Authors: Michael Haas
Hollywood
Hollywood's moguls were mostly Eastern European and Russian Jews themselves, and they must have felt a touch of
Schadenfreude
as they scooped up the cream of Western European talent following Hitler's rise to power. Most
of the newcomers were assimilated, urban Jews who were intimidatingly glamorous and sophisticated. Certainly Jack Warner, head of Warner Brothers, felt their arrival provided the opportunity to move away from low-budget gangster films and to smarten up the studio's image. At the same time, cultural insecurity meant he made agreements with this abundant talent that did not tally with his normally canny business instincts. One of these untypical deals was Max Reinhardt's film of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
– which gave Warner Bros the prestige of filming Shakespeare before its rivals at MGM or Paramount. Reinhardt's theatrical reputation was legendary, and his staging of the play at the Hollywood Bowl the previous year had left everyone open-mouthed. It was assumed he would be a cinematic natural.
What Warner had not taken into account was a European sophistication that took little notice of the company's central business precept – to produce mass-market movies with as little financial outlay as possible. Warner Brothers was famous for never going over budget. With Reinhardt's
Midsummer Night's Dream
, all the rules changed. Its expensive stars spoke lines in a weighty Shakespearian language that many movie-going Americans had difficulty following. The film may have been a
succès d'estime
, but it was a financial disaster. A combination of panic and cultural insecurity even saw Warner agreeing to another Reinhardt contract to make a film version of Georg Büchner's play
Dantons Tod
, while simultaneously taking measures to make sure such financial folly would never get beyond the planning stages. If it had, Korngold would have finally been able to supply Reinhardt with an original score, an ambition that was never to be realised.
Korngold's arrival had a galvanising effect on the Warner Brothers music department. Though many studio composers from this time are now well known, such as Alfred Newman and Max Steiner, none arrived in Hollywood with a career as firmly established as Korngold's. They supplied music by the minute and used stopwatches to measure to the second what was required. A team of orchestrators and arrangers would then flesh out sketched ideas. Korngold's practical mastery was unheard of. He conducted with authority, played the piano like a virtuoso and orchestrated as he composed, leaving details to assistants like Hugo Friedhofer. Most astonishingly, he knew instinctively how much music was needed for, say, twelve inches of film, and never used a stopwatch. The film version of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
launched not only Korngold's Hollywood career, but also those of many in its cast: Olivia de Havilland and Mickey Rooney made their film debuts and the role of Bottom was improbably played by James Cagney.
On completion of the film, Korngold returned to Austria in May 1935 to continue work on
Die Kathrin
. New contracts from Warner Brothers had
already been offered to him for further projects with Reinhardt and Ernst Lubitsch. Paramount wanted him to compose the music for their newest signing: Jan Kiepura, the heart-throb star of Korngold's opera
Das Wunder der Heliane
, recently exiled from Hitler's Germany. The resolute Romantics of Vienna and Berlin had found their refuge from Europe's cultural and political dictatorships, and it was called Hollywood.
I, as a Jew, expect the redemption of the world to come to us through a renewal of a pure and genuine Christianity.
Ich als Jude erwarte die Erlösung der Welt von der Wiedergeburt eines reinen und echten Christentums.
Speech by Franz Werfel in Vienna, 4 March 1932
We have eradicated International Jewry from cultural life; we have purged the theatres and cinemas and we have returned a respectable press to the German people. We have placed our entire intellectual and cultural life onto a new foundation.
Wir haben das internationale Judentum aus dem Kulturleben ausgemerzt, wir haben die Theater und Kinopaläste gesäubert, wir haben dem deutschen Volk wieder eine anständige Presse gegeben und wir haben das ganze Geistes- und Kulturleben auf eine neue Basis gestellt.
Speech by Josef Goebbels in Hamburg, 3 March 1933
At the end of 1932, there was much to occupy the largely Jewish contingent of journalists at Vienna's
Neue Freie Presse
. The 300th birthday of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza was celebrated on 24 November,
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though despite the detail of the accompanying articles, it was far more subdued than the retrospective the paper had produced on the 250th anniversary of his death in 1927.
