6. Jews in German Art and Literature
Many years before the National Socialist regime, indeed even before the War and before the period when Jewish emancipation had reached its climax, anxious observers pointed out that cultural life in Germany hardly deserved the name "German" any longer and that it had become a merely Jewish sphere of activity. The crisis in German cultural life has never been more aptly described and the Jewish problem never discussed in clearer terms than in the article by the Jewish essayist Moritz Goldstein, published as early as 1912 in
The Protector of Art [
Der Kunstwart] (March, 1912), a German art magazine of high standing.
Goldstein describes how the Jews, at the beginning of their emancipation, generally invaded all branches of German cultural life and, being quick studies, soon commenced to supplant their masters. Goldstein gives the following synopsis of the consequences of this development:
Jews suddenly filled all those positions which are not withheld from them by force. They have converted German aims and tasks into their own and they strive for them accordingly. It seems as if German cultural life were to be completely transferred into Jewish hands. This was neither anticipated nor desired by the Christians when they granted the pariah in their midst a share in European cultural life. They began to take defensive measures, they resumed their custom of calling us aliens, they commenced to regard us as a danger in the Temple of their Art. Consequently we are now faced by the following problem. We Jews guide and administrate the intellectual property of a nation which denies our qualification and competency to do so.
Goldstein describes this Jewish administration and control of German art and culture as a "prodigious fact." An examination of pre-1933 German intellectual life will corroborate Goldstein's testimony. In all spheres, whether the stage, literature, music, painting, the plastic arts, the cinema, or, more recently, broadcasting, Jews always occupied the leading positions, compelling all to follow their intellectual guidance.
Consider theater, for instance. Being the most modern, the Berlin stages are always imitated by all the provincial theaters, and they were all under Jewish management. The choice of the programs was made according to an entirely Jewish outlook, and the result was that Jewish authors predominated.
In literature, the best-sellers were always the output of Jewish authors or publishers. Readers abroad who took an interest in German literature in those days will still be able to recall the names Emil Ludwig, Jakob Wassermann, Arnold Zweig, Lion Feuchtwanger, and various others. The sales of their books outweighed those of all other German authors by far. Statistics have shown that almost half of all German high literature circulating abroad during the last ten years was the product of Jewish authors.
Musical life was similarly dominated by Jewish influence. In the great majority of cases, the important conducting positions in Berlin and in the provinces were occupied by Jews. This was a decisive factor in the choice of the works that would appear on the programs of opera and concert halls. The representation of Jewish composers reached astonishing dimensions. Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg were substituted for Beethoven; Richard Wagner and Hans Pfitzner were supplanted by Franz Schreker. Music critiques written by Jews, as well as the influence of the professional agencies (which were totally in Jewish hands, as a practical rule), did their part to support this development.
This tendency was even more evident in the lighter type of entertainment music such as the operetta, not to mention the cinema, broadcasting, and the gramophone industry. One could observe an ever-increasing Jewish influence on conservatories, the publishing branch as a whole, and professional music literature. The conclusion was justified that Jewish preponderance in musical life was worrying.
The situation was no different in the plastic arts and painting. Jewish art-market traffic and Jewish art literature paved the way to success for a whole generation of Jewish painters and sculptors, a way barred to the majority of German artists. Film and broadcasting were more or less exclusively reserved to Jewish activity, so that it is nearly impossible to speak of German participation in those fields.
To dispel any doubt as to the accuracy of these statements regarding Jewish preponderance in German intellectual life, it is necessary merely to refer to the testimony of so reliable a Jew as Moritz Goldstein who, as far back in 1912, made the following observations (in the essay referenced above):
Nobody actually questions the power the Jews exercise in the press. Criticism, in particular, at least as far as the larger towns and their influential newspapers are concerned, seems to be turning into a Jewish monopoly. The dominance of the Jewish element in the theater is also generally recognized: nearly all the managers of Berlin stages are Jews; the same may be said of a large part, even perhaps the majority, of the actors; the fact that the concert and theater are dependent upon the Jewish public is continuously being proudly asserted and also deplored ... Many an apostle of German art has been forced, much against his will, to convince himself of the enormous number of Jews among German poets.
