Authors: Michael Haas
As early as April 1933, the Nazis had succeeded in bringing various Jewish charitable societies together into a Central Committee for Aid and Development. These included both Zionist and non-Zionist organisations, which had been unwilling to co-operate until pressure from National Socialists left them with no option. From the beginning of June 1933, a Central Office for Jewish Economic Development was initiated,
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followed by the Reich's Representation of German Jews in September,
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as a collective body for all regional Jewish societies. The rapid pace of this reorganisation was designed to make it appear to the outside world that Jews themselves were involved in their own exclusion from wider German society. The Central Committee for Aid and Development was also able to raise funds for emigration from sponsors in the United States and elsewhere, freeing the Nazi State from supporting its domestically unemployable Jewish citizens. The idea of a Jewish Culture League grew as a consequence of these developments and was the brain-child
of a 26-year-old theatre director named Kurt Baumann and his cousin, the critic Julius Bab, along with the conductors Michael Taube, Joseph Rosenstock and the neurologist who had become Carl Ebert's deputy director at Berlin's Charlottenburg Opera, Kurt Singer. Singer would become the prime mover within the organisation and the front man in all of its dealings with Hans Hinkel, its Nazi partner and ultimately by necessity, its protector. Singer outlined the purpose of the League as follows:
Keeping outer politics at bay from our affairs and not mixing in the domestic affairs regarding Jewish policies. We nonetheless stand up more boldly than ever for our Jewish heritage and believe in drawing from that, all which is specifically Jewish in drama, music and various intellectual fields. [This] is our uppermost duty and must ultimately be our greatest gain! That we are living proof of what has been nurtured by German culture and its great masters does not need to be repeated to any German Jew. So, is this a compromise? Yes! But it is one that is made in the conviction that there is a will to join German Jewry's diverse communities of ideas into a single unit!
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The League's inception was recounted by Singer in the
Zentral Vereins Zeitung
on 28 September 1933:
In those days during which we Jews had to put up with work restrictions, the young director Kurt Baumann came to see me at the beginning of April with a plan for the foundation of a theatre and members’ organisation. I had already worked out a similar plan and passed both of them on to Rabbi Dr Baeck for his consideration. With his support I invited leading representatives of Jewish organisations for preliminary consultations. […] One working committee drew up the statutes, while another prepared the organisational aspects for recruitment evenings and yet another took on the artistic planning. I presented official requests for permission to set up the ‘Cultural League of German Jews’ to various government offices. The decision on the matter was handed over to the Prime Minister of the Ministry of Education and the Arts, under whom was placed the President of the Prussian Theatre Committee and the State Commissioner Hinkel, who conducted the negotiations in part in person and in part through his representatives. At the same time I continually kept police headquarters and the Ministry of Propaganda […] informed of the progress of discussions.
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Kurt Baumann gives a slightly different account of the founding of the Kulturbund.
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He begins by mentioning that he had calculated that a city
like Berlin, with 175,000 Jews, would be able to maintain a parallel cultural existence that could go some way towards compensating Jews for their exclusion from mainstream cultural life. Some of the initial difficulties he encountered came from Zionist organisations who wanted plays and readings to be in Yiddish or Hebrew. However, Berlin's Jews were largely unable to speak or understand either language, and many were reluctant to place themselves, seemingly of their own free will, into a ghetto. Baumann points out that Jews had not yet been banned from attending public performances and if they possessed coveted tickets to Philharmonic subscription concerts, they simply closed their eyes and settled down among the surrounding Nazis in the audience. Baumann wrote: ‘People later said that we only founded the Kulturbund to provide a few Jewish artists with work and bread, but this is only half true. Of course we were concerned with giving the hundreds of Jewish artists who had been summarily dismissed a modest living until such time as they could leave the country. But for us in those days it was much more important to provide the Jewish public in Germany, which had once stood at the forefront of German cultural life, with a home for as long as possible.‘
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The resulting creation of the Jewish Cultural League was finalised by Hans Hinkel who, under Göring and Goebbels, was responsible for removing all Jews from Prussian, then national, cultural life. The League was founded, according to its first statute, in order to ‘support Jewish cultural and scientific interests and to create work places for Jewish artists and scientists’. Paradoxically, Hinkel had already admitted that ‘Jews with their naturally superior intellectual abilities had simply led to a situation in which Germans were no longer masters of their own homes’.