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It was a last gasp of rationalism: the Dutch Jewish philosopher had laid the intellectual basis for the Enlightenment that became the foundation for two pillars of German Humanism: Lessing and Goethe. In 1933 the readers of the
Neue Freie Presse
were offered a reminder of the conflicts between Wagner
and Brahms, with a variety of articles and feuilletons: it was 50 years since Wagner's death and 100 years since Brahms's birth. The anti-Semitism of Wagner goes unmentioned,
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though the Austrian journalist deplores the brutalised co-opting of Wagner by ‘the new politics of today’ and paints his German nationalism in wilfully Kantian colours. Similarly, the philo-Semitism of Brahms passes without direct comment.
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Brahms's support for the Liberal Party, the basis of the paper's editorial philosophy, is considered more relevant – and tacitly it amounted to much the same thing. Mahler's beloved soprano Selma Kurz also died in 1933, making it a poignant year for Julius Korngold, who had been one of her most ardent supporters. More irksome for Julius was the continued success of his son's work as an arranger of operettas, most recently Offenbach's
Helen
, which opened to sensational reviews in London.
And then there were the political changes taking place in Germany: Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933, the burning of the Parliament the following month and the imposition of the Reichstag Fire Decree on 27 February, suspending civil liberties and allowing the Nazis to embark on the systematic suppression of all opposition. This was followed on 23 March 1933 by the Enabling Act, sanctioned by the German Parliament, which gave Hitler absolute dictatorial powers, and given the totally inappropriate title ‘Law to Remedy the Distress of the [German] People and Reich’.
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On New Year's Eve 1933, an anonymous editorial was printed in the
Neue Freie Presse
entitled ‘Between Hell and Purgatory’. It is an intriguing article, presenting the reader today with a combination of clairvoyance mixed with blindness, and wisdom tempered by fear and doubt. As with most leading articles in the paper, it is full of historic and literary allusions, starting with a quote from the fourth-century Greek sophist Alcidamas: ‘The Gods set all humanity free – nature has yet to make them into slaves.‘
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The article goes on to deal with contemporary macro-economic issues and the insanity of further defence spending. The writer is justifiably fretful regarding the delicate nature of relations between France and Germany, and is sceptical about Roosevelt's financial plans, which he views as reckless and unproven. But developments in Germany are the cause of greatest concern:
It becomes more and more difficult to greet the developments of the age using words that offer mere credulity. It's as [
Götterdämmerung
] when during night's darkest moment, the rope of fate being woven by the Norns suddenly snaps, cut by a curse as forbidding as a peak within the distant mountain range. By this we mean that a normal evaluation [and interpretation of the end of the year and its implications for the year to come] is
frankly not possible using simple reason, scientific objectivity, or even human instinct. The irrational and hallucinatory music of
Götterdämmerung
confuse the songs that ordinarily make up our end-of-year rounds and rob us of all confidence and assurance. The Alberich of today has more power at his disposal than the former Gods of light. […] In wishing to guess what may be in store, we can only grope blindly forward, trying to make out shapes in the dim light of a sun losing its warmth. We must free ourselves of everything we've ever believed – horror is the only emotion allowed. However, if we wish to divine the fate of humanity, we have no choice but to remain objective. Without objectivity, we're unable to place all that is hateful into its true alignment with our present condition. […] Yet this year's greatest outrage has been the dehumanising of humanity – the indifference to the fate of others, the greedy grasping of uncontrolled power and the idolisation of vulgar bigotry which is spreading like an intellectual epidemic more deadly than any variant of mediaeval mysticism. […] European culture itself as a spiritual entity has been destroyed. The intellectual traditions of generations have been wrecked. The dictators of recent times are uncannily adept at using the double edge of their swords: they position themselves at home as military absolutists on the one hand, while on the other, they make outward declarations of peace. […] Hitler has risen to the very top and has managed uncontested to rub out all political opposition like smudges on a chalkboard. […] He brought on elections that resulted in a monopoly in the Reichstag, which he has nevertheless succeeded in excluding from all political and economic decisions. He's turned theories of race into an anti-gospel that stands in stark contrast to the true gospels of mercy and charity towards one's neighbour. He has forced tens of thousands to flee, and many more have been ejected from their places of work. He ignores Frederick the Great's view that ‘misplaced zeal results in a tyranny that leaves the country barren – tolerance on the other hand is a gentle mother which nurtures and yields forth fruit’. The National Socialists have been able to carry out these brutalities by going out of their way to avoid conflict with the world's most important powers. They have spoken words of peace to all who chose to listen, expressed their desire to strike deals and negotiate the unresolvable. Nobody seems to recall their previous statements regarding Poland. [Hitler's government] has even been able to make a reasonable impression in Britain by acknowledging the mistakes made in previous disarmament conferences, counting on the desire of peace by the majority of the British people along with their sickness of war and their abject reluctance to start another arms-race. It is from precisely this point that we witness a new era in European politics: a shift away from the recent axiom of all western
nations aligned against Germany. From now on, we witness concessions as the basis of all negotiations.
