Cultural Translation and Knowledge Transfer on Alternative Routes of Escape from Nazi Terror: Meditations Through Migrations 9780367569112, 9780367569136, 9781003099871

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Cultural Translation and Knowledge Transfer on Alternative Routes of Escape from Nazi Terror

The book investigates and compares the role of artistic and academic refugees from National Socialism acting as “cultural mediators” or “agents of knowledge” between their origin and host societies. By doing so, it locates itself at the intersection of the recently emerging field of the history of knowledge, transnational history, migration, exile, as well as cultural transfer studies. The case studies provided in this volume are of global scope, focusing on routes of escape and migration to Iceland, Italy, the Near East, Portugal and Shanghai, and South-, Central-, and North America. The chapters examine the hybrid ways refugees envisaged, managed, organized, and subsequently mediated their migrations. It focuses on how they dealt with their escape in their art and science. The chapters ask how the emigrants located themselves—did they associate with ethnic, religious, and/or cultural affiliations, specific social classes, or specific parts of society—and how such identifications were portrayed in their knowledge transfer and cultural translations. Building on such possible avenues for research, this volume aims to offer a global analysis of the multifarious processes not only of cultural translation and knowledge transfer affecting culture, sciences, networks, but also everyday life in different areas of the world. Susanne Korbel researches and lectures at the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Graz specializing in Cultural Studies, Migration Studies, and Jewish history. Philipp Strobl is a cultural historian and a lecturer in Contemporary European History in a Global Context at the Stiftung Universität Hildesheim, Germany.

Studies for the International Society for Cultural History

In both research and teaching, the study of cultural history is burgeoning, with a variety of interpretations of culture cross-fertilizing between disciplines—history, critical theory, literature and media, anthropology and ethnology, and many more. This series focuses on the study of conceptual, affective, and imaginative worlds of the past and sees culture as encompassing both textual production and social practice. It seeks to highlight historical and cultural processes of meaning-making and explore the ways in which people of the past made sense of their world. Series Editors: Patryk Babiracki and Filippo Carlà-Uhink Cultural History in France Local Debates, Global Perspectives Edited by Evelyne Cohen, Anaïs Fléchet, Pascale Gœtschel, Laurent Martin, and Pascal Ory New Perspectives on Jewish Cultural History Boundaries, Experiences, and Sensemaking Edited by Maja Gildin Zuckerman and Jakob Egholm Feldt Reconstructing Minds and Landscapes Silent Post-War Memory in the Margins of History Edited by Marja Tuominen, T. G. Ashplant, and Tiina Harjumaa Cultural Translation and Knowledge Transfer on Alternative Routes of Escape from Nazi Terror Meditations Through Migrations Edited by Susanne Korbel and Philipp Strobl For more information about this series, please visit: https://www. routledge.com/Studies-for-the-International-Society-for-CulturalHistory/book-series/SISCH

Cultural Translation and Knowledge Transfer on Alternative Routes of Escape from Nazi Terror Meditations Through Migrations

Edited by Susanne Korbel and Philipp Strobl

First published 2022 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Susanne Korbel and Philipp Strobl; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Susanne Korbel and Philipp Strobl to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-56911-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-56913-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-09987-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon LT Std by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Contents

List of Figuresvii Acknowledgmentsix List of Contributors x 1 Mediations Through Migrations: An Introduction on Cultural Translation and Knowledge Transfer1 PHILIPP STROBL AND SUSANNE KORBEL

PART I

Networks: Family, Friendships, Relations

27

2 Jakob Rosenfeld: A Viennese Jewish Doctor Discovers Heimat in Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army29 GABRIEL N. FINDER

3 Knowledge from Five Continents: Escape Destinations in Publications of German-Speaking Political Refugees, 1933–194049 SWEN STEINBERG

4 Salka Viertel and the Gendered In/Visibility of Cultural Mediation66 KATHARINA PRAGER

5 Archives of Imagination: Johanna and Ermanno Loevinson as Cultural Translators83 ASHER D. BIEMANN

vi  Contents PART II

Strategies of Cultural Translation and Knowledge Transfer

115

6 Translating Modernism: Hedy Krilla’s Theater Work Through the Lens of Exile117 CHRISTINA WIEDER

7 Traveling Knowledge: Refugees from Nazism and Their Impact on Art Music and Musicology in Post-1945 Canada135 ANDREA STRUTZ

8 Indecent Bathing Suits and Women Who Smoke: Austrian Refugees as Cultural Mediators in the Transit Country Portugal After 1938154 KATRIN SIPPEL

9 Between the Couch and Two Cultures: William Rose, Psychoanalysis, Translation and the Creation of Cultural Capital by Literary Exiles During the Second World War173 ANDREA MEYER LUDOWISY

PART III

Actors of Transfer and Translation

197

10 ‘Somehow the Ill Winds of War Have Been Favourable to Me’: Travel, Training and Trauma in the Life and Works of Louis Kahan199 STEVEN COOKE AND ANNA HIRSH

11 An Unsung Austrian Doyen: Erwin Felber and the Transference of Cultural and Musical Knowledge in Wartime Shanghai217 JEREMY LEONG

12 Melitta and Victor Urbancic: Art in Exile in Iceland234 MARKUS HELMUT LENHART

13 Ingolf Dahl (1912–1970): Multifaceted Musician—Knowledge and Cultural Transfer Between Central Europe and Los Angeles247 MELINA PAETZOLD

Index

260

Figures

2.1 Plaque with Jakob Rosenfeld’s image at the Unfallkrankenhaus, a hospital in Graz. 2.2 Jakob Rosenfeld with Liu Shaoqi (left) and Chen Yi (right) at the headquarters of the New Fourth Army in Yancheng, 23 March 1941. 5.1 Protagonist Schema of the Lövinson family. 8.1 The 1944 photograph shows men in a café—by then, these places had already been “conquested” by women, Mundo Gráfico 89, 15 June 1944. 8.2 According to the magazine article, the times when cafés were places exclusively for men are “long long ago.” The caption calls the cafés the “latest conquest” of women, Mundo Gráfico 16, 30 May 1941.  8.3 The caption states that the woman is a French refugee and does not wear a hat, Mundo Gráfico 1, 15 October 1940. 8.4 “Avenida,” Mundo Gráfico 64, 30 May 1943. 9.1 Wilhelm Rose served in the Intelligence Corps as one of the many German language specialists and was part of the operations in Bletchley Park, Senate House Library, University of London. 9.2 Letter from the Austrian Bohemian novelist Franz Werfel (1890-1945) refers to his heroism during the Miracle of Dunkirk, Senate House Library, University of London. 9.3 Cover page of William Rose’s PhD thesis, submitted at Christmas 1922, titled “The Development of Weltschmerz in German Literature from “Werther to the Beginning of the Romantic Movement” (PhD thesis University of London 1922). 9.4 Press cuttings made by Rose, Senate House Library, University of London.

30 35 85 159

160 162 167

175

176

177 180

viii  Figures 9.5 Alfred Kerr describing his experience of having his words translated by Rose, Senate House Library, University of London. 9.6 Letter illustrating Rose’s relationship with Stefan Zweig, Senate House Library, University of London. 9.7 Postcard from 1945, in which Alfred Kerr invites Rose to deliver a lecture on a topic of his choice, Senate House Library, University of London. 9.8 Notes for the Lecture to the PEN Club, 1946, Senate House Library, University of London. 10.1 Charlotte Newmann, ‘From Holocaust to New Life’, a commissioned artistic response of the survivor journey produced for the Bicentennial Exhibition at the Jewish Holocaust Centre in 1988, remained on display until 2020. Original in colour. 10.2 Louis Kahan’s journeys, represented in Nodegoat. Original in colour. 10.3 The Flight into Egypt, Louis Kahan, 1952.Original in colour. 10.4 Louis Kahan, The Flight into Egypt, etching, 48/50, 1975 JHC Collection, no. 2357-2, presented by Lily Kahan. Black and white.

185 186 187 188

201 210 211 212

Acknowledgments

This book originated from a conference, held in April 2019 at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, entitled “Imaging Emigration—Translating Exile”. It brought together experts on the history of exiles from a wide and diverse international background to discuss cultural translation and knowledge transfer on alternative routes of escape from Nazi-occupied Europe. Scholars from Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Israel, Malaysia, and the United States participated and contributed to productive discussions about new perspectives and research trends in the emerging field. Stimulated by the presentations and subsequent discussions, the participants developed several questions to explore cultural mediations on alternative routes of escape in exile. These perspectives have found their way into the contributions of this volume. The conference and the publication of this book was made possible by the generous support of the National Funds for the Republic of Austria for Victims of Nationalsocialism, the Zukunftsfonds der Republik Österreich, the University of Graz, the University of Hildesheim, the University of Innsbruck, and the exil.Arte Center at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. We would like to thank Routledge and the editors Patryk Babiracki and Filippo Carlà-Uhink for publishing the book in the International Society for Cultural History book series. The publication of the book would not have been possible without the participation of individual contributors—so many thanks for your collaboration. We also wish to express our gratitude to Anne Ewing, Jakob Gruber, and Steven Franz for assisting us with the editing and formatting process.

List of Contributors

Asher D. Biemann is a Professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, where he teaches modern Jewish thought and intellectual history. He is the author of a critical edition of Martin Buber’s Sprachphilosophische Schriften (2003), The Martin Buber Reader (2001), as well as of Inventing New Beginnings: On the Idea of Renaissance in Modern Judaism (2009), Dreaming of Michelangelo: Jewish Variations on a Modern Theme (2012) and Michelangelo und die jüdische Moderne (2016). Together with Richard I. Cohen and Sarah E. Wobick-Segev, he has edited Spiritual Homelands: The Cultural Experience of Exile, Place and Displacement Among Jews and Others (2020). He is currently completing a book entitled Enduring Modernity: Judaism Eternal & Ephemeral. Steven Cooke is an Associate Professor and the course director for the Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies Programs at Deakin University, Australia. His research interests focus on the spatialities of difficult histories and he is the author of over 30 scholarly publications, including two highly commended monographs on the memory of war and genocide. Gabriel N. Finder is a Professor in the german department and the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Virginia. An associate editor of the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies, he is the coauthor with Alexander Prusin of Justice Behind the Iron Curtain: Nazis on Trial in Communist Poland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018); and coeditor with David Slucki and Avinoam Patt of Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2020). Anna Hirsh is the Senior Archivist at the Jewish Holocaust Centre, Melbourne, Australia, where she is responsible for the documentation, digitization, research access and preservation of the archival and art collections. Her research focus includes structures of memorialization,

List of Contributors xi mapping of personal Holocaust artefacts and art as historical witness. She is an Honorary Fellow at Deakin University. Susanne Korbel is an FWF-funded researcher and lecturer at the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Graz specializing in Cultural Studies, Migration Studies and Jewish History. She is working on a project on new, non-exclusive narratives of the history of Jews in Vienna around 1900 based on everyday life encounters and relations aiming to overcome narratives of particularity. Her first books entitled Auf die Tour! Jüdinnen und Juden in Singspielhalle, Kabarett und Varieté – Habsburgermonarchie bis Amerika was published with Böhlau in 2020. She has held fellowships in Jerusalem, New York, Southampton and Tübingen and taught as visiting faculty at the Andrássy University Budapest and the University of Haifa. Markus Helmut Lenhart is Archivist for the Congregatio Jesu, Munich, Germany. He studied art history, history and religious studies. From 2017 to 2020, he was a senior scientist at the archive of the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz; from 2011 to 2017, he worked as a research assistant at University of Graz and the Zentrale österreichische Forschungsstelle Nachkriegsjustiz WienGraz; from 2008 to 2010, he was a lecturer at the Center for Austrian Studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and from 2006 to 2019, at the University of Graz. He published several articles and two monographs on art history and provenance research. Jeremy Leong is the Head of postgraduate studies at UCSI University Institute of Music in Malaysia. He received his Ph.D. in historical musicology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Graduate Certificate in Southeast Asian Studies with emphases on ethnomusicology, history and cultural studies. He has broad interdisciplinary research interests that include “German philosophical and musical influences in Chinese music education,” “Jewish musical diaspora in China,” “Musical Irony,” “Musical Orientalism” and “Musical responses toward the COVID-19 pandemic in Southeast Asia,” just to name a few. He has published with Ashgate, Notes and Grove Music Online, among others. An article on the musical responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Malaysia will be published in the Journal of Music, Health, and Wellbeing soon. At UCSI Institute of Music, he teaches both Western art and popular music as well as research methods. Andrea Meyer Ludowisy is the Academic Research Librarian for European Art and Culture at Senate House Library at the University of London, a role that includes being the Academic Librarian for the Institute of Modern Languages Research at the School of Advanced Study. Between 2021 and 2024, she is also a visiting research fellow in the

xii  List of Contributors School of Languages, Linguistics and Film at Queen Mary University London. Before taking up her current post, she was a librarian at the Warburg Institute, the Arcadian Library, the Royal Institute for British Architects and an assistant curator at the Wellcome Institute for the history of medicine. Melina Paetzold is a performing musician (clarinet) and a musicological researcher (currently Ph.D. candidate at mdw Vienna) in the field of exiled composers. She has been dedicated to research on Ingolf Dahl for several years now. In 2017, she released the chamber music CD Ingolf Dahl: Intervals; in 2019, her short biography Ingolf Dahl: Ein musikalischer Wanderer was published; and in 2020, the Deutschlandfunk broadcasted her lecture recital about Ingolf Dahl at the Konzerthaus Berlin. Katharina Prager is a Historian and Cultural Scientist. She is responsible for Digital Humanities and Research at the Vienna City Library. She published widely on Lifewriting, Vienna 1900 (Karl Kraus and Berthold Viertel), Gender, Archive and Memory as well as Exile and Re/Migration. Katrin Sippel is a Secretary General in Austrian Society for Exile Studies, studied history, spanish, interdisciplinary communication and latin American Studies in Vienna and Granada. Freelance historian, translator and interpreter. Recent publications, exhibition and research projects about the Jewish community in Vienna before and after 1938, Austrian exiles in Portugal and France, migration history, “narcocultura” etc. for Austrian Academy of Sciences, Wiener Festwochen, University of Applied Arts etc. Swen Steinberg is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Queen’s University in Kingston/Ontario where he teaches as an Assistant Professor (term adjunct). He is an affiliated scholar of the German Historical Institute in Washington/DC with its Pacific Regional Office at University of California in Berkeley and Research Ambassador of the German Academic Exchange Service. His research is focused on the intersection of migration and knowledge, knowledge and young migrants, forestry and mining, exile and forced migration studies. Philipp Strobl is a cultural historian and a lecturer in Contemporary European History in a global context at the Stiftung Universität Hildesheim, Germany. He held research and lecturer positions in Austria, Germany, Slovakia, the United States and Australia. His research is focused on the history of ideas and entanglement of knowledge and culture, as well as on migration history. He is the author, co-author and editor of various different books, articles, edited volumes and radio documentaries.

List of Contributors xiii Andrea Strutz is key researcher and head of the program line “Migration” at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for History of Society and Culture, lecturer at the University of Graz, with a postdoctoral habilitation in Contemporary History. She has published widely on the role of memory for Austrian Jewish refugees and their families, on measures for victims of Nazism and on migrations to and exile in Canada including “Interned as ‘Enemy Aliens’: Jewish Refugees from Austria, Germany and Italy in Canada” (Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, 2020). Christina Wieder is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna. She is currently working on a thesis on visual strategies of self-empowerment: Jewish women artists from Central Europe to Argentina. She was a junior fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna, visiting researcher at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and a lecturer at the Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Vienna.

1

Mediations Through Migrations An Introduction on Cultural Translation and Knowledge Transfer Philipp Strobl and Susanne Korbel

The 20th century saw massive displacements of hundreds of millions of people all over the world. Not surprisingly, many observers retrospectively used drastic metaphors to describe the period. Eric Hobsbawm called it the “age of extremes.”1 Others gave it different labels, such as the “age of genocide,”2 the “age of displacement” or the “age of dispossession.”3 One of the main events that triggered the exodus of millions of people, from territories from France to China, was the Nazi takeover in Germany, the German expansion in Europe and, subsequently, World War II that led to the global displacement of at least 60 million people.4 A brutal track of dispossession and displacement followed the Nazi expansion from 1933 onwards. Among the first who were forced to flee were the opponents of the Nazi regime in Germany, as well as those regarded as “racially inferior” by the regime. Jews, Romani and Slaws became increasingly isolated, deprived of all their citizen rights and were consequently expropriated and forced into emigration. At least 500,000 people from Germany, most of them Jews, were driven into exile. A total of 130,000 followed after the Nazi annexation of Austria and another 80,000 fled after the German invasion and later occupation of Czechoslovakia.5 Many people were surprised to find themselves dispossessed and discriminated by the Nazis. Refugees came from all walks of life and social strata. Since the Nazis imposed their own racial definition of “Jewishness,” tens of thousands of Catholic and Protestant Germans, Austrians and Czechs became “Jewish” overnight and were consequently subjected to isolation and oppression. The so-called Nuremberg laws, enacted in 1935, provided the legal basis for the massive process of dispossession and expulsion of Germans who were defined as Jewish regardless of their self-affiliation. They were no longer regarded as citizens and became subject to legally defined discrimination and, later, a murderous action plan.6 Being expelled from their countries, their primary aim was to find a safe haven, to survive the Nazi terror and to build a new life. An immense obstacle to their undertaking, however, was the fact that the international community was more than reluctant

2  Philipp Strobl and Susanne Korbel to offer shelter or even support to refugees. Finding a safe haven became increasingly difficult, especially during the second half of the 1930s. At first, refugees from Germany sought temporary refuge in the adjacent countries of Czechoslovakia, France, Belgium, Austria and Switzerland, hoping for the possibility to return after a (widely expected) quick collapse of the Nazi regime.7 These hopes, however, dwindled with the fast expansion of the Nazi empire, and a growing number of refugees had to consider a more permanent exile in more remote regions. The March 1938 Anschluss of Austria brought Europe’s third largest Jewish community into the Nazis’ sphere of power. The fast enactment of the discriminatory Nuremberg laws in Austria and their subsequent execution by Adolf Eichmann with the establishment of the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung (The Central Agency for Jewish Emigration) in Vienna8 led to another wave of refugees. As a result, many countries that had offered at least limited protection to German refugees closed their borders, which led to an increased illegalization of refugee migration.9 Consequently, refugees began to spread throughout the world, moving to wherever they could secure the increasingly rare entry permissions. The largest share of them went to the United States, Palestine, France or Great Britain, the most famous host countries for Central European refugees. These countries have been the subject of intense research among different academic disciplines over past decades. Other routes and regions of migration, however, were largely neglected by scholarly research until the second decade of the 21st century. Alternative routes and destinations of emigration have appeared on the radar of migration historians only very recently, with researchers beginning to uncover those “white spots” on the map of World War II refugee migrations.10 Among those who escaped were numerous qualified and welleducated people. In his study on the contributions of German exiles to English and US society, historian Daniel Snowman wrote, 20 years ago, that “[w]hat makes the events of the 1930s almost unique in history is the intellectual talent of the refugees. […] No other emigrant group in history was so talented, highly educated and influential.”11 Indeed, when the Nazis took over, they drove many of the world’s greatest artists, musicians, filmmakers, writers and scientists out of the country, causing irreparable damage to one of the world’s most developed cultures. During the late 19th and early 20th century, the German-speaking area was one of the highest developed regions in the world, both economically and culturally. Vienna, Hamburg and Berlin were leading hubs of culture, education and the arts. Germany, despite the setbacks of a lost war, was in the midst of the second phase of the industrial revolution. Its economy still ranked among the world’s most powerful and innovative economies at that time. Music, movies, theatre, medicine, architecture and electrical engineering were only a few of the booming

Mediations Through Migrations 3 social and economic sectors of the 1920s and 1930s. When the Nazis came to power, they began to remodel and dissolve a highly innovative and productive German urban society and culture between Hamburg and Vienna,12 leading to a significant transplantation of knowledge and cultural capital. Despite the general anti-refugee mood that dominated the English-speaking media during the late 1930s, numerous articles can be found that mention the valuable cultural capital and knowledge being pushed out of Germany. Various contemporary newspapers reported about the high level of qualification of many refugees, describing the situation with phrases such as “Hitler’s loss is our gain.”13

1.1  Who Were the Refugees? The lives and stories of those expelled by the Nazis are manifold and diverse. In this chapter, we decided to offer insights into some specific aspects of refugee mediators by examining two case studies of emigrants who are representative for the tens of thousands of academics and artists pushed out of German-speaking areas during the 1930s. As (cultural) mediators we consider people who (1) were forced to leave or were prevented from returning to their chosen country of residence and (2) consequently and unavoidably – not based on personal decisions but rather the mechanisms inherent to daily encounters leading to personal, professional, cultural etc. exchange – became the subjects of communication processes and interactions that both changed the way the migrants, respectively, refugees and the nonmigrants perceived and/or understood their environment. We consider these (cultural) mediations as mutual rather than a one-way street through which the minority is expected to appeal and adapt to the majority. We argue that phrasing this as “cultural” – solely – emerged in the post-World War II history of labeling discourses as anything but “national” and does not adequately reflect the full dimension and complexity of the exchanging processes refugees/migrants together with nonmigrants have been continuously facing. Hanny Exiner (née Johanna Kolm) was among those who fled from Vienna. Despite her young age of 19, Exiner had gained a first-class education. When she was forced to leave because of her Jewish heritage, she had not only finished two years of medical studies but also had completed a four-year diploma from the Vienna Academy of Music and Performing Arts (Akademie für Musik und Darstellende Kunst) with her mentor, the world-famous professor of modern dance, Gertrude Bodenwieser. She was also teaching dance at the Bodenwieser Academie and the Viennese Volkshochschule. After the Nazis marched into Austria, Bodenwieser lost her job because of her Jewish heritage, and she fled to France.14 Mediated by a diplomat friend, she was invited to organize a group of her former Viennese students and colleagues to

4  Philipp Strobl and Susanne Korbel perform at the Centennial Festival of Bogotá, Colombia.15 Knowing of Exiner’s uncertain future in the Nazi state, Bodenwieser invited her to join her dance troupe. Out of a “need for security,” as Exiner later mentioned, she dropped her medical studies and went to South America with the Bodenwieser ballet.16 Six months later, her unusual route of escape brought her to Australia when she accepted the invitation of a friend who had fled there, and the two opened a small dance studio together. In Australia, Exiner had to adapt her professional activities from dancing to teaching. As she later claimed: “We had to teach to earn a living.”17 Knowing the value of learning and education and the importance of having her knowledge officially acknowledged, Exiner finished teacher’s training at a university in Melbourne. During that time, she began to move away from her previous focus on technical training to embrace a creative approach to dance that could be used to foster children’s development.18 In 1950, she formed an ensemble called the Modern Ballet Group; 20 years later, she was appointed lecturer at the State College of Victoria in Kew. In that capacity, and with knowledge of what she had learned in Vienna, she established a Diploma in Music and Dance, the first of its kind in Australia. In a later phase of her life, she became involved in dance as therapy. In 1982, she opened a studio in Fitzroy, Victoria and developed a graduate certificate in Dance Therapy for the University of Melbourne. Due to her interdisciplinary and multifaceted education that was unique in postwar Australia, as well as her willingness to improve and adapt her knowledge, Exiner left a deep imprint on the Australian postwar dance scene. When she died in Melbourne in 2006, she was a leading figure in developing and teaching dance therapy and advancing modern dance in Australia. She not only brought her prewar knowledge and education to Australia but also acted as a transnational mediator of cultural capital by building and maintaining networks with dancers and educators in Australia, Europe and the United States, creating new knowledge, ideas and university curricula. Another person who left Austria was Thomas Chaimowicz, who was born in Vienna in 1924. The grandson of immigrants to Vienna – Chaimowicz’s grandparents had left the eastern provinces of the Habsburg Empire for its capital – he received a good education and was raised with at least some religious traditions. Of his youth in Vienna, he remembered his Bar-Mizwah the most, which he celebrated in 1937 in the Seitenstättentempel (great synagogue in Vienna’s first district): “This celebration was the last highlight of my life in Vienna, the life before the emigration, and likewise it was the counterpoint to all, what was going to follow now, to the incidents that forced us to leave Austria.”19 Chaimowicz was an adolescent of 15 years when he left the former Habsburg capital – what Vienna always remained for him – for Bogotá, the capital of Colombia. He fled with his family. Because of his father’s arrest by the Nazis, he spent the first part of his escape with his

Mediations Through Migrations 5 mother. Shortly before they left Europe, the family was reunited, when Chaimowicz’s father, released from prison, joined them. Chaimowicz highlighted that learning Spanish was a challenge, in particular for the immigrant generation his parents belonged to. Chaimowicz himself managed to become fluent in English as well as Spanish at his very first job after their arrival in Bogotá. He earned a high school diploma and attended a Catholic university, the Escuela Normal Superior, studying social studies and economics in this new and unfamiliar educational environment.20 Additionally, he was offered a grant to study in the United States and completed a bachelor’s degree at the University of Alabama at Birmingham before completing a PhD at the Pontifical University back in Bogotá. 21 In 1949, he returned to Austria where he became a student again – this time at the University of Vienna and soon thereafter at the University of Innsbruck, where he submitted a second doctoral thesis on the work of the Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke in 1953. 22 He finally returned to Austria in 1955. He became a Privatgelehrter for Roman History, Philosophy and Classical Philology, founded the Burke Society, and aimed at supporting the University of Salzburg in becoming a Catholic university. 23 His academic knowledge and political beliefs were strongly influenced and affected by the intermingling of the multifarious cultural capital from his transnational backgrounds: his experiences of growing up in a Viennese, Jewish, educated, middle-class family fruitfully contributed to what he experienced afterward when encountering the ideas of Greek thinkers from the Colombian academic perspective. Moreover, during his academic and cultural socialization in Colombia, he experienced the political conflict between liberals and conservatives, the so-called La Violencia that cost the lives of approximately 180,000 Colombians between 1948 and 1953. Chaimowicz called himself a “conservative” and mediator between Catholic and Jewish thought. This academic and personal self-description reflected, not least, his witnessing of the political development of the South American metropolis and the influence of traditionalist thought he had become acquainted with at universities in the United States. The way he wrote about his experiences is unique, especially in how he depicted becoming academically acquainted with diverse new cultures and surroundings. Yet, he is less known than others who operated as brokers between Central European and (South) American academia. When Chaimowicz returned to Austria and started his academic career once again as a doctoral student at the University of Vienna, he did not serve only as an academic mediator between Austria and the Americas but also as a religious one, between Jewish and Catholic faiths. The stories of Exiner and Chaimowicz will accompany us throughout this chapter as their lives will help us to better understand processes of transnational mediation as well as cultural translation.