This development had progressed very rapidly after 1912. The main cause of this was that Jews invaded the official administration of German intellectual life. They were granted governmental positions which had been closed to them before the War.
For many years the Jewish lawyer Seelig was head of the Department of Theaters in the Prussian Ministry of Culture, while the Department of Music was in the hands of the Jew Leo Kestenberg. Considering the fact that the policy of the German press was controlled by Jews — indeed, its supreme official administration was conducted by Secretary of State Weismann — it is quite possible to conjecture to what extent the Jewish usurpation of German intellectual life was officially sponsored and propagated.
Jewish preponderance was by no means the result of intellectual superiority, of greater talent or creative power on the part of the Jewish race. On the contrary, it was mainly the Jewish economic ascendency described above which led to the establishment of their high position in German cultural life. This economic domination was the tool they used to attain their intellectual and cultural influence.
In this connection it is even more important to bear in mind that the characteristic Jewish intellectual attitude, which manifested itself in all spheres of cultural life, decisively favored the realization of their craving for predominance. Their lack of national sentiment, their egoism, absolute rationalism, absence of scruples, and characteristic habit of speculating upon the basest instincts, traits which have already been mentioned in the chapter devoted to Jewish journalism, were the foundation for their economic success, upon which their intellectual domination was based. The result was the disintegration and decay of German cultural life. As a matter of fact, it wasn't so much the dimensions of Jewish power, nor the extent of the alien takeover, which aroused opposition and protest on the part of the German nation, finally leading to the most acute antisemitism. It was, instead, the characteristic Jewish moral standpoint, their innate spirit, and the methods applied by their race to use and abuse this intellectual influence.
To demonstrate this clearly, it is necessary to examine more closely the various spheres of pre-1933 German intellectual life.
Literature:
We have mentioned the names of the Jewish authors whose works, at least as far as their sales are concerned, ranked foremost among German novels. The most successful of these writers was Emil Ludwig, whose real name is Cohn. In that period, his books presumably were the most widely circulated works of literature published in the German language. The total number of printings of his works exceeded two million in 1930, and his novels have been translated into 25 languages. Abroad, Ludwig was regarded for many years as the epitome of German contemporary literature.
This reputation and the enormous sales of his historical biographies cannot, however, be explained by the actual quality or ethical value of his literary work. Ludwig is one of the best examples of what enormous success may be achieved by well-calculated advertising undertaken on a generous scale. All his books, dedicated to great personalities of history, are based merely upon a glib style and lighthearted manner of narration, while the content itself is of the most deplorable banality, clothed in a mantle of superficial philosophical commonplaces. He utterly lacks true understanding of real historical greatness and of fundamental historical motives, focusing his attention mostly upon the personal and intimate traits of the subjects he portrays, that is, upon that part of human nature where even the greatest are but ordinary mortals. All his books, which he dumped the market at incredibly short intervals, are characterized — whether they deal with Napoleon I, Lincoln, Goethe, or even Jesus Christ — by the same absence of individual profundity and earnest engrossment, and they all bear the same features of a formulaic and, as it were, wholesale production.
