Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945–1989
TINA FRÜHAUF
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Frühauf, Tina, author
Title: Transcending dystopia : music, mobility, and the Jewish community in Germany, 1945-1989 / Tina Frühauf
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2021 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020022207 (print) | LCCN 2020022208 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197532973 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197532997 (epub) | ISBN 9780197533000 (digital online) | 9780197532980 (updf)
Subjects: LCSH: Jews Germany Music History and criticism | Music Germany 20th century History and criticism.
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022207
LC ebook record available at https://lccn loc gov/2020022208 DOI: 10 1093/oso/9780197532973 001 0001
You hauled the rubble you paved the way To Pauline Rother Bienick (1909–2003)
For your sagacity and faith
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Moving Toward Silence
On Transliteration and Translation, Spelling, and Names
Abbreviations
Introduction: Against All Odds The Jewish Gemeinde as Sonic Community in an Age of Mobility
PART I AFTER THE RUPTURE: THE INTERREGNUM AND THE CULTURE OF REBIRTH
1 In the Midst of Rubble: Rebuilding a Musical Life in Berlin
2 Out of the Depths: The Case of Munich and the South
3 Communal Encounters: Frankfurt am Main and the North
4 Remnants in the Soviet and French Zones and Beyond
5 Remembering the Holocaust: Mourning and Celebration
6 Disseminating Survival: Jews, Music, and the Media
7 The End of Dystopia?
PART II MUSIC IN MOTION: THE JEWISH COMMUNITIES IN WEST GERMANY 8 Returning and Leaving: Frankfurt in Flux 9 Rebuilding with or without Organ
Cantors on the Move
Regenerating a Choral Music Culture 12 Music in Social Life
PART III THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE: JEWISH (HERITAGE) MUSIC IN EAST GERMANY
13 Dystopia under Communism: Communities in the Crossfire of Politics
Werner Sander and the Formation of the Leipziger Synagogalchor
15 Facing Cultural Stagnation: Musical Life after Sander
“Making Antifascist Politics Visible”: Jewish Heritage Music and Cold War Politics 17 The Leipziger Synagogalchor in the Service of State Propaganda 18 Jewish Culture in Public Diplomacy, Memory Politics, and the Curious Case of Halle 19 Projecting Utopia: Jewish Heritage Music Abroad
PART IV MUSIC AS VORTEX IN JEWISH BERLIN
21 The Establishment of the Jüdische Gemeinde von Groß-Berlin
22 The Anniversary Year of 1971 and the Dawn of Détente
23 The Rise of the Jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin
24 Deterioration and Recovery: The Jüdische Gemeinde Berlin, Hauptstadt der DDR
25 Toward a New Communal Future: Parallel Sound Worlds and Rapprochement
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
This book could not have been completed without the generous support of institutions and individuals to whom I would like to express my warmest gratitude. First and foremost I wish to thank the many informants and witnesses who enriched the content of this book and who generously shared with me their time and insights: David Clark, Udo Deiries, Jochen Fahlenkamp, Barbara Grimmer, Oljean Ingster, Helmut Klotz, Kurt Messerschmidt, Thomas Pammler, Ursula Philipp-Drescher, Jalda Rebling, Reinhard Riedel, Siegmund Rotstein, Eliyahu Schleifer, Guido Shamir, Chaim Storosum, Marcel Wainstock, Anne Weiss, and Bret Werb, as well as Kathryn Luzader and the Kelleher family in Melrose, Massachusetts, for sharing the estate of Adolf Schwersenz.
Research and writing have been financially supported by the AMS Janet Levy Fund for Independent Scholars, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Leo Baeck Institute’s Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellowship. Having such support means the world to any independent scholar lacking a sabbatical and being ineligible for many fellowships. Therefore, I am also most grateful to the Verein der Freunde und Förderer des Synagogal Ensemble Berlin and the Handelsverband Berlin-Brandenburg for supporting the very final stage of this book, its production. As the hosts and supporters of the Louis Lewandowski Festival, an annual international festival in Berlin-Brandenburg with focus on Jewish choral and synagogue music, they ensure the performance of musical traditions, many of which are at the heart of this volume.
The various kinds of research could not have been completed without the many archivists and librarians who assisted me. The materials they allowed me to access have made this a truly original volume that brings to light new information, facts, and sources that are significant, not only to the study of music, but also to Cold War studies, cultural history, German studies, Holocaust studies, and Jewish studies. I would like to extend my deep appreciation to Peter Honigmann, Eva Blattner, and Elijahu Tarantul for making my time at the Zentralarchiv der Juden in Deutschland (Heidelberg) so very memorable. Special thanks also go to Werner Grünzweig (Akademie der Künste, Berlin), Thomas Andrey Hirth (Archiv der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Dresden), Klaudia Krenn (Archiv der Israelitischen Religionsgemeinde zu Leipzig), Zachary Loeb and Melanie Meyers (Leo Baeck Institute Archives, New York), Aubrey Pomerance (Archiv des Jüdischen Museums Berlin), and Hermann Simon and Barbara Welker (Archiv der Stiftung Neue Synagoge Berlin Centrum Judaicum).
I am indebted to the Leipziger Synagogalchor for sharing with me materials and insights, and for hosting me in Leipzig. Very special thanks go to Franziska Menzel who went out of her way to help me with my research and for reading parts of the book and providing valuable feedback.
My research home base was Berlin, where I spent memorable times thanks to my dear friends who aided me in various capacities, with great generosity, and without whom this
journey would not have been as special: Nils Busch-Petersen, Jörg Sandmann, Lisa Schoß, Regina Yantian, and Cem Yurtsever. During the very last stage of completing this book, the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich became a second home base for additional research and writing. My gratitude extends to my colleagues Claus Bockmaier and Markus Bellheim for facilitating the DAAD guest professorship and for providing a supportive and collegial framework for my stay.
