Jewish Art in Nazi Germany

The Jewish Cultural League in Bavaria

Dana Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000568080
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book provides a social and cultural history of Jewish art in Nazi Germany, with a focus on the Jewish artists, art critics, and audiences in Nazi Bavaria.

From the time of its conceptualization in the autumn of 1933 until its final curtain call in November 1938, the Jewish Cultural League in Bavaria sustained three departments: music, visual arts, and adult education. The Bavarian example steps outside the highly professional cultural milieu of Jewish Berlin, and instead looks at relatively unknown efforts of Bavarian Jewish artists as they used art to define what it now meant, to them, to be Jewish under Nazism.

Insightful and engaging, this book is ideal for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars interested in social and cultural histories of Jews in Germany.

Part One1933–1935

doi: 10.4324/9781003160311-2

1Jewish Exclusion from the ‘German’ Cultural SphereImpact and Responses

DOI: 10.4324/9781003160311-3

In the late spring of 1933, a group of newly unemployed artists, artists who had been dismissed from their jobs because they were Jewish, gathered for a casual meet up in a small studio on Luisenstrasse in Munich’s Maxvorstadt, a university neighbourhood with a number of art museums and galleries – the first of many informal meetings to come. The studio belonged to the visual artist Maria Luiko (Marie Luise Kohn), a Münchnerin from her birth until the regime deported her to her death in 1941.¹ After her father’s death in 1933, she lived with her mother and older sister, Dr. Elisabeth Kohn (one of the first female lawyers in Bavaria) in Munich’s Neuhausen district, a short bicycle ride from her art studio. Luiko, at the time 29 years old, had recently spent eight semesters at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. While in school she studied painting under Karl Caspar, graphic arts under Adolf Schinnerer, and stage design under the prominent designer Emil Preetorius.² Her professional and social life revolved around Munich’s bohemian circles and progressive artist associations, particularly the pro-modernist group Die Juryfreien – as well as the city’s Jewish circles.³ A handful of friends joined her in her studio that night, including fellow visual artists Rudolf Ernst and Alfons Rosenberg, author Fritz Rosenthal (Rosenthal later changed his name to Schalom Ben-Chorin – which most people likely know him by), and actress and sculptor Elisabeth Springer.⁴ Their meeting covered the personal and the professional – an intertwining of the two spheres that came to set the stage for their work over the course of the upcoming years. Ben-Chorin, in an essay written decades later, reflected on this first meeting, writing that from the start the group intended to provide a system of social support for discriminated artists. They sought to establish an ‘apolitical Jewish opposition group’ against recent decrees enacted by the newly in-power National Socialist government. They knew their worlds were changing. They wanted to do something.⁵

National Socialist assaults on the world of arts and culture began almost immediately after Adolf Hitler’s assumption to the chancellery in 1933. Indeed, the cultural world became the first sphere from which the Nazi regime expelled Jews (and ‘leftists’) in large numbers.⁶ In a country that fashioned itself as the ‘Land of Poets and Thinkers’, cultural production remained – and remains – a serious business. In 1925, the arts employed nearly 1 per cent of Germans (excluding technical and support positions). This percentage increased in urban cultural centres; in Berlin 1.29 per cent of the population found employment in the arts, while in Munich the total rose to even greater heights, at 2.04 per cent of the city’s population being employed in some artistic field. Eight years later, a total of 169,463 Germans were employed in the arts during the first year of the National Socialist regime.⁷ Further, in 1933 there were no fewer than 262 theatres in Germany. Most of these stages were found in Berlin, where there were a total of 43,000 theatre seats – or one seat for every 100th Berliner in the Reich capital. Although there were fewer total theatres in Munich, the Bavarian capital housed approximately 6,600 theatre seats – or one seat for every 116th Münchner.⁸

The political importance of art extended beyond this physical presence and into the ideological realm. Nazi cultural understandings built on pre-existing völkisch interpretations of a ‘national’ art that represented the ‘health’ of the national ‘body’ – all ideas that developed under Romanticism and re-emerged with the recent contemporary turn toward Neo-Romanticism.⁹ Under National Socialism, the state politicised cultural life, and as such art represented a component of the regime’s overall ideology and worldview: ‘… the struggles for racial, political, and cultural renewal would be identical. The politics of art would be integral to the creation of the “people’s community”’.¹⁰ Conceptually, a ‘new’ Nazi artform or art tradition presented, at least theoretically, a heroic ‘German’ past to a collective ‘German’ audience.¹¹ Performance venues, art galleries, opera halls – it all became the stage for racial-political expression, and a chance for education and learning. This supposedly ‘pure’ ‘German’ audience, now presented with a specific National Socialist understanding of the past, would, regime ideologues believed, see the performance and be inspired to fulfil the supposedly great potential of their blood.¹² Nazi cultural plans did not – indeed, in their minds, could not – include Jews within this new ‘people’s community’ who made note of the ‘great potential of their blood’. Jews, taking from decades of racist-cultural-polemics at that point, had to be excised from the ‘German’ cultural-political body. The process of Jewish cultural exclusion began in April 1933 and continued until the regime’s defeat.

