The Coming of the Third Reich (69 page)

It would also, however, be appropriate to protest against artistic experiments at a time when German artistic life is almost entirely determined by the mania for experiment of elements who are distant from the people and of alien race and thereby pollute the artistic reputation of Germany and compromise it before the whole world.

That ‘Germanic’ musicians had contributed to this deformation of art showed, in Goebbels’s view, how far Jewish influence had penetrated. He welcomed Furtwängler as an ally in the struggle to remove it. Genuine artists like him would always have a voice in the Third Reich. As for the men whose silencing had so offended the conductor, the Reich Propaganda Minister brushed their dismissal aside as a triviality while at the same time disingenuously disclaiming responsibility for it:

To complain against the fact that here and there men like Walter, Klemperer, Reinhardt etc. have had to cancel concerts seems all the more inappropriate to me at the moment in the light of the fact that over the past 14 years, genuine German artists have been completely condemned to silence, and the events of the last weeks, which do not meet with our approval, only represent a natural reaction to this fact.
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Who these ‘genuine German artists’ were, he did not say, and indeed he could not, for his claim was a complete invention. Conscious of the damage that would be done to Germany’s international musical reputation if he acted rashly, however, Goebbels brought the great conductor and his orchestra to heel not by open confrontation, but by more underhand means. The Depression had deprived the Berlin Philharmonic of most of its state and municipal subsidies. The Reich government made sure that no more were forthcoming until the orchestra was on the verge of bankruptcy. At this point, Furtwängler appealed directly to Hitler himself, who, scandalized that the country’s greatest orchestra was in danger of having to wind up its affairs, ordered it to be taken over by the Reich. From 26 October 1933 the Berlin Philharmonic was no longer independent, therefore, and Goebbels and his Ministry were now in a good position to bring it to heel, which eventually they proceeded to do.
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IV

The creation of what the Nazis regarded as a truly German musical culture also involved the elimination of foreign cultural influences such as jazz, which they considered to be the offspring of a racially inferior culture, that of the African-Americans. The racist language that was second nature to Nazism was particularly offensive and aggressive in this context. Nazi musical writers condemned ‘nigger-music’ as sexually provocative, immoral, primitive, barbaric, un-German and thoroughly subversive. It confirmed the widespread Nazi view of American degeneracy, even if some writers diplomatically preferred to emphasize its origins in Africa. The swooning tones of the newly popular saxophone also came in for criticism, though, when saxophone sales began to slump as a consequence, German manufacturers of the instrument riposted by trying to claim that its inventor Adolphe Sax was German (in fact, he was Belgian) and by pointing out that the venerated German composer Richard Strauss had used it in some of his compositions. The prominence of Jewish composers such as Irving Berlin and George Gershwin in the jazz world added another layer of racial opprobrium as far as the Nazis were concerned.
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Many jazz, swing and dance-band musicians in Germany were of course foreign, and left the country in the hostile climate of 1933. Yet for all the violence of Nazi polemics, jazz proved almost impossibly difficult to define, and with a few deft rhythmic tweaks, and a suitably conformist demeanour on the part of the players, it proved quite possible for jazz and swing musicians to continue playing in the innumerable clubs, bars, dance-halls and hotels of Germany throughout the 1930s. Bouncers at swanky Berlin nightclubs like the Roxy, Uhu, Kakadu or Ciro turned away the invariably shabbily dressed spies sent by the Nazis, ensuring that their chic clientele could continue to swing to the latest jazz and pseudo-jazz music inside. If a spy should gain entry, the doorman simply rang a secret bell and the musicians rapidly changed the music on their stands before he reached the dance-floor.