My heartfelt thanks go also to my colleagues in the United States, who listened, advised, and supported me during the various stages of research and the years of writing the book: Zdravko Blažeković, Joy Calico, Sabine Feisst, and Mark Slobin. I wish to extend my innermost gratitude to Pryor Dodge for his emotional, intellectual, and logistical support of all my endeavors. His invaluable advice on the visual aspects of this volume, especially the cover art, and help with photo editing has, for sure, enriched this book.
And lastly, I am thankful to Oxford University Press and the anonymous reviewers they engaged to respond to the volume. Their valuable criticism has unquestionably improved the book. The editors at Oxford University Press have shaped the volume in significant ways, first and foremost Suzanne Ryan. I would also like to recognize Norman Hirschy and Mary Horn for their eloquent guidance before and during production, and Tim Rutherford-Johnson for his thorough copyediting.
The book is dedicated to my grandmother Pauline Bienick (neé Rother) for her lightness about fate an equanimity that borders nobility but comes with no pride.
Prologue: Moving Toward Silence
Schweigen ist Ende, Schweigen ist Tod,
Stille aber ist sanftes Gleiten, Stille is Atmen, ist ruhiges Schreiten
Durch alle Träume der Not
Being silent is final, being silent is death,
But quiet is gentle gliding,
Quiet is breathing, it is calm striding
Through all the dreams of need.
Leo Menter, “Der Ton Für Arno Nadel,” Der Weg 1, no 18 (1946): 1
The destruction of Jewish culture in Nazi Germany was a gradual process conducted in five successive phases that began with a series of highly publicized acts to ostracize prominent Jewish figures and their friends through defamation, boycott, and cultural ghettoization between 1933 and 1935; the legal dismemberment and dissimilation between 1935 and 1938, and the elimination of the economic basis of existence through “bureaucratic exclusion” of all Jews; the total disenfranchisement between 1939 and 1941; and the Final Solution, the Nazis’plan to annihilate and exterminate the Jewish people, between 1941 and 1945.
Before this destructive process began, music in Jewish life had just reached another juncture. In the autumn of 1931 Munich-based composer and organist Heinrich Schalit had conceived his Freitagabend-Liturgie, op. 29, for cantor, chorus, and organ. The work was the result of criticism of the state of synagogue music, specifically the repertoire of Louis Lewandowski, which many deemed outdated at the time. A number of Jews active in music as theorists, composers, performers, or critics Schalit being one of them had been pursuing a repertoire representative of the Weimar Republic’s Jewish community: modern and Jewish, cosmopolitan and worldly, reflective of the relative pluralism that defined the Jewish community of that period, when Eastern sounds were embraced as authentically Jewish. Music now conveyed a new sense of Jewish identity in response to a cultural process which the philosopher Martin Buber in 1903 had termed a Jewish renaissance perhaps an equivalent to Jewish modernism, a cultural utopia in Jewish style.
On September 16, 1932, the Vereinigte Synagogenchöre of Berlin (a choral association of some one hundred singers enlisted from all of Berlin’s synagogue choirs to perform largescale works in concert) premiered Schalit’s Freitagabend-Liturgie at Lützowstraße Synagogue in Berlin, under the baton of the Jewish community’s music director Alexander Weinbaum (1875–1943), who had inspired the conception of the work. Max Janowski played the organ and Chief Cantor Hanns John Jacobsohn sang the solo parts. The premiere of the Freitagabend-Liturgie, attended also by a good number of non-Jews, could not have been a greater success, as we learn from composer and synagogue musician Oskar Guttmann:
For the first time in decades, a music has been heard in the organ synagogue whose disposition and instinct can be characterized as liturgically Jewish It was created not merely by a musician, but by a Jewish master a Jewish human being, who tries to allow the inherent melos of the Hebrew language, its rhythm and meter, its accentuation, to resonate. Thus, for the first time, a fully correct intonation of the Hebrew text exists. The Hebrew meter, too, the symmetry and asymmetry of diction, is taken into consideration, so that the musical form does not senselessly destroy the word but rather grows out of it. Schalit borders on modernism. Through the use of church modes [sic; he refers to shtayger] and their conforming harmonization, a unique and solemn atmosphere emerges . . . The house of worship was surprisingly full, as it is during the High Holidays, which is proof of a broad interest in the renewal of synagogue music 1
Musicologists Alfred Einstein, Hugo Leichtentritt, and Curt Sachs, as well as music director Hermann Schildberger, praised the Freitagabend-Liturgie for its use of contemporary modal techniques as well as Eastern melodies previously discovered by Abraham Z. Idelsohn (1882–1938).
Only a few months after this milestone performance, the new directions in Jewish music, reflective of the community during the Weimar Republic, took a sharp turn. Soon after the takeover, the Nazis began to orchestrate a campaign against Jewish musicians, with organized mobs disrupting public concerts by musicians deemed to be potentially hostile to the new government. The first official step in the destruction of Jewish musical life and elimination of Jewish musicians from public culture was taken on April 7, 1933, when the Nazis promulgated the so-called Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service, which called for the dismissal of Jewish employees in the public realm, exempting at first only a very few, such as veterans of the First World War (by the fall of 1935 even these exemptions were canceled by and large). The law applied to Jews who worked in cultural institutions and in the arts, and extended to state-employed musicians of Jewish origin who by the spring of 1933 were beginning to lose their tenured positions. On August 16, 1933, Jews were excluded from choral groups. Many private and semi-public institutions took advantage of the new regulations to rid themselves of unwanted Jewish members. Abruptly, thousands of artists of Jewish origin were unemployed and an exodus of scholars, actors, writers, and musicians began. Those who did not emigrate attempted to reorganize.
