Violins of Hope (3 page)

By May 1933, Baumann had convinced the Nazi authorities to allow him to create a league that would sponsor high-quality productions by Jewish musicians, actors, and lecturers. There were, of course, several stipulations designed to segregate what was happening in the Jewish community from the rest of Germany. The staff and presenters would be composed exclusively of Jews, and their activities would be reported only in the Jewish press. The audience would also be limited to Jews, who would be registered, monthly subscribers with photo identifications—no tickets could be sold at the door. The subscribers were especially important since the league would not receive the government subsidy enjoyed by Aryan organizations. The texts, music, and exhibits were increasingly limited to non-German works that had to be approved by the Interior Ministry at least one month in advance. In addition to gaining control over Jewish cultural activities, the Nazi authorities gained a valuable propaganda tool. Any international questions about Germany's treatment of the Jews could be answered by pointing to the cultural organization that the Nazis had created especially for the Jews.

By providing both culture and inspiration, the culture league became very popular within the city's Jewish community. By early 1934, the association had twenty thousand members. Audiences flocked to culture league performances to briefly escape the problems they increasingly faced in their daily lives. But the culture league provided much more than a diversion. It was a source of spiritual resistance in the face of Nazi oppression. “For those who played, it was something very special—after all, nothing else was available,” violinist Henry Meyer explained. “We were born to perform and when we did that we really lived.”
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The culture league in Berlin inspired offshoots in Frankfurt, Cologne, and Hamburg. While the Berlin league staged theatrical productions, operas, and orchestral concerts, the league in Frankfurt hosted only an orchestra. The leagues in Cologne and Hamburg limited their scopes to theatrical performances. Smaller league branches were also established in dozens of other German cities.

One of the musicians in the Frankfurt Culture League orchestra was Günther Goldschmidt. Günther was a flute student at the conservatory in Sondershausen before being expelled in 1934 because of his Jewish heritage. He transferred to the Karlsruhe music academy, but was removed a year and a half later for the same reason. Kicked out of school and unemployed, Günther agreed to play two concerts with the Frankfurt Culture League orchestra, substituting for its sick principal flutist, Erich Toeplitz. Günther escaped to Sweden shortly after the performances, but traveled back to Frankfurt six months later to permanently replace Toeplitz, who had immigrated to Palestine. Although it meant returning to Nazi Germany, Günther was eager to reunite with violinist and violist Rosemarie Gumpert. Günther and Rosemarie had met during Günther's first rehearsal with the Frankfurt orchestra. They had quickly fallen in love.

In 1935, the Nazi government consolidated all forty-six independent culture leagues under the umbrella of the Reich Association of Jewish Culture Leagues, with Singer as its leader. The change in name from the Culture League of German Jews to simply the Jewish Culture League reflected an increase in government-sponsored anti-Semitism. A person could either be a German or a Jew, the Nazis maintained, but there was no such thing as a “German Jew.”

Of course, it was not just Jewish musicians who were subjected to escalating anti-Semitism. The Nazis were continuing to implement policies that discriminated against Jews in all walks of life. In September 1935, Nazi Germany further marginalized Jews by enacting the two notorious legal measures known as the Nuremberg Laws. The first, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, prohibited marriages and extramarital intercourse between Germans and Jews. The second, the Reich Citizenship Law, robbed Jews of their German citizenships, stripping them of their rights and providing the legal justification for further ostracism. Jews lost access to state hospitals and universities. They were no longer allowed to enter public libraries, parks, and beaches. They were officially Germans no more.

In the years that followed the passage of the Nuremberg Laws, the culture leagues struggled to stay afloat. Their memberships dwindled as Jews continued to emigrate. Those who remained behind were increasingly unable to pay their monthly dues as new laws went into effect banning them from employment. By early 1938, at least half of Jewish workers in Germany were out of work. In response to the shortage of subscribers, the Nazis shut down the various branches of the culture league throughout Germany, leaving intact only the original chapter in Berlin.

With the shuttering of the Frankfurt Culture League, Günther and Rosemarie joined the orchestra of the league in Berlin. Just as Günther had been able to join the Frankfurt orchestra when Erich Toeplitz had immigrated to Palestine, numerous departures from the Berlin orchestra had opened up positions there.

