sexual relationships and marriage. Those who could not prove their pure Aryan lineage were stripped of fundamental rights, which would soon progress from the profoundly distressing, such as losing all means of employment, to the petty and mean-spirited, such as not being allowed in public parks or attending entertainments held in public venues. In August 1938, a law was passed that required all men and women of Jewish descent to take a common middle name that would instantly identify them as Jews. For men this name was ‘Israel’, and for women ‘Sarah’. These regulations spread from region to region as each tried to outdo the others in finding new means to isolate and humiliate German Jews.
With the annexation of Austria, the full fury of Austrian Nazi frustration unleashed a blood bath. What had taken five years to carry out in Germany was accomplished in a matter of months in Austria. The extreme brutality caused a wave of suicides among Jews with no foreign connections to help them escape. Even well-known figures were affected, such as the cultural historian and writer Egon Friedell, who leapt to his death from a window when he believed Nazis were storming his apartment building.
Nazi laws would extinguish Austria's literary identity. The annexation would be the last nail in the coffin of the depressive and alcoholic writer Joseph Roth, who died in Paris in 1939. Robert Musil died in Swiss exile in 1942, the same year that Stefan Zweig and his wife jointly committed suicide in Brazil. The works of writers who had died before the annexation, such as Karl Kraus in 1936, Franz Kafka in 1924, Rainer Maria Rilke in 1926, Arthur Schnitzler in 1931 and Hugo von Hofmannsthal in 1929, were taken out of circulation and even burned, though Hofmannsthal, as Strauss's librettist, was treated more lightly than others despite his Jewish ancestry.
On 22 September1933, the Nazis created the Reichskulturkammer (RKK) or the Reich's Chamber of Culture under Goebbels as a means of foiling the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF) or the German Workers’ Front, organised under Robert Ley. The DAF had been set up as a National Socialist umbrella organisation for German workers after the disbanding of all Weimar Republic trade unions in 1933. Under Ley's guidance, it had begun encouraging professionals and employees involved in the arts and culture to join. But this was an area that Goebbels saw as very much his own. Goebbels's RKK consisted of seven subdivisions, represented by the usual artistic disciplines of ‘written word’, ‘music’ and the ‘visual arts’, but also extending to the press and broadcasting. Beneath these were representatives of Germany's 31 districts. The RKK division devoted to music was called the Reichsmusikkammer (RMK – Reich Chamber of Musical Affairs), initially with Richard Strauss as its president and Wilhelm Furtwängler as his deputy. In fact, the 69-year-old Strauss had been appointed without his acceptance even being sought, but believing his new-found influence might help his Jewish in-laws and be useful to other musicians and friends, he complied and took up the post without further question. It looked as if there was a glimmer of hope that some sense of restorative balance might be brought to the racist fanaticism that dominated all other aspects of Nazi cultural policy.
Both appointments proved to be short-lived. Strauss was replaced by the more hard-line Peter Raabe in 1935 following Strauss's collaboration with Stefan Zweig on Die schweigsame Frau. The ubiquitous Paul Graener took over from Furtwängler as early as 1934 after Furtwängler publicly expressed support for Hindemith's opera Mathis der Maler and resigned from the RMK in protest at its banning. The purpose of the RMK was to provide support for composers and performers, protect their interests and offer a minimum of social security. Under Strauss's short presidency, the one position that was markedly improved was, unsurprisingly, that of copyright protection, which was extended to fifty years after a composer's death.
Despite the relatively early arrival of the RMK within the political apparatus, its removal of Jews from musical life was initially fairly half-hearted owing to Strauss's insistence on following the word, rather than the spirit, of the regulations. As the statutes of the RMK did not specifically prohibit Jews, Strauss was inclined to include them. This was despite a vague RKK statement from 9 November 1933 with the implication that Jews should be excluded. It took a specific instruction from Goebbels in March 1934, stating unequivocally that Jews were inappropriate stewards of German culture, before they were officially excluded. This position was reconfirmed the following month in an internal document of the RMK.55
Establishing whether a person was an Aryan or not, was to be based on information provided by applicants to the RMK on a questionnaire that was otherwise
meant to establish the professional suitability of musicians. As the RMK had become de facto a closed trade union, it was impossible to work without membership, and this was only offered on the basis of the questionnaire. Surprisingly, it was almost a year after Goebbels's instruction that Jews be removed from musical life before the legal mechanism was put into place to dismiss the remaining 8,000 Jewish musicians still in employment in February 1935.56 Nevertheless, according to several entries in Goebbels's diaries, the RMK even under Raabe was not purging Jews efficiently enough. The problem lay in defining exactly who should be classed as a Jew.57 The Nazi answer was to count the number of Jewish grandparents. This was straightforward if the grandparents were Jews, but more complicated if the grandparents came from mixed marriages. This hair-splitting became endemic at the RMK. For example, racially pure Germans, without any Jewish grandparents, were treated as Jewish if they converted to Judaism or if conversions to Judaism had taken place in previous generations. If an Aryan musician was married to a Jew, he or she was to be classified as ‘half-Jew’. Unsurprisingly, full Jews could not be classified as ‘half-Aryan’ under similar circumstances.