Upon losing his position as professor at the Staatliche Akademische Hochschule für Musik and as artistic director of the Städtische Oper in Berlin-Charlottenburg, the neurologist, musicologist, and conductor Kurt Singer (1885–1944), together with two colleagues, initiated a unique program to provide help and give his unemployed colleagues new opportunities. In May 1933 they presented the proposal for a Kulturbund deutscher Juden (Culture League of German Jews) in Berlin to the Nazi authorities, proposing a theater, an orchestra, an opera company, and cultural activities for the benefit of unemployed artists of Jewish origin. This concept was accepted just two months later on the condition that the word “German” be omitted from the league’s name, that the organizers and the audience be exclusively Jewish, and the events be closed to the general public. The Nazis approved this endeavor as it suited their own plan for cultural ghettoization as well as propaganda abroad to present the Jews as a sheltered minority.2 Supervised by Goebbels’ special commissioner for cultural affairs, Hans Hinkel, the first of the so-called “closed performances” took place in Berlin in the fall of the same year.
During its first six months, the league organized 313 events in Berlin alone and many more in the surrounding region. This success motivated the founding of similar organizations in
other parts of the German Reich.3 Leagues formed in the areas of Rhine-Ruhr and RhineMain, with the formation of a second and third active league in Cologne and Frankfurt am Main, respectively. Smaller offshoots formed in Breslau, Chemnitz, Dresden, Düsseldorf, Eschwege, Hamburg, Kassel, Munich, Mannheim, Stuttgart, and elsewhere. By 1935 the league had forty-six local chapters in other cities and towns, grouped under the umbrella organization, Reichsverband der jüdischen Kulturbünde (Reich Association of Jewish Culture Leagues), also based in Berlin. As such, the Jewish Culture League was a doubleedged sword, a Nazi controlled cultural ghetto, but also a temporary safe haven for those involved in the arts.4 The league events guaranteed about 2,000 Jewish musicians and cultural figures a forum of their own, though a segregated one. This separation would redefine the experience of music within the Jewish community it would now expand, both in scope and in repertoire.
Initially the league carried on existing concert practices and relied on canonical works of classical music. Even though the performers and audiences were suddenly isolated, they continued with repertoires they had known for decades and thus remained in contact with the musical culture they had come to appreciate and participate in. As the repertoire could be chosen freely, the league did not introduce a specifically “Jewish” program. However, this would change when the censors banned musicians from performing the works of “German” composers. (Handel’s music was permitted as one of several exceptions, probably because of his affinity to England and preference for biblical subjects of the Old Testament.5) Although the works of non-Jewish composers from outside the German-speaking world could still be performed, the role of works by Jewish musicians began to play a much greater role, if in the end only for the survival of the organization.
At first, the question of “Jewishness” in art led to a crisis within the league that threatened its very existence, which the leadership tried to avert by holding the 1936 conference on the subject of Jewish music.6 But the censorship and ensuing repertoire debates also had unanticipated positive consequences, leading to a substantial broadening of works performed to include folk music, synagogue music, and works of contemporary Jewish composers. The latter was encouraged through a competition for the advancement of contemporary Jewish music, open to all composers of Jewish heritage living on German soil and abroad.7 By supporting Zionist and national-Jewish activities, the league inadvertently catered to the Nazis’ Judenpolitik, which amounted to the suppression of all assimilatory endeavors.8 The isolation of Jews within German society inevitably led to an increased consciousness of Jewish identity and awoke the desire for “Jewish experiences” in the league’s concert halls.
Although the league was closely tied to the community, its venues were not. Performances took place at authorized segregated spaces. In Kassel, one such place was the Murhardsaal; only on some occasions performance took place in the Königsstraße Synagogue. The Hamburg branch initially offered performances in the Conventgarten, Kaiser-WilhelmStraße, sometimes also in the Curiohaus and the Tempel at Oberstraße. In January 1938 it moved to the Jewish community center in Hartungstraße, a building that after 1945 housed the Hamburger Kammerspiele.
In Berlin concerts took place at Bechstein Hall and the liberal Lützowstraße Synagogue in
the Tiergarten district. Although the synagogue was damaged during Kristallnacht, so-called Morgenfeiern (devotional and paraliturgical events with music that included a combination of hymns and other religious music with Bible readings and spoken reflections on religious subjects) continued there at least until 1941, possibly also because the grand organ was still fully operable.9 Berlin’s municipal administration also leased the Berliner Theater on Charlottenstraße to the league’s management. When in 1935, after two years, the league was not allowed to renew the lease and lost the theater, operations transferred to the Herrnfeld Theater on Kommandantenstraße. This performance hall had been carefully guarded during Kristallnacht, so that it could continue to be exploited for propaganda purposes. Thus the November pogroms did not quite affect the league operations (save that many musicians realized that they needed to leave the country). In fact, the Nazis ordered the league to resume their activities within three days after Kristallnacht, a testimony to the crucial stance of the league in Nazi policy in return league officials exerted their own pressure on the Nazi regime, demanding the release of those who had been arrested.10
But while functioning to some extent, the league’s situation became more difficult and its activities were severely curtailed. Many local league chapters disbanded shortly after the 1938 pogroms, such as those in Munich and in Frankfurt am Main. The Nazis dissolved the Reich Association of Jewish Culture Leagues in 1939, resulting in the closure of most of the local league chapters. Its successor organization, the Jüdischer Kulturbund in Deutschland, organized all cultural events independently and with its own responsibility. The Berlin league was one of the few Goebbels permitted for propaganda purposes; concerts in other towns became rare. On September 11, 1941, the Gestapo dissolved the league, citing the first paragraph of the Reich Chancellor’s order of February 28, 1933, as a pretext for “the protection of people and state.” Though, as Rebecca Rovit asserts with view on the league’s theater company, the league “did not indeed could not simply end with a Nazi government order.”11 Some musical activities might have continued underground.12
Clearly, 1941 was the year in which the Nazis perceived the war as having transformed into a global conflict and hence the year in which they moved to intensify their anti-Semitic program into an accelerated and intensified campaign of complete annihilation. If the policies of 1933 and 1941 led to sharp turns in the Jewish communities’musical lives, another rupture occurred during the night of November 9‒10, 1938, when synagogues as venues of communal gathering and music making, liturgical and otherwise, were largely destroyed, with only a few exceptions. By destroying almost every major synagogue on German soil, and with it its three-fold purpose as bet ha-kneset (house of congregation), bet ha-midrash (house of education), and bet ha-tefilah (house of worship), the Nazis effectually dislocated the Jewish community. Aside from religious and cultural activities, the social services of the synagogue were limited if not destroyed, leaving community members unable to interact.
