121. THIRD MOVEMENT 'German' Exiles Transform Classical Music In

121. THIRD MOVEMENT

1932-1938

‘German’ exiles transform classical music in the Mandate

The push

From its inception the Nazi Party stressed the importance of music to sway ‘the masses.’ In Mein Kampf Hitler, following Wagner’s vitriolic pronouncements,1 recounted his thunderstruck pre-teen reaction to Lohengrin, proclaiming such music the essence of “German-ness.” The Party appropriated convenient excerpts from Wagner and other “pure Germans” for demonstrations, marches and rallies. In January 1933 the future Führer conspicuously visited Wagner’s Leipzig birthplace for memorials surrounding the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death. Soon he made Bayreuth attendance compulsory for senior Party officials.2

Much Nazi music was not so elevated. But as S.A. marching songs like Wenn der judenblut vom messer spritzt 3 confirmed, the universal theme was that poisonous ‘un-volkish’ music must be extinguished. Joseph Goebbels, new Minister of Enlightenment, saw this cleansing as one of the Third Reich’s crucial tasks. Within a month of the NSDAP’s accession he established the Chamber of Culture with its reichsmusikammer, charged not only with licensing acceptable musicians but with supervising all music in Germany, from elementary school instruction through home records and concert halls. A month later thousands of Jewish musicians at universities and city orchestras found themselves unemployed under the Law for the Protection of the Civil Service.

In 1934 Jewish music and musicians were banned in public. Thick directories of prohibited Jewish works and performers appeared, complete with blank pages for personalized updates. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws expanded the ban to half-Jews and quarter-Jews, decimating even performers whose grandparents had converted. In spring 1938 a large Dusseldorf exhibit of “Degenerate [German] Music” followed the better-known 1937 Munich premiere of “Degenerate [German] Art.”4 That November, kristallnacht’s horrors put an end to lingering illusions,

2 especially for some 20,000 resident Jewish ‘subjects’ hustled to Dachau or Buchenwald – and offered release if they promptly left Germany.5

These developments not only stunned long-established German Jews. They struck at the core of their cultural identity, which largely revolved around concert subscriptions and regular hausmusik recitals in their homes.

The pull

Between 1932 and 1938 some 50,000 German Jews plus another 20,000 German-educated Jewish refugees from countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia reached Palestine. This wave – the so-called Fifth Aliyah, or aliyah germanit -- was less than half of all immigration to the Mandate during that desperate time. But its impact on the yishuv’s music transcended statistics.

Because they mostly packed and left in a compressed group the new, relatively well-off arrivals often brought everything with them. This included not only phonograph collections, classical or modern music scores, music-patronage traditions, and boatloads of bulky pianos they could not bear to leave. It included hundreds of highly-trained concert soloists, orchestra musicians and conductors, plus recognized European composers like Paul ben-Haim (born Frankenburger), Joseph Tal (born Gruenthal), Marc Lavry (born Levin), Erich Sternberg and Alexander Boskovich.6 Importantly, it included the new immigrants’ habits and their critical mass – thousands of patrons willing and able to support classical music initiatives that previously had limped or foundered under the Mandate.

In 1935 the Polish-German violin virtuoso Bronislaw Huberman began to organize a permanent Palestine symphony orchestra that also could rescue unemployed European talent. He sent agents across central Europe to audition prospects; secured subscription and financial commitments; obtained special music exemptions from Mandate immigration quotas; and managed to import more than 200 top-rate Jewish musicians7 including the violist/composer Odon Partos, who became Rebecca’s friend and nominal Academy boss.8 The rehearsals of Huberman’s Palestine Symphony (later the Israel Philharmonic) were routinely conducted in German, the orchestral common tongue of the time.