The following are but a few examples, to illustrate Ludwig's literary methods. In his study of Goethe,
Genius and Character [
Genie und Charakter] (Berlin, 1924), his account of the relations between Goethe and Schiller completely ignores the intellectual dimension — the opposite poles embodied by these two men who, by the metaphysical contrast between their natures, simultaneously attracted and repelled each other. Ludwig regards the relations between these two eminent men in the light merely of professional envy and competition, where one grudges the other fame and fortune. In his work about Jesus Christ, Ludwig even takes a frankly blasphemous tone. The title itself —
The Son of Man [
Der Menschensohn] (Berlin, 1928) — is a deliberate antithesis to the Christian conception of Christ as the Son of God. Ludwig's portrait consequently deprives the figure of Christ of all its religious attributes. What remains is a benevolent, rather sentimental type of person, hypnotized by a mission which has been foisted upon him by outsiders. According to Ludwig, Christ's ideas and teachings are not new at all but represent old Jewish religious doctrines already extolled by Philo and others. In his telling of the Sermon on the Mount, Ludwig says about Christ's teachings: "His audience is not aware that Hillel, head of the Synedrion, taught the same ideas couched in practically the same words fifty years before." Should this passage not suffice to demonstrate Ludwig's style, the following examples will no doubt convince; they clearly show the approach he chose in order to create a blasphemous caricature of the Savior:
Also wealthy citizens often invite him because he is learned in the Holy Scriptures and because of his reserved conduct.[...] At such occasions he whiles in their company and partakes of their wine — it is strong wine from the vineyards on the hills. He avoids neither festivities nor women and he jests with the party-goers ... He is also of cheerful disposition and does not scorn the pleasures of the table ... When the women anoint him or languorously listen to his words, his heart’s yearning and dream of love are realized and he, the Prophet, lavishly distributes to many what the good man reserves for one alone.
However, Ludwig goes further and openly ridicules every Christian sentiment. According to him, it is solely Judas the Traitor who gave Christ the necessary opportunity of fulfilling His mission of redemption. "Judas wanted to force Jesus and his enemies to a decision [...] Only he who brought suffering upon the Master could open the Gates of Eternal Splendor for him [...] If God wrought a miracle and granted that His Son should finally be victorious, then the apparently faithless disciple [Judas] would be doubly justified." These words are the quintessence of all impiety towards divine and human ideals and shamelessly betray the most blatant cynicism, an eternal character trait of the Jewish race.
Alfred Kerr is our second important figure among the Jewish literary pseudo-prophets. In his capacity as critic for the Jewish
Berliner Tageblatt, he despotically waved his wand over all the theaters of the capital. His word was decisive for the success or failure of actors and personnel. His activity, however, was not confined to newspaper criticism, for he also devoted his time to writing books. His friend and biographer, the Jew Joseph Chapiro, relates the following exceedingly characteristic confession made by Kerr: "My friends — what is character? Very often just the opposite of the general conception, for our display of character is restricted to minutes." Kerr also discussed the figure of Christ, in his book
The World in Light [
Die Welt im Licht] (1913). While Ludwig at least tries to keep up the appearance of a certain literary seriousness, Kerr casts aside every vestige of decency and goes for the jugular. No profanation is too tasteless and he even asserts: "I can well imagine hearing Christ jabbering Jewish jargon. Oscar Wilde let him pompously talk Greek — rubbish — he spoke Jewish jargon." Considering this complete lack of every kind of delicate feeling, it is not surprising that the lyrical poems of this guardian of German culture (
Whimsies [
Caprichos] [1921]) are nothing but a collection of obscene and repulsive sexuality.
Georg Hermann representes a somewhat different, but by no means superior, type of Jew occupying a conspicuous position in the German literary world. In his political diary entitled
Marginal Notes [
Randbemerkungen] (Berlin, 1919) he reveals the credo of a weak, utterly decadent man of literary ambitions, devoid of moral backbone and support: "As a Jew, I belong to a race much too old to be duped by mass suggestion. Such words as Nation, War, and State are endowed with neither sound nor color for me." The cosmopolitan, international mentality of Ahasuerus's sons is clearly reflected in the following confession: "I feel at home in any country of the world whose language I speak, where there are beautiful women, flowers and art, a good library, a chess board, pleasant and cultivated society, and where the climate is healthy and agreeable and the landscape attractive." Nevertheless, Hermann is honest enough to admit that the Jewish race is responsible for the dissemination of the negative attitude towards State and patriotism. He declares: "The Jew's rejection of all nationalistic ideology is the principal source of his evolutionary quality and intrinsic value." Hermann's standpoint, which, as a matter of fact, is a purely anarchistic one, even goes so far as to confess personal cowardice: "Five minutes of cowardice are preferable to being dead for the rest of one's days."