A number of synagogues survived Kristallnacht, among them the synagogue in Augsburg, as it neighbored a compound of kerosene tanks; the synagogue in Lübeck, because it practically abutted the city’s Museum für Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte; synagogues in Berlin (Heidereutergasse, Levetzowstraße, Münchner Straße, Reformgemeinde Johannisstraße, Oranienburger Straße, and the Orthodox Synagogue Kottbusser Ufer, today Fraenkelufer), Munich (Reichenbachstraße Synagogue), and Frankfurt (Westend Synagogue); and a good
number of smaller synagogues such as those in Amberg, Straubing, and Weiden.13 But only a few could be used for worship into the 1940s and congregants gathered in private milieus.14 According to personal memoirs and other documentation, services slowly began to dwindle.15
The Oranienburger Straße Synagogue was one of the few to continue operations after 1938. Miraculously saved by a police officer during Kristallnacht, services with music resumed there after a few months, as a letter from Sigmund Hirschberg, dated April 1939, attests:
But now I want to tell you that yesterday on the evening of the first day of Passover service was held for the first time in the New Synagogue. The three of us anticipated the crowds and arrived an hour earlier, though doors were opened only ½ an hour before The large and solemn space was unchanged and the wedding hall did not show anything strange, only on closer inspection could you see the retouching. In a very short time the space so familiar to everyone was filled with an unusually large number of devotees. You could see all of the deep emotion that moved them, and how fond they have grown of this place they have known since childhood And now about something that will especially move and delight you: the magnificent organ in full work roared with mighty chords above the deeply shaken crowd, with a wellplayed classical prelude. In grand style. Mr. Gollanin served together with Rabbi Dr. Wiener who gave a speech, short, meaningful, and relevant to the present 16
Lützowstraße Synagogue in Berlin, although damaged and closed, was used by the congregation one last time on Passover of 1942. The last public synagogue service in Berlin was held in November 1942 at the Heidereutergasse Synagogue.
In Frankfurt am Main the Jewish community held their services after Kristallnacht at the Philantropin, one of the oldest secular and very prestigious Jewish schools, founded in 1804. On June 27, 1941, the last Religiös-musikalische Weihestunde, an afternoon devotion took place that featured a broad range of Jewish music. The program included vocal and instrumental works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by both Jewish and other composers, among them Antonín Dvořák, Herbert Fromm, Louis Lewandowski, Arnold Mendelssohn and Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, and Samuel Naumbourg. Chief Cantor Nathan Saretzki conceived and directed the performance.17 He, as well as the principal performers, singers Nelly Fuchs and Paula Levi, pianist Claire Wohlfahrt, and organist Siegfried Würzburger, would not survive the shoah.
On December 18, 1942, the Nazis forbade public announcements of services. It became risky to attend worship in the remaining synagogues and prayer halls as the Gestapo often took advantage of such gatherings, abusing and arresting congregants.18 Due to their forced closure, by mid-1943 Jewish communities no longer existed in Germany, but Jewish communal life never fully dissolved as some rabbis continued covertly to perform clerical tasks such as funerals and weddings.19 Eva Frank-Kunstmann remembers these times in Berlin: “It was freezing in the room . . . Then we got a coat, sat down, and sang songs, and we said afterward that it would be nice to celebrate Chanukah the next time, when it was all over . . . And we could then later celebrate freely again in our country.”20 Indeed, Jewish communal activity moved slowly underground.21 And with it, music making became an expression of resistance.
Between January and June 1943, Zionist Hachshara farms also served as a space where
Jews met and engaged in communal activity. On April 7, 1943, the authorities ordered the inhabitants of the last remaining community in Neuendorf to prepare for deportation. They gathered that evening for their final Fahnenappell, a roll call flag-raising ceremony. The next day, the group was taken from the Neuendorf agricultural center to the assembly camp at Groβe Hamburger Straße 26 in Berlin. There they held the last joint Sabbath celebration for all of the detainees. The following Monday, on April 19, 1943 incidentally the onset of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising they were deported to Auschwitz.22 In her memoirs, AnnelieseOra Borinski, one of the leaders of the farm, recounts the last days before their deportation:
It appears as a kind of tragic irony. Once we formed an official singing group, we sang our songs, and the Gestapo listened And if they could understand, they may have laughed at these fools who in this situation were singing, “We are building a new, strong race! We demand Jewish honor! We stand up for freedom, equality, and justice!”23
On June 10, 1943, the Gestapo disbanded the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Association of Jews in Germany) and all Jewish organizations. The remaining Jews were placed under police law and deported in the following days. Shortly thereafter further deportations took place, with the last one being on February 14, 1945. In these final moments music evaporated, vanishing upward, reluctantly turning into silence. But not for long.
On Transliteration and Translation, Spelling, and Names
Many of the foreign terms used in this book do not exist in the English language and are left in their original language. To make this book accessible to a broad readership, these are glossed en route and in the Abbreviations section. The different Ashkenazic pronunciations often rendered in various spellings such as “Ma tauwu,” “Ma Towu,” “Ma tauwo,” “Mah tauwu” and other divergent spellings were kept intact in quoted sources. Otherwise, as with all Hebrew transliteration in this book, they are reconciled following the standards of the American Library Association, Library of Congress. Yiddish is transliterated according to the Standard Yiddish Orthography established by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. Following the YIVO guidelines, the Romanization of titles uses initial capitals only for the first word. Personal names and the names of organizations and places are capitalized. Exceptions to all these rules pertain to words and concepts that have become an integral part of the English language and are now in common usage (such as Hanukkah), quotations from other works, and sources that already exist in transliteration (such as the Israeli newspaper Jedioth Hadashoth). The Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, eleventh edition, serves as the authority for assimilated terms. Different spellings of the same personal name, such as Leibovits, Leibovitz, Leibowicz, and Leibovic, were reconciled in the narrative, but are preserved in the index. The Encyclopaedia Judaica, second edition (2007), is the last word on all other Hebrew names and common terms. Geographic terms appear in the form current during the period discussed. Where those differ from the terms used today, current usage is provided as well. Translations and transcriptions, unless marked otherwise, are by the author.