6  Philipp Strobl and Susanne Korbel

1.2  What Is This Volume About? This book is about all those Exiners and Chaimowiczs who were expelled from their homeland and had to start anew elsewhere under mostly different and diverging conditions. In many cases, the transplantation of cultural capital turned out to be successful and productive. Since there was an oversupply of well-educated architects, designers, lawyers, doctors, art historians, movie makers, dancers, writers and other creative professions in Germany and Austria during the 1920s and 1930s, many did not see a bright future in regard to the working opportunities in their old homelands. Their expulsion allowed some to make use of the potential of their education and knowledge in a society where their knowledge was seen as new and uncommon. It was particularly this contrast between the different levels of general or specialized education and professional practices that turned many of the refugees into successful mediators between cultures, particularly in more uncommon destinations of refuge. Cultural differences, however, did not always necessarily or exclusively support mediations. There were many examples when mediations did not work out – simply because there was no understanding among the members of the host society about the need of integrating a specific idea or cultural translation. Many writers, artists, lawyers and academics remained silent because they were unable to convince their new host society of the importance and the value of their cultural capital and knowledge. In such cases, knowledge and cultural capital was lost on the way out of the German-speaking areas. This book aims at tracing back the “losses” and “gains” of Hitler’s intellectual expulsion frequently mentioned in the historiographic literature, seeking to analyze some of the consequences of the displacement of hundreds and thousands of people from the Germanspeaking regions of Central Europe before and during World War II. Consequently, it offers insights into the contributions and performances of mediation of German-speaking refugees on a global level. In contrast to existing studies that focus mainly on the major receiving countries of World War II refugees, such as Great Britain, the United States and Palestine, it seeks to explore the performances of cultural translation in societies on alternative routes of escape, where the cultural, social and educational differences between the members of the host society and the newcomers were particularly striking. It is known in scholarship that refugees contributed to a crucial transatlantic knowledge transfer which benefitted American and British academia, science, the industry and consumers. 24 Beyond that, this book shows that people thrown out of the Nazi Reich also contributed greatly to many other regions as well. This clash of contrasts, as we will see, led to productive cultural mediations in different parts of the world, from Iceland to China.

Mediations Through Migrations 7 Since the authors of this book seek to detect transplanted, displaced or translated knowledge, what follows merges two major trends in modern history: the history of knowledge and the history of diaspora and exile. In the following pages, this chapter will offer an introduction to the academic concepts and approaches applied in the chapters of this book. Starting with insights into the state of research on alternative routes of escape, we will show what has been done in this context so far and identify some of the “white spots” on the research map. The next section introduces the concepts of transculturation, knowledge and cultural transfer and translation, as well as Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the forms of capital, seeking to locate them within the context of global and transnational history. Another part of this introduction is dedicated to the location of sources and archives and also questions how different practices of storing and archiving ego-documents of refugees affect their depiction within the historiography. The following section is dedicated to the introduction of the individual contributions of this book. In the last part, we finally seek to offer an outlook on further research on refugee mediations on alternative routes of escape. 1.2.1  Alternative Routes of Escape The main routes taken by refugees during emigration and transmigration have been well-documented and carefully researched; however, other destinations and routes remain underexplored. Early research on exile focused primarily on the life stories of prominent émigrés and the intellectual elites in fields such as music or literature. Early studies explored the emigration of writers to Great Britain and the United States, and analyzed the professional development of psychoanalysis in the context of Sigmund Freud’s emigration to London. 25 Other early works analyzed the Jewish migration movement to Palestine organized by Zionist organizations. 26 Only during the late 1980s and 1990s, other, more diversified topics and subjects have come on the radar of researchers. This was not least triggered by the growing impact of oral history on migration studies. 27 Research interests then focused on the United States where 120,000 refugees survived World War II with New York and Los Angeles as the most common places for refugees to settle down. At the very heart of early research interest were also Great Britain with its capital city of London and Palestine respectively Israel after 1948. 28 Later, interest of scholars shifted toward the Chinese city of Shanghai, which had become a safe haven for approximately 20,000 refugees from Germany and Austria and the occupied Polish territories, because no entry visas were required until August 1939. Only hesitantly did researchers become interested into other destinations of refuge:

8  Philipp Strobl and Susanne Korbel exile communities in Canada, Australia, India and Latin America have been examined from the early 2000s onwards, 29 and only recently, many more destinations described as “alternative routes of emigration” became the subject of research.30 Yet, refugees who moved between several destinations and thus were considered as transmigrants and their states of “being on the way” have not obtained much attraction by historians interested in exiles from Nazi-occupied Europe. 31 As the cultural anthropologist Joachim Schlör puts it, routes of escape must be taken into further consideration when examining and describing processes of getting acquainted to new surroundings, making a home in exile and analyzing processes of cultural encounters happening there. The way into exile, intermediate stops and the arrival at an (alleged) final destination, as scholarship in migration studies was able to demonstrate, had a high impact on how life there was perceived and framed and thus must not be ignored in research. 32 Referring to one of our protagonists can help us exemplifying this development. The escape route negotiated by Thomas Chaimowicz and the ways he remembered his escape in his later life’s writing illustrate the significant impact the way into exile had on his imagination of his future life in Bogotá, which he believed at that point in time was the final destination of this route: departing from Vienna on February 28, 1939, heading to Brno (Czechoslovakia) and on to Prague, he arrived there with his family on March 14, 1939, only one day before the German occupation of the city. “Our flight to Amsterdam was scheduled to depart on March 15th, but by then, there were no flights any longer.”33 In the night of March 16th, they left Prague for Amsterdam by train via Leipzig where the family finally stranded for some weeks during which they were terrified. The family was not allowed to pass the boarder to the Netherlands only a few days before their ship was to depart since their visas were not valid before that day. By mid-May, “their” ship, the “Colombia” left Amsterdam. The next stop on their route was Dover, then Madeira; after another three weeks their ship arrived in the Caribbean and anchored off Barbados. Afterwards, their route made them pass Trinidad, Curaçao, La Guairá and Puerto Cabello toward Río Magdalena. Some hours later they went ashore in Barranquilla. “We said farewell to the ship which meant a piece of Europe for us.”34 Finally, they spent some days with Chaimowicz’s uncle, who had emigrated to Bogotá in 1928, before the family had to spend another week on board of a steamer heading into the heart of the country. Thomas Chaimowicz dedicated a considerable part of his memoirs to a description of his route of escape. When he tells about experiences in his later life – traveling to the United States in order to study, returning to Austria but also in acquiring new skills – he compares these experiences to observations he made on his route of escape. The impact this

Mediations Through Migrations 9 alternative and unique route of escape had on his life in Bogotá can be detected in several passages of his memoirs. This was not uncommon for many works written by refugees and exiles.35 Alternative routes of emigration thus frame the contributions to this volume, serving as the basis to explore the practices refugees used to get accustomed to their new living and working surroundings. 1.2.2  Transnational History and Exile Studies This book pursues a global approach, bringing together case studies about refugees who were expelled from the German-speaking regions between the 1930s and 1945. When examining the lives of the refugees, different concepts stand out which can be used to describe the transnational or transcultural lives of refugees. Transnational studies and global history has become increasingly popular over the past 20 years. A growing awareness of the universal importance of information and the knowledge societies we live in for present and future human interactions accelerated and intensified this development. Consequently, scholarship has developed a historical perspective on current debates. 36 Researchers considered global perspectives and approaches to overcome the methodological nationalism that was for long immanent in the historical sciences by focusing on entanglements and a relational, non-Eurocentric history. 37 Due to this reconsideration, global or transnational history has become “trendy” as the historians Sebastian Conrad and Andreas Eckert mentioned at the beginning of their pioneering Global History introductory reader. 38 Not least a need for comprehending and explaining the complex processes of entanglement and exchange has increased over the past three decades due to technological and economic development. Since globalization and the rapid exchange of data and information have become universal phenomena affecting all parts of humankind’s lives on a global level, the need to explain these phenomena has increased. 39 This affected historiography insofar as historians increasingly realized that analyses have to be undertaken with open structures and in open categories allowing to combine and compare a variety of different stories.40 Due to the boom in the field and the frequent uses of the terms “Global History” and “Transnational History,” there are no uniform definitions and both concepts frequently become intermingled and used differently.41 What is important, however, is that the use of global or transnational approaches necessarily leads to a change of perspectives toward a multifocal understanding of historical processes. This can be considered one of the main benefits of transnational or global history. Changing perspectives and comprehending history in a multidimensional and multifaceted way means more than doing “Big History,” “Macro-History,” or writing down the history of great powers or

10  Philipp Strobl and Susanne Korbel empires, as historian Andrea Komlosy pointed out.42 It requires historians to move analytically between different spaces, using local and micro-historical levels as points of reference that allow for a comparison with and contextualization within other spatial entities. This will improve our understanding of the entanglement of the different dimensions in which the lives of historical actors took place. 1.2.3 Transculturation When it comes to understanding migration and cultural interaction in more critical and analytical ways, the concept of transculturation can be useful. It has replaced other “one-sided approaches” such as acculturation or assimilation, because of its more open and dynamic approach, implying that change takes place for both parties in the encounter.43 Transculturation involves cultural elements created through appropriations from and by multiple cultures. It implies that culture and knowledge was created through and because of intercultural encounters. Thus, the identification of a single originating culture is problematic. Transculturation involves ongoing, circular and mutual negotiations of elements between multiple cultures, including elements that are themselves pluricultural.44 Social Scientist James Lull describes transculturation, for example, as a process “whereby cultural forms literally move through time and space where they interact with other cultural forms and settings, influence each other, produce new forms, and change the cultural settings.”45 Here again, the career of Hanny Exiner exemplifies this process very well, showing how ideas can be advanced and adapted through transcultural mediations. Educated in Interwar Austria, Exiner joined the Bodenwieser Academy, one of the leading schools for Modern Dance. The German-speaking area was the region where Moderner Ausdruckstanz (Modern Expressive Dance) first appeared during the late-19th and early-20th century. Vienna, where Exiner grew up, was one of the hotbeds of that development. Influenced by gymnastics, Modern Dance sought to develop the ideal body control necessary for the creative period. Priority was not given to bodily development alone, but also to artistic dance.46 Gymnastic lessons and the daily training were accompanied by music that inspired concentrated activity. In a later interview, Exiner recalled her early dance lessons as follows: I remember them as sheer joy” “it was much more dynamic as a classic ballet has to be. We had improvised music by a top class musician. Everything became alive in a dance-like fashion. So the dancing started the moment you got into the classroom. We had also training, because at that time in Vienna the Swedish gymnastics had entered the dance scene and we had to train stomach muscles as well

Mediations Through Migrations 11 as body movements in a certain style. The body had to develop in a healthy way through gymnastics. Bodenwieser was a person who never put herself into the foreground. For her dance was what it was all about.47 Exiner continued her dance education during her school years completing it with a four-year diploma at the Vienna Academy of Music and Performing Arts, where Bodenwieser was a professor of Dance.48 She described her education and the choreographies she learned from her teacher as a “total experience.”49 Since she was also enrolled in medical studies at the University of Vienna, she had acquired a medical background, which would later affect her professional development toward blending the aesthetics of dancing with therapeutic elements. At the time she escaped Vienna in 1938, Exiner had acquired specialized embodied and institutionalized cultural capital in one of the world’s leading environments for Modern Dance. After coming to Australia through her unusual detour via South America, she opened up her first studio, the Studio of Creative Dance in Melbourne dedicating much time to amateur performances.50 Soon, however, she realized that she could not simply transfer and implement what she had learned in Vienna and began to adapt her cultural capital. Performing professional dance, however, did not suffice to provide enough financial resources as she later recalled, and so she started teaching. “We had to teach to earn a living,” Exiner described her changing professional focus toward teaching. 51 At first, she taught classes for adult women, but soon switched to child education, working as a teacher in movement and dance in primary and secondary schools. This work, as she later put it, “led to invitations by teachers’ colleges to offer the then still novel creative approach to dance to their students.”52 Inspired and triggered by her teaching, Exiner completed a certification in teaching in Melbourne and subsequently accepted a position as a senior university lecturer.53 The transcultural interaction of different cultural forms and social and professional settings triggered by her forced displacement led to a massive adaption of her cultural capital. This change has been described as a “turning point in her life,” when she “completely broke from [sic!] her earlier training”54, moving away from her previous emphasis on technical training to embrace a creative approach to dance.55 She turned her focus toward child development studying the educational theories of Jerome Bruner, Maria Montessori and Jean Piaget. Accordingly, she adapted her own teaching of dance, formulating more open ideas about learning through contact, manipulation and exploration.56 Another transcultural element in Exiner’s career as a cultural mediator was her willingness to embrace a – in fact – global mobility. She was keen to extend her knowledge and cultural capital by learning from different approaches in various parts of the world. In 1961, she traveled

12  Philipp Strobl and Susanne Korbel to London and Vienna, studying Rudolf von Laban’s work on “Modern Educational Dance” and adapting it for her own experiences. Exiner later described studying and adapting Laban’s ideas as a “proverbial turning point in her style of teaching.”57 During the 1970s, she undertook regular study and research trips to Europe and the United States that brought her into contact with dance as a form of therapy.58 She continually worked on the improvement of her knowledge by learning from her transnational contacts. In Australia, she worked together with leading psychologists and was invited by psychological hospitals to provide dance therapy for dysfunctional patients. As one of the few people with transnational knowledge and contacts, she quickly became one of the leading figures in dance therapy in Australia, laying also the theoretical cornerstone for this new field through the publications of various highly recognized works about dance therapy.

1.3  Cultural Translation The field of exile studies has been subject to fundamental changes in the last decades. Postmodern perspectives, entangled histories and interpretations, to name just a few, shape the way we look at relations between refugees and their host societies and cultural encounters in this context. As postcolonial studies demonstrated, cultures are defined rather at their instable borders than through an “intrinsic essence.”59 In particular, the works by scholars of postcolonial theory, such as Edward W. Said and Homi K. Bhabha, and the so-called turns in the Kulturwissenschaften (cultural studies) mostly in German-speaking academia have changed the way scholarship conceptualizes cultural encounters depicting them as reciprocal rather than a one-way-street from the minority toward the majority.60 Among these turns, the translational turn has probably found its way into all various disciplines of the humanities more than any other; according to Doris BachmannMedick, translational and global history should be approached like a “project of translation.”61 In the translational turn, global consideration of cultures as well as constellations of power, postcolonial relationships, negotiating gender and interactions between ethnic groups have begun to be considered under the angle of translation.62 The concept of cultural translation augmented and replaced, among other things, the paradigm of cultural transfer with its weaknesses of thinking the constitution of culture and cultural exchange as a linear process.63 Considerations on the impact of spaces and spatial experiences triggered a new focus on the spaces “in between” these translational processes. Departing from the paradigm of liminality,64 the negotiation of cultural contacts occurs “in-between” spaces, as Bhabha stated.65 “In-betweenness” is therefore considered a space that is able to express

Mediations Through Migrations 13 the complexity of social processes.66 From this point of view, translation becomes an existential question, since only those able to translate adequately or those whose ideas become translated are represented and, thus, have received a voice. Being able to “speak,” and operate in an in-between space and consequently implement successful strategies for a cultural translation are closely connected to the ability to express oneself. In their specific situation, refugees needed to master vocabulary and language to make themselves heard. Moreover, being able to manage cultural contacts also represents power relations. Someone is only heard if they are able to use power to express their voice. And it becomes a question of expression: only those who have mastered the corresponding words, language and linguistic attributions can be translated.67 Analyzing Thomas Chaimowicz’s biography through the lenses of postcolonial and translation studies approaches, for example, opens the floor for a debate about how refugees or immigrants perceived themselves in processes of cultural transmission or knowledge acquisition. When Chaimowicz studied in the United States, he experienced the diversity of academic traditions and the range of perspectives existing. When evaluating the American historiography, one might not forget that profound problems of the European intellectual- and religious history contributed to the attitude of American historians and politicians. […] that in particular in Austria the antisemitism of the Christian-Social Party caused unintended consequences […] contributed to a blurred interpretation of Austrian history. Thereby, the noble moral of the catholic Dynasty was not considered, and I regarded it as my duty to honor it in due form.68 Thomas Chaimowicz did not only regard it as his duty to mediate between the Austrian, Latin-American and US-American academic traditions but also considered himself as a mediator between The Catholic and Jewish faith. He was the “first Jewish student” who obtained a PhD degree from “the padres” and considered himself also a broker between the institutions. His later first wife Doris, also a Jewish immigrant to Bogotá, earned her PhD only a few years after Chaimowicz. During the graduation, Jewish students swear their oath with the new formula “having their hand on the holy books of their people” thenceforth.69 Besides the question of mastering the language, refugees arriving as strangers in sociologist Alfred Schütz’s sense also had to build up ties and connections in order to promote their translations and convince the members of the host society of the need to accept them. To understand their individual strategies, it is important to comprehend how refugees built up social ties to respond to notions of “everyday otherness” and promote themselves and their cultural capital.70 Their strategies of

14  Philipp Strobl and Susanne Korbel building up ties are also highly relevant for this book and its individual accounts.

1.4  Cultural Capital As we have learned, refugees such as Hanny Exiner and Thomas Chaimowicz brought valuable assets with them to their host countries. In some cases, they were lucky enough to have the contacts and financial means to bring financial capital with them. This gave them a certain amount of personal and financial security after their arrival. Most of the refugees, however, were not so lucky due to various factors. At first, World War I, as well as the economic crisis of the 1920s and 1930s had drastically reduced the resources of many formerly wealthy families in Germany and Austria. Second, and even more importantly, the National Socialist emigration laws, the so-called Reichsfluchtsteuer, involved the organized impoverishment of emigrants.71 Consequently, many of the people forced to flee the Nazi state arrived with very limited financial resources. What they, however, brought with them was knowledge, education and social, artistic and professional experience, as described earlier. When speaking about or analyzing these valuable but abstract elements, it makes sense to use concepts that could be applied to make them more feasible. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical concept of the forms of capital can be a useful tool in migration studies to explore the role of capital, assets and resources.72 According to Bourdieu, the social world consists of accumulated history. Capital, for him, can be described as accumulated labor either in materialized or embodied form.73 Accordingly, explaining the structure and the functioning of the social world is “impossible, unless one reintroduced [the term] capital in all its forms.”74 This means exceeding a purely economic explanation of capital and extending the term to other forms of accumulated labor, such as cultural capital (ideas, knowledge) or social capital (networks). As Bourdieu found out, cultural capital exists in three forms: in the embodied state (long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body), in the objectified state (cultural goods such as pictures or books) and in the institutionalized state (university education).75 His theory allows for a universal description of assets and values of migrants as it explores the interaction of economic, cultural, social and symbolic forms of capital. It understands cultural capital as the migrants’ “treasure chest.”76 In contrast to the transnational movement of financial capital that has a relatively stable exchange value, the value of cultural capital has to be renegotiated after migrants leave their countries of origin. Studies have shown that “favorable historical, social, and psychological conditions” have to be met for the translation and transfer of knowledge to take place.77 The receiving society, in short, must regard translated cultural capital as necessary

Mediations Through Migrations 15 and desirable. Consequently, as Bourdieu suggested, migrants have to develop strategies to utilize their capital, since the acceptance of cultural translators depends largely on their ability to promote their skills and knowledge in their new host society. This promotion process again is also highly transcultural, since it usually led to the production of new forms of migration-specific cultural capital.78 Researchers are beginning to understand the strategies migrants employ as “knowledge in its own right.”79 This specific process of negotiating and promoting cultural capital requires further investigation since in most cases we know a lot about the actual performances and achievements of historical actors as a consequence of their knowledge translations, but we know only little about their translation strategies, about how they transferred and promoted their knowledge in their new homes.80 To refer to one of our examples again, Hanny Exiner was one of those refugees who mastered her escape and the building of a career and life in her new host society without the security of imported financial capital. Instead, she came to Australia with a first-class dance education, institutionalized by a diploma from the Vienna Academy of Music and Performing Arts, representing her institutionalized cultural capital. Additionally, she had acquired experience and know-how in performing professional dance and teaching dance classes, which constituted her embodied cultural capital. She also managed to bring books and pictures with her, which she later was able to use for her teaching (objectified cultural capital). The dancers around her mentor Gertrud Bodenwieser were well connected and many of them, including Bodenwieser herself, had migrated to Australia and New Zealand. Exiner had the necessary social capital to use her networks to facilitate her emigration to the southern hemisphere. A long-term analysis of her life and her professional activities over a period of 50 years illuminates, as explored earlier, how she adapted her professional activities from dancing to teaching and finally to dance therapy, to answer the specific needs of her altered situation. In Australia, Exiner was very active in promoting and institutionalizing her cultural capital and finally succeeded in getting her cultural capital appreciated. She not only completed different degrees in higher education after her escape to complement her Viennese education (teachers training certificate from the Mercer house College in Melbourne, accredited course in Movement Therapy from the University of Los Angeles, United States). Knowing about the importance of institutionalized education, she even managed to lecture Movement and Dance for more than a decade at the institute of early childhood development in Melbourne. Additionally, she developed Australia’s first graduate diploma in movement and dance at the Institute of Early Childhood Development in Melbourne as well as a graduate certificate in Dance Therapy for the University of Melbourne. It was particularly the adaption of her dance know-how toward childhood development and dance

16  Philipp Strobl and Susanne Korbel therapy that allowed her to successfully implement her knowledge in Australia. From 1970s onward, 20 years after her escape, she became one of the driving forces in the field, cofounding amongst others the Australian Association for Dance Education (Ausdance) in 1977.81 Thus, her “secret” to have her foreign capital accepted in Australia was to adapt and extend it considerably to fit the needs of her new host society. 1.4.1  Sources and Archives Where can we find the traces of Hanny Exiner’s and Thomas Chaimowicz’s lives? Does the location of storage influence their perception? How can we access them today and “why” are their papers where they are? Thomas Chaimowicz’s papers are archived at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York which is part of the Center for Jewish History, one of the main institutions when it comes to the history and heritage of Jews around the globe today. Hanny Exiner’s descendants have donated her literary and professional estate to the National Library in Canberra, where it is stored together with a comprehensive interview, which was conducted with her in 1994 as part of an oral history project of the National Library. When Atina Grossman discussed the question of how personal life stories fit into the larger historical picture and further asked what this implies for the place where ego-documents should be archived and stored, she mentioned that the framing of an archive or an institution has, at first, a significant impact on the perception of the person. Second, it is closely connected to questions of accessibility (especially in times of increasing digitalization)82 and interest: who has (when and where) access to the personal papers of refugees?83 Should someone interested in the experiences of refugees understand at least a part of the journey the papers and the persons they belonged to underwent? Whether a person’s life’s remainings are stored at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, London, Berlin, or Jerusalem or at some other archives in Berlin, Vienna, or Krakow influences these questions. Accessing a single estate in an archive not necessarily associated with storing ego-documents of refugees might take more time and efforts than family papers handed over to well-known institutions. This not only impacts the possibility of reception but also the question of who can control its transmission and narrative formed around it. Grossman aptly put it: “Do I really want to let some young German graduate student who has decided to become an expert on Jews to [sic!] interpret my family papers?”84 The historian Julius H. Schoeps took a different position, when asking who cares about the German-Jewish heritage today. Because many institutions in Germany would not take responsibility, so his argument, many family papers would end up in oblivion; some would not even make their way into any archive. For him, this is because of a lack

Mediations Through Migrations 17 of interest in heritage, as well as insufficient language skills among the potential readers. Even more striking, as Schoeps argues, is the lack of resources available to secure travel expenses in order to provide researchers with the opportunity to access papers scattered in archives around the globe.85 Grossman and Schoeps pled for different approaches to archiving papers of refugees – storing them in an archive at their exile destination versus returning them to archives in Europe. The places where ego-documents are stored and where they are framed as life documents of Jewish refugees, of immigrants or something else have a huge impact on how they become included – if at all – in the historical narrative about refugees and personal and cultural contacts occurring between the immigrants and the host societies. Historians who deal with the complexity of cultural and knowledge transfer processes thus must be aware of that fact and need to draw particular attention to the sensibility of identifications and their creation through their place of storage. 1.4.2  Outlook – Research Questions The field of cultural translation and knowledge transfer has only recently gained increasing academic interest and importance. This book deals with questions that provide a crucial basis for research. It aims to offers a better understanding of the complex and hybrid mutual processes of cultural translation and knowledge transfer. To provide comparable and uniform insights into their research, the authors of this book have agreed to address the following guiding questions in their papers: • • • •

• • •

What strategies did the refugees use to become acquainted with their exile? What cultural and social capital did they bring with them as their “cultural luggage” that influenced their first time in exile? How did they engage their social capital? How important was the refugees’ social capital? How did refugees use their networks to facilitate their escape and to organize their subsequent lives in their new homelands? What expectations did they have in their networks? What types of network did they use? To what extend did identifications (Jewishness, religion, class, bourgeoisie lifestyle, etc.) influence network behavior? To what degree did experiences from their emigration routes influence the refugees’ artistic and professional work? What impact did their cultural translations have on the specific cultural domains in their host society? What strategies did refugees pursue to exercise agency to promote their translations? To what extent were émigrés able to translate their capital within new contexts?