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With this thought uppermost, it was clear to Hinkel that heading such an organisation with a highly creative workforce would be politically advantageous. He became the Cultural League's defender against future Nazi excesses, while remaining the most whole-hearted believer in the removal of Jews from German cultural life.
By May 1933, a Cultural League Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Michael Taube, had been established in Berlin, and by June, Singer had approached Hinkel with a petition to establish the Cultural League (‘Kulturbund’) officially, a move disparaged by many in the Jewish Community, not least the philosopher Martin Buber, as a ‘ghetto that is called a league’.
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Singer, however, was of the view that the ghettoization of Jewish culture would become so important that Nazis would soon see the error of their ways. It was a fatal misreading of Nazi intentions. Singer eventually managed to escape to the Netherlands in 1938, but he was captured and murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. From his indefatigable efforts to meet the genuine cultural needs within the remaining German Jewish communities between 1933 and 1938, he
managed to establish a network of Cultural League chapters throughout the country. Performances were for Jews and given by Jews, taking place in disused cinemas and theatres.
There remained the irksome and continuing dilemma of who actually counted as a Jew in the eyes of the Nazis – and who was thereby allowed to participate in the Cultural League. Equally complex for a largely secular community was how the various religious communities addressed this question. It was a conflict that would be encountered again by charities working to free Jews from Nazi Europe over the coming years as well. The confederation of German Jewish Cultural Leagues had its headquarters in Berlin, and in April 1935 it was renamed the Reichsverband Jüdischer Kulturbünde (JKB),
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the word ‘German’ having been removed. In Hitler's New Germany, German Jews were an obvious contradiction.
One of Hinkel's principal worries was exactly the point that Singer had stated as the League's ultimate goal: that non-Jewish Germans would gravitate towards the Cultural League's events. Baumann mentions that there was even a suspicion that the whole thing could be a Jewish trick to take Germans away from their own, dedicated Nazi events. Enormous hurdles were imposed: tickets could only be sold to members carrying photo identification and it was impossible to buy a ticket for an evening's performance by walking in from the street. Material was censored and the Kulturbund was expected to steer clear of conspicuously German content. In return, the Nazis offered the League and its members protection. The first event, following the placement of an advertisement in both the Jewish and general press, resulted in a midsummer attendance of 2,500 at Berlin's central Prinzregenten Synagogue and subsequent events attracted even larger numbers.
Baumann explains in his essay that the League's scheduling in Berlin meant that a play would run for one month, followed by an opera which also ran for a month. In addition, there were two concert programmes and two lecture series per month: ‘Subscribers could choose their own days and were guaranteed two programmes, whatever they selected.‘
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According to Baumann, the orchestra became one of the best in Berlin. When Michael Taube emigrated to Palestine, his position was taken by Joseph Rosenstock, who arrived from Mannheim (where shortly before he had conducted the premiere of Berthold Goldschmidt's
Der gewaltige Hahnrei
). By 1935, the membership figures of the JKB and its affiliates were quite staggering: there were 46 local chapters in all, with a combined membership of 70,000, a number that more than doubled to 153,000 in the course of a single year.
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Programming was to become difficult for the organisers; at first the Cultural League was the only place where it was possible to hear music by Mahler and Mendelssohn, or to watch a play by Schnitzler. Though works by non-Jewish German composers and writers were banned from the programmes, this did not keep the JKB affiliates from scheduling works by non-Germans, including Austrians. With the annexation of Austria in March 1938, this would change, and Mozart and Schubert joined the list of composers outlawed from JKB performances. Over time, limitations became even more restrictive, eventually resulting in all non-Jews being excluded from the programmes.
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Those Jews who had not managed to emigrate tried to fill the void, writing new plays and composing new music. Singer, in retrospect, was starting to cause more harm than good as he attempted to persuade the best musicians against leaving or even to return for important performances. From 1938, venues began to be closed down, while the few that remained had their utilities severely restricted: electricity, lighting, water and heating were often shut off. More and more programming was relocated to private homes, the Josef Lehmann School or the small Kulturbund Saal in Berlin. With the Reichskristallnacht in November 1938, the Cultural League effectively came to an end, though it was not officially disbanded until 1941.