Abbreviations
AdIRGL Archiv der Israelitischen Religionsgemeinde zu Leipzig (Archive of the Jewish Community of Leipzig); in 2017 parts of this archive moved to the Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland in Heidelberg
AdJGD Archiv der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Dresden (Archive of the Jewish Community of Dresden)
AdJMB Archiv des Jüdischen Museums Berlin (Archive of the Jewish Museum Berlin)
AdK Akademie der Künste (Academy of the Arts), Berlin; the abbreviation is used only in reference to the institution after reunification
ADN Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst (General German News Service)
AJW Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland (1949–66), Allgemeine unabhängige jüdische Wochenzeitung (1966–73), and Allgemeine jüdische Wochenzeitung (1973–2001). The weekly Der Weg and the monthly Allgemeine Jüdische Illustrierte were appended to the AJW from 1951 on.
ARD Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Consortium of Public Broadcasters in the Federal Republic of Germany)
BArch Bundesarchiv (Federal Archives), Berlin
BStU Behörde für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (Federal Commissioner for Stasi Files)
CDU Christlich-Demokratische Union (Christian Democratic Union)
CJA Archiv der Stiftung Neue Synagoge Berlin – Centrum Judaicum (Centrum Judaicum Archive), Berlin
CSSR Czech and Slovak Socialist Republic
DEFA Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (German Film Corporation)
FJG Frankfurter Jüdisches Gemeindeblatt: Mitteilungsorgan des Landesverbandes der Jüdischen Gemeinden in Hessen
FRG Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany)
GDR Deutsche Demokratische Republik (German Democratic Republic)
IRGL Israelitische Religionsgemeine zu Leipzig (Israelite Religious Community of Leipzig)
JGD Jüdische Gemeinde zu Dresden (Jewish Community of Dresden)
JGG Jüdische Gemeinde von Groß-Berlin (Jewish Community of Greater Berlin), from June 1977 on Jüdische Gemeinde Berlin (Jewish Community of Berlin)
JGH Jüdische Gemeinde in Hamburg (Jewish Community of Hamburg)
Joint* American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and Refugee Aid
LATh HStA Weimar Landesarchiv Thüringen Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar (State Archive Thuringia – Main State Archives Weimar)
LexM Lexikon verfolgter Musiker und Musikerinnen der NS-Zeit
MDR Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (Central German Broadcasting)
Nachrichtenblatt This newsletter appeared quarterly until September 1990 under varying titles, as Mitteilungsblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde von Groß-Berlin (1953–60), Nachrichtenblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde von GroßBerlin und des Verbandes der Jüdischen Gemeinden in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (1961–March 1977), Nachrichtenblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde von Berlin und des Verbandes der Jüdischen Gemeinden in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (June 1977–82), and Nachrichtenblatt des Verbandes der Jüdischen Gemeinden in der DDR (1982–90). The earliest issues of 1953 and 1954 do not contain any music-related information
NDR Norddeutscher Rundfunk (Northern German Broadcasting)
NWDR Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (Northwest German Broadcasting)
RIAS Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor (Radio in the American Sector)
SAPMO-BArch Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv (Foundation Archives of Parties and Mass Organizations of the GDR in the Federal Archives)
SED Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of Germany)
SFB Sender Freies Berlin (Radio Free Berlin)
SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany)
StAH Staatsarchiv der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg (State Archive of the Free and Hanse City Hamburg
Stasi Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security)
StVuR Stadtverordnetenversammlung und Rat der Stadt Leipzig, 1945–1990 (City Assembly and Council of the City of Leipzig)
UNRRA United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration
USHMM United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC
USPD Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany)
USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Verband Verband der jüdischen Gemeinden in der DDR (Association of Jewish Communities in the GDR)
VVN Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes (Association of Victims of the Nazi Regime)
WDR Westdeutscher Rundfunk (West German Broadcasting)
WIZO Women’s International Zionist Organization
ZA Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland (Central Archives for Research on the History of the Jews in Germany), Heidelberg
* The official abbreviation is JDC, but to ensure a more fluid narrative, this book prefers the short form Joint
Introduction Against All Odds
The Jewish Gemeinde as Sonic Community in an
Age of Mobility
In an interview upon his arrival in New York on December 17, 1945, Leo Baeck (1873–1956) assertively proclaimed: “The history of German Jews has ended once and for all.”1 A spiritual leader who embodied German Jewish culture at its core, Baeck was not the only one to announce the end of an era, which musically implied the definitive end of Orgelsynagogen, the disuse of repertoires created by Louis Lewandowski, Emanuel Kirschner, Heinrich Schalit, and many others, and no second renaissance of Jewish culture. However, his prophecy did not quite prove to be true, although transformations were certainly to be expected after dystopia: the population of native Jews had shrunk from over one-half million to a fraction; and with Germany in shambles there seemed little if nothing to return to for those 270,000 who had exiled. Music as an integral part of Jewish culture seemed even more unthinkable in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
But with the end of the Second World War, the Jewish communities in occupied Germany witnessed a miraculous, if limited, reemergence of culture and musical activity, driven by a Jewish population that had returned from underground hiding (the illegals), survived while protected through what the Nazis had termed “privileged” mixed marriage,2 re-emigrated (the returnees), or survived the camps and settled temporarily. It certainly seems an irony of history, even a paradox, that German soil provided a haven for Jewish refugees in the first years after the war. Some of those who returned immediately came with the idealism to help build a new and democratic Germany. Many settled in the eastern part, attracted by the emerging antifascist agenda, which the Democratic Bloc promoted early on.