18  Philipp Strobl and Susanne Korbel The 11 case studies of this book offer an excellent overview about different aspects of knowledge mediation and cultural translation from Central Europe into different parts of the world. To draw a more accurate and graspable picture of the wide range of topics and the global geographic reach of our chapters, we decided to organize them along thematic core themes. The first part of the book deals with “Networks: Family, Friendship, Relations.” Starting with the life story of Ermanno Loevinson (born Hermann Loevinson) in Berlin, Asher Biemann examines a family biography that illuminates the global network of a Jewish family, whose members had to flee from Nazi occupied Europe. Biemann gives fascinating insights into how the family members negotiated their Jewishness through the experiences of emigration as well as into the exile at different destinations, including fascist Italy and the United States. In the next chapter, Gabriel Finder tells the story of the Austrian born physician Jakob Rosenfeld’s network in Communist China. Rosenfeld found refuge in Shanghai – not incidentally and not least due to ideological conviction and fascination with the Communist cause – and later even volunteered for Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army. Finder investigates how Rosenfeld’s experiences, while serving in the army, helped him to get in touch with the Chinese culture and subsequently made him a mediator between not only the Chinese, the Central European, but also the Jewish culture. Katharina Prager explores the life of the actress and screenwriter Salka Viertel, who lived a transnational live between Galicia, Vienna, Berlin and California. Although Viertel’s destination of refuge, the United States, was far from “alternative,” the early date of her immigration made it stand out from other migration stories to North America. Stressing that “the work of women is blanked out from research on transnational and international relations,” Prager analyzes Viertel’s life as a case study to shed light on her mediations of gendered images between Europe and the United States. In this context, she also explores Viertel’s practices of building up transnational networks to support knowledge mediations. In his chapter, Swen Steinberg chose a different account, analyzing German-speaking publications by Social Democratic exiles instead of the life trajectory of one single person. His chapter indicates the global dimension of the refugee movement from Central Europe during the 1930s and early 1940s and exemplifies how alternative routes of escape, especially into the “Global South,” have been perceived in the German-speaking exile press. Analyzing mentions of routes of escape in exile newspaper coverage, Steinberg asks when and how escape routes were discussed, what types of knowledge can be observed and what kind of refugee agency can be identified to foster a mediation of knowledge. The second part of this volume is dedicated to “Strategies of Cultural Translation and Knowledge Transfer.” Andrea Strutz examines six case

Mediations Through Migrations 19 studies of artists and musicians who had to flee Austria, Germany and Czechoslovakia and stranded in Canada. By tracing their knowledge background and diverse practices of getting acquainted with the conditions they found in Canada, she is able to demonstrate how the protagonists under consideration became even founding mothers-fathers of new disciplines. The next chapter takes the reader to Portugal. Kathrin Sippel analyzes the cultural clashes triggered by the arrival of refugees from an urban and progressive environment. Although up to 100,000 refugees migrated via Portugal to various countries, only a fraction stayed. As Sippel shows, there were many cultural and social differences between the refugees and the members of the Portuguese majority population. Among the most striking issues were the role of women in society, behavior in public spaces, as well as fashion and consumption practices. Although small in numbers and initially rejected, the refugees managed to leave their footprints in the society, supporting a cultural widening as well as a process of liberalizing woman’s rights, as Sippel puts it. In the last chapter in this section, Andrea Meyer Ludowisy introduces the British translator and Germanist William Rose who was a key actor in the network of German-speaking writers exiled in Great Britain during World War II. An impressive estate, today stored at the University of London, bears witness to the work left by Rose and the discussions he had with his clients on cultural mediations, translations and interventions. Ludowisy is thus able to shed light on the complex process of cultural translations and the way knowledge transfer was assisted and enabled by a third party invited in it. The chapters of the third part deal with “Actors of Transfer and Mediation.” Steven Cooke and Anna Hirsh bring the reader “Down Under,” analyzing the impact of the refugee artist and set and costume designer Louis Kahan, who fled from Vienna via different interim destinations to Australia. On his unusual journey, Kahan spent the war years as a member of the French Foreign Legion in North Africa and migrated to Australia only after the End of the War. Cooke and Hirsh use Kahans’ transnational life to explore the reception of his work in different transnational contexts, examining how his training, artistic practice and experiences traveled with him. Their case study offers an innovative approach to understanding design influences through an engagement with transnational and diasporic histories. The city of Shanghai is the venue for the next chapter in this volume. Jeremy Leong explores the work of the Vienna-born refugee and later music professor at Shanghai University, Erwin Felber. He was among a number of refugees who stayed in China after the war and managed to pursue a professional career in the communist country, based on his prewar knowledge. As Leong shows, music in the refugee society of Shanghai went far beyond pure entertainment. It served to reaffirm the refugees’ sense of cultural identity in an unfamiliar Sinitic environment. Christina

20  Philipp Strobl and Susanne Korbel Wieder’s chapter brings the reader to Argentina and investigates the exile experience of the actress Hedy Krilla who had gained expertise as an actor in pre-Nazi Austria, Germany and France before she was forced to leave Europe. In Argentina, she not only became a popular actress on German and French-speaking exile stages, she also developed a successful way to mediate her exile experiences contributing to the modernization of the independent theater. Markus Helmut Lenhart explores a rather unusual route of escape. His paper deals with the lives of Melitta and Victor Urbancic, who migrated from Vienna to Iceland in 1938. The Austrian composer, conductor, teacher and music scholar and his wife, who started a career as a writer in their new homeland, managed to mediate their Central European musical knowledge to the Icelandic society, thus becoming an integral part of the country’s postwar cultural scene. Melina Paetzold challenges the ever-stressed awareness of Arnold Schoenberg in the context of exiled composers in the United States by introducing Ingolf Dahl’s alternative approach to cultural and knowledge transfer between Central Europe and the United States. Though the German-Swedish musician did not choose an atypical route into exile, the way he saw himself as a mediator is unique and offers promising insights into the ways the experiences of persecution, displacement and exile shaped a musician’s career.

Notes 1. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World 1914–1989 (Hachette: Abacus, 1995). 2. Tony Kushner and Katherine Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide: Global, National and Local Perspectives during the 20 th Century (London: Frank Cass, 1999). 3. Jerzy Zdanowski, Middle Eastern Societies in the 20 th Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014). 4. Ruth Balint, “Children left Behind: Family, Refugees and Immigration in Postwar Europe,” History Workshop Journal (2016): 1–23, 2. 5. Philipp Strobl, “Medienhistorische Überlegungen zum Bild deutschsprachiger Flüchtlinge in englischsprachigen Tageszeitungen,” in They trusted us, but not too much: Transnationale Studien zur Rezeption deutschsprachiger Flüchtlinge in englischsprachigen Medien, ed. Philipp Strobl (Hildesheim: Universitätsverlag, 2020), 9–26, 12. 6. Hannelore Burger, Heimatrecht und Staatsbürgerschaft österreichischer Juden: Vom Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts bis in die Gegenwart (Vienna: Böhlau, 2014), 152; Beate Meyer, “Ausgrenzung und Vernichtung der deutschen Juden (1933–1945),” in Die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, eds. Arno Herzig and Cay Rademacher (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 2008), 218–223. 7. Strobl, Medienhistorische Überlegungen, 12. 8. Hans Safrian, Eichmann’s Men (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Hans Safrian, Die Eichmann-Männer (Vienna: Europa, 1993).

Mediations Through Migrations 21 9. Marlou Shrover, Joanne van der Leun, Leo Lucassen, and Chris Quispel, eds., Illegal Migration and Gender in a Global and Historical Perspective (Amsterdam: University Press, 2001). 10. For more information, see Margit Franz and Heimo Halbrainer, eds., Going East – Going South. Österreichisches Exil in Asien und Afrika (Graz: Clio, 2014); In September 2017, the research center for Austrian and German Exile Studies in London organized a conference about emigration from Nazi-Occupied Europe to British Overseas Territories after 1933, a series of conferences conducted by the German Historical Institute in Washington in 2018 and 2019 deals with refugee migration into the Global South; in April 2019, the editors of this book organized a conference entitled Imaging Emigration – Translating Exile” that dealt exclusively with alternative routes of Emigration. 11. Tom Ambros, Hitler’s Loss: What Britain and America gained from Europe’s Cultural Exiles (London: Peter Owen Publishers, 2001), 12. 12. There are many excellent depictions of cultural live in the German speaking areas during the 1920s and 1930s, see, for example, Deborah Holmes and Lisa Silverman, eds., Culture between tradition and Modernity (Rochester: Camden House, 2009); Daniel Snowman, The Hitler Emigrés: The Cultural Impact on Britain of Refugees from Nazism (London: Chatto and Windus, 2002). 13. See, for example, The Daily Telegraph, 25 November 1940, 6; Cairns Post, 5 December 1940, 7. 14. Karen Bond, “Honoring Hanny Exiner: Dancer, Philosopher and Visionary Educator,” in Dance education: Essays and Interviews on Values, Practices, and People, ed. Thomas K. Hagwood (Amherst: Cambria Press, 2008), 99–114, 100. 15. Emmy Steininger, “The Emigration of Gertrud Bodenwieser and her Dancers,” in Gertrud Bodenwieser and Vienna’s Contribution to Ausdruckstanz, eds. Bettina Vernon-Warren and Charles Warren (London: Routledge, 1995), 101–104. 16. Hanny Exiner interviewed by Michelle Potter, 1994. NLA Canberra. 17. Ibid. 18. Bond, Honoring Hanny Exiner, 101. 19. Thomas Chaimowicz, Briefe an Miraim und Raphael, 1983. Rückkehr und Heimkehr. LBI NY, Memoir Collection, ME 1043. A shorter version of this manuscript was published in 2000. Thomas Chaimowicz, “Heimkehr aus dem Exil,” Salzburg. Geschichte und Politik no. 4 (2000). See also Eleonore Lappin, “Jüdische Lebenserinnerungen: Rekonstruktionen jüdischer Kindheit und Jugend im Wien der Zwischenkriegszeit,” in Wien und die jüdische Erfahrung 1900–1938: Akkulturation – Antisemitismus – Zionismus, eds. Barbara Eichinger, Frank Stern (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau, 2009), 17–38, 21. 20. Chaimowicz, Briefe, 26–31. 21. Ibid. 42, 56. 22. Ibid. 72. 23. Alexander Pinnwinkler, Die „Gründergeneration“der Universität Salzburg: Biographien, Netzwerke, Berufungspolitik 1960–1975 (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau), 112–117. 24. Jan Logemann, European Émigrés and the Transatlantic Circulation of Knowledge: Examples from Mid-20th-Century Consumer Capitalism, 20 April 2020, https://migrantknowledge.org/2020/04/29/european-emigrestransatlantic-circulation-of-knowledge/ (accessed on 31 August 2020).

22  Philipp Strobl and Susanne Korbel 25. Holgar Gumprecht, “New Weimar“unter Palmen: Deutsche Schriftsteller im Exil in Los Angeles (Berlin: Aufbau, 1998); also recently, Magali Laure Nieradka, Exil unter Palmen: Deutsche Emigranten in Sanary-sur-Mer (Darmstadt: Theiss, 2018). 26. Gabriele Anderl and Walter Manoschek, Gescheiterte Flucht: Der „Kladovo-Transport“auf dem Weg nach Palästina 1939–1942 (Vienna: Mandelbaum, 2001); Thomas Albrich, Flucht nach Eretz Israel: Die Bricha und der jüdische Exodus durch Österreich (Innsbruck, Vienna, Bozen: Studienverlag, 1998); Werner Feilchenfeld, Dolf Michaelis, Ludwig Pinner, Haavara-Transfer nach Palästina und Einwanderung deutscher Juden 1933–1939 (Tübingen: J. C. B. mohr, 1972); Victoria Kumar, Land der Verheißung – Ort der Zuflucht: Jüdische Emigration und nationalsozialistische Vertreibung aus Österreich nach Palästina 1920 bis 1945 (Innsbruck, Vienna, Bozen: Studienverlag, 2016); Paul H. Silverstone, “Our only Refuge Open the Gates!” Clandestine Immigration to Palestine 1938–1948 (New York: Silverstone, 1999). 27. Stephen Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, the Ellis Island Project, or later the Austrian Heritage Collection initiated by Albert Lichtblau and located at the Leo Baeck Institute New York are only a few prominent examples to mention. Daniela Ellmauer, Helga Embacher, and Albert Lichtblau, Geduldet, geschmaeht und vertrieben: Salzburger Juden erzählen (Salzburg: Otto Mueller, 1998). 28. Ulla Kriebernegg, Gerald Lamprecht, Roberta Maierhofer, and Andrea Strutz, eds., “Nach Amerika nämlich!“Jüdische Migrationen in die Amerikas im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2012); Evelyn Adunka and Peter Roessler, eds., Die Rezeption des Exils: Geschichte und Perspektiven der österreichischen Exilforschung (Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2003). For latest numbers of refugees, see the Encyclopedia of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Immigration to the United States 1933–1941, https:// www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10008297 (1 June 2020). 29. Alisa Douer, Ursula Seeber, Wie weit ist Wien: Lateinamerika als Exil für österreichische Schriftsteller und Künstler (Vienna: Picus, 1995); Franz, Halbrainer, Going East – Going South; Margit Franz, Gateway India: Deutschsprachiges Exil in Indien zwischen britischer Kolonialherrschaft, Maharadshas und Gandhi (Graz: Clio, 2015); Andrea Strutz, “‘Detour to Canada:’ The Fate of Juvenile Austrian-Jewish Refugees after the ‘Anschluss’ of 1938,” in The Young Victims of the Nazi Regime: Migration, the Holocaust, and Post War Displacement, eds. Simone Gigliotti and Monica Tempian (London: Bloomsberry, 2016), 31–50; Birgit Lang, Eine Fahrt ins Blaue: deutschsprachiges Theater und Kabarett im australischen Exil und Nach-Exil (1933–1988) (Berlin: Weidler, 2006). 30. Swen Steinberg, Anthony Greenville, eds., Refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe in British Overseas Territories (Leiden: Brill, 2020); Evelyn Adunka, Primavera Driessen Gruber, Simon Usaty, eds., Exilforschung: Österreich. Leistungen, Defizite & Perspektiven (Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2018). 31 Tobias Brinkmann described the importance to consider migration not only as a one-way street from “A” to “B” but rather as a continuing process, a transmigration. Tobias Brinkmann, “Points of Passage: Reexamining Jewish Migration from Eastern Europe after 1880,” in Points of Passage, Jewish Transmigrants from Eastern Europe in Scandinavia, Germany, and Britain 1880–1914, ed. Tobias Brinkmann (New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 2013), 1–26, 1–3.

Mediations Through Migrations 23 32. Joachim Schlör, “‘Solange wir auf dem Schiff waren, hatten wir ein Zuhause’: Reisen als kulturelle Praxis im Migrationsprozess jüdischer Auswanderer,” Voyage – Jahrbuch für Reise- und Tourismusforschung 10 (2014): 226–246, 228–230; on the importance of routes for migration processes see also James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Philipp Strobl, “Austrian-Jewish Refugees in Pre- and Wartime Australia: Ambivalent Experiences of Encounter,” Zeitgeschichte 02 (2021): 253–272. 33. Chaimowicz, Briefe, 13. 34. Ibid. 17. 35. For example, autobiography by Dr. Isidor Fuerst. See, memoir by Isidor Fuerst, 10–15, Archive of the University of Southampton, Hartely Librarby, Jewish Division, MS 116/68. 36. Philipp Strobl, “Migrant Biographies as a Prism for Explaining Transnational Knowledge Transfers,” Migrant Knowledge, 7 October 2019, https://migrantknowledge.org/2019/10/07/migrant-biographies-as-aprism-for-explaining-transnational-knowledge-transfers/ (accessed 31 August 2020). 37. Volker Depkat, “The Challenges of Biography and Migration History,” in Quiet Invaders Revisited: Austrian Immigrant Biographies to the United States in the Twentieth Century, ed. Günther Bischof (Innsbruck, Vienna, Bozen: Studienverlag, 2017), 299–309, 305; Sebastian Conrad and Andreas Eckert, “Globalgeschichte, Globalisierung, multiple Modernen: Zur Geschichtsschreibung der modernen Welt,” in Globalgeschichte: Theorien, Ansätze, Themen, eds. Sebastian Conrad et al. (Frankfurt: Campus, 2007), 7–52, 7. 38. Ibid. 39. See: Philipp Strobl and Manfred Kohler, The Phenomenon of Globalization: A Collection of Interdisciplinary Globalization Research Essays (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2013); Günther Bischof et al., eds., Globalization and the City: Two Connected Phenomena in Past and Present (Innsbruck, Vienna, Bozen: University Press, 2013). 40. Conrad and Eckert, Globalgeschichte, 8. 41. Klaus Kiran Patel, “Transnationale Geschichte,” in Europäische Geschichte Online (EGO), ed. the Institut für Europäische Geschichte (IEG), Mainz (3 December 2010), http://www.ieg-ego.eu/patelk-2010-de (accessed 31 August 2020). 42. Andrea Komlosy, “Was ist Globalgeschichte? Neue Herausforderungen an den Geschichtsunterricht,” Praxis Globales Lernen 2 (2019): 7–8, 7. 43. Peter Burke, Exiles and Expatriates in the History of Knowledge (Massachusetts: Brandeis University Press, 2017), 3. 44. Richard A. Rogers, “From Cultural Exchange to Transculturation: A Review and Reconceptualization of Cultural Appropriation,” in Communication Theory 16 (2006): 474–503, 491. The concept of pluriculturalism builds on the assumptions of multiculturalism, though, in an attempt to overcome the problematic singularity of the concept of multiculturalism, scholars began to focus on how cultures resonate, interact and merge through mutual mediation, rather than merely tolerating or coexisting. On the concept see Anil Bhatti, “Plurikulturalität,” in Habsburg neu denken: Vielfalt und Ambivalenz in Zentraleuropa – 30 kulturwissenschaftliche Stichworte, eds. Johannes Feichtinger and Heidemarie Uhl (Vienna: Böhlau, 2016), 171–180.

24  Philipp Strobl and Susanne Korbel 45. James Lull, Media Communication, Culture: A Global Approach (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 242. 46. Virginia Steward and Merle Armitage, The Modern Dance (New York: Dance Horizon, 1970). 47. Interview Exiner 1994. NLA Canberra. 48. Bond, Honoring Hanny Exiner, 99. 49. Exiner and Kelnack, 1994, xx (Foreword). 50. Meredith Bowman, “Tributes”, Ausdance (2007): 27. 51. Interview Exiner, 1994. NLA Canberra. 52. “Biographical Background Hanny,” Hanny Exiner files. NLA Canberra. 53. Ibid. 54. “About Johanna Exiner,” Hanny Exiner files. NLA Canberra. 55. Bond, Exiner, 101. 56. “About Johanna Exiner,” Hanny Exiner files. NLA Canberra. 57. “Biography, Background Hanny,” Hanny Exiner files. NLA Canberra. 58. Ibid. 59. For a critique on the paradigm of cultural transfer see Petra Broomans, Sandra van Voorst, “Introduction,” in Rethinking Cultural Transfer and Transmission: Reflections and New Perspectives, eds. Petra Broomans, Sandra van Voorst (Groningen: Barkhuis, 2012): 9–14; Michaela Wolf, “‘Cultures’ Do Not Hold Still for Their Portraits: Kultureller Transfer als ‚Übersetzen zwischen Kulturen’,” in Ver-rückte Kulturen: Zur Dynamik kultureller Transfers, eds. Federica Celestini and Helga Mitterbauer Helga (Tübingen: Stauffenberg, 2003), 85–98; Werner Suppanz, “Transfer, Zirkulation, Blockierung: Überlegungen zum kulturellen Transfer als Überschreiten signifikatorischer Grenzen,” in Ver-rückte Kulturen: Zur Dynamik kultureller Transfers, eds. Federico Calestini and Helga Mitterbauer (Tübingen: Stauffenberg, 2003), 21–36. 60. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London/New York: Routledge, 1994); Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books 2003). On cultural turns in general and the translational turn in particular see Doris Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften (Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag 2014), 239–284, Strobl, Experiences of Encounter, 7; Kenneth D. Madsen and Ton van Naerssen, “Migration, Identity, and Belonging,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 18 (2003): 61–75. 61. Doris Bachmann-Medick, “Introduction,” in The Trans/National Study of Culture: A Translational Perspective, ed. Doris Bachmann-Medick (Berlin/Boston: DeGruyter, 2016), 1–22, 3. 62. Federico Italiano and Michael Rössner, eds., Translatio/n: Narration, Media and the Staging of Differences (Bielefeld: Transkript, 2012); Michaela Wolf, “Translation – Transkulturation: Vermessung von Perspektiven transkultureller Aktion,” in Borders, Nations, Translations: Übersetzung in einer globalisierten Welt, ed. Translate/eipcp (Vienna: Turia+Kant, 2008), 77–91. 63. Michel Espagne Michel and Michael Werner, “Deutsch-französischer Kulturtransfer im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert,” in Francia 13 (1985): 502–510; Wolfgang Schmale, Martina Steer (eds.), Kulturtransfer in der jüdischen Geschichte (Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 2006). 64. Suppanz, Transfer, Zirkulation, Blockierung, 24. 65. Bhabha located the negation of cultures between differences and displacements in so-called in-between spaces, see Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 5.

Mediations Through Migrations 25 66. Gayatri Chakravorty-Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? Postkolonialität und subalterne Artikulation (Vienna: Turia+Kant, 2008), 6–12; see also Susanne Korbel, “From Vienna to New York: Migration, space and in-betweenness in Im weißen Rößl,” Jewish Culture and History 17, no. 3 (2017): 233–248. 67. Nadja Grbić, Susanne Korbel, Judith Laister, Rafael Schögler, Olaf Terpitz, Michaela Wolf, “Introduction,” in Übersetztes und Unübersetztes: Das Versprechen der Translation und ihre Schattenseiten, eds. Nadja Grbić, Susanne Korbel, Judith Laister, Rafael Schögler, Olaf Terpitz, Michaela Wolf (Bielefeld: Transkript, 2020), 1–18. 68. Chaimowicz, Briefe, 53. 69. Ibid. 58–59. 70. Strobl, Experiences of Encounter, 7; Alfred Schuetz, “The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology,” American Journal of Sociology 49 (1944): 499–507; David Radford, “‘Everyday otherness’ – Intercultural Refugee Encounters and Everyday Multiculturalism in a South Australian Rural Town,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2016): 2128–2145. 71. Philipp Strobl, “Social Networks of Austrian Refugee-Migrants from the Anschluss in Australia – An Analysis of Meaning Structures,” Journal of Migration History 5 (2019): 53–79, 57. 72. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital”, in Handbook of Theory of Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J.E. Richardson (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1986): 241–258. 73. Bourdieu, Capital, 241. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid. 243; see also Philipp Strobl, “‘But the Main Thing is I had the Knowledge:’ Gertrude Langer, Cultural Translation and the Emerging Art Sector in Post-War Queensland (Australia),” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 18 (2018): 16–30, 17. 76. Umut Erel, “Migrating Cultural Capital: Bourdieu in Migration Studies,” Sociology 44 (2010): 649; Strobl, Langer, 17. 77. Aneta Podkalicka and Philipp Strobl, “Skiing Transnational: Cultures, Practices, and Ideas on the Move,” in Leisure Cultures and the Making of Modern Ski Resorts, eds. Philipp Strobl and Aneta Podkalicka (London: Palgrave, 2019), 1–24; Yuri Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 147.  78. Stefan Manz and Panikos Panayi, “Refugees and Cultural Transfer to Britain: An Introduction,” Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora 30, no. 2–3 (2012): 133. 79. Andrea Westermann, “Migrant Knowledge: An Entangled Object of Research,” in Migrant Knowledge, 14 March 2019, https://migrantknowledge. org/2019/03/14/migrant-knowledge/ (accessed 31 August 2020). 80. Tim Corbett, Klaus Hödl, Caroline Kita, Susanne Korbel, and Dirk Rupnow, “Migration, Integration, and Assimilation: Reassessing Key Concepts in (Jewish) Austrian History,” Journal of Austrian Studies 54, no. 1 (2021): 1–28; Philipp Strobl, “Migrant Biographies as a Prism for Explaining Transnational Knowledge Transfers,” Migrant Knowledge, 7 October 2019, https://migrantknowledge.org/2019/10/07/migrantbiographies-as-a-prism-for-explaining-transnational-knowledge-transfers/ (accessed 31 August 2020). 81. Bowman, “Tributes,” 27.

26  Philipp Strobl and Susanne Korbel 82. Frank Mecklenburg, “Als deutsch-jüdisch noch deutsch war: Die digitalisierten Sammlungen des Leo Baeck Institut Archives bis 1933,” in Das Kulturerbe deutschsprachiger Juden: Eine Spurensuche in den Ursprungs-, Transit- und Emigrationsländern, ed. Elke-Vera Kotowski (Oldenburg: DeGruyter, 2015), 500–510. 83. Atina Grossmann, “Versions of Home: German Jewish Refugee Papers Out of the Closet and Into the Archives,” Taboo, Trauma, Holocaust 90 (2003): 95–122, 102. 84. Grossman, “Versions of Home,” 102. 85. Julius H. Schoeps, “Das Stigma der Heimatlosigkeit, Vom Umgang mit dem deutsch-jüdischen Erbe,” in Das Kulturerbe deutschsprachiger Juden: Eine Spurensuche in den Ursprungs-, Transit- und Emigrationsländern, ed. Elke-Vera Kotowski (Oldenburg: DeGruyter, 2015), 489–499.