The versatility and inconsistency attributed to the chameleon and the Israelite alike were developed to an almost unparalleled perfection in the Jewish author Kurt Tucholsky. This exceptionally productive gossip-column writer, endowed with a brilliant style and great talents, made use of not less than four different pen names, with which he operated as the occasion demanded. Apart from his own name he signed with the pseudonyms Peter Panter, Kaspar Hauser, and Theobald Tiger. Many important daily newspapers and magazines published his articles. His numerous books, which all attained a wide circulation, ranked him among the most read German authors in those days. Unfortunately, he employed his admirable intellectual gifts merely for destructive criticism. Nothing was sacred to him and he scoffed at the ideals of the German nation; he flung his biting sarcasm and venomous mockery at every religious and national sentiment. After the general collapse of the German Empire in 1918, Tucholsky, who never took part in the War himself, derided and gibed at the German Army in endless tirades in which he particularly gave vent to his contempt of the German officer. Like his Jewish colleague Lessing, he insulted the venerable and revered Field Marshal von Hindenburg and publicly described him as a "national hero as they are painted on beer glasses." Devoid of all sentiment of patriotism, the stigma of actual High Treason could not stop him. In his book
Germany, Germany Above All Else [
Deutschland, Deutschland über alles] (Berlin, 1929), which is solely dedicated to the calumniation of his native country, he cynically asserts: "What these judges term High Treason is no concern of ours and can be estimated as an honorable action in our eyes." The analysis of his mentality may be completed by reading these words of his which advocate an absolute liberation from all moral discipline: "Man has two legs and two convictions, one during the times of his prosperity, the other during the times of want." Finally, Tucholsky was addicted to the most pernicious type of pornography, and he, together with the Jew Theodor Wolff, strongly opposed the Law for the Protection of Juveniles against the detrimental influences of worthless and immoral literature.
Theater:
To depict the rapid takeover of the entire German theater by Jews it should be enough to refer the reader to the book published by the formerly very popular Jewish author Arnold Zweig,
Jews on the German Stage [
Juden auf der Deutschen Bühne] (Berlin, 1928). With unparalleled frankness Zweig describes how the jobs of financier, theater director, agent, stage manager, actor, critic, poet, and playwright were taken over and held by Jews. Zweig relates: "They come from God knows where with money in their pockets ... " meaning that type of Jew who, like the briber Katzenellenbogen, the Russian Jew Kahn, and the two Rotter brothers — the latter having emigrated to Germany from Eastern Europe — tried their luck in the theatrical line, thereby degrading to a mere source of pecuniary profit an institution originally dedicated to art and culture. Zweig designates the Jewish agents, upon whose favor all actors were dependent for their engagements, as "slave-holders" who had, in the course of time, developed an unrestricted monopoly by means of which they controlled the entire theatrical domain. He says: "The various agencies' international collaboration corresponds to and is a direct result of the international interrelationships of the modern East European Jewish movements. There is no actor who does not remember the countless humiliations and insults to which he has had to submit in this slave market. In the case of some of these agencies the path to public recognition and fame traverses the path of the extortionist ... "
It has been mentioned already that the management of the more influential theaters of the country, particularly that of the Berlin stages and even the State Theaters, had been acquired by Jews. The two Rotter brothers alone were managers of seven theaters in Berlin. In their case even Zweig was compelled to admit that "under the management of these upstarts the literary theater was degraded to a mere financial enterprise devoted entirely to the realization of pecuniary profit." The Jew Leopold Jessner, stage manager of the Berlin State Theater, twisted Shakespeare's and Schiller's classical dramas into eccentric popular hits which aroused justified indignation even outside of Germany. Although a Jew himself, critic Fritz Engel was forced to express his disapproval of the performance of Jessner's staging of
Hamlet in December 1926: "He converts it into a society play, sometimes into a comedy, and almost into a revue."
In view of this Jewish predominance in the theatrical sphere, it is hardly surprising that the plays figuring in the repertoires of the theaters exactly reflected the mentality of their Jewish proprietors. The aim upon which all these plays were based was the destruction of generally accepted ideals of Society and State, Nation, Government and Legislation, and religious and moral principles. Anyone taking the trouble to study the theater programs of those days will observe that Jewish names predominate by far.