Given the extreme population flux during the first postwar years, the number of Jews on German soil and the accuracy of statistics are difficult to estimate. This is primarily due to registration issues. The very designation of “Jew” had become a contested one that circled within a complicated framework of facts, politics, and polemics. Who identified and selfidentified as Jewish differed greatly at the time, depending on position and perspective. A number of non-Jews declared themselves Jewish in order to evade prosecution as Nazi criminals, and, traumatized by the years 1933–45, many Jews did not want to identify themselves at all.3 To provide a rough estimate for the immediate postwar period, the ca. 18,000 to 20,000 nascent Jews who survived through marriage or in hiding (about 7,000 of them in Berlin) were joined by about 55,000 survivors4 liberated in Germany and around 9,000 native Jews who survived in camps and ghettos abroad, totaling 83,000 indeed, a fraction compared to the pre-1933 population.5
During the first years, native Jews lived side by side with the constantly fluctuating number of incoming Holocaust survivors from the East.6 They came as Jewish displaced persons (henceforth DPs) after having been released from concentration camps. Some had been partisans, others were persecutees from Poland and Russia who could not and did not
want to be repatriated out of fear of further persecution.7 For them the DP camps on German soil and elsewhere provided temporary shelter. The numbers of these refugees at some point reached the 300,000 level.8 Being in Germany by external circumstance, about 10 percent of the DPs decided to stay and eventually joined the over one hundred Jewish communities that had been reestablished. This melding apexed when the camps were dissolved beginning in the summer of 1948, after the foundation of Israel and the passage of the DP Act. Föhrenwald in Bavaria was the last camp to close in 1957.
If before the Nazi era Jews in Germany constituted only 1 percent of the population, after 1945 they were an even smaller fraction. But to consider them to be a postwar minority seems an inappropriately Eurocentric way of dealing with difference. In reality, Jews maintained a significant presence on German soil, though community demographics vastly differed and unity was not necessarily a given. Prior to 1933 the nascent Jews had formed the majority, while the ca. 70,000 eastern European Jews, who had arrived around the turn of the century to escape pogroms and famines, played a marginal role. Even those arriving as part of a second wave of eastern European immigration after the First World War often lived and worshipped segregated from the native Jews in order to avoid looming tensions. After 1945 new tensions were on the rise, but circumstances differed. The DPs who decided to stay and join the reestablished local communities often outnumbered the nascent Jews. When they were in the majority, they initiated changes in religious service including its decorum, aesthetics, and music. Often divisions over cultural, religious, and even political issues ensued.
After twists and turns in the first years after the war, with the formation of the two German states in 1949, internal demographics began to settle and shift. As the Soviet Zone barely had any DP camps (the Russians refused to acknowledge the DP problem) and did not experience a large influx of Eastern European Jews, communities there remained almost uniformly controlled by native Jews. In contrast, in West Germany the cultural fabric differed in each individual community; overall and over time the communities became increasingly diverse, such that by 1989 they consisted of a unique blend of Ashkenazic and Sephardic, Eastern and Western Jews. This heterogeneity affected identity politics, which showed various forms of self-identification a stark contrast to prewar times.9 Some self-identified as Juden in Deutschland (Jews in Germany) or deutsche Staatsbürger (German citizens), others opted for German Jews, German citizens of Jewish faith, and Jewish Germans a nomenclature that underlined the fragmented and fluid nature of their identities. The heterogeneity was not only due to country of origin, but also driven by generational differences that would crystalize in the 1960s and 1970s. Older Jews had returned with a longing to re-embrace their prewar existence, while a new generation grew up in the ruins of a post-Holocaust reality, seeking a future while feeling ambivalent about Germany. Jewish identities shifted in complex ways. Indeed, their diversity and fragmentation in the postwar Germanys extends far beyond the previous scatteredness in the Diasporas. Jonathan Boyarin terms this heterogeneous and unstable Jewish state of existence after 1945 as post-Judaism.10
How then can we understand Jewishness and Germanness, when the terms are no longer embedded in fixed identities and national borders?11 In 1994 anthropologist Richard Handler
posed the question whether identity is, indeed, a useful concept and suggested that we should “be as suspicious of ‘identity’ as we learned to be of ‘culture,’ ‘tradition,’ ‘nation,’ and ‘ethnic group.’ ”12 Indeed, identity is problematic if assumed to be fixed. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jonathan Karp assert with regard to Jewish identity that it should be analyzed “as contingent and contextual rather than definitive and presumptive.”13 In this sense, the heterogeneity, even porousness of identity is important to acknowledge as it has affected the nature of the Jewish Gemeinden. Their boundedness is thus symbolic, not actual, and merely constitutes the site in which the postwar history of music could unfold.
To be sure, the concept of Jewish Gemeinde (henceforth called “community”) has evolved and changed over time. In later modernity, it has come to refer to an autonomous incorporated local entity. As a historically established form of Jewish organization, it dates back to the early nineteenth century, when congregations evolved from strictly religious organizations into communities of increasingly social and cultural functions in the early twentieth century.14 The postwar establishments built and expanded on these pre-1933 structures.15 Communities in this sense reconstituted themselves in the midst of great chaos, just weeks after what Jews called liberation (for others, the rupture was known as “the collapse”). Native Jews founded them predominantly in urban centers. The drift away from villages had already been well under way in the 1920s and 1930s, but it increased after the war when the majority of surviving Jews settled in big cities.
Nobody at the time envisioned that Jewish communities would reestablish themselves on German soil and could or even should have a lasting presence. Among the initial reasons for reinstating them was the need to accommodate survivors and facilitate the administration of aid. Ominously named Liquidationsgemeinden, they were conceived as temporary spaces that supported self-liquidation through supporting emigration, although a good number of Jews did not want to leave for a variety of reasons some were too old or frail for relocation, others felt an emotional attachment to the only country they knew. It did not take long until they began to contemplate how to foster the interest of the nascent survivors and plan for a permanent presence.16 Thus the communities morphed from being liquidation communities, serving administrative functions, to become developing communities, supporting economic and cultural interests. Among others, the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization founded in 1948 and the Allied Military Government were reluctant to recognize postwar Jewish communities as legitimate successors of prewar ones a disagreement that affected restitution.17 But by the 1950s Jewish communities in the FRG and West Berlin were incorporated under public law, though the exact legal form varied from state to state.18 In the GDR and East Berlin the community had an official status with the right to levy taxes on members.