Part I

Networks: Family, Friendships, Relations

2

Jakob Rosenfeld A Viennese Jewish Doctor Discovers Heimat in Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army Gabriel N. Finder

Jakob Rosenfeld (1903–1952) was a bourgeois Jewish physician in interwar Vienna who, through a strange twist of fate, rose to the rank of general in Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army in China. He was exiled from Austria, the land of his birth, finding last-minute refuge in China. His final resting place is, however, Israel. Chinese authorities and people of a certain age in China remembered him with reverence after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). But because his former friends from his days in Mao’s forces, Liu Shaoqi and Chen Yi, later president and foreign minister of the PRC, respectively, were targeted during the Cultural Revolution, it was inopportune in China between 1966 and 1976 to recover Rosenfeld’s legacy. However, it was eventually resurrected in the country in the 1980s. Ever since the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Israel in 1992, a delegation from the Chinese embassy in Israel makes an annual pilgrimage to Rosenfeld’s modest grave in Kiryat Shaul Cemetery on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, to pay tribute to the Jewish doctor. In 1992, a statute of Rosenfeld was erected in front of a hospital named for him in the country of Junan in the Shandong province of China, where he was stationed and practiced medicine between 1943 and 1945. The Shanghai Jewish Museum houses a bust of Rosenfeld, which was unveiled during the opening of an exhibit in 2016 in commemoration of Jews who contributed to the creation and development of the PRC.1 Austria, for its part, has made an effort to reclaim Rosenfeld. Since 1993, a bronze plaque with his image and a bust adorn the Unfallkrankenhaus, a hospital in Graz (Fig. 2.1). A park is named after him in Vienna; and a street is named after him and a memorial tablet erected in his honor stands in Wöllersdorf, the town in Austria where he spent his childhood. The Austrian television broadcast company Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF) produced a documentary film in 1993 called Ich war ein chinesischer General: Die Erlebnisse des österreichischen Arztes Dr. Jakob Rosenfeld in China (I was a Chinese General: The Experiences of the Austrian Doctor Dr. Jakob Rosenfeld in China); and, in cooperation with a French crew and ARTE, the

30  Gabriel N. Finder

Figure 2.1  Plaque with Jakob Rosenfeld’s image at the Unfallkrankenhaus, a hospital in Graz. Source: Photograph by Susanne Korbel

Franco-German television network for cultural programing, it made another in 2003 entitled Maos General: Das erstaunliche Leben des Jakob Rosenfeld (Mao’s General: The Amazing Life of Jakob Rosenfeld). And after 1996, a traveling exhibit dedicated to Rosenfeld made the rounds in Vienna, Tel Aviv, Shanghai, and Beijing. In 2003, the National Museum of China in Beijing mounted it, and it was inaugurated by Chinese president Hu Jintao. With the intention of raising Jews’ awareness of Rosenfeld’s life, the Diaspora Museum (Beit Hatfutsot) in Tel Aviv in 2000 and the Jewish Museum on the Judenplatz in Vienna in 2006 played host to the exhibit. (Most Jews, are, however, still unfamiliar with Rosenfeld’s name.)2 But which of these countries—Austria, China, or Israel—did Rosenfeld call home? Rosenfeld kept notes in German of his frontline service with the Chinese Communists’ New Fourth Army and then Eighth Route Army between 1941 and 1949 with an eye to publishing a book one day. He completed the manuscript in 1950, but he was unable to find a publisher for it before his life was cut short by heart disease. His niece in the United States inherited his effects and had the manuscript published under the title Ich kannte sie alle (I Knew Them All). Everyone, including myself, who is interested in the extraordinary life of Jakob Rosenfeld owes a debt of gratitude to the pioneering research and efforts of Austrian Sinologist Gerd Kaminski, who almost singlehandedly rescued Rosenfeld from obscurity. Kaminski published

Jakob Rosenfeld 31 a biography of Rosenfeld in 1993 and then the manuscript in 2002. Moreover, Kaminski helped curate the exhibits of Rosenfeld in Vienna, Tel Aviv, and Beijing in the first decade of this century. For his biography of Rosenfeld, Kaminski interviewed numerous people who knew Rosenfeld, both Austrian, including Rosenfeld’s siblings, and Chinese. 3 Kaminski counts Rosenfeld among a significant number of Austrian physicians whose paths led them to China in the 1930s and 1940s. Several, if not most, of them were Jews who fled the Nazis after the so-called annexation (“Anschluss”) of Austria in 1938.4 In modern times, scores of Jewish traders from Baghdad settled in Hong Kong and Shanghai in the nineteenth century, a few thousand Jews in search of refuge from the Czarist empire and the Soviet Union migrated to Harbin and Shanghai in the early twentieth century, and some 20,000 Jewish refugees from Nazi-dominated Europe, especially Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, flocked to Shanghai in the 1930s. Although relations between Jews from abroad and the Chinese were amicable, Jews generally lived apart from the Chinese. They resided first in colonial enclaves or so-called “concessions,” and then, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor until the end of World War II, Japanese occupation authorities crammed them into an isolated area or “ghetto” in Shanghai. Jews’ contacts with Chinese were largely limited to commerce. None of the European Jewish communities was permanent. As Israel Epstein, a Jew who called China home, wrote, “Most of those who came as refugees were, in their own eyes, transients ‘sitting on their suitcases’ as a saying among them went, although some stayed for one or two generations.”5 Rosenfeld belonged to the substantial wave of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism. But unlike all but a fraction of them, he was part of an obscure coterie of Jews from Central Europe, Great Britain, and even the United States who sought self-fulfillment in China, developed close relations with certain segments of Chinese society, supported the Chinese Communist movement, and, in many cases, made a deliberate decision after the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949 to settle in the PRC and help construct “the new China.” The number of these devoted “Jewish friends of the Chinese people” or “Red Jews”—my names for them—was modest, about two dozen people. They were journalists, authors, teachers, professors, and, like Rosenfeld, doctors. Rosenfeld was one of a handful of Jews who found themselves on the frontlines of the Communists’ military efforts to oust the Japanese from China from 1937 to 1945 and then in their successful struggle against Chiang Kaishek’s nationalist, anti-Communist Guomindang regime from 1945 to 1949 for control of the country. Several Jews who stayed in China after 1949 acquired Chinese citizenship—no small feat for a foreigner—and half a dozen or so even rose through the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), eventually attaining the official status of “foreign expert”

32  Gabriel N. Finder and achieving membership in the influential National Committee of the Chinese People’s Consultative Conference, an advisory body in the government. To be sure, there were many non-Jewish foreigners who traveled to China, identified with the goals of the Chinese Communist Revolution, and remained in the PRC after 1949, and they outnumbered their Jewish counterparts. What makes this small group of highly committed young people of Jewish origin who chose to cast their lot with China in the 1930s and 1940s and then to settle and build their lives there after 1949 distinctive, particularly in the context of Jewish history, was their decision to seek not only shelter but also their purpose in life in China when many of them had other contemporaneous options for self-fulfillment. Of course, thousands of Jews, including Rosenfeld, had no choice but to seek refuge in China—it was their last escape route from Nazi-occupied Europe. But Rosenfeld’s odyssey, like that of most other Jewish friends of the Chinese people, is noteworthy because China may have been his only option to escape the Nazis, but once in China he decided to devote himself to the Communist cause and the Chinese people—in his case, soldiers in Communist forces and peasants. Although he left China in 1949 and settled temporarily first in Austria until 1951 and then in Israel in the years 1951–1952, he hoped eventually to return to China. Death intervened. What emerges from Rosenfeld’s manuscript and the writings of other Jews who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s, made their way to China, and lent their support to the Communists, whether they stayed in China after 1949 or not, is that their Jewish background helps us understand their affinity for China and Chinese Communism. It is important to note that they were not observant Jews. They felt Jewish for reasons that had nothing to do with the Jewish religion. By the same token, their writings make clear that they transcended the confines of Jewish life and that, therefore, their being Jewish or their Jewish identity has to be thought of in ways that take into account many other dimensions of their legacies. Rosenfeld is a case in point.

2.1  From Austria to China Jakob Rosenfeld was born in 1903 to a Jewish family in Lemberg in the Habsburg Empire (now L’viv in Ukraine). The family relocated in 1910 to the Lower Austrian village of Wöllersdorf, which lies 50 km south of Vienna. He was one of six children. His father was a noncommissioned officer in the army; his mother was renowned in the community for her acts of charity, and she bequeathed her altruistic spirit to her son. His parents were faithful Jews without being dogmatic. His mother kept a kosher home until World War I, but when kosher meat became unobtainable, the family took to eating non-kosher food.

Jakob Rosenfeld 33 She lit Sabbath candles, although Jakob and his siblings generally made themselves conveniently scarce when she performed this ritual. Since the nearest synagogue was 12 km away, the family seldom attended services. Unlike his brothers, Jakob avoided physical skirmishes with Catholic peers who baited them with antisemitic taunts. Religious instruction was obligatory in Austrian schools—pupils took instruction in the tenets of their respective faiths—but Rosenfeld’s receptiveness to instruction in Judaism was perfunctory at best. Rosenfeld excelled, however, in secular subjects. After the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918, his father left the military and became proprietor of a millinery in Vienna. In 1921, Rosenfeld moved to Vienna to study medicine. He proved to be an outstanding student, and in various hospital internships, he won abundant praise from his mentors for not only his medical knowledge and skills but also his solicitude for his patients. He specialized in surgery, urology, and gynecology, which would stand him in good stead once he joined the ranks of Mao’s forces and cared for Chinese patients. He received his medical degree at the University of Vienna in 1928, and after additional training at the Rothschild Hospital, the hospital run by the organized Jewish community (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde) in Vienna, he opened a practice, first in Wiener Neustadt, then in Vienna, specializing in urology and gynecology. He became a highly successful and popular physician and surgeon whose patients hailed largely from the upper echelons of Austrian society. Rosenfeld personified the stereotypical self-cultivated Jewish esthete of fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century Vienna. A devotee of opera and theater, Rosenfeld exhibited slightly above-average interest in politics in Austria’s tumultuous 1930s. Apart from spurning National Socialism and fascism, he was closest in political orientation to the Austrian Social Democratic Party. His idyllic existence was shattered by the “Anschluss” in March 1938. He was arrested in May 1938 and sent first to Dachau and then to Buchenwald. Although he was not a born hero, he discovered unknown reserves of resilience within himself, caring for fellow prisoners who fell ill or were brutalized by the guards, who beat and even injured Rosenfeld in their fruitless effort to stop him. After he had been incarcerated for a year, his family finally succeeded to have him released from Buchenwald if he promised to emigrate from Austria within two weeks, and after an unsuccessful attempt to secure a visa for the United States, he took the only option left open to him and booked passage on a ship to Shanghai. In Shanghai, Rosenfeld opened a practice and, in comparison with the majority of other Jews who found shelter there, he led a financially secure life. But his incarceration in concentration camps had politicized him, and he was becoming sensitized to the abject poverty around him. In Shanghai, he met a fellow Austrian, Hans Shippe, who had been born

34  Gabriel N. Finder Morzec Grzyb to a Jewish family in Krakow. Shippe was a journalist and enthusiastic supporter of the Chinese Communists whose seminars on Marxism were attended by Rosenfeld. Shen Qizhen, chief medical officer of the Communists’ New Fourth Army, attended Shippe’s seminar in 1941. Rosenfeld became convinced of the justness of the effort to expel the Japanese from China, and, in like measure, he grew incensed by the Guomindang’s attacks on Mao Zedong’s Communist forces, when—so he came to see things—the Communists represented the vast majority of Chinese people, striving to empower them and raise their standard of living, while the antidemocratic Guomindang regime under Chiang Kai-shek, in contrast, was determined to preserve an oppressive feudal system in China. The single-minded Rosenfeld resolved to apply his medical knowledge in the service to the Communist cause. With the assistance of Shen Qizhen, he sneaked across Japanese enemy lines to join Mao Zedong’s New Fourth Army, which was encamped in Yancheng in Jiangsu province. Rosenfeld quickly developed a reputation for his vast medical knowledge, selflessness, and tireless devotion to his patients. When he was not caring for wounded soldiers, he was tending to the peasant population in the areas where Communist forces operated. His comrades and peasants called him by various nicknames. One was “Long Nose” (Luo Dabizi)—for obvious reasons! He befriended the New Fourth Army’s commanding officer Chen Yi and Liu Shaoqi, its political commissar (both of whom would fall out of official favor during the Cultural Revolution) (Fig. 2.2). In 1942, with the backing of Chen Yi, he applied for CCP membership and was made an honorary member of the party. In 1943, the Communist Central Committee decided to have Rosenfeld transferred to the Eighth Route Army, which operated in Shandong province, because it wanted him to be near and attend to the Eighth Route Army’s commander, Luo Ronghuan, who suffered from kidney ailments. (In 1938–1939, the famous Canadian physician Norman Bethune had served in the very same Eighth Route Army.) After Japan’s defeat in 1945, Rosenfeld accompanied the Eighth Route Army to Manchuria in the northeastern region of China, where it was sent to fight Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang forces. In 1947, Rosenfeld was promoted to the rank of general and became surgeongeneral of the First Brigade of the Eighth Route Army, the head of its medical services and the highest office attained by any foreigner in the Communists’ armed forces. He took part in the People Liberation Army’s march on Beijing. After the Communists’ takeover of Beijing from the Guomindang in January 1949, he participated in a meeting with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai—his only face-to-face encounter with Mao—to plan the offensive to the far south to consolidate Communist control over the mainland, but he was too ill, suffering from cardiac disease, to join the troops on their southward march. He

Jakob Rosenfeld 35

Figure 2.2  Jakob Rosenfeld with Liu Shaoqi (left) and Chen Yi (right) at the headquarters of the New Fourth Army in Yancheng, 23 March 1941. Source: Courtesy of Dr. Gerd Kaminski and the Austrian Institute for China and Southeast Asian Research (Österreichisches Institut für China- und Südostasienforschung), Vienna, Austria

received permission to return to Vienna to obtain medical care for his heart and look for surviving family members.

2.2  Doctor on the Frontline Central to Rosenfeld’s self-identity was being a doctor. His focus was on healing. He had no sooner arrived at the redoubt of the New Fourth Army than he vigorously and indefatigably tackled the medical needs of the troops. He operated from early morning until mid-afternoon without interruption. Only then would he allow himself hot water or a modest meal. He would help carry patients on stretchers from the operating table to their beds. He was not risk-averse. Defying death, he tended to wounded soldiers on the battlefield and operated in makeshift frontline facilities. He treated not only ill and injured soldiers in the Communists’ forces but also peasants in the countryside, who flocked to him, calling him the “Tiger Balsam Doctor,” since he reminded them of the wonder salve to which they would resort for all kinds of ailments. When they went to him, he cured them. He also earned the sobriquet “Living Buddha” (Hua Tuo) for saving the lives of countless pregnant women, not only peasants but also female soldiers, and delivering their babies. When

36  Gabriel N. Finder he was short of medical supplies, he improvised or created blueprints for the construction in the field of suitable rigged equipment. Without giving second thought to the risks involved, he exposed himself to disease, jeopardizing his own health for the recovery of his patients. He fell ill several times. He even ordered his assistants once to lower him into a well in a successful attempt to reduce his own fever in its cool waters. He went to great lengths to improve hygienic conditions and practices in the lives of soldiers and peasants. He practically worked himself to death, while he himself suffered increasingly from heart disease. No less significant was Rosenfeld’s concerted effort to transmit his specialized medical knowledge to Chinese colleagues. Communist forces suffered from a shortage of trained medical personnel. Rosenfeld founded a field medical school in Huazhong, the Huazhong Medical Academy of the New Fourth Army. He gave lectures, demonstrated dissections, led rounds exposing students to internal medicine and surgery, offered instruction in pharmacology, and supervised students by example in battlefield rescue. By 1949, when he left China to return to Vienna, hundreds of the New Fourth Army’s and Eight Route Army’s medical personnel had trained under Rosenfeld.6 Several decades later a couple of Rosenfeld’s students recalled the essence of what he had taught them: It’s not enough just to have good technique in order to be a good doctor. One has to have the eye of an eagle and the ear of a musician in order to make a good diagnosis. Add to that the talent of an actor in order to console the patient and to allay his spiritual agony. And one must have hands as skilled as [those of] the tailor and cabinetmaker and as strong as [those of] of the blacksmith and mason. In this way one can reduce the time of an operation to a minimum.7 If this recollection is any indication, Rosenfeld not only taught his students standard medical procedures but also stressed “bedside manners,” inspiring them to see the human being behind the patient. The question naturally arises whether the mindset of this bourgeois Viennese Jewish doctor suggests the presence or effects of colonialism. Take a typical passage from his manuscript in which he describes the state of sanitation in Shandong after his arrival there in 1943 to join the Eighth Route Army: Here, too, in Shandong sanitary conditions were very sad and in need of intense educational work [Aufklärungsarbeit] in order to mobilize [support in] the civilian population for greater cleanliness, for the battle against flies, bugs, and lice. The lack of fuel—there is almost no wood, people use sorghum for cooking … — naturally complicates our work. Despite this we had certain success in the

Jakob Rosenfeld 37 population. The army was overall excruciatingly clean; only in the poorest districts of Shandong did I find a high percentage of troops infected by scabies. Apart from the infectious diseases that I had encountered in Jiangsu, such as malaria, … typhus, relapsing fever and so forth, in Shandong I found perhaps the most horrific disease, leprosy, fortunately only in isolated cases in dozens of villages. The facial [expressions rendered] vacant through the loss of eyebrows, the eroded noses, the mutilated limbs were a gruesome sight. Effective isolation of the ill was impossible, since they often exchanged our areas for those occupied by the Japanese. Under such conditions, it’s almost a miracle that I discovered only two cases of leprosy in our army.8 Does this passage smack of a colonial attitude? The term “educational work,” Aufklärungsarbeit in German, emits a whiff of superiority. The entire passage, however, arguably also exhibits a fair degree of solicitude and empathy. To my mind, this utterance, however, in its entirety does not reflect the mentality of a doctor whose vision of his professional role in China was fundamentally colonial in nature. To be sure, individual motivation of a historical actor is elusive. But it can be deduced or inferred in Rosenfeld’s case not only from passages in his manuscript like these, over which readers may beg to differ, but also from his actions. A doctor who operates long hours under less than ideal conditions, who helps carry his patients to their beds after surgery, who rushes headlong onto the battlefield to minister to wounded soldiers and performs surgery during enemy aerial bombardment, who exerts himself to improve the public health of his patient constituency, who teaches and offers encouragement to hundreds of students—one would be hard-pressed to accuse such a doctor of harboring a colonial attitude. Indeed, in his manuscript, Rosenfeld repeatedly expresses his abhorrence of the colonial aspirations of the Japanese invaders, then of the colonial proclivities exhibited by the Guomindang regime of Chiang Kai-shek. Rosenfeld even appears to have evinced interest in traditional Chinese salves, in the healing capacity of which he put great faith. Furthermore, the troops loved him because he made no distinction between the treatment of officers and rank-and-file soldiers. He attended to the patient who was in immediate need of treatment regardless of rank.9 It might be tempting to view Rosenfeld, regardless of the fact that he was uprooted and displaced and that he was unsure of his family’s fate in Nazi-occupied Europe, to some extent as the adventurous European who saw himself as introducing modern, Western medicine in the “exotic,” non-Western space of China. This, however, would, in my view, be an inapt description of Rosenfeld. I think it is fair to say that he was, in essence, a selfless and tireless humanist who was devoted to saving lives—as fate would have it, to

38  Gabriel N. Finder saving the lives in China of oppressed peasants and the soldiers mobilized to deliver them from their oppression.

2.3  Jewish Maoist Rosenfeld was, then, in his own mind, first and foremost a doctor—a doctor who was bringing his medical expertise to bear in China on behalf of the cause of Chinese Communists under the leadership of Mao Zedong. Indeed, he begins his manuscript with a dedication to Mao: To Mao Zedong, the genius of the new China [;] to Mao Zedong, dedicated respectfully [.] Rosenfeld encountered Mao (and Zhou Enlai) in person only once. After the takeover of Beijing in 1949, Rosenfeld was summoned with 400 other army officers to Mao’s headquarters on the outskirts of Beijing to discuss the offensive to the south. There he heard a brief exhortation by Mao. “His order,” Rosenfeld writes, “was: Lead the revolution to its conclusion. Carry it to the farthest territorial borders of China.”10 Like many of his idealistic contemporaries—the legendary Edgar Snow, author of Red Star over China (1938), is but one example—Rosenfeld, as historian Julia Lovell describes Snow, “wanted to see—and did see—a brand-new China, led by Mao.” And in Rosenfeld’s eyes, as in Snow’s, Mao appeared “larger than life.”11 Rosenfeld’s praise of Mao dovetailed with his Jewish background—a syncretistic amalgamation to say the least. Jewish markers don’t predominate in Rosenfeld’s manuscript, but they are inescapable. They are attributable mainly to the Holocaust. Thus, following the dedication to Mao, Rosenfeld writes in the manuscript’s preface, written after his return to Vienna: On 28 November 1941, Soviet troops beat back the German military invasion in heroic defense of Rostow. Jiangsu, 28 November 1941. Once again the N[ew] 4th A[rmy], in which I had by then serving six months as a surgeon, succeeded in breaking through a concentrated encirclement of the Japanese fascist army, which was supported by Guomindang troops. On 28 November 1941, my mother was killed by gas in a concentration camp in Minsk. With her died thousands of defenseless men, women, and children of all nations. Inextinguishable hatred for the fascist beast till the end of days and eternal glory to the fighters and liberators. Vienna, 1950. In lieu of an introduction. The author.12

Jakob Rosenfeld 39 Here Rosenfeld situates the fate of his mother and of other victims—he avoids calling them Jews—in the context of Nazi and fascist persecution across the globe and of the global struggle for liberation from the forces of Nazism and fascism. (In fact, the Nazi regime deported nearly 24,000 Jews from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia to the Minsk ghetto between November 1941 and October 1942. SS and police authorities either shot most of them or gassed them in special gas vans after their arrival in Maly Trostinec.)13 Rosenfeld begins his narrative with a description of a welcome ceremony held in his honor on the frontline in March 1941. He is running late because he is coming directly from performing surgery. Accompanied by his friend and translator Shen Qizhen, he is summoned by Liu Shaoqi, the New Fourth Army’s political commissar, to the podium from which its commanding officer, Chen Yi, is making a speech before an assembly of 1600 soldiers. Chen Yi interrupts his speech to shake the embarrassed Rosenfeld’s hand while the soldiers applaud. Emblazoned on the walls of the room and above the podium, banners read “Welcome to our international friend, long live our new doctor, our helper in the struggle against Japanese fascism, long live international solidarity, down with international imperialism.”14 Seated on the podium, Rosenfeld spies a rope from which a lantern would be attached hanging from the ceiling “like a noose.” The rope provokes a flashback in Rosenfeld: The Nazis’ execution by hanging in December 1938 of a young prisoner in Buchenwald who was captured after attempting to escape the camp. All the prisoners were forced to watch, and the victim’s body was left dangling for 24 hours. In his speech to the troops, Chen Yi, the commanding officer, admonishes them to treat the peasants with respect and help them with their planting and during the harvest season. He punctuates and concludes his speech with rousing words: “The nation is with us, victory is with us…. Justice is with us, the sympathy of all oppressed nations and classes are with us…. Long live the army, long live the party, long live Mao Zedong.”15 After the applause subsides, it’s Rosenfeld’s turn to address his new comrades. In his manuscript he recounts his speech: I spoke of Hitler, of the concentration camps in Dachau and Buchenwald. Of the steadily growing number of resistance fighters, of the horrific terror, the bestial actions of the inhuman, megalomaniac mass murderers. And of the hope of mankind that this war would break the back of these bandits. In my mind’s eye, I saw the newly erected shower facilities, built by us, that were to be used then as gas chambers. I related how they hanged prisoners from trees for hours in order to extort a confession.

40  Gabriel N. Finder Here in Jiangsu we are the last bastion against fascism, the eastern barricade of freedom in the world. To be with you, to fight with you, after all of my terrible personal experiences, is the greatest satisfaction of my life. The commissar [Liu Shaoqi] hugged me, we left the podium, which was swiftly converted into a stage, and we sat among the soldiers. Since the modification [of the podium into a stage] required some time, we had to sing at the energetic request [of those in attendance]. People heard “Brothers, to the Sun, to Freedom,” the Buchenwald song [sung by prisoners], and Schubert’s “Lindenbaum” probably for the first time ever in Yen-Chin [Yancheng], [sung] loudly rather than beautifully, but the applause was frenzied.16 Although Rosenfeld worked day and night in the field, making rounds, delivering babies, operating, and running a makeshift course for young doctors, the concentration camps were never far from his mind. He often made associations between what he observed in the Chinese hinterland and what he had witnessed in the camps. He relates in his manuscript that, in one recurring nightmare, scenes from the camps would merge with his memory of two skeletal Chinese peasants beating each other with clubs over competing claims to horse manure, which they each wanted to fertilize their meager plots.17 Just prior to the manuscript’s epilogue, Rosenfeld, who over the course of the Second Sino-Japanese War and then the civil war between the Communists and the nationalists in China had become an enthusiastic admirer of Mao Zedong, draws a comparison between Mao and—of all people—Moses! Mao Zedong. Just as Moses [led] the Jews through the desert, he led the Red Army on the “Long March” with unflinching courage towards a new future…. While insanity was assuming power in Germany, the revolutionaries in China were moving to the northwest, to Yan’an, in order to continue their struggle for the freedom of China and the world…. Mao Zedong! Under his leadership the war … against the Japanese was waged and won…. And in spite of the war, peasants in Red areas were offered a better life than ever before. And millions of peasants who were no longer hungry prayed: Mao Zedong woan sue! [Long live Mao Zedong!] Mao Zedong! In the four-year civil war, the Communist Party triumphed under his leadership against Chang Kai-shek and Wall Street. The country belongs to the peasants. The country is free. And free are the worker in the factory and the student in school. Over all of [the] large [country of] China, from hundreds of millions of lips roars the cry: Mao Zedong woan sue!18

Jakob Rosenfeld 41 In Rosenfeld’s mind, then, Mao, a modern-day Moses, leads the Chinese people—like the Jews, the heirs to an ancient civilization—after years of oppression and struggle out of the wilderness and into the Promised Land, a land of freedom. But unlike Moses, Mao himself enters the Promised Land to continue to lead the people there.19 I would describe Rosenfeld as a nondogmatic Jewish Maoist. Maoism is not easy to define, since it assumed various forms as a result of shifts in Mao’s thoughts and whims and of specific national contexts in which self-proclaimed Maoists sought to foment political revolt under the banner of the Maoist program. In historian Julia Lovell’s words, Maoism embodies “Mao’s veneration of the peasantry as a revolutionary force and his lifelong tenderness for anarchic rebellion against authority,” in combination with a “veneration of political violence, [a] championing of anti-colonial resistance, and [the] use of thought-control techniques to forge a disciplined, increasingly repressive party and society.”20 Many aspects of Maoism, especially its faith in and commitment to the use of terror in the service of rebellion and deployment of thought control, could not have appealed to Rosenfeld, the Jewish refugee doctor from Nazi Europe who was a quintessential humanitarian. To be sure, Rosenfeld admired Mao. He was given Mao’s treatise “About the New Democracy” when he first joined the New Fourth Army and he took copious notes, copying many of Mao’s maxims on paper. He frequently sings Mao’s praises in his manuscript. That said, for Rosenfeld, Maoism, I would suggest, represented an alternative or even a solution to the exploitation and abject misery of millions of Chinese people and, by extension, to the threat of fascism worldwide. In this sense, the Chinese were Asia’s Jews. By serving in Mao’s Communist forces—his weapon was his medical expertise—he was fighting for all oppressed people, Chinese and Jews alike. In exile from Austria, in China he discovered purpose in his life—the liberation of not only Chinese but also all oppressed peoples, indeed of mankind. In other words Rosenfeld—the doctor, the Jew, the humanist—was not a doctrinaire Maoist, but he was a stakeholder in Mao’s revolution. 21 This may explain why the last sentence in his manuscript, in the epilogue, reads “Long live the new China!” rather than “Long live Mao Zedong!”22

2.4 “Heimat” But did the new China feel like home to Rosenfeld, driven from Austria, the land of his birth, and particularly Vienna, his adopted city, which occupied a special place in his heart? To be sure, Vienna came to feel increasingly distant. In early 1943, he writes: “Ever more attenuated and colorless became my memory of Vienna.”23 In place of Vienna, he had discovered a new home, his elective home, but it wasn’t China per se. “In the company of the N[ew] 4th A[rmy] I had found a new home

