Violins of Hope
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Violins of Hope

James A. Grymes

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eBook - ePub

Violins of Hope

James A. Grymes

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About This Book

A stirring testament to the strength of the human spirit and the power of music, Violins of Hope tells the remarkable stories of violins played by Jewish musicians during the Holocaust, and the Israeli violin maker dedicated to bringing these inspirational instruments back to life.

The violin has formed an important aspect of Jewish culture for centuries, both as a popular instrument with classical Jewish musicians—Jascha Heifetz, Yehudi Menuhin, Itzhak Perlman—and also a central factor of social life as part of the enduring Klezmer tradition. But during the Holocaust, the violin assumed extraordinary new roles within the Jewish community. For some musicians, the instrument was a liberator; for others, it was a savior that spared their lives. For many, the violin provided comfort in mankind's darkest hour, and, in at least one case, helped avenge murdered family members. Above all, the violins of the Holocaust represented strength and optimism for the future.

In Violins of Hope, music historian James A. Grymes tells the amazing, horrifying, and inspiring story of the violins of the Holocaust, and of Amnon Weinstein, the renowned Israeli violinmaker who has devoted the past twenty years to restoring these instruments in tribute to those who were lost, including 400 members of his own family. Juxtaposing tales of individual violins with one man's harrowing struggle to reconcile his own family's history and the history of his people, it is a poignant, affecting, and ultimately uplifting look at the Holocaust and its enduring impact.

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Year
2014
ISBN
9780062246844
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1