Outgrowing the initial need for social services for the recovering Jewish population, the postwar communities, especially in the FRG, often included depending largely on size and budget one or more synagogues, a community center, health and welfare services, and schools, as well as other facilities run by a board elected by its members.19 The community’s dual use in one site, place of worship and social and cultural center, is crucial, as it implies musical practices in very different contexts. Indeed, music has been an integral part of both
religious and social life, the latter evident in concerts, cultural events of a great variety, and other (recreational) activities.20 Such diverse functions had prewar origins as well. In the postwar era the communities also became political arenas, in which local, national, and Cold War issues played themselves out in sometimes more, sometimes less subtle ways and musical practices often correlated. Indeed, with an understanding of the Jewish community as a political entity, Max Weber’s elaborations come to mind, with his very broad conceptualization of communities as religious, cultural, social, and political bodies, defined in terms of the solidarity shared by their members that forms the basis of their mutual orientation.21
To be sure, the concept of Jewish community is distinct, not merely implying Jewish life or existence in a broader sense, neither referring to Jewish collectives of a different kind, nor Jewish space, which implies a heavy presence of non-Jews,22 although some of these are relevant. Indeed, the Jewish community as a defined collective cannot be entirely disconnected from others, such as the DPs and their culture. Although their musical practices somewhat represent a world of its own that predominantly existed in a segregated environment, there were myriad interactions as the DP camps were not completely isolated and about one-fourth of the DPs lived outside the camps.23 For that reason DP culture is taken into consideration whenever it intersects with the Jewish community. This is also true for other alternative groupings, such as the East Berlin predecessor of the Jüdischer Kulturverein, Wir für uns Juden für Juden (We for Us Jews for Jews), which did not formally join the community but maintained loose ties. Such connections have historical origins, as before 1933 a good number of native Jews had only sporadic contact with the communities. They also link to mainstream culture due to their physical location. Moreover, in postwar Germanys, political parties, churches, and various (Jewish) institutions connected with the communities.
Reflecting the reality of collectivities as mosaics and products of interacting individuals, this study inscribes them into the discourse. As such, it strongly considers the role music played in the lives of those associated with or entrenched in the communities.24 It highlights the achievements of those who deeply and lastingly engaged in musical activity as composers, performers, organizers, or audiences. Indeed, many nearly forgotten individuals played seminal roles in the restoration of musical practices in the Jewish communities after the war and its continuation thereafter. The inquiry into performances, repertoires, and their contexts is equally pertinent. It is on these grounds that cultural dynamics and musical practices of the Jews in the postwar Germanys are discussed, as a sonic community defined by individual contribution and divergent influences.
The communities sonically reflect and represent Jewish identities and memory politics in the aftermath of the Holocaust and during the Cold War as they shape the postwar history of music within and beyond the Jewish realm. With this in mind, the role of music in the cultural formation of the communities and its manifestations such as identification or recollection are considered from two perspectives: from “within” (how cultural activity reflects the identity formations of Jews in the postwar era and music acts as a narrative of self-recognition) and from “without” (how cultural activity functioned in the context of the
postwar Germanys and music acts as a narrative of dialogue).
Taking the geopolitical setting into consideration and recognizing that the fluidity of events does not lend itself to an overarching chronological structure, the book is divided into four parts: occupied Germany, the Federal Republic, the Democratic Republic, and divided Berlin. There are geopolitical reasons to look at the situation in Berlin separately. Officially, the divided city remained a territory under Allied supervision. With the foundation of the two German states in 1949, it continued to be under Allied occupation until reunification in October 1990, although as two separate political entities, designated as East and West Berlin. As the hub of the Cold War, the eastern part was politically and ideologically separated from the western part and vice versa, but Berlin’s Jewish community remained united until its formal division into two distinct entities in 1953. Thereafter ties remained, with a largely one-sided filtering of Jewish culture from the West into the East. These Germanys encompass the period of 1945 to 1989 beginning with the end of the Holocaust and liberation, and concluding with the fall of the Wall, thus stopping short of the first year of substantial Jewish immigration from the Soviet Union which significantly changed the communities’ demographics and cultural climate. Although the four parts are structurally clearly delineated, there are slight overlaps in content, especially with regard to the Jewish community in divided Berlin. Throughout each part, observations move between different cities to kaleidoscopically reconstruct musical activities and their significance during the postwar and Cold War eras. As such, the structure of this volume illustrates that Jewish music in the postwar Germanys cannot be divorced from politics.25
To draw together the selective yet comprehensive insights of heterogeneous developments, this study relies on the concept of mobility as a guiding thread. (The kaleidoscopic approach to writing might be regarded as another manifestation of mobility.) The postmodern notion of spatiality which conceives the essence of places, societies, and states as being constantly in motion is especially important when examining a sonic community through the lens of mobility and its others. In its breadth and inclusivity, mobility accounts for the transcultural, migrant, and transnational reality that has defined Jewish collectives for centuries. Indeed, Jews have been exceptionally mobile in comparison to other populations. Mobility as a concept renders itself in three ways: In its literal meaning it manifests itself, for example, in the circulation of musicians and their cultures, ideas, and practices within, through, and beyond the Jewish communities. As a metaphor, mobility describes non-linear processes such as moving between center and periphery, or interior and exterior; or processes such as cultural transfer, cultural exchange, or intercultural dialogue, except that such terms reaffirm boundaries, instead of (transnational) echo chambers of the Jewish communities in the different Germanys. And as a paradigm brought about by the “mobility turn,” this study also draws on the concept of cultural mobility, championed by Stephen Greenblatt and the notion of mobility constellations put forward by Tim Cresswell. Like many other thinkers, both stress that there are mechanisms at work when people, objects and products, and practices move in and through time or space, and inhabit it while being at the same time, as Greenblatt puts it, conspicuously out-of-place.26 Serving as conceptual cornerstones of my theoretical framework, they deserve some further ontological and phenomenological discussion specifically in their applicability to this study.