42  Gabriel N. Finder [Heimat],” declares Rosenfeld in his manuscript. 24 He uses the German term Heimat. Heimat is not simply “home.” It signifies a place where a person has or has struck deep, enduring roots. Not the country of China, in his mind, but the company of comrades bearing arms in support of a cause with which he wholeheartedly sympathized—this particular milieu became his Heimat. 25 Vienna, given his bad associations with it, may have become a distant memory, but Rosenfeld was quintessentially European to his bones. During the civil war, he spent almost a year in Harbin in the northeastern corner of China—Harbin was the first large city to fall under Chinese Communist control. He recalls in his manuscript “a delightful city that appears thoroughly European…. In short, for me Harbin was almost a piece of Europe.”26 Or consider Rosenfeld’s encounter with American flyers who were forced to parachute into Communist-held territory when their spy plane was hit during a reconnaissance mission in support of Guomindang forces. He writes that he explained to them that he was “an Austrian and a doctor.”27 After Beijing fell to the Communists in January 1949, Rosenfeld took leave of his many friends and returned to Vienna in the fall of 1949 to seek relief of his heart condition and ascertain what had happened to his family. It was good timing, since he was made to feel out of place in the new China in subtle ways. For instance, he was given the cold shoulder during the Communists’ victory parade in Beijing, and he was forced to wade through the crowd to watch it from the street, far from the official grandstand on which Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai stood surrounded by an assembly of VIPs. In Kaminski’s view, this snub is highly instructive. “Jacob no longer has a rightful place [in the new China],” writes Kaminski. “He is no longer the person who today saved lives in a small, discrete unit; rather, he has become an anonymous person in the gigantic army and administrative apparatus, in which many people strive to go to Beijing to secure a place and position in the building of the new China.”28 Moreover, for all of his devotion to and self-sacrifices for the Communist cause, he was, when push came to shove, still a foreigner— and, thereby, an outsider.29 Yet on the train leaving Beijing on the first leg of his long return journey to Vienna, a wistful Rosenfeld looks out of the window and sees the “landscape that has become dear” (liebgewordene Landschaft) to him.30 As his train departed, Luo Ronghuan reminded him that his roots lay in China. As Kaminski observes, “His friends were worried about whether Jakob Rosenfeld would be able to feel comfortable in Austria. The fears of his friends would prove to be correct in the extreme.”31 At this point, his manuscript ends. Gerd Kaminski interviewed several people who encountered Rosenfeld after this return to Vienna. They told him that although Rosenfeld was reunited with some of his siblings, he could not adapt to life in Vienna. He was profoundly shaken

Jakob Rosenfeld 43 and upset when he learned that his beloved mother had been deported and killed at Maly Trostinec. (His father had died of natural causes.) Return to the Rothschild Hospital was impossible because it was unable to reopen after the war, yet he dreaded the prospect of working alongside former Nazis if another hospital hired him. However, none did. Furthermore, he was disappointed by the disinterest of Sovietoriented publishers and publishers under the control of the Western Allies in his manuscript; they were not interested in the recollections of a former general in the People’s Revolutionary Army. All of his efforts to readjust to life in Vienna were fated to fail. “I was unable to settle in here at all,” he lamented to his sister. 32 A friend recalled that Rosenfeld said something to the effect that “it is perhaps best for him to return to China.”33 The Korean War erupted in June 1950 and he was eager to fight alongside his old comrades-in-arms. Rosenfeld’s application to Chinese consular officials, apparently in East Berlin, for a visa to return to China was denied. He traveled to Bern, Switzerland to apply for a visa at the Chinese embassy in person. His request fell on deaf ears. After the establishment of the PRC and the outbreak of the Korean War, he seems to have fallen victim to the disinclination of the new regime, on the lookout for spies, to admit foreigners to the country, even a man like Rosenfeld who had made a significant contribution to the establishment of the PRC. According to Shen Qizhen, whom Kaminski interviewed, Chinese authorities’ denial of a visa left Rosenfeld nonplussed. As Kaminski astutely puts it, “He [Rosenfeld], who had already been rendered homeless [heimatlos], feels like a man without a home [ohne Heimat] for the second time…. He belongs nowhere; no one needs him.”34 Or as Rosenfeld himself wrote to his sister, “One could just as well be dead.”35 Unable to adjust in Vienna and resigned finally to China’s refusal to readmit him to the country, Rosenfeld, in Kaminski’s words, “wants to belong somewhere. Since his ‘beloved land’ (geliebtes Land) does not seem to want him, he goes to the ‘Promised Land’ (gelobtes Land).”36 His brother Josef had migrated from Shanghai to Tel Aviv after World War II. Rosenfeld arrived there in 1951 and secured a position at the Assuta Medical Center. It’s clear from his letters that Israel’s pioneering spirit appealed to him, but, in his mind, Israel always remained a transit point on the way to China. From Israel he made several inquiries with the Chinese embassy in Bern. This time he received a reply. He gave his relatives and friends the impression that he had assurances from Chinese officials in Bern that the issuance of his visa was imminent. He even asked his sister in London to send him medical supplies that he intended to take with him to China. It was, however, not to be. Rosenfeld died of a heart attack in April 1952 at the age of 49 and was buried in Tel Aviv. His friends in China inquired after him in Vienna in vain, unaware that he had passed away in Israel.

44  Gabriel N. Finder Indeed, Rosenfeld’s life was representative of the modern predicament, exemplifying, as the famed literary scholar Erich Auerbach, writing from his own place of exile in Istanbul, observed, “the task of making oneself at home in existence without fixed points of support in a boundless and incomprehensible world.”37 Rosenfeld had discovered Heimat in China, but China was not tantamount to Heimat. If Rosenfeld, the humanitarian Jewish doctor, could call any set of circumstances home, if any “place” was his elective homeland, his Wahlheimat after his exile from Austria in 1939, it was, ironically, in the camaraderie of soldiers in China with whom he shared a common cause—the liberation of mankind—in the years 1941–1949. But he tragically died homeless, or heimatlos, only three short years later.

2.5  Place in Jewish History Jakob Rosenfeld greatly admired and thoroughly identified with Mao Zedong and Chinese Communists, with their promise to bring equality and peaceful development to all of China’s inhabitants. The liberation of the Chinese people by Communists under Mao’s leadership—this was in complete harmony with Rosenfeld’s own personal political journey, which gestated in Nazi concentration camps and, as is evident from his comparison of Mao with Moses, integrated a Jewish sensibility. I would argue that in the application and transmission of his vast medical knowledge in service to the Communist cause, one sees the intersection of the Jewish sensibility developed by Rosenfeld and other Jews like him—refugees from Nazism who were anxious to change the world—and their sympathy for the idea of a new China inspired by Maoism and governed by Mao. In Rosenfeld’s case, as in the case of many other Jews whose paths led them from Nazi-occupied Europe to China, knowledge transfer was a political act, the result of a lesson Rosenfeld and his cohort drew from their own experiences of oppression, in this case because they were Jews. While many Jewish young adults were attracted to Zionism in the 1930s and 1940s, others gravitated to socialism. Zionism was never an option for Rosenfeld. But there is a similarity between idealistic young Jews of Rosenfeld’s generation who went to Palestine and Rosenfeld. What idealistic Jewish young adults saw in Palestine, on the one hand, and what he and others like him saw in China, on the other, was a utopia in which people from one group could live on equal terms with other peoples, free from prejudice and discrimination.38 This brings me to my second point. Even with its miniscule Jewish community, China could be said to have belonged to the global Jewish Diaspora, but it was unlike the European Jewish Diaspora from which Rosenfeld hailed in one highly significant respect: The Chinese were largely innocent of antisemitism.39 The utopian idea and the absence of antisemitism help

Jakob Rosenfeld 45 explain, through a Jewish lens, China’s appeal to Rosenfeld and other Jews or those of Jewish origin like him. I should add that Rosenfeld made no attempt to hide or escape his Jewishness. He, like many other Jews, was drawn to Communism and socialism because they held out the promise of the coexistence of all peoples, including Jews with others, and the guarantee of the basic rights of all peoples, including Jews. This is what being Jewish meant to Rosenfeld. In a landmark essay, historian Ezra Mendelsohn asks whether historical figures whose Jewish identities were eclipsed by other aspects of their lives should still be considered important for Jewish history. His test cases are Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, the nineteenth-century composer and convert to Christianity, Franz Boas, the anthropologist who championed racial justice, and Berthe Weill, the art connoisseur who discovered Picasso. All three of these significant figures were highly or totally assimilated. They did not regard themselves as belonging to the Jewish people or believe in the existence of a modern Jewish nation, and although they were all victims of antisemitism, it did not define them. Nevertheless, Mendelsohn argues, scholars of Jewish history should take note of them because, as he shows, their respective lives, political and cultural attitudes, and career paths were shaped by their Jewish origins. In Mendelsohn’s words, Jewish history is not only the history of men and women who saw themselves as representatives of the Jewish collective and who sought to promote national or religious Jewish interests. … It must include within its province the behavior and activities of totally assimilated Jews … so long as it can be claimed with a degree of probability that such behavior and activities were in some way connected to these individuals’ Jewish roots. Mendelsohn adds in conclusion: “I have tried to argue here that the careers of Mendelssohn[-Bartholdy], Boas and Weill are connected in not unimportant ways to what is called these days the ‘Jewish experience.’”40 In this vein, I would argue that we should take notice of Rosenfeld in the context of Jewish history because his life, behavior, attitudes, and actions were connected in significant ways to his Jewish roots. When he first arrived in Shanghai, Rosenfeld’s social and political milieus were, for the most part, Jewish. Of course, after he left Shanghai to join Communist fighting units, he associated primarily with Chinese people. That said, his Jewishness is a key to understanding Rosenfeld’s strong feelings for the Chinese, his political affinity for the CCP, and his activities in Mao’s People’s Liberation Army. I suggest that Rosenfeld and other Jews like him, some two dozen or more, who felt not only the push to flee to China because of antisemitism in Europe but also the pull to venture to China and then stay in the country or return to

46  Gabriel N. Finder it after 1949, are emblematic of the Jewish experience in modernity. In their case, they constituted a group of Jewish individuals who, however far they strayed from traditional Jewish national, cultural, and religious concerns, engaged in an unconventional and idiosyncratic reinscription of Jewish identity—here, in a Chinese milieu—in Rosenfeld’s case, an identity shaped by his parental home, his ordeal at concentration camps, emigration, exile, and the ultimately abortive pursuit of a fixed home. Jewishness was only one dimension in the formation of Rosenfeld’s multidimensional life, career, and political allegiances. So it was in the life of other Jews like him whose personal paths led them to China. But their Jewish identity was a significant factor in their fellow feeling for China. Ensuing from this identification of being Jewish, each individual brought certain sensibilities and skill sets—in Rosenfeld’s case, an abiding commitment, fostered in Nazi concentration camps, to freedom from political repression and his medical expertise, which he shared with and transmitted to the Chinese in service to the Communist cause.

Notes 1. The exhibit was dedicated to Rosenfeld and two other physicians of Jewish origin, Richard Frey, also from Austria, and Hans Müller, from Germany, all three of whom joined Communist forces in the struggle to oust Japan from China and then witnessed the birth of the PRC in 1949. 2. On efforts to establish Rosenfeld’s legacy in Austria, China, and Israel, see Gerd Kaminski, General Luo gennant Langnase: Das abenteuerliche Leben des Dr. med. Jakob Rosenfeld (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 1993), 192–213; Gerd Kaminski, ed., Ich kannte sie alle: Das Tagebuch des chinesischen Generals Jakob Rosenfeld (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 2002), 200–221; and Gerd Kaminski, “Der ‘lebende Buddha’ für chinesische Frauen, Dr. Jakob Rosenfeld und andere österreichische Ärzte in China,” in Going East – Going South: Österreichisches Exil in Asien und Afrika, eds. Margit Franz and Heimo Halbrainer (Graz: CLIO, 2014), 601–624, here 610–613. 3. Basic biographical details from Rosenfeld’s life in this essay derive from Kaminski’s books General Luo and Ich kannte sie alle and his book chapter “Der ‘lebende Buddha’ für chinesische Frauen.” 4. See Kaminski, “Der ‘lebende Buddha’ für chinesische Frauen.” 5. Israel Epstein, preface to The Jews in China, ed. Pan Guang (Beijing: China Intercontinental Press, 2001), no pagination. 6. Rosenfeld describes his medical efforts and achievements in several passages in his manuscript; see, e.g. Kaminski, Ich kannte sie alle, 62–64, 127–130; See also descriptions by his Chinese contemporaries of Rosenfeld’s dedication to his patients in Kaminski, General Luo, 60–65, 83, 137, 142–153; and Kaminski, “Der ‘lebende Buddha’ für chinesische Frauen,” 605. 7. Quoted in Kaminski, General Luo, 77; also in Kaminski, “Der ‘lebende Buddha’ für chinesische Frauen,” 605. 8. Kaminski, Ich kannte sie alle, 127–128. 9. Kaminski, General Luo, 144. 10. Kaminski, Ich kannte sie alle, 184.

Jakob Rosenfeld 47 11. Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2019), 75. 12. Kaminski, Ich kannte sie alle, 55. 13. On Maly Trostinec, see Deportation und Vernichtung: Maly Trostinec, ed. Christine Schindler (Vienna: Dokumenationarchiv des österreichischen Widerstands, 2019). 14. Kaminski, Ich kannte sie alle, 57. 15. Ibid., 58–59. 16. Ibid., 59–60. 17. Ibid., 71. 18. Ibid., 190–192. 19. I am reminded of Deuteronomy 18:15, in which Moses says to his Israelite followers: “The Lord will raise a prophet like me from among you, from among your brethren, and you shall heed him.” Did Rosenfeld have this verse in mind? It is almost certain that he did not. But he was obviously conversant with the image, familiar to Jews of his background, of Moses leading the Jewish people out of slavery to freedom. 20. Lovell, Maoism, 26. 21. On Mao’s faith in the power of brute force in service to rebellion, see Lovell, Maoism, chap. 1. 22. Kaminski, Ich kannte sie alle, 193; As Kaminski observes, Rosenfeld was “never a “faint-hearted party loyalist.” Gerd Kaminski, “Dr Jakob Rosenfeld, Mensch und Mythos,” in Jews and China: From Kaifeng … to Shanghai: Jews in China, ed. Roman Malek (Nettetal, Germany: Steyler Verlag, 2000) (Monumento Serica Monograph 46, 461–478, quote on 464.). 23. Kaminski, Ich kannte sie alle, 121. 24. Ibid., 126. 25. Although Rosenfeld doesn’t use the word Heimat to describe his first encounter with the soldiers of the New Fourth Army when he makes his rousing speech from the podium to frenetic applause, Kaminski makes an observation similar to mine. He writes: “Rosenfeld, the one who had become homeless [der heimatlos Gewordene] had once again found a home [eine Heimat gefunden].” Kaminski, “Der ‘lebende Buddha’ für chinesische Frauen,” 604. Edgar Snow expressed a similar sentiment when it was time for him to return to Beijing to write his account of his conversations with Mao and his interactions with other Communist functionaries in their redoubt in Yan’an. Quoting from Red Star over China, Lovell notes, “‘Most of the time I felt completely at ease in their company as if I were with some of my countrymen.’ Little surprise, then, that Snow felt depressed as he left. ‘I felt that I was not going home, but leaving it.’” Lovell, Maoism, 76. 26. Kaminski, Ich kannte sie alle, 163, 172. 27. Ibid., 169. 28. Kaminski, General Luo, 153. 29. Matthias Messmer notes that “perhaps the new leadership want[ed] to quite deliberately prevent any possible interference by Western foreigners.” Matthias Messmer, Jewish Wayfarers in Modern China: Tragedy and Splendor (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 201. 30. Kaminski, Ich kannte sie alle, 185. 31. Kaminski, “Der ‘lebende Buddha’ für chinesische Frauen,” 609. 32. Quoted in Kaminski, Ich kannte sie alle, 194; also in “Der ‘lebende Buddha’ für chinesische Frauen,” 609. 33. Kaminski, Ich kannte sie alle, 194. 34. Ibid., 196. 35. Ibid.

48  Gabriel N. Finder 36. Ibid., 197; also in Kaminski, General Luo, 186. 37. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 311. 38. It should be noted that a modest number of young Jews in Europe promoted the idea of “pan-Asian Zionism.” Eugen Hoeflich, who hailed from Vienna, was representative of this Jewish pan-Asian movement. Hoeflich, who saw no future for Jews in Europe, envisioned a Jewish state in Palestine as part of greater Asia; it would be aligned primarily with Japan. See Hanan Harif, “Asiatic Brothers, European Strangers: Eugen Hoeflich and Pan-Asian Zionism in Vienna,” in Against the Grain: Jewish Intellectuals in Hard Times, eds. Ezra Mendelsohn, Stefani Hoffman, and Richard I. Cohen (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014), 171–185. Many Jews of Rosenfeld’s generation in Vienna and elsewhere in Europe were receptive to the Orient and China as well as to Japan – we might call this “Jewish Orientalism.” Some of them traveled to China, fell in love with the Chinese people, championed the Communists, and stayed in China after 1949. Ruth Weiss was one of them. See, e.g. Ruth Weiss, Am Rande der Geschichte: Mein Leben in China (Osnabrück: Zeller Verlag, 1999). By the same token, Rosenfeld evinced no particular interest in China before he was forced to flee Austria. His affinity for China and its people, not to mention Mao Zedong, took root only after he arrived in China. 39. China was not—and is not—free, however, of pervasive stereotypes of Jews. In this regard, see Zhou Xun, “Jews in Chinese Culture: Representations and Realities,” in Jewries at the Frontier: Accommodation, Identity, Conflict, eds. Sander L. Gilman and Milton Shain (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 224–241; idem, “The ‘Kaifeng Jew’ Hoax: Constructing the ‘Chinese Jew,’” in Orientalism and the Jews, eds. Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2005), 68–79. One such stereotype may have worked to the advantage of Rosenfeld and other Jews like him, reinforcing Chinese Communists’ receptiveness to their presence among them. According to Zhou Xun, in the eyes of many left-wing Chinese intellectuals in the 1930s, not only were Jews and Chinese both oppressed peoples united in a common struggle against imperialism, but also the oppression of the Jews had inspired the Chinese to revolt. In the words of one Chinese writer in 1938, “‘The tears, blood and death of the Jewish people have awakened the oppressed Chinese.’” Zhou Xun, “Jews in Chinese Culture,” 237. 40. Ezra Mendelsohn, “Should We Take Notice of Berthe Weill? Reflections on the Domains of Jewish History,” Jewish Social Studies 1, no. 1 (1994): 22–39, quote on 34.

3

Knowledge from Five Continents Escape Destinations in Publications of German-Speaking Political Refugees, 1933–1940 Swen Steinberg

In fall 1937, the head of the social democratic refugee relief in Prague, Willy Sander, asked for Christmas greetings from German socialist refugees from all over the world who had been assisted by his exile organization in Czechoslovakia once. These greetings were read out at the Christmas party of the social democrats in the Czech capital. However, the refugees did not just send greetings from the countries they had reached. Instead, they reported in letters from a total of twenty-three states and five continents about their experiences— about job opportunities, the role of language, visa regulations, climate, and more; on the occasion of the “fifth year of our emigration”, Sander summed these fifty-nine letters up in the ninetypage brochure Emigrant Letters from Five Continents with an introduction from socialist journalist Edgar Hahnewald, who fled with Sander from Dresden to Czechoslovakia in spring 1933.1 Two aspects are of interest for this volume: on the one hand, there are four letters from British India and four more from South Africa and Palestine in this publication, one message came from Australia and an additional twenty-one letters from Central and South American countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Mexico, and Paraguay. Only five letters came from the United States, and twenty-three more from countries in Western Europe, such as Sweden and England as “known” or well-researched regions for refugees from Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe. 2 The letters from the “global South”, in particular, refer to alternative routes of exile as well as the quantitative distribution of the phenomenon of global flight within the group of German-speaking political refugees, which—although with apparent differences in the numbers— had already taken place in 1937 on five continents. 3 On the other hand, though, these Emigrant Letters also raise questions about the content—namely when and how knowledge about specific destinations has been acquired, translated, distributed, and circulated or perceived?

50  Swen Steinberg

3.1  German-Speaking Political Refugees This chapter is focused on political refugees fleeing Nazi persecution and newspapers set up by socialists, social democrats, communists, democrats, or liberals between 1933 and 1940, especially in Czechoslovakia and France. Most of them were not “ordinary refugees”4; they fled within or into networks established in the 1920s especially in borderland regions5: many of these political refugees were secretaries or other employees of political parties at least on the local level, officials from the workers’ sports, unions, leisure, or consumer associations, journalists and staff of political newspapers, bookstores, and printing or publishing houses, as well as members of parliament on both local and regional levels.6 But the question of how a “political refugee” was defined was difficult to answer, as, at the time, it had not been legally defined nationally or internationally: on the one hand, Norman Bentwich, Director of the High Commission for Refugees from Germany, still distinguished between “Jewish” and “non-Jewish refugees” in 1936. Bentwich estimated the latter at the end of 1933 at around 13,000 and described them primarily as “political refugees, and a smaller number of exiles for freedom of conscience”.7 The American writer and political activist Dorothy Thompson, on the other hand, campaigned in 1938 to resolve precisely this contrast, since categories such as “Jewish”, “Aryan”, or “Nordic” were constructs of the National Socialist ideology that concealed other reasons for fleeing: Many of the German refugees are as ‘Nordic’ as can be, but have had to flee for political reasons, because they were liberals, socialists, democrats, pacifists, or religious devotees. As for a new stream of exiles from former Austria, it includes monarchists of aristocratic background, former members of Chancellor Schuschnigg’s Fatherland Front, and Catholics.8 But “political emigration” or “political refugee” as terms reflected also contemporarily the self-understanding of these groups and has been used for their self-description—and, in addition to Jewish aid organizations, created refugee relief structures mainly based on party affiliation and organizing basic needs for food, cloth, or accommodation.9 Determining the size of this group remains difficult; its extent changed over the years in host countries such as France or Czechoslovakia, mainly due to such events as the February Uprising in Austria in 1934 or the vote on the Saar region in 1935. Until 1941, the number of refugees fleeing Nazi Germany and Austria is estimated at 278,000, most of them persecuted as “Jews”; the number of “political refugees” is estimated at an additional 40,000.10 From a European perspective, the year 1941 marks a

Knowledge from Five Continents 51 caesura: Die Zeitung, a refugee weekly published in London from 1941 to 1945 by Sebastian Haffner and others, wrote in March 1941 about the impossible “ongoing migration” all over Europe. Some weeks later an article reported the “import ban for people”.11 However, it was not only the war, the lack of transportation, or the reluctance of countries all over the globe to provide a safe haven for refugees12 that brought this flight from Europe to an end: in fall 1941, the Nazi leadership forbade any emigration from Germany and German-occupied territories in Europe;13 flight and expulsion was followed by extermination and the Holocaust. Besides relief efforts centered first in Prague and later in Paris, these groups established their publications as early as summer 1933: daily and weekly newspapers, journals, brochures, or book series.14 The newspapers and other periodicals, in particular, had four main objectives: first, to report about Nazi persecution to a mostly politically tied audience in the host country and to mobilize resources or solidarity; second, to develop a platform for discussions about fighting Fascism in Germany and Europe, as well as a Germany after Hitler; third, to support all forms of resistance against Nazism by smuggling these publications into Germany from where much of the information published in these newspapers came from. The fourth objective was focused on group-building within the specific political refugee groups and had impacts on political networks, also represented by small publications like the Emigrant Letters from Five Continents quoted at the beginning. One element of this group-building was the transfer of knowledge on alternative routes of escape: in many cases, countries like Czechoslovakia or France were not final destinations; refugees often remained in transit because of an uncertain legal status or the lack of documents, and the public opinion in these countries changed throughout the 1930s.15 At this point, alternative destinations and knowledge about them became increasingly necessary and in demand.16 But for political refugees, this was connected to a fundamental change of perspective: most of them fled into close-border regions, hoping to return soon. The efforts to support the resistance struggle in Germany were a vital element of this situation in-between; these stages of exile were also connected to aspects such as identity or belonging.17 In 1935, though regional socialist writer and journalist refugees in Czechoslovakia, such as Robert Grötzsch and Edgar Hahnewald, began looking “for a new country” or “returned home” into exile—they began to accept the host country as the new home country.18 Looking for alternative destinations further away from the ongoing German aggression was yet another strategy for coping with the “legal limbo” of refugees in the latter half of the 1930s. When and how were escape routes discussed, what types of knowledge can be observed, and what kind of refugee agency can be identified

52  Swen Steinberg as transfers or translations of knowledge? This paper analyzes this perspective using the example of the German social democratic refugee weekly Neuer Vorwärts, which appeared between 1933 and 1938 in Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary) with circulation declining from 28,000 to less than 10,000; until 1940 Neuer Vorwärts appeared in Paris with a circulation of around 3,500.19 This decline hides the distribution, though; between the end of November 1937 and the summer of 1939, the weekly was still available in more than twenty countries in Central Europe as well as overseas. 20 In addition, the German communist refugee weekly Gegen-Angriff, also published in Prague and later in Paris, and the Pariser Tageblatt (since 1936 Pariser Tageszeitung) with a liberaldemocratic orientation, which also appeared in the French capital from 1933 to 1940, are included. This presentation and representation of alternative routes of escape and knowledge about them are analyzed first as a topic in general in the publications mentioned earlier and starting in 1933 in countries such as Czechoslovakia and France. Second, the “peak” of the political refugee press coverage in 1938/1939 about destinations in the global South will be analyzed. This article argues that sources like the publications of the political refugees from Nazi persecution represent network-related bodies of knowledge from the experience of forced migration “from country to country”—bodies of knowledge that could only be created and translated during and after this migration. Since these political refugee newspapers were also distributed in the countries on which they reported, processes of knowledge circulation can also be identified. At the same time, these knowledge transfers were embedded in politics because of the specific ideological orientation of these refugee groups.