The social scene of Weimar days thus carried on through 1933, with few changes except those already forced on it by the economic stringencies of the Depression. Even Jewish musicians were mostly able to continue playing in the clubs up to the autumn of 1933, and some managed to continue for a while thereafter. In Berlin’s famous Femina bar, swing bands continued to play to over a thousand dancers through the night, while a system of 225 table telephones with instructions for use in German and English enabled singles to ring up potential partners seated elsewhere in the hall. The standard of the music may not have been very high, but stamping down on everyday - or everynight - pleasures would have been counter-productive, even if the Nazis had been able to do it.
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Only where singers were overtly political, as in Berlin’s famous cabaret venues, did the stormtroopers move in seriously, forcing a mass exodus of Jewish performers and silencing or removing singers and comedians of Communist, Social Democratic, liberal or generally leftist persuasion. Others cleaned up their acts by removing the politics. The Nazis for their part, realizing the popularity of cabaret and the need not to deprive people of all their pleasures, tried to encourage ‘positive cabaret’, where the jokes were all at the expense of their enemies. There was a story that the celebrated cabarettist Claire Waldoff was daring enough to sing a song satirizing Goring, based on her signature tune, ‘Hermann’: ‘Medals to the left, medals to the right/And his stomach gets fatter and fatter/He is master in Prussia - /Hermann’s his name!’ Soon, whenever she sang the original version of ‘Hermann’, her listeners grinned appreciatively as they thought of the satirical lines. But Waldoff did not compose the verses: the joke was wishful thinking and so untrue. It could not disguise the fact that the Nazis had taken the guts out of cabaret by the middle of 1933.
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For some it was too much. Paul Nikolaus, political conferencier of Berlin’s famous Kadeko club - ‘The Cabaret of the Comedians’ - fled to Lucerne, where he killed himself on 30 March 1933. ‘For once, no joke,’ he wrote: ‘I am taking my own life. Why? I could not return to Germany without taking it there. I cannot work there now, I do not want to work there now, and yet unfortunately I have fallen in love with my Fatherland. I cannot live in these times.’
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THE PURGE OF THE ARTS

I

The chill winds of antisemitism, anti-liberalism and anti-Marxism, combined with a degree of stuffy moral disapproval of ‘decadence’, also howled through other areas of German culture in the first six months of 1933. The film industry proved relatively easy to control because, unlike the cabaret or club scene, it consisted of a small number of large businesses, inevitably perhaps in view of the substantial cost of making and distributing a movie. As in other sectors, those who saw which way the wind was blowing soon began to bend to its pressure without being told explicitly what to do. As early as March 1933 the giant UFA studios, owned by Alfred Hugenberg, still a member of Hitler’s cabinet at this time, began a comprehensive policy of dismissing Jewish staff and cutting contacts with Jewish actors. The Nazis soon co-ordinated the German Cinema Owners’ Association. Unionized film workers were Nazified, and on 14 July Goebbels established the Reich Film Chamber to oversee the entire movie industry. Through these institutions leading Nazis, and particularly Goebbels, an enthusiastic connoisseur of the movies himself, were able to regulate the employment of actors, directors, cameramen and backroom staff. Jews were gradually removed from every branch of the industry despite the fact that it was not covered by the Law of 7 April. Actors and directors whose politics were unacceptable to the regime were frozen out.
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Under the new conditions of censorship and control, a minority of people in the motion picture industry preferred to seek their fortune in the freer atmosphere of Hollywood. Those who found it included the director Fritz Lang, who had scored a series of successes with films such as M:
Murderer Amongst Us, Metropolis
and
The Nibelungen,
an epic that remained favourite viewing for Hitler. Lang’s film
The Testament of Dr Mabuse,
an indirect satire on the Nazis, was banned shortly before its scheduled premiere in the spring of 1933. He was followed into exile by Billy Wilder, whose popular romantic films had so far betrayed few hints of the boldness he was to show in his Hollywood films such as
Double Indemnity
and
The Lost Weekend.
Both men created some of Hollywood’s most successful movies in the following decades. Other movie directors migrated to Paris, including the Czech-born G. W. Pabst, director of the classic Weimar film Pandora’s Box and a cinema version of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s
Threepenny Opera,
and Max Ophüls, born in 1902 in Germany as Max Oppenheimer. Some German directors and film stars, however, had been lured by the pulling power of Hollywood well before the Nazis came to power. The departure of Marlene Dietrich in 1930, for instance, had more to do with money than with politics. One of the few who left as a direct result of the coming of the Third Reich was the Hungarian-born Peter Lorre, who had played the shifty, compulsive child-murderer in Fritz Lang’s M; Nazi propaganda later attempted to suggest that the murderer was Jewish, an insinuation entirely absent from Lang’s film.
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But while these emigrés attracted deserved attention, the great majority of the people employed in Germany’s thriving film industry stayed. Of the 75 film stars listed in the magazine
Film Week
in 1932 as the most popular in Germany (on the basis of fan-mail received), only 13 emigrated, though these included three of the top five - Lilian Harvey and Kaethe von Nagy, both of whom left in 1939, and Gitta Alpar, who left in 1933. Lower down the list, Brigitte Helm left in 1936, and Conrad Veidt in 1934. Apart from Alpar, only one other star, Elisabeth Bergner, who was Jewish, left in 1933; 35 out of the 75 were still working in German films in 1944-5.
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Cinema had become increasingly popular in the course of the late 1920s and early 1930s, above all with the advent of the talkies. But in an age before television, the most popular, and fastest-growing modern means of mass communication was the radio. Unlike the film industry, the radio network was publicly owned, with a 51 per cent stake belonging to the nationwide Reich Radio Company and the other 49 per cent to nine regional stations. Control was exercised by two Reich radio commissioners, one in the Ministry of Posts and Communications and the other in the Interior Ministry, together with a series of regional commissioners. Goebbels was very conscious of the power of radio. During the election campaign of February-March 1933, he had succeeded in blocking all attempts by parties other than the Nazis and the Nationalists to get party-political broadcasts transmitted. Soon, he had secured the replacement of the two existing Reich radio commissioners by his own appointments, and obtained a decree from Hitler on 30 June 1933 vesting control of all broadcasting in the hands of the Propaganda Ministry.