While Tim Cresswell’s constellations of mobilities combine physical movement, its meanings, and its variant experience by considering multiple interrelated dynamics, Greenblatt argues that cultures have been rarely stable or fixed, because mobility is its constitutive condition, not its disruption.27 Cultural mobility thus critiques older models that highlight culture’s stability or conceptualized it as virtually motionless. More precisely, this notion of culture refers to an opposition between restriction and mobility which form a dynamic that creates boundaries of culture and the circulation of social energies. In Greenblatt’s words, culture submits to a “restless process through which texts, images, artifacts, and ideas are moved, disguised, translated, transformed, adapted, and reimagined.”28 As a paradigm of cultural theory, cultural mobility consciously moves away from (but does not exclude) mobilities’ literal focus of migration and transport. Cultural mobility also grapples with questions of transmission and influence, as well as with the material and spatio-political processes that allow for the circulation of culture over time.
Surely, the notion of cultural mobility is intrinsic to Jewish music in the postwar Germanys with its plural nature, which is inherited, transmitted, altered, modified, and reproduced. It thus accommodates musical practices in the conceptual framework of a Jewish culture defined by movement and (unpredictable) change as well as persistence; it fashions an understanding that is able to register radical transformation, drastic renegotiation, and sudden rupture, elements that Greenblatt believes to be at least as essential to cultural history as continuity and progress. There is no doubt that these elements apply to the Jewish community and its musical practices, especially following the Holocaust. This aftermath is thus not merely a chronological preposition. It implies that Jewish culture changed because of the Holocaust. Jewish music, even from the period preceding 1933, can never be understood again the same way due to the Holocaust’s retrospective effects.
If the Jewish communities in the different postwar Germanys with their inherent heterogeneity are linked by a common conceptual denominator then it is, indeed, that of mobility, its antonyms (immobility and stasis), and in line with the poststructuralist critique of binary opposites their disjunctures. While useful for the contextualization of culturally mobile objects and practices in any historical period, it is particularly relevant for Jewish music in the postwar era, which as a cultural product reflects the status of its agents. If social mobility and economic improvement marked the decline of traditional Jewish culture, after 1945 it became more mobile than ever, horizontally crossing the borders of continents and countries, genres, and denomination and heritage, shifting to new performance contexts. In the later twentieth century, it began to climb vertically (upward mobility), becoming established in the general music scene. It is through mobility that Jewish music ultimately gained a cultural autonomy that now determines how people are mobile.
Aside from its theoretical basis, this study is informed by methods commonly employed in ethno/musicology, Jewish studies, history, and cultural studies, which it uses in combination, pursuing an interdisciplinary framework. It relies to a large extent on historical primary sources, including audio recordings and textual artifacts such as Jewish community records, government documents, and official reports of various kinds, from archival and private collections. However, the source situation does not allow for a balance in content. For instance, the Munich community, because of its high membership, might ideally have served
as a major case study, could not be fully considered. On February 13, 1970, the community archive burned down due to arson, fracturing historical records so that a comprehensive history of the community’s musical practices is not possible.
The ethnographic portions are primarily based on data collected between 2009 and 2018 in Berlin, Dresden, and Leipzig. They draw on continuing conversations with people mentioned in this volume, in person, over the phone, via email, and in various online forums, to substantiate the data. The historical narratives are based on oral history collected between 2010 and 2015 through personal communication with eyewitnesses who were involved in various capacities in the Jewish communities during the time of the events described. Like the oral histories, memoirs are used with great caution, given that many are not historical accounts but rather narratives about the vicissitudes of remembering and thus often represent misguided, if genuine, attempts to empathize.29 Indeed, trauma and time alter the way we recollect significant events. Thus oral histories and memoirs are not employed as empirical foundation of this study, but rather serve to illustrate historical and subjective realities, and are considered with awareness of their subjectivity, partiality, and potential inaccuracy that affect all personal accounts.
Similar caution is applied to secondary literature that offers problematic perspectives and interpretations (such as the essentializing or simplifying assessment of East Germany being anti-Semitic, or polemics such as Michael Wolfssohn’s book Deutschland-Akte).30 The same caution is applied to newspapers, two of which serve as core sources that reflect to a certain extent the self-understanding of the Jewish communities: the Nachrichtenblatt and what is today known as Jüdische Allgemeine Wochenzeitung (henceforth AJW). With regard to the Nachrichtenblatt and other GDR newspapers, it is important to know that the state tightly controlled them through the Zentralkomitee’s Abteilung Agitation und Propaganda (Central Committee, Department of Agitation and Propaganda). Using them with the awareness of underlying censorship, they are important sources as they genuinely reflect the structure of GDR society, relating its historical phases, carriers of action, structures, discourses, and problems. In other words, they mirror the societal condition. The case of the AJW as the organ of Jewish communities in the West is different. Neither censored nor under state control, it experienced a major shift. In 1973 the Central Council took it over and moved the staff from Düsseldorf to Bonn. This prompted significant change in its journalistic development, turning it into more of a community newsletter (see the title change with its deletion of the word “independent”). Still, all offer important data for gaining insight into collective self-understanding and self-representation.
Given the heavy reliance on a vast number of newly unearthed materials, it is the author’s wish to initiate new discourses about the Jewish communities during the core timeframe of this study and beyond. As the first account of their musical practices during the postwar and Cold War era, it tells the story of how the traumatic experience of the Holocaust led to transition and transformation, and the significant role music played in these processes. It purports to offer a new perspective on the community during a critical time of its existence and give relevance to using music as a lens of interdisciplinary study. Given the Jewish community’s enduring presence in unified Germany, having become the third largest in Europe after France and Great Britain, it aims to contribute to a better understanding of its
