Berlin полностью

Desperate now to come up with a politically acceptable “German Jazz,” the regime sponsored a nationwide contest to identify a band that could swing in lock-step. The final round of the contest, held at the Berlin Zoo in March 1936, featured three regional bands, two that were obviously inept plus a fairly decent group from Hamburg. Most Berliners expected the Hamburgers to win, but the judges, all Nazi hacks, gave first prize to an unknown outfit from Frankfurt because it could make the fox-trot sound like a march. Of course, this band went nowhere, except back to Frankfurt. The authorities eventually abandoned their promotion of nazified jazz, just as they gave up on producing Nazi cabaret. The jazz music that Berliners continued to listen to in the Third Reich was by no means as “hot” as one could hear in New York, but it retained enough soul to disgust the state officials. Fritz Stege, a hard-line cultural bureaucrat, could lament in 1937: “It is true: jazz is still with us, in spite of prohibitions and decrees.”

Toward a “Jew-free” Berlin

If certain elements of Weimar culture hung on tenaciously in Berlin during the early years of the Third Reich, so did most of the capital’s Jews. The campaign to “aryanize” Berlin’s cultural establishment drove away some prominent Jewish artists early on, but the vast majority of the city’s sizable Jewish community, which in 1933 numbered 160,564 souls (3.78 percent of the total population), saw fit to remain. Like other groups who were threatened by the new regime, many of Berlin’s Jews chose to believe that Nazism was simply a passing storm. “The Nazis will never last,” was the hopeful word of the day. In retrospect, such optimism may seem foolhardy, and the Jews who stayed on in Berlin and other German cities were later harshly criticized, especially by pioneering Zionists, for failing to recognize from the outset that they had no future in Nazi Germany. This criticism, while understandable, is unjustified. We must remember that in much of Germany, certainly in Berlin, it was the Nazis, not the Jews (at least not the assimilated native Jews), who were the newcomers, the “foreigners.” As the German-American historian Peter Gay, who fled Berlin with his family in 1939, put the matter in his memoir, My German Question:, “the gangsters who had taken control of the country were not Germany—we were.” Recently arrived Ostjuden, meanwhile, hoped to find safety in numbers, as did Jews from the German provinces who moved to Berlin in the early years of the Third Reich to escape harsher persecution in their hometowns.

The Nazi regime responded to the Jews’ determination to stay put by sharpening discriminatory measures designed to induce emigration. Supposedly in revenge for reports of anti-Jewish persecution in the foreign press, Goebbels called for a Reich-wide boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933. The campaign was backed by the Kampfbund des gewerblichen Mittelstandes (Fighting Association of the Commercial Middle Class), which hoped to curtail competition from Jewish businesses. Because Berlin had so many thriving Jewish-owned enterprises, the Nazis focused their effort on the capital. Storm trooper thugs scrawled jingles like “Jede Mark in Judenhand / Fehlt dem deutschen Vaterland (Every mark in a Jew’s hand is one less for the fatherland)” on Jewish shop windows and stationed themselves menacingly in doorways. They employed similar tactics at Jewish-run law offices and medical practices. The State Library was closed to Jews, and Jewish students were forbidden to enter the University of Berlin. Litfass Pillars, usually covered with advertisements for plays and concerts, now bore announcements of the boycott. At the Anhalter Railway Station Bella Fromm was shocked to find a group of Brownshirts greeting incoming trains with the cry: “To hell with the Jews! Shameful death to the Jews! We won’t have any more Jews!”

SA man warning Berliners not to patronize a Jewish-owned shop during the Jewish boycott of April 1, 1933

The boycott, however, proved a flop, at least in the capital. Many Berliners continued to shop at the stores defaced by anti-Semitic slogans. Whether they did this out of protest against the Nazis, or out of a determination to get the best bargains, is impossible to know. Perhaps in many cases it was a bit of both. In any event, Goebbels was not pleased by the response of “his city” to the Nazi campaign. Clearly, the Berliners needed more “enlightenment” with respect to the Jewish menace.