The Communist Jew Ernst Toller was the first author to write for the stage after the War ended. In 1919 he was a member of the Communist Workers Council under Eisner's leadership in Munich. His drama
Fire from the Boilers (British title:
Draw the Fires) [
Feuer aus den Kesseln] is a deliberate glorification of the Sailors' Mutiny of 1918, and
Cripple, the German Man [
Der deutsche Hinkemann] is a unparalleled mockery of the German Army.
Friedrich Wolf, a Jew whose plays were included in the repertoire of practically all theaters, also devoted himself at first to the creation of dramas about mutinies, then switched to topics based on moral and intellectual disintegration and freeing oneself from all principles of ethical conduct. In his play
Cyanide [
Cyankali] he aggressively advocates abolishing the paragraph of German Law that protects the life of the unborn child.
Walter Mehring is one of the nastiest personalities of the Jewish literary world, and he displayed much more malice and venomous animosity than any of his predecessors and colleagues. He started by writing filthy songs, the flagrant libertinism of which was beloved and boosted by the mostly Jewish public frequenting the cabarets and places of amusement at the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin. His drama
The Merchant of Berlin [
Der Kaufmann von Berlin], which was first produced by the Communist stage manager Piscator, may be regarded as the low point of the Jewish debauchery of the German stage. With pitiless cynicism Mehring caricatures the poverty and misery of the German Nation during the years following the War, which attracted countless swarms of vampire-like Eastern Jews from Galicia, Armenia, Poland, and Russia. The hero, a poverty-stricken, miserable immigrant and typical Eastern Jew, appears in those streets of Berlin that are principally populated by Jews. In a short time, he is successful in subjugating the whole town, which fulfills his every whim. The shameless way in which Mehring depicts this development, which he seems to regard as natural, can only be compared to the brutality with which he ridicules all ethical values holy to the German Nation; as a crowning effect of the drama, street cleaners sweep away, together with a heap of refuse, revered national symbols, soldiers' steel helmets, and even the corpse of a dead warrior. To accompany this procedure the chorus sings: "Away with the rubbish into the gutter ... "
It would not be difficult to continue this list of dramatists by piling up innumerable names and examples. In addition to Arnold Zweig and Waiter Hasenclever, Ferdinand Bruckner, for instance, should be mentioned; his dramas were considered revelatory by an audience composed of perverse seekers of sexual sensations. The plays
Malady of Youth [
Krankheit der Jugend] and
Criminals [
Verbrecher] enjoyed their particular popularity because they dealt almost exclusively with sexual and criminal abnormalities, which were treated as if they embodied the very joy and purpose of life.
But the foregoing should suffice to force anyone to ask himself which other self-respecting country, valuing the integrity of its religious conceptions and its moral principles, would have put up with the activity and intellectual influence of such a depraved group of literary corrupters. It is indeed a regrettable symptom that Germany, saturated with the Jewish mentality, endured their presence and influence for so long, in fact until the National Socialist regime brought about a complete revolution in this respect.
Cinema:
To an even greater degree than in theater, Jews had swooped down upon the whole film industry before 1933. This is easy to explain, inasmuch as financial and artistic factors are more interrelated in this branch of art than in any other. The profits made in the film industry considerably exceed those made in any other artistic enterprise. The possibility of realizing tremendous earnings naturally induced Jews to invade the German film industry, which had begun to flourish during the years following the War.
The enormous Jewish participation in film is demonstrated by the following figures. In 1931, 41 of the 67 (61%) film production firms in Germany were in Jewish hands. Of 28 distributors 24 were Jewish (85%). During the same period, 119 of the 144 film scripts were written by Jews (82%). In 77 cases the staging was carried out by Jews (53%). If one examines the names of the producers, directors, and actors participating in those films which were enthusiastically praised by the press and which developed into box office successes, one will invariably discover that the great majority were Jews. Among the producers and distributors we find Pressburger and Rabinowitsch (Cine-Allianz), Heymann, Fallner and Somló, Levy and Cohn. The directors were Oswald-Ornstein, Zelnik, Meinert, Neufeld, and Schönfelder. The actors: Pallenberg, Siegried Arno, Fritz Walburg, Felix Bressart, Kurt Gerron, Grete Mosheim, Gitta Alpar, Rosa Valetti, etc.