THE WAGNER VIOLIN

Arturo Toscanini (center left) and BronisƂaw Huberman (center right) at the public dress rehearsal of the Palestine Orchestra on December 25, 1936—one day before the ensemble’s debut. (Photograph by Rudi Weissenstein, Pri-Or PhotoHouse. Courtesy of the Murray S. Katz Photo Archives of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.)
In the early twentieth century, Jews living in Germany were participating in the intellectual and cultural life of their county in ways that would have been inconceivable in previous eras. In 1925, Jews comprised 16 percent of physicians, 15 percent of dentists, and 25 percent of lawyers in the German state of Prussia, even though they formed less than 1 percent of the general population. In addition to holding prominent positions in the banking industry and on university faculties, Jews were disproportionately represented in Germany’s artistic scene, representing 3 percent of professionals in music and theater, 4 percent in the film industry, and 7 percent of visual artists and writers.
Tragically, the increase in Jewish success in professional life was accompanied by a rise in anti-Semitism. Discrimination against Jews was, of course, not limited to Germany, and it was certainly not anything new. Ever since the birth of Christianity, gentiles had looked upon Jews with suspicion, blaming them for everything from the death of Jesus Christ to natural disasters. The persistent myth of the “blood libel” even accused Jews of using the blood of Christian children for religious rituals, particularly the making of the unleavened bread for Passover.
In the years following World War I, right-wing Germans blamed the Jews for their demoralizing losses on the battlefield, as well as for the social and economic turbulence that followed. Jews were falsely accused of stabbing the country in the back by failing to adequately support the war effort. The right wing maintained that it was this betrayal, not weaknesses in the military, that had ultimately led to Germany’s defeat. They contended that the only way to restore Germany to its former glory was to rid the country of the Jews who were responsible for its ruin.
The assimilation of Jews into German society was also blamed for a perceived decline in German culture. Germany had dominated classical music from J. S. Bach in the early eighteenth century to Richard Wagner in the late nineteenth century. The end of that two-hundred-year supremacy was attributed to the Jewish composers and composition teachers who eschewed traditional Germanic tonal structures in favor of modernist compositional processes. The international Jewish influences that championed atonality, it was argued, had undermined German culture. One prominent conservative composer even drew a parallel between the “impotence” and “decay” in German musical tastes and the decline in German society that had led to the country’s otherwise inexplicable military defeat.1
Immediately after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, he and his Nazi Party initiated an agenda to rid Germany of the Jewish influences that they blamed for the country’s downfall. On April 7, Hitler ratified the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. The new law called for the removal of Jews from all public positions, but its interpretation was later expanded to exclude employment at private institutions, as well. It mandated the dismissal of Jewish personnel at police and fire stations, post offices, libraries and museums, and especially at cultural institutions. Jewish musicians who worked for music conservatories, orchestras, and opera companies quickly found themselves out of work.
Ernst Böhm had been serving as the solo contrabassist for the West German Radio Orchestra in Cologne for seven years when he received instructions to stay away from the radio building until further notice. The order claimed that the injunction was just temporary, but Böhm would never play with the orchestra again. On June 29, the Reich Broadcasting Association sent the West German Radio a list of “non-Aryan” and “politically unreliable” employees who were to be fired in keeping with the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.2 Böhm’s name was at the top of that list. He was officially dismissed exactly one month later.
The decisions over which musicians would keep their jobs were left to the newly created Reich Chamber of Music. Founded by Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels as one of seven departments within the Reich Chamber of Culture, the Chamber of Music oversaw all professional musical activities in the country. To assist with the restoration of Germany’s musical supremacy, the Chamber of Music made sure that only “good German music” such as the compositions of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn, Mozart, and Wagner were performed. Strictly forbidden was “Degenerate Music” such as jazz, atonal works, and any compositions by Jewish composers such as Mahler, Mendelssohn, and Meyerbeer. The chamber also controlled who performed the approved music. To earn money by performing, one had to be a member of the Chamber of Music. To be a member of the Chamber of Music, one could not be a Jew.
Given the Jewish propensity for string instruments—especially the violin—it is not surprising that Jews had been especially overrepresented in the string sections of professional orchestras. Once the dismissals began, their absence was felt immediately in those ensembles. German composer Georg Haentzschel once remarked that he noticed that the Jewish musicians were disappearing, “because the violin sections were getting thinner and thinner.”3
A minority of internationally renowned Jewish musicians were fortunate enough to have the means to leave Germany. Arnold Schoenberg, the Jewish composer who is considered to be the father of atonal music, had little choice but to flee. He ended up in the United States, along with former concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic Szymon Goldberg, virtuoso violin soloist Fritz Kreisler, and a number of other famous conductors, performers, and composers. All in all, the United States served as the sanctuary for approximately half of all Jewish immigrants from Germany and Austria, including 465 musicians.
Many outstanding performers stayed behind. While they were indeed well trained and highly skilled, they had not yet established the level of international prestige that would have attracted offers from orchestras outside of Germany. Others might have been able to secure employment, but lacked the resources to move abroad. Jews who wished to emigrate with their families had to secure the sufficient travel funds up front. They would then have to navigate through an intentionally difficult Nazi bureaucracy for the necessary tax clearance certificates and exit permits. Finally, they would be able to leave Germany only if the immigration quotas established by their destination countries had not already been met.
There was also a subset of the Jewish population that simply did not want to leave their homes. Some—especially those who were decorated veterans of World War I—were patriotic Germans who refused to believe that they would really be in danger in their beloved homeland. They convinced themselves that their country’s experiment with Nazism would be so short-lived that any inconveniences would be temporary. Tragically, they could not have been more wrong.
The Jewish Culture League
Percussionist Kurt Sommerfeld was one of the hundreds of Jewish musicians who were dismissed from their orchestral positions. After being fired when the Berlin Municipal Orchestra was purged of its Jewish performers, Sommerfeld registered with the employment office, where he found little sympathy. “That’s no problem,” the clerk told him sarcastically. “Go to the Jewish cemetery and become a Jewish gardener.”4
Determined to make his living as a musician, Sommerfeld answered an advertisement for a drummer in a coffeehouse band. The gig was going fine until a man in the audience stood up and shouted, “Waiter, a round of beer for the band, except for the Jew back there. No beer for him!”5 Sommerfeld walked off the stage, quitting the job on the spot.
Sommerfeld was out of work again, but not for long. In September 1933, he became the first of many unemployed Jewish orchestral musicians to find refuge in the Culture League of German Jews.
The Culture League of German Jews was founded in 1933 by Kurt Baumann, a twenty-six-year-old production assistant who had worked for the capital city’s most prominent opera houses: the Berlin State Opera, the People’s Theater, and the Municipal Opera. Baumann realized that the 175,000 Jews who lived in Berlin—approximately a third of Germany’s Jewish population—could support their own cultural activities as well as any medium-sized city could. He worked out a plan for a Jewish culture league and presented it to his mentor Kurt Singer, a charismatic former deputy director of the Municipal Opera who had already been thinking along the same lines. Their plan was bold: to maintain a presence for Jewish culture in Germany while also providing modest incomes for out-of-work Jewish artists.
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.”6
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 GĂŒnther Goldschmidt. GĂŒnther 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, GĂŒnther agreed to play two concerts with the Frankfurt Culture League orchestra, substituting for its sick principal flutist, Erich Toeplitz. GĂŒnther 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, GĂŒnther was eager to reunite with violinist and violist Rosemarie Gumpert. GĂŒnther and Rosemarie had met during GĂŒnther’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, GĂŒnther and Rosemarie joined the orchestra of the league in Berlin. Just as GĂŒnther 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!”7 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 GĂŒnther’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...

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