The Orchestra’s 1936 debuts in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem were an international sensation. They were conducted by Arturo Toscanini – as ferocious an anti-fascist as he was a disciplinarian -- who recently had refused to conduct at Bayreuth. Despite Arab unrest and the need to transport personnel in armored busses, they were more than sold out. Thousands who could not get the low-priced tickets trailed the orchestra and surrounded its concert venues.9 Many more listened to its broadcasts in the yishuv alone.

That year the Mandate’s Palestine Broadcasting Service (PBS) had begun operating from Jerusalem in three languages, with several hours of daily live music performed by its own studio orchestra plus guest conductors and soloists.10 Its programming chief was another recent German-Jewish immigrant, the pianist, baritone, composer and conductor Karl Solomon.11 With the growth of home radios Solomon’s programs provided a new national venue that built audiences for recitals at theatres or other physical sites.

This explosive transformation was not without tensions. The germanit still was displaced and in exile, with the loss, longing and disorientation that condition involved. Added to this was the distress of witnessing what its beloved Germany had become. German-speaking arrivals would keep struggling to locate their heimat (“homeland”). One observer put this succinctly: “There’s no plural for heimat. You can only have one of them.”12

In addition, the new wave was highly-educated, professional, formal and urban – a recipe that gave rise both to innumerable yekkes jokes13 and to deeper clashes with the redemption-through- farming ethos of East European agricultural pioneers.

At a practical level the germanit flooded (even as it expanded) the existing job market with fearsome competition, producing the same grievances as those pressed in 1930 by yishuv musicians who petitioned British officials to ban talkies that wiped out silent-film accompaniment.14

And here too, arrivals faced pressures not just to write or play “old” music, but of whether and how their talents should help build a state. Those questions included the unanswerable ones of what constituted “Jewish” or “new Jewish” music, how it should relate to pre-existing Sephardic competitors, and how or when it should be written and performed. As the German-Jewish composer/musicologist Peter Gradenwitz diplomatically put it:

Not only did they come to a continent which had nothing of the civilization and cultural tradition in which they had grown up but they also soon acquired the feeling that they were called upon to contribute by their very creative work, to the upbuilding of the old- new country. Their previous notions seemed curiously out of place in the new surroundings and acclimatization was imperative.15

For Rebecca the influx was a mixed blessing. The new wave was her cultural compatriots -- trained in the same schools, bound by the same technical and interpretive criteria, serving the same music gods. But it also was the next generation, both avant-garde and beholden to Mandate authorities and the Jewish Agency for entrance visas and other benefits. It went its own way.

Wagner, Der Judenthum in der Musik, Leipzig, 1869.

Prospective Chancellor Hitler listens to Wagner at the Gewandhaus, Leipzig, 18 Jan. 1933.

Degenerate Music, exhibit poster and catalogue cover, Dusseldorf, 1938.

Toscanini at the Dead Sea, Palestine 1936. The Maestro buys a pardess, Tel Aviv, 1936.

1 E.g., that “mongrel” Oriental Jews had neither a real language, no place in Occidental culture, or any claim to produce “music of the blood.” See, e.g., Das Judentum in der Musik (1850; enlarged 1869; rev. & republished by Heinrich Berl (Deuthsche-Verlags-Anhalt, 1926)) and Wagner’s numerous later writings; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Judenthum_in_der_Musik; http://www.jrbooksonline.com/pdf_books/judaisminmusic.pdf (both accessed 5-25-16).

2 See, e.g., http://holocaustmusic.ort.org/politics-and-propaganda/third-reich/wagner-richard/; “Hitler and Wagner, Daily Telegraph (7-25-2011), ______(both accessed 5-25-16); Irene Heskes, Passport to Jewish Music: Its History, Traditions, and Culture (Greenwood, NY, 1994) Chap. 19, https://books.google.com/books/about/Passport_to_Jewish_Music.html?id=WFpOGhL3qV8C .

3 “When Jewish blood spurts from my knife, then everything goes so well.”