The mentality typical of the Jewish film industry is displayed in its crudest form in the so-called "social and hygienic instruction films," a type of film which absolutely flooded the German cinemas in the post-war years. Officially these films were intended to acquaint the masses with the dangers of abnormal sexual intercourse and debauchery. But they were based on a pseudoscientific foundation and under this mask Jews made a financial killing off the primitive erotic desires and lowest instincts of the public. Criminals, prostitutes, and the pathologically abnormal were the heroes of this category of film. A selection of titles taken at random from the legion of such "instructive" films will give the best idea of their type and value:
Morals and the Erotic —
The Book of Sin —
What Price for Love? —
Guilty Mothers —
Prostitution —
When Women Go Astray. The contents harmonized with these seductive titles, which gave rise to considerable expectations on the part of the public, who were by no means deceived. These films truly wallowed in mire and filth and, with the most cynical openness, reproduced scenes actually showing the most repulsive debauchery and perversion. The government of those days, which could hardly be called prudish or narrow-minded, was compelled in 1920 to put a stop to the greatest excesses in this direction by passing a Film Law, without, however, being successful in radically eliminating this evil.
In subsequent years the greatest profits in the film industry were derived from "military farces" — a category of film dedicated to ridiculing the German Army and the individual German soldier. These films were also generally the product of Jewish activity, since Jews figured as producers, authors, directors, or actors. Finally, it is important to remember that Communist propaganda films such as
Potemkin and
Storm over Asia were introduced into Germany by Jewish distributors and cinema theater owners.
Revue:
The disintegration and decay of German intellectual life under Jewish supremacy are most apparent and crude in light entertainment. In the operetta, and especially the revue, frivolity and licentiousness had developed to such an unbelievable extent that Berlin was regarded as the most immoral town in the world in those days; under the circumstances this was not astonishing.
None other than Jews introduced the new form of public amusement, the revue, a branch of art utterly unknown in the Germany of pre-war days. Not content with the introduction of this novelty, they abused it, converting the revue into that species of entertainment which was to blame for quite a large part of the depravity and laxity that had attacked German moral life.
It is extremely characteristic that every one of the Berlin revue proprietors — in the provinces there were very few enterprises of this nature — were Jews, without a single exception. Many a former visitor to Berlin will still associate such names as James Klein, Hermann Haller, Rudolf Nelson, the two Rotter brothers, and Eric Charell with most unpleasant recollections. The complementary staff of authors, composers, directors, and stars was also generally chosen from among the members of the Jewish race.
These revues were veritable orgies of sexuality and licentiousness. All aspects of life were reduced to lust and its satisfaction. Modesty and decency were scoffed at as being old-fashioned and ridiculous.
The loud and vulgar titles given to these revues, which were advertised to the hilt, speak for themselves. The following titles give an impression of what was presented to the public:
"Undress Yourselves" — "A Thousand Naked Women" — "The Sins of the World" — "Houses of Lust" — "Strictly Prohibited" — "O Gee, A Thousand Pretty Girls" — "Sweet and Sinful."
The advertisements for James Klein's revue "Undress Yourselves" were deliberately designed to awaken the lowest instincts of the public by enticing it with the following enumeration: "An evening without morals and principles — Sixty nude models, winners of beauty prizes — The adventures of beautiful women — Experiences with a girl of fifteen."
The posters advertising the revue "A Thousand Naked Women" announced: "The grand revue of Free Love — Forty Pictures of Morality and Immorality."
The performances themselves fulfilled the expectations. The scenes on the stage revealed all that the most daring fantasy can imagine: in short, a display of complete libertinism and surrender to sensual passions.
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Next week:
7. The Jewish Share in Immorality