Forbidden Music (45 page)

British government policy at this time stands in contrast to the United States, which had its strict quotas. British policy was still undefined and allowed individual officials to make case-by-case decisions. These were largely sympathetic, as can be deduced from the relatively small number of entry refusals. From 30 March 1933, Harwich officials enforced certain refusals, but reversed them as soon as support guarantees could be obtained.
¹⁴
Such policies allowed for a greater degree of flexibility than America's quota system. Nevertheless, by 1938, officials were considering new measures that would go against prevailing public opinion – still largely sympathetic to the plight of Germany's Jews. With the annexation of Austria, visa requirements were enforced, and with Vienna operating as a provincial capital rather than a national seat of government, its embassies had been turned into much smaller consulates with reduced staff. As a result, desperate Austrians, now considered Germans, often had to queue for days for an appointment, while Nazi hooligans openly harassed them on the street. This method, though painfully slow, allowed British officials to preselect Austrians for immigration before their arrival in Britain. With the recognition of the legality of Austria's
annexation in April 1938, only well-connected Austrians with excellent qualifications and access to foreign funds were being accepted, accounting for the high profile of émigré Austrians in Great Britain – especially in music, the arts and sciences – despite their proportionately small number.

The British government continued even after 1938 to have Jewish charities deal with refugees in order to avoid the appearance of public money being spent on foreigners immigrating at a time of financial austerity, international uncertainty and an increasingly shrill tone in the tabloid press. Though the
Daily Mail
had dropped its open support of the BUF by 1934, it was still suggesting that Jewish refugees were economic migrants. Meanwhile, Lord Rothermere remained friendly with both Hitler and Mussolini. As MI5 papers released in 2005 show, Rothermere congratulated Hitler on his invasion of the Sudetenland and encouraged him to march into Romania.
¹⁵

The musicologist Alfred Einstein writing to Hans Gál from America in April 1940 explained how he viewed international reaction at the time: 'I certainly share your wish to see Hitler and his accomplices hanged, but I fear we shall have to wait quite a while as England has made its own job all the more difficult by spending the last six-and-a-half years filling its soup bowl so full that it now has to try carefully to spoon it out again. We just finished reading the book by Sir Neville Henderson [British Ambassador to Germany, 1937–9] regarding the failure of his mission in Berlin, and what comes across most strongly is that he and others truly believed the words of the Führer. If the entire world had not been morally paralysed, things may have turned out differently. I simply hope that the censor who is no doubt reading these lines agrees with me, since I just happen to
be
one of the many victims of this moral paralysis. Especially as America is afflicted by the same condition and hasn't yet realised … how high the stakes are for this country.‘
¹⁶

The Évian Conference

Nevertheless, it was the Americans who proposed setting up an Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (IGC) to coordinate refugee policies. This was established in what became known as the Évian Conference, held at Évian-les-Bains on Lake Geneva, 6–15 July 1938, and involving 32 different nations. The establishment of the IGC was not particularly well received by the Chamberlain government as it was wary of potentially unwelcome consequences. Indeed, it was thought that the use of public money for the Jewish refugee crisis would ultimately exacerbate the situation. However, the British wanted to work with the Americans and welcomed this as an
initiative towards closer cooperation.
¹⁷
Even at this late stage – after the annexation of Austria and with the impending annexation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland – Jewish refugees, who vastly outnumbered all others fleeing Nazi Germany, were not being identified specifically as Jews for fear of anti-Semitism in host countries. This was even the case with the ‘Kindertransport’, officially the Refugee Children Movement (RCM), which saw many Jewish children brought up as Christians by well-meaning adoptive parents, unaware of the true nature of Nazi persecution. As long as refugee work was carried out by Jewish charities, the scale of the crisis could remain helpfully vague. Should official agencies, especially international agencies, become involved, this could make the problem more complex, and more perilous.

The League of Nations remained sensitive to the danger of violent anti-Semitism erupting in countries with large Jewish populations such as Poland, Hungary and Romania. As it was, these countries had already approached the Council of the League of Nations asking for aid in relocating their own Jewish populations. The countries of the IGC would be vulnerable to such requests, since Poland, Hungary and Romania would not be receptive to help being made available for the relocation German and Austrian Jews when they saw their domestic Jewish ‘crisis’ as being equally severe. Sir John Hope Simpson, Director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs’ Refugee Survey, argued that the threats of violence against Jewish populations were potentially greater in these countries than in Germany and Austria.
¹⁸
It was therefore decided at the Évian Conference that Poland, Romania and Hungary should be persuaded against making petitions for IGC funding. Britain, however, was concerned that the USA would manipulate the situation so that government spending would eventually become necessary, indeed unavoidable. The view of Sir Warren Fisher – Permanent Secretary to the Treasury – was more proactive:

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir John Simon, initialled Fisher's memo without comment.
¹⁹
In general, and in stark contrast to other Whitehall departments, the Treasury was receptive to the idea of providing public aid for humanitarian support.

The initial plan of the IGC was to use diplomatic means to persuade the German government to subsidise the removal of Jews by allowing refugees to retain some of their capital on leaving the country. Ultimately, the IGC provided a useful smokescreen, making it appear that governments were more involved than was actually the case. These often undermined private initiatives that would have provided more immediate aid to refugees. Official British policy clung to the idea of using diplomatic pressure to encourage other countries, especially the USA, to take more Austro-German Jewish refugees. The Americans avoided every one of these diplomatic booby-traps while Chamberlain remained paralysed by indecision.