3.2  Alternative Destinations? The intersection of migration and knowledge is a historiographical field in historical research that has been experiencing growth in very recent years. 21 Understanding this intersection benefits especially from an actor-centered approach focusing on migrants and their agency. Migrants are more than government-managed objects, numbers for statistical analysis, or recipients of information. Instead, they are knowledge actors in their own right: they influence, transform, extend, or even forget bodies of knowledge before, during, and after migration. 22 These phenomena occur as migrants and their knowledge faced specific social, political, cultural, and economic constellations during, and especially after migration. All forms of migrant knowledge had always been confronted with ignorance, devaluation, or partial recognition. 23 Newspapers and journals of German-speaking refugees from 1933 onward contained this kind of migrant knowledge—knowledge

Knowledge from Five Continents 53 that migrated, knowledge produced during migration, knowledge about this migration. These forms of knowledge—one may call it everyday or experiential knowledge—have one aspect in common: they were produced, conveyed, or circulated by individual actors and represent a specific agency in the process of forced migration. Volker M. Heins recently published an article on the question “Can the refugee speak?”.24 “Speechlessness”, on the one hand, and self-empowerment, on the other, had been topics in exile studies for quite some time. 25 But identifying the historical actor on both sides, the writer and the reader, might be a helpful perspective for the analysis of the printed sources of Germanspeaking political refugees. Following the assessment mentioned earlier that many political refugees were working for an imminent return to Germany or later to Austria and the Saar region, the aspect of alternative routes of exile appears surprisingly early in their exile newspapers. Already in December 1933, the Pariser Tageblatt—and subsequently other refugee newspapers—reported on the invitation of German Jewish refugees to Birobidzhan (Биробиджáн) by the deputy People’s Commissar for Agriculture of the Soviet Union. 26 In the settlement, declared in 1934, the Jewish Autonomous Republic north of Vladivostok, refugees should be accommodated. This project of settling European refugees, which was never implemented, like many other settlement plans, was repeatedly discussed in the press of the German political emigration until spring 1934. It returned to the press coverage, particularly in the context of the settlement planning in Northern Rhodesia, in 1938/1939. 27 Nevertheless, this example should not obscure the fact that the global flight as an individual perspective has been a marginal topic in the publications of political refugee groups in the first years of exile. Starting in 1933, the newspapers of political refugees published articles dealing with the conditions of “escape”, such as the issue of passports and visas or work regulations28 as well as the fruitless international refugee conferences. They discussed the possibilities of overseas migration or settlement. 29 But for approximately two years, only countries in Europe were introduced as alternative escape destinations. Neuer Vorwärts published, for example, in December 1934 the article “Emigrate, but where to?”, referring to the host conditions in twenty-one European countries like France, Sweden, or Spain.30 Only two months later, in late January 1935, the same socialist refugee newspaper published the article “Closed World. Emigration to Overseas Territories” about escape destinations far beyond Europe—the article introduced visa regulations, job opportunities, and climate conditions, for example, in Palestine, China, Siam, the Philippines, India, Angola, and Kenya. In total, the article named thirteen destinations in Central and South America, eleven in Africa, and twelve in Asia. However, the article made it clear

54  Swen Steinberg from the beginning that opportunities to reach these destinations were less promising or even impossible: “immigration to Australia is blocked”. 31 The changing public opinion determined the context of this article in the country marked by Czechoslovakia’s presidential transition from Tomáš G. Masaryk to Edvard Beneš in December 1935: the country increasingly became a transit country and changed the immigration policies for German-speaking refugees. 32 These mass media-related changes can also be observed in other countries at that time. 33 In April 1936, Prager Nachrichten, a German-speaking daily in Czechoslovakia without direct connection to the political refugees, raised the question “Where is the World still open?” and recommend Syria as one of the possible destinations for Jewish and other refugees in the country. 34 This change of public opinion was, therefore, triggered by a variety of developments: first by the stability of the Nazi regime that made the return of the refugees impossible. Second, by antisemitism in Czechoslovakia that stigmatized all refugees in the country as unasked-for. And third, by Nazi persecution, especially the intensified propaganda against Jews in summer 1935, followed by the Nurnberg Laws in September 1935 and an increasing number of refugees from Germany. A similar effect was associated with the “Saar refugees” in early 1935; Jewish and above all political refugees who fled to France sparked a debate in conservative Christian circles whether these people should be settled in the French colonies in Africa. 35 As a side note, it should be added that the French colonies— in contrast to British colonies—were hardly a topic in the newspapers of German political refugees published in France: the “Guyana Report”, discussed in February 1939, and the related reports of marriages of convenience between Austrians and French to reach French Guyana, was more of an exception. 36 The increasing coverage of these alternative routes or destinations in 1935 in the newspapers of the German-speaking refugees followed an ideological pattern and already marked a knowledge boundary: advocating for further migration was connected to basic ideas of fighting Fascism in Europe and the political context in these specific countries or regions. Beyond the settlement in Birobidzhan and the exceptional emigration of about 800 Austrian “Schutzbündler”—former members of the paramilitary organization of the social democratic party— to the Soviet Union in 1934, 37 communist Gegen-Angriff presented no country from the perspective of onward migration until 1937: the communists refused this migration from refugee host countries like Czechoslovakia or France as a weakening of the fight against National Socialism in Central Europe. In contrast, in 1935/1936, numerous articles about emigration to Brazil, Ecuador, and Paraguay appeared in Pariser Tageblatt and Pariser Tageszeitung. 38 The political situation in the countries of refuge formed another marker to include or exclude

Knowledge from Five Continents 55 specific knowledge in the newspapers or other publications of the political refugees. The Emigrant Letters brochure quoted at the beginning contained, for example, no letter from the Soviet Union—a destination “unthinkable” for German social democrats, similar to socialist Bolivia for liberal democrats. 39 And it might be no surprise that Neuer Vorwärts did not report specifically about the Birobidzhan settlement but threw this project in the mud by characterizing it as rivalry to Palestine, stricken by famine and epidemic diseases.40 In cases like this, the political orientation became an obstacle and prevented knowledge transfers or even circulation, not uncommonly based on false accusations or preconceived opinions. The areas of interest in these articles were nonetheless recurrent topics in the newspapers from four perspectives, but only more or less related to the aspect of further migration: first, concerning the colonies and dominions as spaces of imperialist-oppressive policies of Western colonial nations.41 Incidentally, this was the only reason why the communists in Prague supported the project in Birobidzhan—the Jewish Autonomous Republic in the Soviet Union seemed to be a better option to them than a Palestine under the control of the British imperialists. Second, the articles covered German international and mainly colonial political ambitions as well as the associated activities of German propaganda in the context of the so-called Germans abroad (Auslandsdeutschtum).42 Third, the regions—especially India— were thematized from a cultural-historical perspective, for example, in book reviews.43 Fourth, there has been a reflection on the settlements in Palestine as well as those in Syria,44 beginning in 1934. However, Palestine was always only a descriptive topic that was never discussed as a possible country of emigration in the newspapers of Germanspeaking political refugees: Palestine remained a preserve of Jewish organizations and their publications such as Korrespondenzblatt über Auswanderungs- und Siedlungswesen, Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt or Das Jüdische Volk, all published in Berlin, or later in destinations in the global South such as Shanghai Jewish Chronicle starting in 1938. Political German-speaking refugee newspapers marked Palestine mainly as a particular case because it was “only open for Jewish refugees”.45 As a result of the developments and public opinion in host countries such as Czechoslovakia or France, the number of articles presenting escape possibilities beyond Europe increased between 1935 and 1938 in the publications of the German-speaking refugees. These articles became more and more specific regarding questions of skills or specific knowledge that was necessary to build a new existence: refugees reported how they found their way into these regions, they reported problems and possibilities.46 This had very concrete consequences for refugee relief efforts, especially in Paris and Prague. From 1935 onward, the organizations increasingly turned their activities to the

56  Swen Steinberg skills discussed in such articles; the provision of knowledge under the label of “retraining” became a main focus of the support for the refugees—with a clear focus on agricultural training and language proficiency.47 Willy Sander reported this in the Emigrant Letters brochure from 1937, too, and mentioned the offers of the social democratic refugee aid in Prague.48 But it became even more concrete after the failed refugee conference of Evian49 and at the beginning of 1939 in two series, which focused on escape destinations in Asia, Africa, and Central or South America.

3.3  Overseas Emigration Destinations From January to April 1939, Neuer Vorwärts in Paris published the thirteen-part series “Overseas Emigration Destinations”, 50 from February to May 1939, the twenty-one-part series “Where to Emigrate? The Enquete of the Pariser Tageszeitung” appeared in the French capital. 51 The articles were only devoted to a specific selection of countries in regions: the series by the German-speaking social democrats in Neuer Vorwärts broadly covered the countries and regions Argentina, Mexico, Columbia/Venezuela, Uruguay/Paraguay, Middle America, New Guinea/Philippines, West Indies, Dominica, Newfoundland/ Canada, Canada, Africa, Guyana, and Australia. Instead, the liberaldemocratic Pariser Tageszeitung printed a more focused series with more than one article for a country or region; this series covered Bolivia (4), Columbia (4), Cuba (2), Uruguay (4), Australia (2), China, Shanghai, and Manchukuo (3). The compiled articles—nearly none of them signed by an author— were based on a variety of sources: on reports in other refugee newspapers, whereby newspapers such as the Frankfurter Zeitung appearing in the German Reich were also used. There were also publications from refugee relief organizations about those countries recommended for reading. Above all, the information came from people who had found their way to these countries, describing their experiences and the knowledge gained during and after migration in letters52: not only about the journey, visa requirements, the mood of the population, and politics toward the refugees, but also about food and climate. The article about Bolivia in the Pariser Tageszeitung in March 1939, for example, was based on two letters coming from a man and a woman who immigrated to the country, describing the knowledge they gained on the labor market as well as limitations for specific professions. 53 The following article in the series provided a map of South America and continued the description of job opportunities in Bolivia—again knowledge provided by a “German immigrant”. 54 On April 1, 1939, an article about Columbia presented similar information, for example, about language abilities, also given by an “immigrant”. 55 The same

Knowledge from Five Continents 57 can be observed in the Neuer Vorwärts series, in February 1939; the knowledge presented about Uruguay came, for example, from “a letter of one of our friends”. 56 The letter writers who provided this specific knowledge remained anonymous with a few exceptions: when refugees wrote entire articles about their experiences, like Liese Wahrum in July 1939 in the Pariser Tageszeitung series about her way to and living in Australia. 57 Although a relatively broad impression of the opportunities for life and work was offered—nature and the sometimes far-reaching historical developments of the regions and countries were the central focus of these articles—no article was written as an invitation to seek passage into these regions. In some cases, the articles even warned against these countries; articles in Pariser Tageszeitung in April 1939 were entitled “Warning for Shanghai” or “Concerns about Mandschukuo”. 58 Some weeks later, the same series described Cuba as only a “transit country”. 59 This, undoubtedly, reflected the situation in 1939: in particular the situation of receptivity and entry requirements in many countries as well as the lack of documents and the stateless status of many refugees, especially political functionaries who had been expatriated by the Nazi state since 1933. But the articles in these series are an indication of the global dimension the refugee situation had already reached in early 1939. Respectively, they show how the horizon within the group of political refugees between 1933 and 1939 became wider and wider. Similar observations can be made in the Emigrant Letters from 1937, this brochure was written by German social democrats—and only for them—and represented similar everyday knowledge as well as experiential knowledge: a letter from Port Elizabeth reported, for example, not only about the labor market and living conditions, but also about the colonial setting in South Africa, the inequalities, and not least, the racism the writer experienced.60 A letter from Buenos Aires reported about the labor market, too, and the relation to the German-speaking minority in Argentina: the socialist diaspora organizations helped with the accommodation of refugees but were limited to the fact that all employers of German descent were “throughout Fascists”.61 A letter from Columbia described details of the travel, arrival, and settlement in the new country—bodies of knowledge this migrant could gain only through migration.62 Further, these Emigrant Letters from Five Continents reveal processes of cultural translation during and after migration; such forms of transfers are in general located on a variety of “interconnected levels”—they take place “between generations; between and within ethnic or religious communities; between migrant groups and the state or receiving society; between migrants and their former compatriots”.63 In the letters of the German social democratic refugees, such translations took place by focusing on the entire group of refugees from Nazi

58  Swen Steinberg persecution: many letters stated that, for example, the larger group of Jewish refugees was in a much more difficult situation and confronted with antisemitism in many host societies as well as the visa policies of the countries and regions in the global South.64 Similar to the racism in British colonies or dominions, such kind of translated knowledge came from specific personal experience and hints of nonofficial practices often unreported in newspapers or statements of governments. This translation of local experiential knowledge was, therefore, also connected to emotions like empathy or solidarity. But amongst the group of German social democratic refugees were also Jews, stigmatized in a double sense. For them, this translation of cultural knowledge might have had another meaning and was related to decisions of further migration. Another form of translation can be found in the use of currency known to the readers who had once been in Czechoslovakia. A letter from Columbia used, for example, not Pesos but Koruna československa to give a sense of wages, cost of living, and specific prices for butter, flour, and meat.65 These bodies of knowledge circulated from countries and regions in Africa, Asia, and South America to Central Europe and back in this publication, and, in addition, through Neuer Vorwärts: in January 1938, the exile weekly of the German social democrats published the two-page article “The other Germanness”, quoting specific migrant knowledge in letters from India, South Africa, and Australia in this brochure.66 But even if this knowledge was published in this newspaper, the audience remained limited to the political in-group of social democratic refugees and gained no wider distribution beyond this ideological knowledge boundary. Similarly, the knowledge presented in the series mentioned earlier was not limited to the readers of the newspapers in the French place of publication. This knowledge was also perceived in the countries of the letter writers, because the newspapers (albeit with delay) were distributed and read in these countries: in summer 1939, Neuer Vorwärts was still available in Palestine, Argentina, Brazil, and the United States. 67 This is especially evidenced in the “mailbox” section (“Briefkasten”) of Pariser Tageszeitung where readers responded to reports from the countries to which they themselves had fled and added own knowledge and experiences, for example, about climate conditions, visa regulations, or the average cost of living 68 —again bodies of knowledge acquired during and after migration. The same processes of knowledge circulation can be observed even after 1940 within the political groups and in their “small newsletters” mostly published in London, but also sent from here to other countries and political refugees worldwide. 69 And, finally, these forms of circulation or dissemination can be observed the other way round because refugee relief organizations resorted to the information in such articles as well as private travel agencies, which advertised their offers

Knowledge from Five Continents 59 more and more since 1938 in the newspapers analyzed here: in addition to offers of language courses and learning professions for overseas migration, relief organizations and private agencies were also places where knowledge accumulated from sources like the newspapers of political refugee groups has been made available—via the agencies, of course, for money.70

3.4 Summary The ongoing pressure of German foreign policy on Czechoslovakia made the publication and later also the distribution of Germanspeaking political refugee newspaper and journals by late 1937 impossible, and most of the political papers had to move to France.71 After an “evil year in exile” and the German invasion of France in 1940, the German-speaking political refugees eventually lost their newspapers: Neuer Vorwärts and Pariser Tageszeitung were terminated, and almost nowhere could the costly refounding of a newspaper be organized. Political statements or activities were prohibited in many neutral or allied countries until 1943.72 In Britain, Sweden, Canada, and even the United States, with few exceptions, newsletters were permitted only for in-group communication of political refugees, and in these publications, the countries and regions in Asia or Africa were marginally discussed. There are two reasons: first and aforementioned, the increased numbers of global escape routes were locked soon after the outbreak of the Second World War. Second, there were numerous destinations in the British sphere of influence, which is why organs appearing in the United Kingdom were probably reserved for diplomatic reasons. At any rate, it is more than conspicuous that, for example, in the Sozialistische Mitteilungen published by German social democratic refugees in London or the London Information of the Austrian Socialists in Great Britain, countries such as India are only discussed in the periphery and mainly with a focus on domestic politics, not as places of emigration. But, at the same time, the political refugees in London continued to manage sending Sozialistische Mitteilungen, for example, to British India.73 This communication of information about destinations beyond Europe shifted more and more into the field of private correspondence within groups of political refugees, in which they reported in the form of chain letters or letter transcripts about these regions. Such kinds of “epistolary practices” were limited to neither political refugees74 nor refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe.75 The letters and reports written by refugees in overseas territories and printed in the newspapers in Czechoslovakia and France are one example of knowledge that has been conditioned by a specific experience gained in migration: knowledge that was distributed, circulated, and, through the reactions in the letters-to-the-editor section, probably

60  Swen Steinberg partly modified. It remains an open question how these processes of knowledge transfers and translations were related to other parameters such as gender and especially age; both the newspaper series and the Letters from Five Continents covered the entire spectrum from young to old as well as letters from men and women.76 The aspect of modification hints at another open field because all articles quoted here had authors—journalists—who, in turn, used the knowledge from the letters sent to them—who also translated it somehow into knowledge for a specific audience. Such kinds of modifications might have led to the ideological boundaries of knowledge transfers because the presentation, mediation, or translation of knowledge about alternative routes of escape has clearly been filtered by political considerations in publications of political refugees. Synoptically, the question here was not whether the refugee was able to speak; it was more if she or he was allowed to do so, even among fellow refugees.

Notes 1. Wilhelm Sander, ed., Emigranten-Briefe aus fünf Erdteilen (Prague: Sozialdemokratische Flüchtlingshilfe, 1938), v; Swen Steinberg, “Karl Herschowitz kehrt heim:” Der Schriftsteller-Journalist Edgar Hahnewald zwischen sächsischer Heimat und der Heimkehr ins Exil (Berlin: Metropol, 2016). 2. Swen Steinberg and Anthony Grenville, “Forgotten Destinations? Refugees from Nazi-Occupied Europe in British Colonies, Dominions and Overseas Territories,” Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies 20, (2019), special issue Refugees from NaziOccupied Europe in British Overseas Territories: 1–18, 1–2. 3. Margit Franz and Heimo Halbrainer, “Eine neue Landkarte der Vertreibung durch den Nationalsozialismus – eine Einleitung,” in Going East – Going South. Österreichisches Exil in Asien und Afrika, ed. Idem. (Graz: Clio, 2014), 11–19, 11; Atina Grossmann, “Remapping Relief and Rescue: Flight, Displacement, and International Aid for Jewish Refugees during World War II,” New German Critique 39, no. 3 (2012): 61–79. 4. Wolfgang Benz, ed., Das Exil der kleinen Leute: Alltagserfahrungen deutscher Juden in der Emigration (Munich: Beck, 1991). 5. Swen Steinberg, “Grenz-Netzwerke, Grenz-Arbeit, Grenz-Exil: Der deutsch-tschechoslowakische Grenzraum als politischer Ort, 1920–1938,” in Grenze als Erfahrung und Diskurs, eds. Hermann Gätje and Sikander Singh (Tübingen: narr/franck/attempo, 2018); Helga Schreckenberger, ed., Networks of Refugees from Nazi Germany. Continuities, Reorientations, and Collaborations in Exile (Amsterdam: Brill, 2016). 6. Swen Steinberg, “Reorganisation, inhaltliche Arbeit und alte Konflikte: Zur langfristigen Prägung gewerkschaftlicher Exilnetzwerke kleiner und mittlerer Funktionäre in Großbritannien nach 1938,” Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies 15 (2014): 93–117; idem, “How to Become Isolated in Isolation? Networks in the German Political and Trade Union Exile after 1933,” in Networks of Refugees from Nazi Germany. Continuities, Reorientations, and Collaborations in Exile, ed. Helga Schreckenberger (Amsterdam: Brill, 2016);

Knowledge from Five Continents 61 idem, “Should I Stay or Should I Go? Regional Functionaries, Political Networks, and the German-Czechoslovakian Borderlands in 1933,” in Somewhere Between Home and Arrival: Preliminary Stage of Exile, ed. Reinhard Andress (Amsterdam: Brill, 2020); idem, “Der Blick von unten. Lokale und regionale Partei- und Gewerkschaftsfunktionäre im Exil der Tschechoslowakei,” in Zeitdiagnose im Exil. Zur Deutung des Nationalsozialismus nach 1933, eds. Rüdiger Hachtmann, Franka Maubach and Markus Roth (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2020). 7. Norman Bentwich, The Refugees from Germany, April 1933 to December 1935 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1936), 198. 8. Dorothy Thompson, Refugees. Anarchy or Organization (New York: Random House, 1938), 56. 9. Swen Steinberg, “Kochen im Kollektiv. Selbstorganisation und Verpflegung in tschechoslowakischen Flüchtlingsheimen (1933–1938),” in Küche der Erinnerung. Essen und Exil, eds. Ursula Seeber and Veronika Zwerger (Vienna: New Academic Press, 2018); Kateřina Čapková and Michal Frankl, Unsichere Zuflucht. Die Tschechoslowakei und ihre Flüchtlinge aus NS-Deutschland und Österreich 1933–1938 (Vienna/ Cologne/Weimar: Böhlau, 2012) [first published as idem, Nejisté útočiště. Československo a uprchlíci před nacismem, 1933–1938 (Praha: Paseka, 2008)], 104–114, 122–123; Hans-Georg Glaser, Prag und die Deutsche Emigration. Verfolgte Juden halfen verfolgten Deutschen (Aachen: Shaker, 2009); Martin K. Bachstein, “Die Beziehungen zwischen sudetendeutschen Sozialdemokraten und dem deutschen Exil: Dialektische Freundschaft,” in Drehscheibe Prag. Zur deutschen Emigration in der Tschechoslowakei 1933–1939, eds. Peter Becher and Peter Heumos (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1992), 42–44; Bohumil Černý, Most k novému životu. Německá emigrace v ČSR v letech 1933–1939 (Praha: Lidová demokracie, 1967). 10. Corinna Unger, Reise ohne Wiederkehr? Leben im Exil 1933 bis 1945 (Darmstadt: Primus, 2009). 11. “Weiterwanderung,” Die Zeitung, 20 March 1941; P.H. Frankel, “Einfuhrverbot für Menschen,” ibid., 21 April 1941. See for this exile newspaper Jutta Vinzent, “‘Exilpresse digital’ in Support of Researching Visual Material: Images in Die Zeitung,” Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies 9, (2007): 79–93. 12. David Scott FitzGerald, Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); Doerte Bischoff and Miriam Rürup, eds., Ausgeschlossen: Staatsbürgerschaft, Staatenlosigkeit und Exil, special issue Exilforschung 18 (2018); Steven T. Katz and Juliane Wetzel, eds., Refugee Policies from 1933 until Today: Challenges and Responsibilities (Berlin: Metropol, 2018); Julia Schulze Wessel, Grenzfiguren. Zur politischen Theorie des Flüchtlings (Bielefeld: transcript, 2017). 13. Debórah Dwork and Richard Jan van Pelt, Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933–1946 (New York/London: Norton, 2009), 189–197. 14. Swen Steinberg, “An der Schwelle. Die sozialdemokratische Flüchtlingszeitung ‚Neuer Vorwärts‘in Paris und der Ausbruch des Krieges 1939,” Krieg und Literatur/War and Literature. Internationales Jahrbuch zur Kriegsund Antikriegsliteraturforschung/International Yearbook on War and Anti-War Literature XXVI (2020); Celia Aijmer Rydsjo and Ann Katrin Jonsson, Exiles in Print: Little Magazines in Europe, 1921–1938 (Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang, 2016); Hélène Roussel and Lutz Winckler, eds., Rechts und links der Seine: “Pariser Tageblatt” und “Pariser Tageszei-

62  Swen Steinberg tung” 1933–1940 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002); Lutz Winkler, ed., Unter der “Coupole”. Die Paris-Feuilletons Hermann Wendels 1933–1936 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995); Hélène Roussel and Lutz Winkler, eds., Deutsche Exilpresse und Frankreich 1933–1940 (Bern: Lang, 1992). 15. Čapková and Frankl, Unsichere Zuflucht; Claudia Curio, “Unwilling Refuge. France and the Dilemma of Illegal Immigration, 1933–1939,” in Refugees from Nazi Germany and the Liberal European States, eds. Frank Caestecker and Bob Moore (New York/Oxford: Berghahn, 2010); Charmian Brinson and Marian Malet, eds., Exile in and from Czechoslovakia during the 1930s and 1940s, special issue Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies 11, (2009); Michal Frankl, “Azyl nebo dočasné útočiště? Proměny československé uprchlické politiky, 1933–1938,” in Exil  v Praze  a  Ceskoslovensku  1918–1938/Exile in Prague and Czechoslovakia 1918–1938, ed. Alena Mišková (Praha: Pražská edice, 2005); Kateřina Čapková, “Československo jako útočiště uprchlíků před nacismem!?,” in ibid. 16. Franz and Halbrainer, “Eine neue Landkarte”; Grossmann, “Remapping Relief”. 17. Tabea Alexa Linhard and Timothy H. Parsons, eds., Mapping Migration, Identity, and Space (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Christel Baltes-Löhr, Beate Petra Kory and Gabriela Sandor, Auswanderung und Identität: Erfahrungen von Exil, Flucht und Migration in der deutschsprachigen Literatur (Bielefeld: transcript, 2019); Kristina Schulz, Wiebke von Bernstorff and Heike Klapdor, eds., Grenzüberschreitungen: Migrantinnen und Migranten als Akteure im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Edition text+kritik, 2019). 18. Swen Steinberg, “Tormann Bobby: Biografie, Netzwerke und Identität in Robert Grötzschs Exil-Arbeiterjugend- und Sportroman von 1938,” in Deutschsprachige Kinder- und Jugendliteratur während der Zwischenkriegszeit und im Exil, ed. Susanne Blumesberger and Jörg Thunecke (Frankfurt a. M.: Lang, 2017); idem, Karl Herschowitz. 19. Steinberg, “An der Schwelle,” 151, 154–155. 20. “Impressum,” Neuer Vorwärts, 28 November 1937; “Bezugbedingungen,” ibid., 11 June 1939. 21. Simone Lässig and Swen Steinberg, eds., Young Migrants in the History of Knowledge, special issue KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 3, no. 2 (2019); Philipp Strobl, “Migrant Biographies as a Prism for Explaining Transnational Knowledge Transfers,” Migrant Knowledge, 7 October 2019, https://migrantknowledge.org/2019/10/07/migrantbiographies-as-a-prism-for-explaining-transnational-knowledgetransfers/(accessed 31 August 2020); Andrea Westermann, “Migrant Knowledge: An Entangled Object of Research,”  Migrant Knowledge, 14 March 2019, https://migrantknowledge.org/2019/03/14/migrantknowledge/ (accessed 31 August 2020); Levke Harders, “Migration und Biographie: Mobile Leben schreiben,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 29, (2018): 17–36; Simone Lässig and Swen Steinberg, eds., Knowledge and Migration, special issue Geschichte und Gesellschaft 43, no. 3 (2017); Peter Burke, Exiles and Expatriates in the History of Knowledge, 1500–2000 (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2017). 22. Simone Lässig and Swen Steinberg, “Knowledge on the Move. New Approaches toward a History of Migrant Knowledge,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 43, no. 3 (2017), special issue Knowledge and Migration: 313–346, 326.