4 See, e.g., https://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/online-features/collections-highlights/julien-bryan/nazi- germany-1937/1937-munich-exhibition-of-degenerate-art ; http://germanhistorydocs.ghi- dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=1578 ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_Art_Exhibition (art); http://www.dw.com/en/the-nazis-take-on-degenerate-music/a-16834697 ; https://explore.lib.virginia.edu/exhibits/show/censored/walkthrough/entartete ; http://germanhistorydocs.ghi- dc.org/sub_image.cfm?image_id=2082 ((music) (all accessed 5-26-16).

Authors’ note: Both exhibits traveled to other German cities until the outbreak of WWII. For the catalogue of one comprehensive reconstruction of Entartete Kunst with essays analyzing the exhibit’s uxtaposition of proscribed art with images of mental illness and disease, see Stephanie Barron et al., Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991). As noted in, e.g., Michael Meyer, “A Musical Façade for the Third Reich,” the goal of total control consistent with Nazi ideology -- expressed in the euphemism Gleischaltung (coordination) – was meant to reach every corner of German society. For an example of its application even to Alpine climbing. see Bettina Hoerlin, Steps of Courage: My Parents’ Journey from Nazi Germany to America (Author House, Bloomington IN, 2011).

5 E.g., sources n. 2 above. By 1939 the ‘exit’ option largely vanished. See Chap. __ (“The Doors Slam Shut”) below and following chapters.

6 See respectively, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ben-Haim; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Tal; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Lavry; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Walter_ Sternberg; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Uriah_Boskovich (all re-accessed 5-25-16).

7 And their families, totaling more than 1000 refugees from Naziism. See sources cited Chap __ (“Second Movement”) above.

8 See Chap.__ below.

9 One kibbutz sent 200 members to a closed Tel Aviv rehearsal that had been rumored to be free to all. Toscanini ordered that they be let in. Hershberg, op cit. p __.

10 See Chap. _ (“Arabs and Jews”) App. __ (“Jerusalem Calling”) below.

11 See, e.g., http://via.lib.harvard.edu/via/deliver/deepcontent?recordId=olvwork465664 ; http://web.nli.org.il/sites/NLI/English/music/archives/detailed_archives/Pages/Karel_Salmon.aspx (both accessed 5- 25-16). For German-Jewish musical figures noted above, see also, e.g., Gdal Saleski, Famous Musicians of Jewish Origin (Bloch, NY, 1949).

12 Boorman, op. cit., p. __. The multi-faceted lure of heimat was deep-rooted in German culture, where it had been reinforced for generations by vandervogel songs and other manifestations. Id., pp ____.

13 Authors’ note: The Yiddish word yekkes (literally “short jacket” but metaphorically “necktie”) generally implies the kind of punctual formality that wears ties and suits even in blazing desert sun and always appears one minute early for appointments. See, e.g., http://www.theyeshivaworld.com/coffeeroom/topic/yeskkes ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yekke (both accessed 5-25-16).

For the broader meaning of “misfit” and a discussion of yekkes jokes – which persist – see Boorman op cit., pp __.

14 As the charismatic Jewish-Yemenite singer Bracha Zefira admitted after failing to get German-Jewish symphonic instrumentalists to play her “Oriental” arrangements the way they were written, “They just refused. And also, I was scared of them.” Hershberg, op cit. pp ____. See Salesky, op cit. pp. _____; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Israel; https://musicinisrael.wordpress.com/2013/10/02/playlist-of-the- week-bracha-zefira/; http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopedia-of-jews-in-the-islamic-world/zefira- bracha-SIM_0022590 (all accessed 5-25-16).

15 Music and Musicians in Israel: A Comprehensive Guide to Modern Israeli Music (Israeli Music Publications Ltd., Tel Aviv, 1959) p. 17 passim. The reference to “old-new country” is a somewhat pressurized play on Herzl’s Altneueland. See Chap. __ (“Zionism - A Leap of Faith”) above.