At that time, the Nazis were content to solve the “Jewish Question” by simply removing Jews from German society. The first step had been to segregate the Jews by removing them from public life and stripping them of their civil rights. The second step was to intimidate the Jews into leaving the country—a policy that ironically overlapped with that of the Zionists who dreamed of creating a Jewish nation in Palestine. It was not until 1942 that Nazi Germany would fully enact the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” by annihilating the Jews who remained behind.

The problems of sustaining the culture league while so many of its members were emigrating can perhaps best be seen in the string of first-rate conductors who led the orchestra in Berlin. The first conductor was Michael Taube, who had served as Bruno Walter's assistant at the Berlin Municipal Opera. After Taube immigrated to Palestine at the end of 1934, Joseph Rosenstock took over. Rosenstock, who had succeeded Otto Klemperer at the Wiesbaden State Opera before becoming the music director of the Mannheim National Opera, left for Japan in 1936, ultimately immigrating to the United States. He was succeeded by Hans Wilhelm Steinberg, who had previously directed the opera house in Frankfurt. Motivated by the success of the Berlin Culture League, Steinberg had founded its counterpart in Frankfurt in 1934 before transferring to Berlin. Steinberg conducted the Berlin Culture League orchestra for only three months before fleeing to Russia and then to Palestine. The ensemble's final conductor was Rudolf Schwarz, who had served as the music director at the state theater in Karlsruhe.

One of the most infamous anti-Semitic demonstrations during this period took place between November 9 and the morning of November 10, 1938. On that riotous night, Nazi Brownshirts stormed the streets shouting, “Perish, Jewry” and “Kill the Jews!”
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They destroyed hundreds of synagogues, looted thousands of Jewish-owned businesses, and physically assaulted every Jew they could find. At least ninety-one Jews died that night. Another thirty thousand Jews—including Günther's father—were arrested and sent to the Buchenwald, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. The shattered glass on the ground reflected the flames of the burning buildings, earning the riots the name “Kristallnacht,” or “Night of Broken Glass.” The large-scale violence forced many European Jews—and the rest of the world—to finally start to grasp how ruthless the Nazi regime could truly be.

Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews intensified after Kristallnacht. Jews were no longer allowed to own businesses of any kind. They were forced to sell any land, stocks, jewels, and works of art for whatever prices they could manage. Jewish children were expelled from public schools. Jews were banned from attending public concerts, plays, movies, museums, and sports events. All Jewish newspapers and publishing houses were shut down. The culture league in Berlin became the only source of culture, entertainment, and news for Jews in all of Germany.

It was in this climate of increasing oppression that the Berlin Culture League orchestra continued to perform. Their concerts brought an ongoing sense of normalcy to the performers and audience members. The performances also provided a form of spiritual resistance—even if it was within a system tightly controlled by the Nazis. “This is why I practice, this is why I perform,” Günther thought to himself. “This is what I'm meant to do. And for as long as I can, I must continue to make beautiful music. In an ugly time, the best protest is beauty.”
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By 1941, the Jewish Culture League was on its last legs. The majority of the performers who were in the primes of their careers had left the country, leaving behind musicians who were unable to sustain the high quality of performances. Since Jewish musicians tended to prefer string instruments, it was especially difficult to find wind players to balance out the instrumentation. The audiences had also shrunk considerably, through emigration as well as through poverty and incarceration. Some musicians and audience members were murdered at the hands of the Nazis. Others, such as former Munich Philharmonic violinist Josef Lengsfeld, committed suicide. Fully immersed in a world war and no longer making a pretense of supporting Jewish society, the Nazis disbanded the culture league in August 1941.

By this time, Günther and Rosemarie had gotten married and had immigrated to the United States. An American benefactor had provided the required sponsorship by guaranteeing that they would be gainfully employed. He had even raised the six hundred dollars they had needed for the journey. A friend in the American embassy had helped them apply for visas. They had left Berlin on June 1, 1941, and had started their new lives in America three weeks later as George and Rosemary Goldsmith. They performed all over the country before settling down in Missouri, where Rosemary played with the St. Louis Symphony while George worked as a bookseller. In 1967, they moved to Ohio so Rosemary could join the venerable Cleveland Orchestra, a position she held until her retirement in 1981.

