Emigration 1933–1945/1950 by Claus‐Dieter Krohn
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Emigration 1933–1945/1950 by Claus‐Dieter Krohn National Socialism destroyed and displaced the unique culture of the short‐lived Weimar Republic The forced emigration of most of its representatives meant that rather than being obliterated this culture was exported and preserved on the other side of the Atlantic, where (in the USA) it still has something of a mythical status. It is no mere coincidence that it was Peter Gay who coined the term "Weimar Culture" in his seminal study "Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider". Gay was born in 1923 in Berlin and fled in 1939 with his parents from Nazi Germany to the United States, where he went on to become a prominent American historian. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Profile of the Movement to Escape After 1933 2. Cultural Transfer via the Emigrants 3. Conclusion 4. Appendix 1. Sources 2. Literature 3. Notes Indices Citation Profile of the Movement to Escape After 1933 Weimar culture is associated with modern, avant‐garde movements within art and literature, with urban life, the development of film as medium, Americanization, Westernization and mass culture, but also with the analysis of modernity within the social sciences, a trend that had emerged definitively in Germany following the disruption of the World War I. These social movements and reorientations contradicted National Socialist ideologies. The aura which still surrounds the culture of the Weimar Republic today is rooted in the debate over social and intellectual questions which remain relevant to contemporary society. This is even more remarkable when one considers the deplorable collapse of the first German democracy. ▲1 About 500,000 people fled or were driven from the area controlled by the National Socialists after 1933, a rather insignificant number compared with other modern migrations. Around 360,000 of these were from Germany itself and another 140,000 from Austria after the annexation of 1938. The émigrés included primarily social democrats and members of the inner circle of the liberal bourgeoisie as well as communists and avant‐garde writers and artists and, finally, a considerable number of scholars. In the wake of the "Restoration of Professional Civil Service Act" (Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums), passed in early April 1933, German institutions of higher education lost about a quarter of their instructors – roughly 3,000 individuals. Many were discharged for political reasons or because they were of "non‐Aryan" descent. Shortly thereafter, the competing political parties were banned, and in the summer of 1933 the first expatriation list (➔ Media Link #ab) was released. By early 1945, there had been another 358 such lists (➔ Media Link #ac).1 ▲2 The National Socialist definition of "non‐Aryan" need no further attention here, for those affected usually had completely different ideological alliances and their Jewish ancestry played a role in only that, faced with the crumbling assimilation in Germany, they had tended to develop into social critics par excellence. As a result, those classified as such were especially prone to be involved in the modern scholarly disciplines which had just become established in the 1920s: sociology, economics, psychology, political science and, within the natural sciences, biochemistry and nuclear physics. Without exaggerating, Peter Gay (1923–2015) (➔ Media Link #ad) could claim that "[t]he exiles Hitler made were the greatest collection of transplanted intellect, talent and scholarship the world has ever seen."2 The triptych which the émigré painter Arthur Kaufmann (1888–1971) (➔ Media Link #ae) created between 1939 and 1963 depicts a representative sample of the émigrés. (➔ Media Link #af) ▲3 Most of those who fled Germany after the rise of National Socialism did not initially set out for the USA. America was seen as a point of no return, which made it unattractive to political refugees and the literati. It is this group, which was long the focus of scholarship, which is meant when one speaks of "exiles". They mistakenly assumed that the Nazi regime would experience a quick demise and initially emigrated to countries bordering on Germany: Czechoslovakia (app. 9,000), France (app. 100,000), Switzerland (app. 25,000), the Netherlands (app. 10,000) and Scandinavia (app. 8,000). There were significant publishers of exiled authors in Prague, Paris, Zürich and Amsterdam, and politicians and writers hoped both to reach German‐speakers outside of Germany and also to influence the future of the Nazi state via clandestine channels.3 ▲4 The exiled party leadership of the SPD – the so‐called "Sopade" – fled to the Czech capital while only a relatively small group of communists (about 3,000) found refuge in the Soviet Union due to the restrictive conditions for entry. Most of the latter later disappeared in the Stalinist Gulag. Research has shown that the leaders of the German Communist Party were just as likely to be executed in the Soviet Union as they were in Nazi Germany.4 Palestine and Turkey were further exceptions as countries of exile in 1933 to which