Forbidden Music (44 page)

Nevertheless, it was this Society that eventually drove the planning and the performances of the other three ensembles. From 1936 onwards, The Society for the Promotion of Jewish Music was forced to start meeting in closed groups in private homes, again mirroring the situation with the Kulturbund, and was finally disbanded in 1939 following Austria's annexation in 1938.

To make a more public declaration of Austrian patriotism, the League of Jewish Front Soldiers was founded in 1932 with a membership of some 4,000. By 1935, this had grown to 20,000, and by the time of Austria's annexation to 24,000.
⁹³
Members of its orchestra undoubtedly doubled up with the Hakoah Orchestra and its repertoire was somewhat similar – but with more emphasis on Jewish composers writing European music rather than on the more ‘oriental’ music favoured by the Hakoah Orchestra. As such, it made a speciality of promoting Austrian composers with Jewish roots including, intriguingly, a good deal of Johann Strauss, though in truth this was probably due to a desire to present popular programmes. In 1934, for example, the orchestra offered an evening of Mendelssohn and a Chanukah Festival concert, an event repeated every year until the annexation of Austria. Kurt Pahlen was its regular conductor and its events were well attended. Pahlen went on to establish the Opera Studio, the only fruit of which was a single performance of
Der Freischütz
, mounted a couple of weeks before Austria's annexation. The Chanukah concert of 1937 consisted of works by Goldmark and Meyerbeer, an improvisation on
Kol Nidrei
by Josef Sulzer;
Psalm 111
by Salomon Sulzer; the Overture to the
Merry Wives of Windsor
by Nicolai; a selection of Palestinian folk songs, and some of Brahms's
Hungarian Dances
; it ended with Johann Strauss II's
Frühlingsstimmen
and his father's
Radetzky March
.
⁹⁴

The Final Solution was still a few years away and, despite the hardships endured by Jewish musicians and composers, what lay in store did not become apparent until the annexation of Austria and its ensuing flood of refugees, sending countries around the world into panic at the thought of the potential consequence of millions of homeless European Jews. In the expanding Reich, wanton arrests, pointless beatings and bully-boy sadism were rife. The Nazis claimed that this was all an attempt to persuade Jews to
leave. By this point, most would willingly have done so had they had the connections or the money, or even had they been allowed to take what little money they had with them; punitive taxes imposed by the Nazis meant that emigrating Jews arrived penniless at their eventual destination. The exile that Walter Braunfels rightly identified as ending his creativity as a German composer would do exactly that to most of the others who fled. Those who stayed risked internment, slave labour and, ultimately, horrors that were unimaginably worse.

Escape: Destination, Unknown

In a letter to Erich Korngold dated 6 December 1934, Ludwig Strecker of the music publisher Schott confirms that with the new situation in Germany, the firm is not in a position to take on the composer's new opera
Die Kathrin
: ‘Only yesterday, Furtwängler, Kleiber and Hindemith have resigned from all of their posts and they stand accused of being “too Jew-friendly”. Fall's operettas, even Offenbach and Mendelssohn, are being boycotted these days and not even works by Kreisler are allowed to be broadcast on the radio.‘
¹
When, four years later, Otto Witrowsky wrote to his brother-in-law Julius Korngold on 15 August 1938 to inform him of their progress in leaving Austria, he made the humorous aside that a new history of the Jews was being written with the title ‘From King David to Affidavit’.
²
To the cynical, the Austrian version of this ‘history’ would have been more accurately and less humorously titled ‘From the December Constitution of 1867 to the Affidavit of 1938: 71 Years of Delusion’. The subtitle for the German edition would have read ‘62 Years of Delusion’ as Jewish emancipation arrived four years later (1871) only to be removed five years earlier (1933) than in neighbouring Austria.

By 1938, nearly every Austrian and German Jew was concerned with finding an affidavit somewhere, somehow, from someone. Only with a document guaranteeing that somebody in America would cover financial costs could one obtain one of the coveted ‘quota’ or ‘non-quota’ visas to enter the country. Under the so-called quota-scheme, a certain number of immigrants, based on current numbers of any given ethnic community already resident in the United States, were allowed entry. Under the ‘non-quota’ scheme, a smaller number of immigrants were given permission to stay as a result of political or religious persecution. Entering merely with a common visitor's visa would mean deportation or arrest once the visa had expired or if the visitor had taken up any kind of employment. Despite the offer of a professorship at New York's New School for Social Research, Hanns Eisler and his wife Lou entered the United States with a visitor's visa and found themselves one step away from the police with arrest warrants being issued at one point. They were legally barred from re-entering the US from Mexico where they had to return continually in order to renew their entrance applications. Only after an official at a remote crossing (ignorant of the Eislers’ status) issued a visa that permitted them to enter the US and to work were their problems resolved – until Ruth Fischer denounced her two brothers five years later (see Chapter 7).

Gertrude Zeisl, wife of the composer Erich Zeisl, managed to lay her hands on a New York phone book and wrote to every Zeisl or Zeisel she could
find, eventually locating a plumber named Morris Zeisel who agreed to provide her family with the necessary documentation. When Morris disappeared, they were helped by an equally unfamiliar and unrelated Arnold Zeissl from Milwaukee. They were lucky but had worked hard to make their luck. In truth, though, every individual had his or her own story. Probably the only generalisation that can be attempted is that by 1938 everyone wanting to leave Europe wanted to end up in America. If they landed in Britain or France, it was viewed as a purely temporary measure. A fair number of unlucky individuals went east to the Soviet Union, where many would fall victim to Stalin's purges in the late thirties and again in the early fifties. By the time of Austria's annexation in 1938, it was clear to the rest of the world that there would be a massive number of refugees to accommodate. How this was handled remains a matter of ethical debate to this day.