Austrian Leagues
A thesis completed at Vienna Music University in 2000 by Yukiko Sawabe highlights four organisations and ensembles in Austria that shadowed Germany's Kulturbund from 1933, though this is not specifically noted by the author.
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The relationship with the Kulturbund was not the subject of the thesis, but the repertoire choices and programme development of these institutions seemed to run in tandem with that of the Kulturbund in a way that does not appear to be merely coincidental. The organisations were the Society for the Promotion of Jewish Music, the Hakoah Orchestra, the Jewish Song Society, and the Symphony Orchestra of the League of Jewish Austrian Front Soldiers, which was established later than the others, in 1932.
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All four of these ensembles had originally been inspired by the idea of preserving Jewish folk music, as part of an initiative started in St Petersburg in 1908 by the composer Joel Engel. Noted members of his Russian Society of Jewish Folk Music included, Josef Achron, Michael Gnessin and Alexander Krein. The Austrian Zionist and cellist Joachim Stutschewsky pushed for the establishment of several of the Viennese organisations and left an account of their activities in his book
Mein Weg zur jüdischen Musik
.
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The Hakoah Orchestra, under the direction of Salomon Braslavsky, had already been established in Vienna in 1919, fourteen years before the founding of the Kulturbund Orchestra in Berlin. Hakoah (Hebrew for ‘Strength’) was the name of the Viennese Jewish sports club which would produce not only many Olympic medallists but also a football team that won the league championship in the 1924–5 season, having become the first continental club to defeat an English team when they beat London's West Ham 5–1 in 1923. Though the Hakoah concerts started off fairly conventionally with programmes consisting mostly of Mendelssohn and the occasional Russian, they became more specifically Jewish and closely shadowed the repertoire restrictions being imposed on Germany's Jewish Kulturbund. It is unclear if this was an act of solidarity or simply a way of profiting from the greater pool of Jewish musicians available. Concerts were held in either Vienna's Musikverein or the Konzerthaus and were well attended by subscribers. If in 1919 a typical concert programme consisted of Puccini, Liszt, Chopin and Sarasate, with an interpolated monologue from Karl Gutzkow's play
Uriel Acosta
as nearly the only Jewish element, by 1936 this had changed to performances of works by Darius Milhaud, Jacques Offenbach, Joel Engel, Friedrich Bloch and Adolf Fleischer.
Things were slightly different with the Jewish Song Society, which had also been founded in 1919. The material that made up its concerts had been largely liturgical from the outset, though the Society programmed many secular Jewish and Hebrew works as well as more familiar choruses by Mendelssohn, or works by Rubinstein and Handel.
The Society for the Promotion of Jewish Music was established in 1927 with Julius Korngold's arch-enemy, the music critic Max Graf, as its president. A previous organisation operating under the same name had been founded in 1919 with Erwin Felber as president, but this had come to nothing, owing to unresolved arguments over what constituted Jewish music. A concert to launch the new Society by Austria's B'nai Brith was met with ridicule in a review written by Felber in the
Wiener Morgenzeitung
of 13 May 1927:
The offerings of the second part of the concert showed even more clearly that we have still not succeeded in establishing what a Jewish musical language should actually sound like. A full emancipation from European music has yet to take place. What one hears in Vienna from such long-familiar composers as Achron, Krein and Milner was an enthusiastic avowal of orientalism which is left unfulfilled when it comes to actual implementation. And when these Jewish masters do take up the styles of the east with their free variations and improvisations, they inevitably sink into the monotone,
twisted and complex. […] As interesting as the evening was, it proved that only with organic nurturing from the traditions of the homeland can one expect to develop an authentic Jewish musical language. Every national culture demands a landscape from the ‘Motherland’ in order to develop its own uniqueness. And only the most audacious of souls would suggest that, in the millennia that have elapsed since the days of the Jewish Kings, Jewish musical individuality has in any way truly managed to survive.
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