While Günther and Rosemarie were able to immigrate to the United States thanks to an American patron, a number of Jewish musicians and their family members were rescued from Nazi persecution by Jewish violinist Bronisław Huberman when he founded what is now the world-famous Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

Born in Częstochowa, Poland, in 1882, Huberman established himself from a very young age as a violinist of extraordinary talent. He was six years old when he started taking lessons at the Warsaw Conservatory. By the age of ten he had been accepted as a pupil of the legendary violinist Joseph Joachim in Berlin. Huberman started touring Europe at the age of eleven, including a performance of Brahms's Violin Concerto in 1896 that impressed even the concerto's famously cynical composer. Huberman spent the next five decades touring the world. In addition to establishing himself as one of the most electrifying violinists of all time, he became beloved for his compassion and humanitarianism by performing free concerts for the poor and by organizing a benefit concert for the victims of the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Messina, Sicily, in 1908.

In the 1930s, Huberman committed himself to protesting the injustices of Nazism. When conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler invited him to appear with the Berlin Philharmonic, Huberman refused. “It is not a question of violin concertos nor even merely of the Jews,” he explained in a letter to Furtwängler that he also released to the press. “The issue is the retention of those things that our fathers achieved by blood and sacrifice, of the elementary preconditions of our European culture, the freedom of personality and its unconditional self-responsibility unhampered by fetters of caste or race.”
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Huberman vowed to never set foot in Nazi Germany.

Huberman would later publish an open letter to German intellectuals in the British newspaper the
Manchester Guardian
that would become widely circulated throughout the world, even in Germany. The letter offered a scathing critique of not only the Nazi thugs directly responsible for heinous crimes against Jews, but also of the German intellectuals who were watching the injustices unfold without interfering. Huberman accused the Germans who were standing idly on the sidelines of being the ones who were the most culpable for Nazi crimes.

At the same time that he was becoming outraged by what was happening in Germany, Huberman was growing increasingly enchanted with Palestine.

Huberman had first performed in Tel Aviv in 1929. When he returned in 1931, even he was unable to articulate why he had come back, other than to say that he was hoping to strengthen the connection between Europe and the Jewish community in Palestine. By his third visit in 1934, when he gave twelve sold-out concerts over eighteen days, Huberman was clearly growing quite attached to Palestine—and vice versa. Huberman's enthusiasm for the Jews in Palestine was reinforced by the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe. While he had initially been skeptical of Zionism, he was now starting to see the Jewish colonization of Palestine as an extension of the European culture he loved rather than as an abandonment of it.

Huberman's newfound excitement for Palestine was also fueled by the remarkable enhancements to the music scene that had occurred over the preceding months. Thanks to a handful of professional musicians who had fled Nazi Germany, Tel Aviv now had a modest orchestra with which Huberman played concertos by Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. One of the orchestra's conductors was Michael Taube, who had been the founding conductor of the Berlin Culture League orchestra. If a population could make such rapid progress in such a short time span, Huberman posited, then its potential for future greatness was unlimited.

Before leaving Palestine for the third time, Huberman penned a letter to Meir Dizengoff. In addition to serving as the first mayor of Tel Aviv, Dizengoff was the president of the Palestine Philharmonic Symphony Union, which sponsored the orchestra. In his lengthy missive, Huberman outlined a proposal to bolster the quality of the orchestra by hiring wind players from Germany. Recognizing that it would be impossible to pay a reputable conductor enough to spend the entire concert season in Palestine, Huberman recommended dividing the responsibilities among two or three Jewish conductors from Europe and the United States. He even contacted two of them: Issay Dobrowen, who was serving as the conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, and Hans Wilhelm Steinberg, who at that time was leading the culture league orchestra in Frankfurt. Huberman's letter to Dizengoff also proposed a number of bold initiatives, such as regular performances in Jerusalem and Haifa in addition to the primary concerts in Tel Aviv, as well as a concert tour of Egypt. In a discussion with other musicians, Huberman further recommended the creation of music schools that could cultivate homegrown talent.