The World Braces Itself for a Refugee Crisis

By April 1933, British officials alerted by the Home Secretary Sir John Gilmore – who had raised matters at a cabinet meeting on 5 April – became concerned that though there were numbers of Jews arriving from Nazi-occupied Europe who were well-qualified professionals, there were others who were destitute.
³
At this point, Jewish charities stepped in to cover the expenses incurred by German Jews without the financial means to support themselves. From 1933 to 1938, Jewish refugee organisations in the United Kingdom, alongside the Home Office, managed a controlled entry of Jews from Nazi Germany. The Home Office insisted that refugees register with the police on arrival but that refugee charities, such as the Jewish Temporary Shelter and the Jewish Refugee Committee headed by the stockbroker Otto Schiff, meet the costs of what was assumed to be transit immigration.
⁴
In contrast to France, there were no visa requirements and the British government left it to Jewish charities to shoulder the immigration costs of refugees. It was assumed that given the restrictions placed on transmigrants, such as leave to stay for only short periods without the right to work, most would soon move on, generally to the USA.
⁵
A few wished to remain in Europe in the anticipation that the ‘Brown Bolshevism‘
⁶
would eventually run out of steam and sanity would return. From April 1933, a new restricted visa policy was set in place that offered refugees a visitor's visa, limited to a single month with a clause that forbade employment of any kind. Estimates of how many Jews could arrive came from British Jewry's weekly newspaper the
Jewish Chronicle
, which reported that of the 4,000 refugees who arrived between March 1933 and October 1934, four-fifths were German and most were
doctors, lawyers, academics, accountants and other professionals.
⁷
It was during this interim period, while refugees were organising further onward travel elsewhere, that Jewish charities guaranteed support.
⁸

An additional difficulty emerged, since it was not immediately clear who counted as a Jew. Those who were defined as ‘Jews’ by Hitler and his regime were by no means Jewish according to the definition understood by the various charities or even the Jewish Refugee Committee. Hitler's view of Jews as a ‘foreign race’ was thus in stark contrast to the conventional, confessional definition held by charities. Jews who had left the religious community through conversion or conviction, or who were born in mixed marriages where the mother was not Jewish, were technically not Jews according to strict religious definitions. As far as Hitler and his Reich were concerned, someone born of, say, a converted half-Jewish mother and a converted or non-practising Jewish father was still a full Jew with three ‘racially’ Jewish grandparents (one from the half-Jewish parent and two from the converted Jewish parent), despite the fact that it was highly improbable that this person, or anyone in his or her immediate family, had ever been near a synagogue. Though Germans who converted to Judaism without any previous Jewish ancestry were counted as full Jews by the Nazis, few orthodox Jews would recognise them as such.

The British central government and the Jewish charities agreed that it was best not to emphasise the fact that the refugees pouring out of Nazi Germany were largely Jewish out of fear of inflaming anti-Semitism, which had briefly got out of control after the First World War, exacerbated by the
Morning Post
and
The Times
publishing articles on the notorious
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, a mendacious bit of ant-Semitic counter-intelligence ‘leaked’ by Russia's Tsarist police.
⁹
The British Union of Fascists (BUF) under Oswald Moseley was growing in popularity and by the mid-1930s had some 16,000 members, though it claimed membership to be as high as 50,000.
¹⁰
Authorities were still mindful of the Battle of Cable Street of 4 October 1936, followed by London's East End pogrom along the Mile End Road. The BUF even enjoyed the support of the tabloid
Daily Mail
, with its proprietor, Lord Rothermere, writing an editorial in 8 January 1934 entitled ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’.

To the British Foreign Office, Jewish persecution was seen as an obstacle to Anglo-German relations and it was wiser not to publicise the problems Jews were having in Germany. Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister from 1937, accepted German anti-Semitism as ‘a fact of life’ but was unhappy at its extreme manifestations, and feared that public debate could be damaging to commercial, social and cultural relations between the two countries.
¹¹
He was inclined to believe the official line coming out of Berlin that, by not formally
sanctioning the Jewish boycott of 1 April 1933 or the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, far greater bloodshed would have ensued.

Commercial considerations were an important issue and resulted in the British government taking the decision to downplay Nazi brutality towards Jews. In April 1933, the British directors of Anglo-Persian Oil (today known as British Petroleum or simply BP) dismissed all German Jews in its German sales subsidiary; still fearing potential loss of German sales, all non-German Jews were then dismissed, including Jewish Britons.
¹²
The Foreign Office's determination to cultivate deeper Anglo-German relations with the holding of a football match between the two countries in December 1935 was equally questionable. But the decision that it be held in White Hart Lane, the home stadium of Tottenham Hotspur – a club that was (and is) predominantly supported by Jewish Londoners – was recklessly provocative. With an attendance of 9,500 predicted, tensions rose between the Home Office, concerned that there would be civil disturbances should the game proceed, and the Foreign Office who saw the match as a crucial step towards maintaining good Anglo-German relations. It ultimately took place with only minor incidents. Jewish refugees even stepped in to earn much-needed cash by conducting tours of London in German for visitors from Hitler's Reich. Meanwhile Lyons and Co., branded by the Nazi publication
Der Stürmer
as ‘a Jewish enterprise that all good Germans should avoid’, provided the catering. The visitors offered the Hitler salute before the anthems and swastikas were waved throughout the game. The home team won 3–0 – a predictable result.
¹³