Goebbels immediately enforced a massive purge of broadcasting institutions, with 270 sackings at all levels in the first six months of 1933. This represented 13 per cent of all employees. Jews, liberals, Social Democrats and others not wanted by the new regime were all dismissed, a process made easier by the fact that many of them were on short-term contracts. Radio managers and reporters identified with the previous liberal broadcasting regime, including the founder of German radio, Hans Bredow, were arrested on corruption charges, taken to Oranienburg concentration camp, and condemned in a massive show trial held, after months of preparation, in 1934-5. The majority, however, were willing to carry on under the new regime. Continuity was ensured by the presence of men like Hans Fritsche, a former director of Hugenberg’s radio news department in the 1920s and head of the German Wireless Service, who was in charge of news broadcasts under the new regime. Like many others, Fritsche took steps to secure his position by joining the Party, in his case on 1 May 1933. By this time most radio stations had been effectively co-ordinated, and were broadcasting increasing quantities of Nazi propaganda. On 30 March one Social Democratic broadcaster, Jochen Klepper, whose wife was Jewish, was already complaining that ‘what is left of the station is almost like a Nazi barracks: uniforms, uniforms of the Party formations’. Just over two months later he too was dismissed.
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II

Radio, Goebbels declared in a speech of 25 March 1933, was ‘the most modern and the most important instrument of mass influence that exists anywhere’. In the long term, he said, radio would even replace newspapers. But in the meantime, newspapers remained of central importance for the dissemination of news and opinion. They presented an obstacle to the Nazi policy of co-ordination and control more formidable by far than that posed by the film and radio industries. Germany had more daily newspapers than Britain, France and Italy combined, and many more magazines and periodicals of every conceivable type. There were independent papers and periodicals at national, regional and local level, representing the whole range of political views from far left to far right. The Nazi Party’s attempt to build a successful press empire of its own had not met with much success. Political papers were in decline in the late Weimar Republic and the printed word seemed to take second place to the spoken in winning adherents to the Nazi cause.
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