Knowledge from Five Continents 63 23. Lukas M. Verburgt, “The History of Knowledge and the Future History of Ignorance,” KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 4, no. 1 (2020): 1–24; Robert N. Proctor and Londa L. Schiebinger, eds., Agnotology. The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 24. Volker M. Heins, “Can the Refugee Speak? Albert Hirschmann and the Changing Meanings of Exile,” Thesis Eleven, no. 158 (June 2020), https:// journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0725513619888666 (accessed 31 August 2020). 25. Helene Maimann “Sprachlosigkeit. Ein zentrales Phänomen der Exilerfahrung,” in Leben im Exil. Probleme der Integration deutscher Flüchtlinge im Ausland 1933–1945, eds. Wolfgang Frühwald and Wolfgang Schieder (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1981). 26. “Auswanderung nach Sowjetrussland: Das Angebot der MoskauerRegierung. Die juedische Republik Biro-Bidschan,” Pariser Tageblatt, 15 December 1933. 27. “Für Ansiedlung deutscher Juden in Biro Bidschan,” Pariser Tageblatt, 7 March 1934; “Die Verfassung von Biro-Bidschan,” ibid., 16 May 1934; “Erste Sowjetkonferenz in Biro-Bidschan,” ibid., 26 December 1934; “Der Aufbau von Biro-Bidschan,” ibid., 18 January 1936; “Die Sowjetregierung baut Biro-Bidschan: Das Budget für 1936,” ibid., 10 May 1936; “Ansiedlung von 100.000 Juden in Biro-Bidschan,” Pariser Tageszeitung, 7 June 1937. See for the overarching topic of settlement planning Susanne Heim, “Zwischen Notlösung und Utopie. Projekte zur Kollektivansiedlung von Jüdinnen und Juden,” in Going East – Going South. Österreichisches Exil in Asien und Afrika, eds. Margit Franz and Heimo Halbrainer (Graz: Clio, 2014). 28. See for example “Emigrantenpässe. Eine Aufgabe für den Völkerbund,” Neuer Vorwärts, 1 October 1933; “Aufenthaltsrecht und Pässe für deutsche Flüchtlinge,” Pariser Tageszeitung, 23 August 1936. 29. “Das Los der Verbannten: Emigranten ohne Land und Recht,” Neuer Vorwärts, 17 July 1938. 30. “Auswandern, aber wohin?” Neuer Vorwärts, 9 December 1934. 31. “Verschlossene Welt. Die Auswanderung nach Uebersse,” Neuer Vorwärts, 27 January 1935. 32. Čapková and Frankl, Unsichere Zuflucht, 220–238. 33. Philipp Strobl, ed., Die Flüchtlingskrise der 1930er Jahre in australischen Tageszeitungen Eine medienhistorische Diskursanalyse (Hamburg: Dr. Kovacs, 2019). 34. “Wo die Welt noch offen ist,” Prager Nachrichten, 27 April 1936. 35. “Was wird aus den Saaremigranten?,” Neuer Vorwärts, 10 February 1935. 36. “Heirat von Ausländern,” Pariser Tageszeitung, 17 May 1939. 37. “Sowjetunion – Unsere neue Heimat,” Der Gegen-Angriff, 6 June 6/16 November 1934; Wolfgang Schellenbacher, “From Political Activism to Disillusionment. Austrian Socialist Refugees in Czechoslovakia, 1934–1938,” S:I.M.O.N. – Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation, 5, no. 2 (2018): 78–94. 38. G.M., “Auswanderung nach Brasilien: Aussichten, Lebensmöglichkeiten und Klima,” Pariser Tageblatt, 30 April 1934; “Auswanderung nach Brasilien,” ibid., 23 August 1934; “Auswanderung nach Brasilien? Möglichkeiten und Aussichten,” ibid., 14 January 1936; “Auswanderung nach Ecuador,” ibid., 21 January 1936; Georg Bernhard, “Paraguay und Hicem,” ibid., 24 May 1936; “Süd-Amerika als Ziel: Ein Ehrenzeugnis

64  Swen Steinberg für die Emigration,” ibid. [Pariser Tageszeitung], 12 June 1936; “Erschwerung der Einwanderung nach Südamerika: Verschärfte Bestimmungen für Brasilien und Argentinien,” ibid., 1 December 1936. 39. “Wohin auswandern? Bolivien – wirtschaftlich geeignet, aber ...,” Pariser Tageszeitung, 7 March 1939. 40. “Verschlossene Welt”. 41. Steinberg and Grenville, “Forgotten Destinations”. 42. See as an example “Deutschlands Kolonialforderungen,” Neuer Vorwärts, 2 September 1936. 43. See as an example “Neue Romane,” Neuer Vorwärts, 3 March 1935. 44. “Siedlung in Syrien,” Pariser Tageblatt, 15 April 1934. 45. “Verschlossene Welt”. 46. See as an example “Brasilianische Emigrantensorgen,” Pariser Tageszeitung, 23 December 1936. Especially the sections “letters to the editor” or “mailbox” contained numerous articles from refugees, some responding to reports in the newspaper of the political refugees. 47. See for example “Umschulungs- und Siedlungsplaene für Oesterreicher: Landwirtschaftsschulen,” Pariser Tageszeitung, 1 December 1939. 48. [Sander], Emigrantenbriefe, 88–90. 49. Paul R. Bartrop, The Evian Conference of 1938 and the Jewish Refugee Crisis (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Jochen Thies, Evian 1938: Als die Welt die Juden verriet (Essen: Klartext, 2017). 50. See for the description of the objectives of the series “Nach Übersee. Die sozialdemokratische Flüchtlingshilfe informiert,” Neuer Vorwärts, 2 May 1939. 51. See the first part of the series “Wohin auswandern? Eine Enquete der Pariser Tageszeitung,” Pariser Tageszeitung, 27 February 1939. 52. Lässig and Steinberg, “Knowledge on the Move,” 332. 53. “Wohin auswandern? Bolivien – wirtschaftlich geeignet, aber …”. 54. “Bolivien braucht nur Pioniere. Ein unerschlossenes Land – Primitive Lebensverhältnisse,” Pariser Tageszeitung, 10 March 1939. 55. “Die Auswanderung nach Kolumbien,” Pariser Tageszeitung, 1 April 1939. 56. “Uruguay und Paraguay,” Neuer Vorwärts, 26 February 1939. 57. Liese Wahrum, “Australien auf den zweiten Blick,” Pariser Tageszeitung, 20 June 1939; idem, ibid., 23 June 1939. 58. “Der Ferne Osten: Warnung vor Shanghai,” Pariser Tageszeitung, 22 April 1939; “Der Ferne Osten. Bedenken gegen Mandschukuo,” ibid., 28 April 1939. 59. “Cuba – Einwanderungs- und Durchgangsland,” Pariser Tageszeitung, 16 May 1939. 60. [Sander], Emigrantenbriefe, 35–37. 61. [Sander], Emigrantenbriefe, 49. 62. [Sander], Emigrantenbriefe, 73–75. 63. Lässig and Steinberg, “Knowledge on the Move,” 330. 64. See for example the letter “Jews not desired” from Bolivia in [Sander], Emigrantenbriefe, 56. 65. [Sander], Emigrantenbriefe, 48. 66. “Das andere Auslandsdeutschtum: Emigrantenbriefe aus fünf Erdteilen,” Neuer Vorwärts, 30 January 1938. 67. “Impressum,” Neuer Vorwärts, 28 November 1937; “Bezugbedingungen,” ibid., 11 June 1939. 68. The migrant knowledge mentioned above occurred in only one issue, see “Briefkasten,” Pariser Tageszeitung, 10 March 1939.

Knowledge from Five Continents 65 69. “Brasilianische Eindrücke,” Freundschaft. Mitteilungsblatt der Treugemeinschaft Sudentendeutscher Sozialdemokraten in England, September 1941. 70. The advertisement sections of Pariser Tageblatt/Pariser Tageszeitung and Neuer Vorwärts mirrored the content in the articles and offered specific services like the transfer of personal belongings to countries in Asia or South America. See for example “wir empfehlen,” Neuer Vorwärts, 23 July 1939. 71. Steinberg, “An der Schwelle,” 154–157. 72. Nicholas John Williams, An “Evil Year in Exile”? The Evacuation of the Franco-German Border Areas in 1939 under Democratic and Totalitarian Conditions (Berlin: Metropol, 2018); Julia S. Torrie, German Soldiers and the Occupation of France 1940–1944 (Cambridge: University Press, 2018). 73. Gerd Greiser, “Exilpubliszistik in Großbritannien,” in Presse im Exil. Ein Beitrag zur Kommunikationsgeschichte des deutschen Exils 1933–1945, eds. Hanno Hardt, Elke Hilscher and Winfried B. Lerg (Munich: Saur, 1979), 229. 74. Jaqueline Vansant, “Cohesive Epistolary Networks in Exile,” in Networks of Refugees from Nazi Germany: Continuities, Reorientations, and Collaborations in Exile, ed. Helga Schreckenberger (Amsterdam: Brill, 2016); Andrea Hammel, Anthony Grenville and Sharon Krummel, eds., Refugee Archives: Theory and Practice, special issue Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies 9 (2008). 75. See for another period and forced migration context Edward Blumenthal, Exile and Nation-State Formation in Argentina and Chile, 1810–1862 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 76. Stefanie Kremmel, Julia Richter and Larisa Schippel, eds., Österreichische Übersetzerinnen und Übersetzer im Exil (Vienna: New Academic Press, 2019); Irene Messinger and Katharina Prager, eds., Doing Gender in Exile. Geschlechterverhältnisse, Konstruktionen und Netzwerke in Bewegung (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2019); Simone Lässig and Swen Steinberg, “Why Young Migrants Matter in the History of Knowledge,” KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 3, no. 2 (2019), special issue Young Migrants in the History: 195–219.

4

Salka Viertel and the Gendered In/Visibility of Cultural Mediation Katharina Prager

4.1  Gendered Practices of Transfer While it is true that cultural translation as an important means of coping with the challenges of life in exile has not received much attention thus far, gender aspects are even more neglected in terms of the transnational transfer of knowledge and cultural capital.1 Gender differences and gender inequality were (re)established, transformed, and upheld in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in various societies across the globe. 2 Different roles historically attributed to men and women led to the exclusion of women from certain spaces, and this exclusion limited certain activities but fostered others. For Austrian Jewish refugees fleeing National Socialism, exile held the potential to renegotiate and reinterpret gender identities. Gender hierarchies also remained intact—even if gendered binaries, imbalances, and in/ visibilities underwent transfers of various sorts.3 A critical analysis and deconstruction of “doing gender”—as the creation and corroboration of gender differences in ongoing daily interactions—is therefore also crucial in order to question pre-established concepts and entities, not only in the context of translation and transnational transfers but also in the context of exile studies.4 In her paper “Invisible Transfers: Translation as a Crucial Practice in Transnational Women’s Movements around 1900,” Johanna Gehmacher—referring to various studies—summarized: “Translation studies have pointed to various aspects in which translation needs to be analysed as gendered. These include the agency of those who translate, the variations of meanings of gender in different cultural contexts, and the analysis of gendered metaphors of translation. […] Taking into account that at least during the twentieth century the vast majority of translators were women, this effectively means that the work of women is blanked out from research on transnational and international relations.”5 To grasp otherwise hidden patterns of transfer, Johanna Gehmacher suggests analysing biographical case studies with a focus on a set of

In/Visibility of Cultural Mediation 67 relevant practices and analysed the life of the feminist activist Käthe Schirmacher as an exemplary case. Her concept of (international) practices is based on Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot, who have argued that “the analysis of transnational exchanges of all sorts […] has to take into account routines of communication, rituals, bureaucratic practices, and personal relationships. They define practices as ‘socially meaningful patterns of action, which, in being performed more or less competently, simultaneously embody, act out, and possibly reify background knowledge and discourse in and on the material world’.”6 Taking up Gehmacher’s arguments on translation as a gendered and often invisible practice, I will use Salka Viertel’s transnational life as a case study, shining light on her translations of gendered images from Europe to Hollywood, understanding translation as part of a broader political, social context, and outlining different kinds of translation. Managing translation, however, was not the only cultural practice employed by women to establish transnational transfer; they also travelled, corresponded, and hosted (often in familial and intimate spheres, such as salons) to keep in/formal, personal contacts, often intertwining politics and friendship that institutions tried to keep separate.7 In this context, I want to outline her hosting, her practices of transfer, and the cultural capital she employed to build and maintain a transnational network or “salon” in Hollywood. Introducing her as a “modern woman,” I will further discuss the in/visibility of her person and her practices as a cultural mediator or broker—and also ask, whether or not she can be regarded as a “feminist.”

4.2  Salka Viertel—A Modern Woman? Salka Viertel needs to be introduced—I want to introduce her as a “modern woman,” with all the ambivalence this entails. She was born in 1889 as Salomea Sara (Salka) Steuermann into a well-to-do, secular Jewish family in the small town of Sambor, in Galicia, part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Her father, a lawyer, was the mayor of the town and it was quite clear (even to his young children) that her mother’s contribution to his position was essential. Auguste Steuermann, also from a well-respected, affluent, Jewish family, took a keen interest in the latest societal and cultural developments, hosted guests, and kept a large “family” informed in extensive letters. Salka Steuermann learned all these cultural practices as well as several languages. She spoke German, French, Polish, Russian/Ukrainian, was taught by governesses and tutors, and even attended a private girls’ school in Lviv for two years. The networks of her family and the surroundings of the garrison city Sambor not only provided her with basic training to be a host and translator between cultures, they also offered

68  Katharina Prager sufficient marriage opportunities. However, Salka Steuermann refused to enter an arranged marriage like her mother did. She wanted to become an actress—a profession that was even more disreputable than that of an opera singer. Thus, even her open-minded and highly musical mother, who had trained to be an opera singer before her marriage, did not support her ambitions at all. Eduard Steuermann, her younger brother, set out to become a pianist and composer of dodecaphony. He was regarded as the “genius” of the family and was supported in his studies and career plans. In Salka Steuermann’s case, only the unexpected death of her fiancée a few months after the engagement gave her the opportunity to leave her family and become an actress, first on provincial stages and later in Viennese theatres. Looking back Salka Viertel described her experiences at the provincial theatres of the Hapsburg monarchy and Wilhelminian Germany as a time of freedom and independence, on the one hand, and sexual harassment and new dependencies, on the other. Although she gradually made appearances on all well-known stages, she never became a star of German theatre. She was then, however, already central to strong networks in the cultural scene and had already learned to cultivate hospitality and maintain contact (through writing letters), thus also keeping herself employed.8 Towards the end of the First World War, she met the writer and director Berthold Viertel in Vienna. Viertel was at that time married to Margarethe Ružička, one of the first female Doctors of Chemistry to come out of the University of Vienna. His marriage with Ružička initially aimed at being a critical alliance of equals based on “new ethics,” not a traditional financial union producing children—on the contrary: both partners should live out their sexuality freely outside the marriage. It was important for critical modernists (with whom Viertel identified) to attack prevailing sexual double standards, but this did not necessarily mean that they also supported the emancipation of women. At that time (when she met Viertel in 1916), Salka Steuermann was also involved in an affair with Alexander Jaray, a married man from a well-known Viennese theatre family. The war, however, brought backlashes and both still thought in the modern gender dichotomies around 1900. Thus, Berthold Viertel framed Salka Steuermann as an “absolute” woman and saw their union as determined by fate. She supported his conception. They were married in 1918, a few weeks after Viertel’s divorce from his first wife.9 Although a new essentialism defined this relationship, certain “modern” ideas survived. Both took it for granted that Salka Viertel would continue her career as an actress, even though this meant living and working in different cities during the interwar years. It was also taken for granted, however, that she would take charge of organizing their everyday and social life—this included not only raising their three sons, born between 1919 and 1925, but also keeping in touch with an international

In/Visibility of Cultural Mediation 69 network of friends, family, and professional contacts—categories which often overlapped.10 Salka Viertel was no writer’s wife in the way Katja Mann or Friederike Zweig organized their husband’s lives. She declared it “absurd” to “renounce [her] profession […] for financial reasons also.”11 There was, however, still a consensus among family and friends—shared also by Salka Viertel—that Berthold Viertel was a “genius” writer and intellectual who shaped the lives, life practices, and scripts of the family.12 Traditional gender orders remained unquestioned for instance, when the Viertels—for a very short time in the mid-1920s—established their own theatre company in Berlin, an ensemble project similar to Harold Clurman’s Group Theater. Berthold Viertel was the director, although Salka Viertel was very much involved in the management, and her “networking capital” was key to the enterprise.13 Because of their dedication to high standards of artistic integrity, but mainly due to the hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic of the early 1920s, the Viertels’ theatre company failed after a year, leaving them in substantial debt. Thus, when Hollywood—also due to the Viertels’ good connections—offered Berthold Viertel a high-paid contract for directing, he very quickly accepted this offer, without even consulting his wife.14 After immigrating to the Unites States for economic reasons in 1928, Salka Viertel, who was then 40 years old and had continuously worked in Europe, felt reduced to a “film-wife.”15 She could not find work as an actress in Hollywood, (mainly) because of her age, her looks, and language. A marital crisis was the subject of many letters going back and forth between the couple. Berthold Viertel had always understood it to be his prerogative to continue his “sexual emancipation” by having affairs. Salka Viertel was shocked at first, but soon also had lovers. In 1932, the relationship changed fundamentally—for various reasons. While Berthold Viertel, after a series of failures, left Hollywood and went back to Europe, Salka Viertel became a highly paid screenwriter for Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) and thereby the breadwinner of the family. In the following ten years, Berthold Viertel was unable to find well-paid work or any work at all. Living on different continents, both formed new relationships—Salka Viertel with Gottfried Reinhard, a man 22 years her junior. However, Berthold and Salka Viertel stayed married until 1948 and remained friends, exchanging long letters, maintaining their large networks, which, however, also began to diverge. In 1949, a divorce became necessary only when Berthold Viertel finally wanted to return to Austria after Nazism to direct at the Burgtheater after the Second World War. It was frowned upon that he lived in Vienna with his new partner Elisabeth Neumann out of wedlock. In divorcing Salka Viertel and marrying Neumann, Berthold Viertel felt he was conceding to the moral sentiments of Post-War Austria.16

70  Katharina Prager When researching a transnational life, “considerable methodological problems” can arise: “Sources on transnational lives are often stored in unexpected contexts; they may be held in multiple countries, or they may have been redefined in a new political context that reduces them to a national political perspective.” Furthermore archives “more often than not impose the historical perspective of those who were in power” and the “marginalized histories in global peripheries”—such as those of exiles—stay marginalized.17 In Berthold Viertel’s case, we do, however, have access to extensive personal papers. Viertel began documenting his life very early on. The earliest preserved autobiographical fragment dates from 1906 when he was only 21 years old. As a so-called politically engaged intellectual, he wanted to have an impact on society and communicated his thoughts in various journals and letters.18 Increasingly he lost faith in being able to make himself understood, especially to his fellow citizens in Post-War Austria, who had lived under National Socialism. He was, however, optimistic that future generations would need to know about “critical modernism,” and for them he continued to work on his autobiographical project that he developed in notebooks and manuscripts. Even though preservation of this material was an important issue for him, he often lost notebooks, and only fragments of his writings were published. Salka Viertel was—together with other members of the family—in charge of preserving Berthold Viertel’s life and writings. In 1953, on her way back to Europe, she carried all their letters with her in large suitcases—and deeply regretted that all the letters from the beginning of their relationship had been lost earlier.19 But it was Elisabeth Neumann as Berthold Viertel’s last wife and widow who managed Viertel’s estate after his death and gave his materials to the German Literary Archive in Marbach. As an important networker for the German-speaking exiled, he fitted the German memory politics of the time. 20 After Salka Viertel’s death in 1978, her sons also gave her papers, comprising of 12 boxes of correspondence, some diaries, and the manuscripts of her autobiography, to the Literary Archive in Marbach. They were labelled explicitly as just an “addendum” to Berthold Viertel’s 90 boxes. It is also interesting to compare the autobiographical practice of the couple:21 While Berthold Viertel spent more than 50 years of his life working on an autobiographical project, of which only a few pages were published during his lifetime—ultimately remaining an autobiographer without an autobiography—, Salka Viertel presented an autobiography of approximately 500 pages, published several times in English and German. In January 2019, it was reprinted by the New York Review of Books. 22

In/Visibility of Cultural Mediation 71 Her own autobiographical project, however, began only in the 1950s, shortly after Berthold Viertel’s death. Preserving the life and personality of her husband was quite an important factor in her autobiographical endeavour and his name is the heading of the largest “chapter” of her life, even when she admits that she “must not idealize Berthold, as I have the tendency to do […] It is harder than I imagined to talk about Berthold and my relationship with him.”23 Yet, she was determined to tell her story—and here she differs from many female exiles—as someone who stood up for her beliefs: “The greatest achievement in my life is probably to have created the image of a very courageous woman.”24 This image she created was also crucially based on her imported cultural capital and her skills as a mediator between Europe and the United States.

4.3 Translations It is important to note that Salka Viertel was better prepared than most to take on the role of a cultural translator as she was not a “typical” refugee from National Socialism, but, at first, a migrant for economic reasons. Up until 1933, the Viertels did not intend to stay in the United States permanently. They even left their three small sons behind in Berlin for the first three months while ascertaining if it would work out. They also repeatedly extended their visitor’s permits through to February 1932. 25 Salka Viertel had time to adapt to the new world surrounding her without financial or other pressures (as Berthold Viertel was clearly the breadwinner then), learn the language, and renegotiate her identity. She noticed “[…] that we were constantly explaining ourselves to our American friends, trying to convey our identity and what really possessed us, who we were. Berthold’s futile efforts to communicate made me unhappy and I hated when he touched upon matters, which I knew his associates would not understand. […] escaping to the men’s room to read Kant and Kierkegaard was a small relief.”26 Europeans had been in high demand in Hollywood in the years leading up to 1928, because in the silent movie era, fluent English was not a requirement. Creative and culturally influential couples like the Jannings or Dieterles, Max Reinhardt, and Ernst Lubitsch had settled down in Hollywood. The first “talkie”—The Jazz Singer—premiered around the time the Viertels arrived in Hollywood in 1928. The Europeans there were quite nervous about the impact talking film would have upon their careers. Some left Hollywood, but other foreign actors and directors— such as Greta Garbo, who came from Sweden and soon became the highest paid star in Hollywood 27—adapted quite well and grew with the challenge. For a short time, foreigners were in even higher demand than

72  Katharina Prager natives because the studios had begun shooting new versions of films in different languages. “These new versions, shot on the same sets as the American films and often with the same supporting casts (though different stars), became a regular feature of Hollywood between 1929 and 1931, though other solutions to the foreign version problem were tried […]. For multi-lingual actors on both sides of the Atlantic the system was a bonanza, and a lively market developed, with German an American studios competing for the best and most fluent performers. […] For eighteen months Hollywood welcomed a stream of young actors and actresses hired exclusively to appear in foreign copies of films […]: all for the most part appeared in only one film before the fashion petered out and they were sent home.”28 Salka Viertel also found employment as an actress in some German remakes of movies, among them Anna Christie. 29 In this movie, she played together with Greta Garbo, with whom she also became personally acquainted at this time. I have described the complex friendship and professional relationship of these two women, which lasted until Salka Viertel’s death, in great detail in my biography on Viertel.30 In any case, this friendship with Garbo was crucial and highly significant—it not only opened up a career for Salka Viertel as a screenwriter for the most important MGM star but was also essential for the expansion and deployment of her network. On the other hand, Salka Viertel’s “European” network was surely one of the reasons why Garbo befriended her in the first place. The Viertels had remained “strangers in a strange land”31 and were regarded as eccentrics; yet, at the same time, they were well-liked and respected. One of the Viertels’ acquaintances is of particular note here: namely, Adeline (Ad) Jaffe-Schulberg. Both she and her husband, the Paramount producer Ben Schulberg, belonged to the established Hollywood aristocracy. Ad Schulberg was interested in socialism, feminism, and all things “European.” The Viertels, who were regarded as intellectuals, were, therefore, her “kind of people.”32 And it may be owing to their “persistent Europeanism” and their acquaintances with people such as the Schulbergs, but also to their strong ties to the European cultural scene that Salka Viertel in particular soon found herself in the role of translator and mediator.33 Before coming back to her work with Garbo, I would like to illustrate Salka Viertel’s translation practices—linguistic and cross cultural— with another example. There is an account or rather a humorous anecdote—often retold without crediting Viertel, making her invisible— telling how Salka Viertel had arranged a meeting in autumn 1935 between Irving Thalberg, the so-called “Boy wonder” of Hollywood’s film production and the composer Arnold Schönberg, who had just

In/Visibility of Cultural Mediation 73 arrived in exile, and was also regularly portrayed as a stubbornly independent genius. It was at the same time “a now-legendary encounter between American commercial culture and European high modernism”34: “I still see him [Schönberg] before me, leaning forward in his chair, both hands clasped over the handle of his umbrella, his burning genius’s eyes on Thalberg, who, standing behind his desk, was explaining why he wanted a great composer for the scoring of Good Earth. When he came to: ‘Last Sunday when I heard the lovely music you have written …’ Schoenberg interrupted sharply: ‘I don’t write lovely music.”35 Salka Viertel had not only been asked to set up the meeting, but also to act as a translator—or better—as a “cultural broker”: “[…] Salka played a greater role here than merely recalling the episode. […] [Her] position as a cultural broker between the two men shows that Thalberg and Schoenberg […] operated as everyone does within a network of connections, without which they could not function. No one understood this network better, or maneuvered through it more effectively, than Salka. She was the mutual contact who first made it possible for the composer and the producer to meet. She was the diplomat with a firm grasp of the complexities of both milieus, who took the trouble to issue honest warnings about each man’s expectations. She was the translator and the trained actress who was able to demonstrate Schoenberg’s arcane techniques, doing what she could to make them accessible to Thalberg. She conveyed to Schoenberg what Thalberg felt entitled to receive from the composer in exchange for the studio’s payment. She was the conduit here between two uncompromising sensibilities, and without her mediating presence it is very likely that there would have been no comprehension and perhaps no meeting whatsoever.”36 This encounter illustrates a clearly gendered role Salka Viertel took on as a “bridge” between cultures. The mission became more urgent as the situation in Europe worsened from 1933. At this point, it is important to emphasize that Salka Viertel’s practices of translation and hospitality not only helped celebrities such as Schönberg or Sergei Eisenstein (for whom she had also acted a cultural mediator), but also many others, lesser known people who asked her for her support. Apart from these private and personal efforts, Salka Viertel did similar translation work in her screenplays for Garbo films, even as early as the point of selecting the material for these films. Greta Garbo, who in the early 1930s was tired of being cast as vamp and/or prostitute, first nudged Salka Viertel to write a film treatment in contravention with her typecasting. It was the story of Sweden’s idiosyncratic seventeenthcentury Queen Christina, whose biography Viertel had just read and whose “masculine education and complicated sexuality made her an almost contemporary character.”37