On 7 April 1933, barely nine weeks after coming to power, the National Socialist regime passed the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (Civil Service Law). This law stipulated the dismissal of ‘politically unreliable’ employees; the flexibility of the term ‘politically unreliable’ encompassed not only members of dissenting political parties but also ‘non-Aryan’ workers – including artists, actors, and musicians employed at state cultural institutions. In Munich alone this resulted in the dismissal of 369 civil servants, artists or cultural workers.¹³ Further, not only were these individuals stripped of their jobs, but former employees were deprived of their welfare and retirement benefits.

The number of Jewish artists in Bavaria forced into unemployment in April 1933 is unclear. Existing statistics on Jewish cultural figures only include limited fields. In 1932, a total of 71 Jewish community members living in the ‘larger Bavarian cities’ (these cities are not named) worked as visual artists, private tutors, and authors. Men accounted for the overwhelming majority of this total, with 52 men citing employment in these areas as compared to 19 women.¹⁴ This number does not account for musicians or actors/actresses. Further, it only includes those who were registered as members of the Jewish community in 1932, thus excluding any artists who were only externally identified as ‘Jewish’ by the National Socialist regime after 1933 (or later).

Still, it is possible to suggest potential limits to Jewish cultural employment in Bavaria by examining the occupational statistics found in two other German cities: Frankfurt am Main and Berlin. In 1932 in Frankfurt am Main (home to a Jewish population of 26,000), 124 Jewish individuals reported their occupation as being in theatre or opera.¹⁵ Not surprisingly, a larger number of Jewish artists were at home in Weimar Berlin. In 1932 the Reich’s capital was home to no fewer than 559 musicians, 298 actors, 291 singers, and 241 visual artists of Jewish heritage (a total of 1,389 self-declared artists).¹⁶ Herbert Freeden, a former Jewish Cultural League dramaturge and author of Jüdisches Theater in Nazideutschland, suggested a much higher total of 2,364 Jewish artists in the whole of Prussia, although the majority of artists in the state of Prussia would have been employed in Berlin. According to these statistics, approximately 0.5 per cent of Jews in Frankfurt am Main were artists, whereas the percentage of Jewish artists in Berlin was higher at either approximately 0.9 per cent (1932 statistics) or 1.5 per cent (Freeden’s 1933 statistics). The numbers for Bavaria as a whole likely gravitated toward the higher end of these percentages; the percentages for the large Bavarian cities likely skewing toward the Frankfurt numbers.

It is highly unlikely that the total number of Jewish artists in Bavaria approached the total number of artists in Berlin, even if one takes into consideration the entirety of the state and compares it to the single city of Berlin. Weimar Berlin is the ubiquitous title representing the artistic glamour of the period, after all, and not Weimar Munich or Nuremberg. Since the turn of the century Berlin had been the most culturally active German city in terms of total numbers; as a result, the capital employed more artists – both Jewish and non-Jewish – than any other city.¹⁷ Further, Berlin’s Jewish community was also the largest in the country. In 1933 over one-third of German Jews called Berlin home.¹⁸ The combination of greater opportunity and larger population led many Jewish artists to move to the German capital in hopes of starting a career and striking it big on the stage.

If the percentage of Jewish artists in Munich reflected the recorded percentages in Berlin, an estimated 81 to 135 Jewish individuals (using the 0.09 per cent quoted in the Gemeindezeitung and the 1.5 per cent cited by Freeden respectively) were professionally employed in the arts – an average of the two percentages results suggests a total of 108 Jewish artists who may have been professionally active in Munich before 1933. Frankfurt am Main’s example suggests this is not too far-fetched. The total numbers of professional Jewish artists were likely even smaller for Bavarian Jewish Cultural League cities outside of Munich, given that there were fewer cultural venues and generally smaller communities. Regardless of the total numbers, however, the situation in Bavaria was reflective of the general situation facing state-employed Jewish artists outside of Berlin. People lost their livelihoods.

Among the numbers are the individuals. Erich Erck (Erich Eisner; Bayerisches Staatstheater), Irma Stern (Münchner Staatsoper), Walter Reis (Nationaltheater München), Lily Marschütz (Münchner Kammerspiele),¹⁹ Herbert Langhofer (Herbert Löwenberg; Gärtnerplatztheater), and Dr. Ruth Schweisheimer all faced employment termination. These individuals had long been at home in Munich – either having been born in Munich or moved to the Bavarian capital in their early childhoods.

Some, such as Schweisheimer, faced immediate release from their jobs in April 1933. Schweisheimer, a native of Munich, was born in 1908 to Frieda (née Schoenthal) and Julius Schweisheimer. She attended university in Munich, where she studied archeology, romantic philology, and art history; her studies often took her to Berlin, Paris, and Italy. In 1932 Schweisheimer received her PhD in art history at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, under the supervision of Wilhelm Pinder. She then moved to Berlin where she began work at the Art Library of the Berlin State Museums (Staatlichen Kunstbibliothek). She was later released from her position as a result of the Civil Service Laws. Schweisheimer reflected on the spring of 1933, writing:

Everything changed, of course, when Hitler became German Chancellor on January 30 1933. … Since our future looked so bleak, we, the younger generation, knew we had to leave Germany as soon as possible. … In order to prepare myself for the possibility that I might not be able to find a job in my profession, I signed up for a course in photography.²⁰

Schweisheimer moved back to her hometown after completing the photography course and set up...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One 1933–1935
• Part Two 1935–1938
• Epilogue
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index