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The writer goes on to despair of the League of Nations, oblivious to the vulnerability of Austria which was being placed under intolerable financial pressure as a result of restrictions imposed by Nazi Germany. He ends after brief excursions into global economic and political matters, expressing hope in Dollfuß and his plans for a hybrid state of democracy and corporatism. And in a plea that must have been uttered for the first time since the end of the First World War, he implores all to show charity towards the many refugees who now live amongst them.
Exit from Chaos: Dictatorship
It is worth remembering how fragile democracy was in the turbulent interwar years: even Britain, at the time of entering the First World War, had less enfranchisement than the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The new democracies that emerged at the end of the First World War fell again just as quickly: Hungary was turned into a monarchy from 1920 by the brutal Miklós Horthy, who made himself ‘regent’ in place of a king. His secret police terrorised and tortured Socialists, Communists and any other ‘ungodly’ political opposition. Bulgaria never really had a chance to try democracy as it moved to the dictatorship of Tsar Boris III. Italy went fascist in 1922, Lithuania and Poland in 1926, and as the 1930s progressed, Latvia, Estonia, Spain and Portugal also fell to various forms of dictatorships. In March 1933, only a month after Hitler's assumption of absolute power in Germany, Austria suspended parliament and joined Italy in its very specific form of ‘corporatist’ non-democratic government.
To speak of fascists as a single block is misleading. The corporatist Mussolini and the National Socialist Hitler loathed each other until circumstances and national greed pushed them together (as would also be the case with Hitler and Stalin in 1939). Up to this point, Italian and even Austrian Jews who feared Hitler saw Mussolini as a bulwark against the racist National Socialism of Germany.
On 20 January 1927, Winston Churchill made a statement in Rome praising Mussolini's brand of Fascism.
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‘I will, however, say a word on the international aspect of Fascismo. Externally, your movement has rendered a service to the whole world.‘
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Reading what was reported in Austria's still free press offers an independent view from Germany's nearest neighbour: according to the
Neue Freie Presse
, Churchill praised fascism's ability to order
the state's finances. The paper goes on to report that Churchill seemed to enjoy siding with Italy to score points against France – by calling for sensible expectations on the question of war reparations. He admired Mussolini's ability to galvanise his country in the fight against Bolshevism and believed that this authority also taught Italians the responsibilities of citizenship, demonstrating how honourable it was to defend themselves ‘against the social sores that were festering all around’.
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In reporting Churchill's statement, the
Neue Freie Presse
is just as fascinated that Churchill was the first British statesman of his time to comment in public on another country's form of government. In fact, this is far more significant to the Austrian observers than Churchill's admiration for Mussolini. The paper also expresses surprise at Churchill's endorsement of fascist policies as an ‘antidote to the virus coming from Russia’. The article ends with the observation ‘that no democrat can truly share Churchill's views, interesting though they are’.
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