The Music Business
The Aryanisation of music publishers was a much slower process. Nevertheless, the voluntary organisation of publishers and music sellers (Deutsche Musikalien Verleger Verein – DMVV) was incorporated into the RMK in January 1934. Before that, as early as April 1933, the DMVV had declared itself supportive of the new government, and although it initially did not explicitly ban Jews, Viktor Albertis, Wilhelm Zimmermann, Henri Hinrichsen, Gustav Bock and Kurt Eulenburg found themselves removed from the executive committee of the DMVV and replaced with supporters of the new regime.58 Once incorporated into the RMK, membership of the DMVV became compulsory for all music dealers and publishers. Between 1933 and 1938, about forty publishers were run by Jewish owners or employed Jews in key executive positions. This amounted to a mere 10 per cent of music publishers, but had a severe impact on publishers of serious music. Peters, Benjamin, Bote & Bock, Eulenburg, Fürstner and Alrobi were the leading German publishers most severely affected, and with the annexation of Austria, a further 24 publishers were added including such prestigious houses as Universal Edition, Doblinger and Weinberger.59 Though there were no direct anti-Semitic attacks aimed specifically against Jews in the various trade magazines that served music publishers, there were clear instructions coming from above that Aryanisation should proceed apace and that under no circumstances should German publishers collaborate with non-Aryan publishers newly relocated abroad.60
Hermann Göring, who had been granted dictatorial powers in the implementation of a draconian ‘Four Year Plan’, started large-scale expropriation of Jewish businesses in 1936. Such powers allowed him to justify this as an ‘economic necessity’, and the removal of the last legal obstacles before the total economic disenfranchisement of all German Jews. Following the Austrian annexation, publishing houses such as Josef Weinberger – Mahler's first publisher, and the publisher of many important operetta composers – managed to relocate to London. Peters, Universal Edition, Bote & Bock and others were Aryanised, with many of their former employees moving to G. Schirmer in New York, or Boosey & Hawkes in London. GEMA,61 the rights management agency charged with collecting royalties from performances and broadcasting, was disbanded in March 1933 and replaced in September by the Nazi company STAGMA.62 The Austrian AKM (Autoren, Komponisten, Musikverleger) was folded into STAGMA after the annexation in 1938, despite protests from such international figures as Béla Bartók.
Logic suggests that Aryanisation would have been internationally sensitive, since publishers based in Germany provided scores and orchestral material for performances around the world. Indeed, a directive from 14 April 1939 stated that works banned in Germany (including annexed Austria) could still be exported, thereby providing much-needed foreign currency and, presumably, encouraging the further ‘degeneration’ of the world's non-Aryan population.63 Until 1942, catalogues that featured Jewish composers, along with printed scores by Jewish composers, were either consigned to be pulped, or marked as unavailable for sale or performance. Sales of scores by Jewish composers from antiquarian shops were to be restricted to music historians, and clearly marked with the letter ‘J’ along with a visible explanation as to its meaning.64 However, most publishers had taken the precaution of producing multiple copies, so that when some 30,000 printed scores and books were confiscated from Universal Edition, almost everything could be recovered later. Alfred Schlee informed Kurt Weill in 1946 that some works had been destroyed, including Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny.65 Fortunately he was mistaken as most of Schoenberg's and Weill's scores had been hidden behind the organ of a provincial village church.66 Weinberger suffered the destruction of scores by Leo Fall, which had been specifically moved to safety away from their normal place of storage but were later found by Nazis.67 However, the same publisher managed to rescue the manuscript of Erich Korngold's opera Die Kathrin from the composer's villa. Along with other items in Korngold's library, Die Kathrin was being thrown into the furnace of the central heating system by marauding Nazis while Korngold was away in Los Angeles composing the film score to Errol Flynn's The Adventures of Robin Hood.68 Weinberger employees broke into the cellar, recovered what was left of the manuscript, and returned it to Korngold by interleaving sheets between pages of Beethoven, Mozart and other acceptably ‘Aryan’ composers and posting these to the composer in California. The orchestral material was rescued from the archive of Vienna's Staatsoper, where it had been scheduled to go into rehearsal under Bruno Walter. The opera was given its premiere in October 1939 in Stockholm, where it was met with mixed reviews, some of them confrontationally anti-Semitic.69 By the time of the officially unleashed overnight pogroms of 9–10 November 1938 (Reichstkristallnacht or Kristallnacht), and the stipulation the following month forbidding non-Aryans from attending any public events, Jews found themselves effectively removed from every means of social, economic or cultural interaction in what had formerly been their native country.