special agreements encouraged targeted migration. In Palestine, under the British Mandate, the number of immigrants was limited. The Jewish Agency, which was responsible for organizing the immigration, reached a transfer agreement (Haavara) with the German state ensuring that the settlers, primarily Zionist pioneers (➔ Media Link #ag) from the HeHalutz association, would come from the wealthy middle class (about 60.000 individuals): the industrial goods which they brought to Palestine had been paid for with Jewish assets in Germany, while their transfer out of the country was not allowed. Turkey, on the other hand, targeted German scholars who had been dismissed (including their families, about 1,000 individuals) for backing its attempt to modernize (➔ Media Link #ah) the country under the dictatorship of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) (➔ Media Link #ai). ▲5 The migration was initially limited to the countries named here, but 1938 brought a new wave of critical events which sparked an upsurge in migration from Europe in general: the annexation of Austria; the occupation of the Sudetenland; the destruction of Jewish property associated with Kristallnacht; the introduction of Italian racial laws modelled after those in Germany; and the looming defeat of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Those countries which had taken the refugees in became increasingly reluctant to do so. In the spring of 1938 an international conference of the League of Nations (➔ Media Link #aj) in Evian on Lake Geneva to address the refugee question was unsuccessful. It was the only such conference convened during these years. From now on the USA, too, came more and more into focus as a refuge. Larger groups of refugees also were able to escape to Latin America (for example, about 35,000 went to Argentina and 16,000 to Brazil) and to South Africa (app. 5,500), but the only other option for those without a visa was, for the short period of Japanese occupation, the international settlement in Shanghai to which more than 18,000 individuals fled after 1938. ▲6 The political and literary exile peaked in the years leading up to 1938 and was recorded in countless books, programmatic brochures and magazines. As suggested by titles like Die Sammlung (The Assembly) or Der Gegen‐Angriff (The Counterattack), these works presented the exiles as the "other Germany". Those in exile understood themselves to be the mouthpiece of a muted nation, as "the better Germany", guided by reason and humanity. "Without the emigration", claimed Heinrich Mann (1871–1950) (➔ Media Link #ak), "Germany could no longer be considered rational and humane; the exiles are all that are left of a Germany that learns, thinks and works towards a future."5 ▲7 Critical, mostly leftist, writers had quickly recognized the scope of the National Socialists' power grab and viewed their expulsion as a political provocation, even if they were unable to wield anything more powerful than their pens. In retrospect, these quite impressive movements for literary and artistic transformation had begun already in the 1920s, for they had opened themselves to Western philosophical ideologies with their urbane, civilizing impulses. These "asphalt literati" were thus targeted in a particularly aggressive campaign, and the burning of their books intended to wipe them from the collective memory. Despite their material problems and their tumultuous biographies, many found their exile to be existentially and spiritually enriching. Excluded from German society against their will, they felt obligated to raise their voices in protest. With their countless publications, they waged battle against the barbarism in Germany and against the persistent global apathy from their countries of refuge. ▲8 For example, in July 1933 the emigrants in Paris had already assembled and published the Braunbuch über Reichstagsbrand und Hitlerterror (Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror) (➔ Media Link #al).6 The National Socialists attempted to frame the Reichstag fire in February of 1933 as a communist conspiracy and sentenced the Dutch anarchist Marinus van der Lubbe (1909– 1934) (➔ Media Link #am) to death for arson, but in the Braunbuch the émigrés argued that the Nazis had set fire to the Reichstag in a ploy to eliminate their political opponents. Lacking detailed information about the proceedings in Germany, the authors influenced the international coverage by depicting the Nazis' brutality and relying on deduction, intuition and assertion. The Braunbuch was published in more than twenty languages (➔ Media Link #an), including the German edition of 135,000 copies and the French edition of 10,000.7 ▲9 A bit later the communist publisher Willi Münzenberg (1889–1940) (➔ Media Link #ao) put together an international committee of prominent jurists and intellectuals to follow the judicial proceedings against Van der Lubbe following the Reichstag fire. These attempts to use propaganda to put the Nazis on the defensive on their own territory – called the "Münzenberg strategy" in the historiography – were complemented by various international writers' conventions which sought to inform the public about the events in Germany.