On the one hand, he was appalled by German policy against the Jews, while on the other, he was nervous about damaging relations, which might make matters even worse. One moment he was refusing an honorary presidency of the German Shakespeare Cooperative because it had expelled its Jewish members, while the next he was writing the following letter to his sister Hilda, dated 30 July 1939: ‘I believe that the persecution arose out of two motives, a desire to rob the Jews of their money and a jealousy of their superior cleverness. No doubt Jews aren't a lovable people; I don't care about them myself; but that is not sufficient to explain the pogrom.‘
²⁰
Ultimately, it must be to Chamberlain's credit that despite his vacillation, he expanded a policy of offering temporary refuge to Jews, in the teeth of opposition from his Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare.
²¹

With the annexation of the Sudetenland in September 1938, and Hitler's declaration of the Moravian and Bohemian Protectorate on 15 March 1939 effectively placing the largest Czech regions within the Nazi Reich, British reluctance to accept Jews became more pronounced. In this context, it needs to be noted that, with the break-up of the Austrian Empire in 1919, German speakers who lived within the borders of the new state of Czechoslovakia were offered the choice of becoming Czechs or remaining Austrians. Many German speakers who had lived in Vienna but who continued to maintain business or family interests in the newly founded republic of Czechoslovakia chose to become Czech citizens, a status that did not alter their rights to remain in Austria. Meanwhile, many German speakers who lived in Czechoslovakia chose to remain Austrians. The two countries were socially and culturally intertwined. Ernst Krenek chose to remain Austrian (he had always lived in Vienna and spoke only rudimentary Czech), much to the annoyance of his
fellow Schreker pupil and Czech nationalist, Alois Hába. Viktor Ullmann was studying with Zemlinsky in Prague in 1919, but chose to remain Austrian – as did Zemlinsky himself, who continued working at the German Theatre in Prague until 1927. Czechoslovakia was not the ethnically homogenous country that emerged after 1945; there were pockets of Hungarians, Ukrainians, Poles and many German communities. The German-speaking Sudetenland community was the crux of the problem. Sudetenlanders saw themselves disadvantaged by the majority Czechs and appealed to Nazi Germany for annexation which was agreed after lengthy negotiations between major European powers (excluding the Czechs) on 30 September 1938. Since independence, the Czechs had indeed become more openly anti-German after centuries of anti-Slav attitudes emanating from their rulers in Austria. The Czech response to the Munich Agreement was to become even more antagonistic to its German speakers, and in September 1938 the German Theatre – one of the most prestigious German stages in Europe – was closed. Indeed, the Austrian-German equivalent of ‘Oxford English’ or ‘Tuscan Italian’ was
Pragerdeutsch
, the German spoken in Prague. Zemlinsky took over the music directorship of the German Theatre from the well-known entrepreneur Angelo Neumann, and he was followed by the conductors Wilhelm Steinberg and Georg Szell. Not only was this the theatre where Zemlinsky had conducted the premiere of Schoenberg's
Erwartung
in 1924, but also where Krenek's anti-fascist opera
Karl V
was first performed in June 1938 under Karl Rankl, after Clemens Kraus's decision not to mount it at Vienna's State Opera following the Nazi ban on Krenek's music, in place since 1933.

As it was largely British negotiations that had precipitated the fall of Czechoslovakia, it is surprising that British policy towards Czech Jews would be so unsympathetic. They placed refugees into three distinct categories. The first were the Sudeten Germans who supported the anti-Nazi ‘German Social Democratic Party’. They were seen as principal collateral damage from the Munich Agreement; though they were also German speakers, they obviously did not support the aims of Hitler. But as German speakers, they now belonged to the group that Czech speakers believed to have undermined national sovereignty, leading to the Czech central government revoking their citizenship. As anti-Nazis, they were unhappy with the outcome of the Munich Agreement and were rightly seen by the British as highly vulnerable. Politically active Jews and even Communists, along with other anti-Nazi activists, also belonged to this group.

The second group was the mix of Austrians and Czechs who had fled to Czechoslovakia following the annexation of Austria in March 1938. British officials referred to this class of refugees as ‘Old Reich’, meaning citizens of the
old Habsburg Empire, and further divided this group into ‘political refugees’ and ‘Jewish refugees’.
²²

The third group were the Jews who had, until the Munich Agreement, lived without difficulties in the Sudetenland. These numbered approximately 22,000 and began relocating to the still independent regions of Moravia and Bohemia. Slovakia, as a consequence of the Munich Agreement, would be partially folded back into Hungary between November 1938 and March 1939. Confusion reigned. As nearly all the Jews from these Czech regions were German speakers, they were not welcomed by the Czechs, and bureaucratic shenanigans made their continued presence dangerous. As it was, Moravia and Bohemia already had a total Jewish population numbering some 300,000, making a refugee tsunami inevitable. Britain, which had pushed for the outcome of the Munich Agreement, was caught between shoring up what remained of the Czech state and officially recognising Germany's sovereignty over the Sudetenland. It offered the Czech government huge funding, much of it private, but also a good deal of public money to deal with the refugee problem in the hope that this would somehow ease pressure on the United Kingdom.
²³

It was the opinion of British officials that the Munich Agreement had left anti-Nazi Sudeten Germans and former ‘Reich-refugees’ exposed to the most danger. They felt that they had an obligation to resettle these groups at the expense of the Sudetenland Jews. As the British government, the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, and the British committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia were all agreed that that they should in principle be against the emigration of Jews, they were accorded the lowest priority. This position was held not only because of fears of anti-Semitism in host countries, but also out of concern that it would encourage Germany's continued persecution of Jews by giving the appearance that they would be resettled elsewhere. From this context, it is possible to understand why Viktor Ullmann's children were evacuated to Britain, even though he and their mother were not. Tragically, nearly all of the Jewish composers living in Czechoslovakia, including such important figures as Ullmann, Pavel Haas, Hans Krása and Erwin Schulhoff, would ultimately end in Nazi camps – as would the exceptional young composer, Gideon Klein.