The concert agency Wolff & Sachs in Berlin, formerly the representative for nearly all major performers in Germany and providing day-to-day management for the Berlin Philharmonic since its foundation in 1882, was dissolved in 1935.70 In Vienna, the publisher Hugo Knepler (brother of the librettist Paul Knepler, who had written texts for Leo Fall and Robert Stolz as well as for Franz Lehár's Giuditta) took over Vienna's Gutmann concert agency in 1907 and became the city's most powerful concert promoter, mounting over 2,000 events and managing such important artists as Maria Jeritza, Arthur Nikisch, Pablo Casals, Jascha Heifetz, Bronisław Huberman, Artur Schnabel and many others until the company crashed in 1931. After Austria's annexation, Knepler fled to France but was captured and deported by the Vichy Regime and murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. Smaller Jewish agencies in Germany and Austria were broken up, dissolved, subsumed or Aryanised under the Reichsmusikkammer.
The purging of musical life of all elements not deemed Aryan was fraught with complexities. As late as 1936 and 1937, Berlin Radio had compiled a blacklist of artists who were to be banned from engagement or performance. This included musicians who were not remotely Jewish such as the Austrian composers Julius Bittner and Wilhelm Kienzl, while the Jewish Erich Korngold is conspicuous by his absence.71 Against such blatant and obvious inconsistencies, the idiosyncratic infringements of other musical Gauleiters, such as those who banned the non-Jewish Manfred Gurlitt while allowing the premiere of Concertante Musik by the partially Jewish Boris Blacher by the Berlin Philharmonic under Carl Schuricht in 1937, come across as arbitrary at best, or incompetent at worst.
An acute problem was caused by one of the mainstays of German literature, the Jewish writer Heinrich Heine, who died in 1856. Hardly any other poet had been set so enthusiastically by so many of the great German composers of the nineteenth century. Karl Blessinger in Judentum und Musik – one of the most astounding anti-Semitic tracts of the Nazi
era – makes the paranoid observation that Jews had camouflaged themselves through a clever use of language to conceal their ambitions for world domination.72 He even goes so far as to suggest that Schumann was able to stop Jewish subterfuges by setting a sufficient number of Heine texts to nip Jewish plots in the bud.73 Nazi favourites such as d'Albert's Tiefland and Lehár's Lustige Witwe were also compromised by librettos by Jewish authors – as Ralph Benatzky pointed out in his diaries, he couldn't recall the name of a single operetta librettist who wasn't Jewish.
Hofmannsthal was another ‘difficulty’. The president of the Reichsmusikkammer, Richard Strauss, however, had seen their collaboration as artistically crucial to his own success, though he went too far in engaging Stefan Zweig, another non-Aryan, as librettist for Die schweigsame Frau – an act considered so reckless that it cost him his position at the RMK. Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart's Jewish librettist for Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte and Le Nozze di Figaro, was yet another headache, as were the German translations of these operas by another Jew, Hermann Levi, the very same Jew who had conducted the premiere of Wagner's Parsifal. Even the other Strausses, Johann, Father and Son, had inconveniently turned out not to be of the pure Nordic stock demanded by the new rulers of the Reich. This was stealthily rectified using a pair of scissors on the Registry of Baptisms in St Stephen's Cathedral, where the names of the offending Jewish grandparents were snipped out. These doctored Strauss credentials may have helped Nazi purists save face, but it was already well known that the Strauss family lived in Vienna's Jewish district, locally known as the ‘Matzos Island'; and as two of Strauss the younger's three wives indicate, he showed a clear preference for Jewish women. Being the Waltz King's step-child did not save the daughter of his third wife Adele from deportation and the gas chambers. Still, it must have been clear to even the dimmest of wits that German and Jewish culture had become so closely intertwined that it was impossible to disentangle them without significant self-harm.