74  Katharina Prager Even though the film, which passed through the hands of many teams of writers and the director, finally focused on a heterosexual love story, it contained an interesting scene that was transferred directly from European cinema, namely from Mädchen im Uniform, a 1931 German film about a lesbian relationship between a teacher and a student in a girls’ school that had become a great sensation in New York at the time. Leontine Sagan, who had directed Mädchen in Uniform, had been Salka Viertel’s colleague at the Neuen Wiener Bühne. Although Salka Viertel states in her memoir that the “schwule Element”38 (gay element) was Thalberg’s idea after seeing Sagan’s film in New York, 39 it is much more likely that she made him aware of the film—perhaps even following Garbo’s wishes: “Thalberg liked Mädchen in Uniform a lot and so I make a few cheeky attempts,” she writes in a letter to Berthold Viertel, but also complains that Hollywood is not yet daring enough for this kind of love story. Salka Viertel refers to the incorporation of the historically documented intimate relationship of the Swedish Queen with her lady-in-waiting Ebba Sparre—in the script’s evaluation notes it says: “Even in the inference of Christina’s passion for a woman the scenes are delicately handled so that only the ‘wise’ may get the idea.”40 The result of all these discussions is finally a short kiss, which Christine/Greta Garbo presses on the mouth of Ebba/Elizabeth Young. Thalberg must have been aware of the effect that such a same-sex film kiss must have had on the audience in connection with the mysterious Garbo, who carefully kept her private life under lock and key. Salka Viertel, on the other hand, mediated the anti-heterosexual subversions and sexual emancipations that she had witnessed and practised in the progressive circles of Vienna and Berlin to Hollywood. In the following ten years, Salka Viertel tried—with varying success— to translate historical and literary women such as Anna Karenina, Marie Curie, and Maria Walewska for Greta Garbo and into Hollywood films. The debates she had to conduct about the acceptance of such heroines were exhausting and often absurd—especially since in the end all corners and edges were sanded down again and again and the story was reworked into the usual Garbo-vamp-vehicle. Still, she succeeded in bringing female characters to the screen—especially at the time of the Catholic Breen Code—that did not correspond to the usual Hollywood stereotypes and yet reached masses through the stardom of Garbo. The position of screenwriters—mainly women, often from Europe— in the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood is similar to that of translators. They frequently remained invisible. Although often forgotten, they have been instrumental in shaping the gendered images or concepts of femininity of the film industry, and it can be said that women’s influence in the picture business was not limited to that of movie stars.41

In/Visibility of Cultural Mediation 75

4.4 Hospitality Apart from her various types of translation and her intensive correspondence, the practice of hospitality is central and specific to Salka Viertel’s transnational life. Although Salka Viertel’s salon received much more attention than her work, it is still worth taking a closer look at this translated form of hospitality, which was perceived very differently from various perspectives. Recent studies on the transfer of European salon culture to the United States state that obviously no normative typification can be discerned in salon gatherings but suggest characteristics, such as mixed gender, centring on a salonnière, regularity of gatherings, guests from different social strata, open and yet exclusive access. All these characteristics apply to Salka Viertel’s hospitality in Hollywood— and of course, they also already applied to her mother’s hospitality in Sambor.42 Salka Viertel’s salon in her house at 192 Mabery Road (purchased in 1930) at first consisted predominantly of members of the American film industry, but from 1933 onwards, exiles from Europe began to mix with the Hollywood crowd. At Salka Viertel’s, European and American members of the film industry met with writers, composers, musicians, and intellectuals. Ad Schulberg was certainly one of the decisive factors in establishing Salka Viertel’s house as a meeting place. The two women met at Hollywood parties, where gender hierarchies were also enforced by a “ritual separation of sexes,” as Salka Viertel called it: “As common in Hollywood beautiful women were clustered in one corner of the room, while men talked shop in the other.”43 Her salon was soon in a kind of opposition to mainstream Hollywood but worked precisely because of its close ties to the Hollywood elite and the alternative possibilities of exchange it created. The list of prominent habitués was long, changed over the years, and was (at least in the auto/biographical sources) male dominated. Apart from Greta Garbo, it included people like Sergei Eisenstein, “Tarzan” Johnny Weissmüller, Bronislaw Kaper, Otto Klemperer, Max Reinhardt, Charlie Chaplin, Hanns Eisler, Leopold Stokowski, Erich Maria Remarque, Bertolt Brecht, André Malraux, Jean Renoir, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, S. N. Behrman, Clifford Odets, Alfred Adler, Arnold Schönberg, Ernst Lubitsch, and George Cukor.44 Salka Viertel herself, as well as the men surrounding her—her son Peter Viertel or her partner Gottfried Reinhard—all documented the salon in their autobiographies and found the term “salon” exaggerated. “Sunday afternoons” or “Sunday parties” would have been more appropriate, because, according to her son, Viertel “simply wanted to cook for her friends, regardless of whether they were famous or not.”45 Reinhardt and others attributed the success of the salon primarily to the presence

76  Katharina Prager of the star Greta Garbo. Christopher Isherwood, a close friend, even questioned Salka Viertel’s competent performance as a salonnière in his diary: If only Salka wouldn’t invite so many people, all so ill-assorted, her parties might be more of a success. […] It’s not merely that the times have changed. I don’t feel that the kind of men and women I meet at Salka’s ever knew how to be really gay. They are too mental. Their wit is all spikes and sharp edges. And so competitive: each one wants to hold the floor. There is a lot of embracing and sentimental fuss, but so little genuine warmth. […] I suppose that people of Salka’s temperament actually prefer to talk to their intimate friends when they are surrounded by a chattering crowd.46 Twenty-five years later he declared in a letter: “Those days of your great salon have become a legend and I often have to tell the young about them!”47 For Berthold Viertel, the meaning of the salon was different and already evident in the 1930s—in a letter he wrote from London to his wife: “The house is a position, a symbol, it is famous, you have to defend it! […] So many people today, in the most unfortunate and confused of all migrations, look to you and to the famous house on Mabery Road, which has a great, widely known name as a refuge, a place of heartfelt help and a kind of oasis in the ever-expanding desert of desolation of spirit and heart, of impotent and unfortunately only too potent hatred. This too is a creation, all the more astonishing as it has succeeded in Hollywood.”48 In the person of Berthold Viertel, the salon was also associated with more institutionalized networks of exiles that had clear names and orientations, memberships that were mostly male dominated, and, despite their transnational character, “aided the formation and consolidation of national boundaries after the war.”49 Surely, the Freie Deutsche Kulturbund, the Ligue pour l’Autriche vivante, the GermanAmerican Writers Association, the Tribüne für Freie Deutsche Kunst und Literatur in Amerika as well as the Aurora Verlag, the Austro American Tribune, and the Council for a Democratic Germany also aimed at mutual cultural mediation and exchange, but far more than Salka Viertel’s salon, they assembled persons and groups that had already existed in another form in Vienna around 1900 or the Weimar Republic. These networks acted much more purposefully and focused on concrete political or professional agitation—here a certain amount of differentiation from one another was also necessary. 50 Of course, there were exchanges as well as multiple overlaps in personnel between these exile organizations and the salon in Mabery Road, especially since Salka Viertel was also a member of a few organizations.

In/Visibility of Cultural Mediation 77 Interestingly, in her case, it was association with more Hollywoodrelated associations, such as the Anti-Nazi League, the European Film Fund, and the Screen Writers’ Guild. By association with these groups, the salon was also closely entangled with the so-called Popular Front in Hollywood: “The Popular Front was not a formal organisation to which one could subscribe or adhere […]. Rather it was a loose term applied to a functioning coalition of organisations, all of which had in common four main objectives: to press the Roosevelt administration in the direction of a world anti-fascist alliance, to aid the defenders of democracy and the victims of fascist aggression, to counter the widely perceived threat of domestic fascism, and to defeat the efforts of conservative big business to thwart the trade union movement and block the passage of social reform measures. Very soon a whole host of specific causes (the Loyalists’ struggle in the Spanish Civil War, aid to refugees, etc.) attached themselves to Popular Front organisations, but the fundamental unifying factor—fervent opposition to international and domestic fascism—was never lost from view.”51 In all these contexts, it is probably not surprising that, relatively early (from 1942), Salka Viertel’s house and her family became the subjects of FBI investigations. Viertel herself was reported to be “anti-capitalistic and communistically inclined.” The telephone was tapped, the letters opened, and everybody going in and out was under surveillance. When the House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) came to Hollywood, Viertel’s friends were subpoenaed, she was herself put on the “greylist,” which meant she would not be employed anymore by the major Hollywood studios in the 1940s and 1950s. In the mid-1950s, she had to sell her house in Mabery Road.52

4.5 In/visible Returning to the gendered nature of practices like translation or hospitality, it might come as no surprise that Berthold Viertel, in the end, profited significantly more from his wife’s social activities and networks than she did. He was one of the few exiles to be called back to Austria after the war to direct at the famous Viennese Burgtheater—a late highlight of his career, also securing some space for him in the collective memory of Austria and Germany. He returned without Salka Viertel. 53 Berthold Viertel had repeatedly assigned Salka Viertel to the United States and Hollywood from the 1930s onwards. She resisted such attributions and declared that she was not “gone Hollywood” and that she was still “European allright [sic].”54 Paradoxically, the salon as system of cultural mediation could not, in the end, provide for her nor support her settling either in Europe or in the United States: “I am homesick for California and when I am there I long for Europe. Uprooted that’s what it is called.”55 With the help of her son Peter Viertel, she finally settled

78  Katharina Prager in Klosters, Switzerland, in her old age and died there in 1978—more or less forgotten. Even though she autobiographically wrote herself into the history of modernity, exile, and Hollywood, even though she is one of the best known among many forgotten exiled women, Salka Viertel still needs to be introduced. She is still often overlooked in relevant studies. When she is mentioned, she usually stands in the shadow of better known personalities such as Greta Garbo or her son Peter Viertel. Not least, the abrupt end of her career in connection with Red-Baiting in Hollywood may have contributed to this.56 It also has to do, though, with the invisibility of her practices as a cultural broker, a translator, and a hostess, none of which receive very much attention. Is she also a forgotten “feminist”? This is not so simple to establish: “In the course of the twentieth century the term ‘feminism’ has become a shortcut to describe these developments, although by no means as historical protagonists later associated with the term would have identified with it at the time.”57 Salka Viertel was not engaged in politics or activism like other women or men identified as feminists were; she did not attend congresses, she was not a member of political parties, she rarely spoke in public or set on public bodies. However, she did build up networks, make connections, was useful to people (especially refugees and women), and wrote screenplays as well as a highly reflexive autobiography that challenged gender hierarchies. She never used the word “feminist” for herself. She did not profoundly question the patriarchal system and its cultures of misogyny. However, there are many incidents in which she displayed decidedly female solidarity and devoted herself to the improvement of the situation of women. And even if she idealized only men as geniuses or distanced herself form lesbian circles, she found it important to bring new concepts of femininity to Hollywood. Salka Viertel is just one case study showing that translation and exchange as well as networks and cultural capital functioned differently and on different levels for men and women in exile. While male mediators and their networks often remained much more attached to their respective nation or culture of origin, female mediators obviously found it easier to open themselves and their networks to other nations and cultures. This had to do mainly with the fact that women were already habitually excluded from many official practices, offices, and institutions on a national or state level, both in their countries of origin and arrival. Because of this exclusion, however, they were better prepared to occupy spaces in between and activate alternative patterns of transfer. Women were used to employing different cultural practices to establish transnational transfer such as translation (as part of a broader political, social context), travel,

In/Visibility of Cultural Mediation 79 correspondence, and hospitality. These gendered practices need to be taken into account when researching mediations, cultural translations and knowledge transfer in the cases of Austrian Jewish refugees fleeing from National Socialism. This also requires a precise, micro-analytical and multi-perspective analysis of gendered binaries, imbalances, and in/ visibilities—all shaped by transfers of various sorts.

Notes 1. Thanks to Johanna Gehmacher and Elizabeth Harvey, the organizers and hosts, as well as to all participants of the conference “Translating, Travelling, Transferring Ideologies. Gendered Practices in Transnational Political Networks,” 12–14 December 2019, at the German Historical Institute London in conjunction with the London School of Economics and the Gerda Henkel Foundation. This conference informed my thoughts on gendered practices of transfer and this chapter benefited greatly from the topics and discussions. 2. Johanna Gehmacher, “Invisible Transfers: Translation as a Crucial Practice in Transnational Women’s Movements around 1900,” German Historical Institute Bulletin 41, No. 2 (November 2019): 3–44, 3–8. 3. Irene Messinger and Katharina Prager, eds., Doing Gender in Exile. Geschlechterverhältnisse, Konstruktionen und Netzwerke in Bewegung (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2019). 4. Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” Gender and Society, (1987), 125–151. 5. Gehmacher, “Invisible Transfers,” 14–15. 6. Gehmacher, “Invisible Transfers,” 13. Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot, “International Practices,” International Theory, 3/1 (2011), 1–36. 7. Gehmacher, “Invisible Transfers,” 12; see also Johanna Gehmacher, “Reisekostenabrechnung. Praktiken und Ökonomien des Unterwegsseins in Frauenbewegungen um 1900,” Feministische Studien 35, no. 1 (2017): 76–92; Johanna Gehmacher, “Reisende in Sachen Frauenbewegung. Käthe Schirmacher zwischen Internationalismus und nationaler Identifikation,” in: Ariadne. Forum für Frauen- und Geschlechtergeschichte 60, (Nov. 2011), 58–65; Susanna Erlandsson, “Off the record: Margaret van Kleffens and the gendered history of Dutch World War II diplomacy,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 21, no. 1 (2019): 29–46. 8. Salka Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers (New York: Random House, 1969/2019), 1–67; Katharina Prager, “Ich bin nicht gone Hollywood…,” in Salka Viertel – ein Leben in Theater und Film (Wien: Braumüller, 2007): 9–30; Katharina Prager and Vanessa Hannesschläger, “Gendered Lives in Anticipation of a Biographer?,” Dutch Journal for Gender Studies 19, no. 3 (2016): 337–353; Special Issue Life Writing, ed. by Mineke Bosch, Marijke Huisman and Monica Soeting 18, no. 3. (Amsterdam: University Press, 2016): 337–354. 9. Viertel, Kindness, 68–86; Prager, “Ich bin nicht,” 32–91. 10. Katharina Prager, Berthold Viertel. Eine Biographie der Wiener Moderne (Wien/Köln/Weimar: Böhlau, 2018): 245–267. 11. Viertel, Kindness, 164. 12. Carl Pletsch, “On the autobiographical life of Nietzsche,” in Psychoanalytic Studies of Biography ed. by G. Moraitis and G. Pollock (Madison: International Humanities Press, 1987), 405–434.

80  Katharina Prager 13. Karen Hunt (Keele University), What a Difference a War Makes: Sustaining Transnational Practices as a Communist Woman. Talk given at the conference “Translating, Travelling, Transferring Ideologies. Gendered Practices in Transnational Political Networks”, 13 December 2019. 14. Viertel, Kindness, 100–131. 15. Katharina Prager, “Berthold Viertel – A Migration Career and No Comeback in Exile,” in: Quiet Invaders Revisited. Biographies of Twentieth Century Immigrants to the United States, ed. by Günter Bischof (Transatlantica Bd. 11. Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2017): 103–113. 16. Prager, Berthold Viertel, 47–74. 17. Gehmacher, “Invisible Transfers,” 8 and 19. 18. Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (London: Penguin Books, 2009). 19. Viertel, Kindness, 76 and 328. 20. Prager, Berthold Viertel, 34–38. 21. Katharina Prager, “‘Amerika ist trotz allem grossartig’ – Die transkulturellen Leben und autobiografischen Praktiken der Familie Viertel,” in Biografien und Migrationen, ÖZG 29/2018/3, ed. by Johanna Gehmacher, Klara Löffler, and Katharina Prager (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2018), 37–57. 22. Salka Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers (New York u.a., 1969); Salka Viertel, Das unbelehrbare Herz. Ein Leben mit Stars und Dichtern des 20. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg, 1970); Salka Viertel, Das unbelehrbare Herz. Ein Leben mit Stars und Dichtern des 20. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg, 1979); Salka Viertel, Das unbelehrbare Herz. Erinnerungen an ein Leben mit Künstlern des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main, 2019); Salka Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers (New York u.a., 2019). 23. Salka Viertel, Diary 1957–1967, 17 February 1961, o.S., A: Viertel, Salka, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach (DLA). 24. Salka Viertel, Diary 1957–1967, 5 and 18 January 1964, o.S., A: Viertel, Salka, DLA. 25. Katharina Prager, “Berthold Viertel,” 103–113. 26. Viertel, Kindness, 143. 27. Karen Swenson, Greta Garbo. A Life Apart (New York: Simon & Schuster Ltd, 1997), 217–226. 28. John Baxter, The Hollywood Exiles (London: Macdonald and Janes, 1976), 151–152. 29. Viertel, Kindness, 130–166; Prager, “Ich bin nicht,” 97–110. 30. Prager, “Ich bin nicht,” 127–220. 31. Salka Viertel in: Do You Know About the New Garbo von Elza Schallert in Movie Classic 1933: 54, Clippling aus A: Viertel, Salka, DLA. 32. Budd Schulberg, Moving Pictures. Memoirs of a Hollywood Prince (London, 1993), 380 and 396. 33. Viertel, Kindness, 135 and 149; Viertel in: Do You Know About the New Garbo, 54. 34. Donna Rifkind, The Sun and Her Stars. Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood (New York: Other Press, 2020), 219–222. 35. Viertel, Kindness, 207. 36. Rifkind, The Sun, 222–223. 37. Viertel, Kindness, 152. 38. Letter by Salka Viertel to Berthold Viertel, 24 September 1932, 78.910/12, A: Viertel, Salka, DLA. 39. Viertel, Kindness, 175.

In/Visibility of Cultural Mediation 81 40. Evaluation by Jessie Burns, 29 July 1932, Turner/MGM Script Collection, Margaret Herrick Library (MHL). 41. Nicole Brunnhuber, “‘Frauenarbeit in der „Kunstfabrik mit Regeln‘. Drehbuchautorinnen im Exil,” in Hollywood, in: Drehbuchautoren im Exil. Eine Publikation des Filmmuseums Berlin – Deutsche Kinemathek, ed. by Gero Gandert et al. (München: edition text + Kritik Richard Boorberg Verlag, 2003), 48–63. 42. Carola Bebermeier, “The Concept of European Salon Culture and its Transfer to the US,” talk given during the workshop “Musical Crossroads. Transatlantic Cultural Exchange 1800–1950”, 28 April 2019, at the mdw, Vienna. Bebermeier defines and works on these characteristics in her project “Music Culture in North American Salons 1850–1950” https://www. mdw.ac.at/imi/musical-crossroads/ (accessed 31 August 2020). 43. Viertel, Kindness, 134 and 142. 44. Prager, “Ich bin nicht,” 93–126. 45. Peter Viertel, Gefährliche Freunde. Unterwegs mit Hemingway, Huston, Welles und anderen Legenden des 20 Jahrhunderts (Zürich: Rüffer&Rub, 2005), 191. 46. Christopher Isherwood, Diaries 1939 1960, edited and introduced by Katherine Bucknell (London 1996), 62 and 73. 47. Letter by Christopher Isherwood to Salka Viertel, 18 September 1964, o.S., A: Viertel, Salka, DLA. 48. Letter by Berthold Viertel to Salka Viertel, 28 June 1940, 78.871/10, A: Viertel, DLA. Translated from German by the author. 49. Dominik Geppert, “National Expectations and Transnational Infra structure: The Media, Global News Coverage, and International Relations in the Age of High Imperialism,” German Historical Institute London Bulletin 39, no. 2 (2017): 21–42, 22. 50. Konstantin Kaiser, Berthold Viertel (1885–1953). Österreichische Literatur in Exil, Universität Salzburg 2002, http://www.literaturepochen. at/exil/l5024.pdf. (accessed 31 August 2020). See also Johann Holzner, “Kulturphantasien in Debatten des Exils,” or. Helmut G. Asper, “Berthold Viertel und der Council for a Democratic Germany,” in: Traum von der Realität, ed. by the Theodor-Kramer-Gesellschaft (Wien 1998), 170–194; Gunther Nickel ed., Literarische und politische Deutschlandkonzepte. Beiträge zu einer Tagung des Deutschen Literaturarchivs Marbach und der Evangelischen Akademie Tutzing (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004); Langkau-Alex, Ursula and Ruprecht, Thomas M., eds., Was soll aus Deutschland werden? Der Council for a Democratic Germany in New York 1944–1945 (Frankfurt, New York: Campus, 1995). Friedrich Pfäfflin, ed., Tribüne und Aurora. Wieland Herzfelde und Berthold Viertel. Briefwechsel 1940–1949 (Mainz: Hase&Koehler, 1990). 51. Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood. Politics in the Film Community, 1930–60, (Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 99–100; Viertel, Kindness, 211. 52. Prager, “Ich bin nicht,” 221–263. 53. Carola Bebermeier and Katharina Prager, “Paarkonstruktionen, Familienkonstellationen und Netzwerke um Salka und Berthold Viertel,” in Paare in Kunst und Wissenschaft, ed. by Christine Fornoff-Petrowski and Melanie Unseld (Cologne/Vienna/Weimar: Böhlau, 2021), 251–274. 54. Cable by Salka Viertel to Berthold Viertel, 13 November 1931, 91.15.179/12, A:Viertel, DLA.

82  Katharina Prager 55. Salka Viertel, Diary 1957–1967, 17 February 1961, o.S., A: Viertel, Salka, DLA. 56. In their book on The Inquisition in Hollywood Ceplair and Englund defined “Red-Baiting” as the following practice: “It was not especially easy to link communism with un-Americanism and thus make it the issue of this country. […] This was accomplished by encouraging the development of an altered and ultra-charged set of connotations for the words ‘Communist’, ‘Red’, ‘liberal’, ‘labor’ and ‘union’. […] The keystone to the reformation of opinion was […]: the linking of all expressions of liberalism and radicalism to communism.” (Ceplair/Englund, The Inquisition, 201–203). 57. Gehmacher, “Invisible Transfers,” 3.

5

Archives of Imagination Johanna and Ermanno Loevinson as Cultural Translators1 Asher D. Biemann

5.1  A Letter from Rome On 11 October 1944, a young American Jewish soldier stationed at an undisclosed location in Italy sends a letter to the radio host Jane Meyer living at 1923 Mount Vernon Street, Philadelphia: Dear Mrs. Meyer, While in Rome for the Jewish holidays—I met a relative of yours at the synagogue—her name is Ruth Loevinson…. [I am] writing to inform you that your relative is feeling fine and is getting along well despite the conditions which exist in Rome…. She hasn’t heard from her mother, father or brother since that horrible day of last October 16th—when the Germans took so many Jews from Rome and deported them to parts unknown—they were taken!…I am not supposed to write to you in reference to a relative in Italy—but I see no harm in writing—doubly so—’cause I am a Jew and if I can’t go out of my way for another person of my religion—then we Jews shall never be able to regain our strength—2 We know very little about the young Jewish corporal, Alvin Solomon, who was among the American Fifth Army division liberating Italy from Fascism and Nazi occupation in 1944. But we do have a postcard Ruth sent to her aunt in Philadelphia a few weeks later telling her that the “jüdische soldier” had visited her again in Rome and promised to bring another letter from America. And we learn that Ruth had been to the apartment of her parents, Ermanno and Wally Loevinson, at 38 Via Porta Maggiore to look for mail, but that she was less than welcome by the Italian family that had taken possession of the property since the October 1943 deportations. “If I manage to get the people out, who have been living there since the time of the Germans,” she writes, “then I might live there again myself.”3 Over the course of the following decade, Ruth Loevinson-Tatti will indeed fight in Italian courts to reclaim the apartment of her childhood and find answers to the whereabouts

84  Asher D. Biemann of her parents and her younger brother Sigismondo (1921–1943). But these efforts are rendered difficult in part by her own fragile health and her repeated admission to a psychiatric institution, where she had been a patient intermittently since 1937 and which, in a strange twist of fate, would save her life during the Nazi Holocaust. Antonio Tatti, her Italian, non-Jewish husband of 25 years, who had fought in Mussolini’s army, would be arrested after the war by the Italian police, interned by the Allied Forces in Sardinia, and released only with an official affidavit by the Rabbi of Rome confirming that he had never been a Nazi collaborator.4 For Ruth, the situation remains extremely difficult. “The Italians,” she writes, “are now very insulting and brazen knowing that I am alone.” But she feels also happy that the Americans arrived and that her health has finally improved: My health now is much better, for I no longer live in fear of the Germans. For months I lived in constant fear, I could no longer sleep in peace, always worried that the next morning I might no longer be here, always in fear of every person, always afraid that they could sell me to the Germans, who paid 5000 Lire for every Jew and offered 300,000 Lire for the Rabbi. But he was hidden with the Partisans and could save himself.5 When Antonio finally returns to the Italian capital, Ruth was undergoing treatments for depression and pulmonary illness at the Ospedale Provinciale S. Maria della Pietà in Rome. In February 1949, he sends a note to zia Giovanna, Ruth’s aunt Johanna, or Jane, who had moved from Berlin to the United States in 1938, to let her know that, in two weeks’ time, Ruth would be released from the hospital and that she appears calm and well-nourished, tranquilla and ingrassata, or as he explains to the German-speaking aunt, fettgemacht.6 They have plans to move to Sardinia, but Ruth is waiting to hear from the Italian courts whether the current tenants in her parent’s apartment can be evicted. When she passes away in December 1957, Antonio sends again a warm letter to zia Giovanna, or Tante Hanne, praising Ruth’s “stoicism and heroic character,” her resilient suffering, and her love for their children, Alessandro and Italo.7 Ruth is buried next to her son Italo (who died in 1936) at the Verano cemetery in Rome, to which her father, the historian and royal archivist Ermanno Loevinson, had devoted an entire monograph in 1914, and which was vandalized by teenage neo-Nazis in May 2017.8 The intersecting, yet also divergent, lives of Johanna—Giovanna— Jane Meyer (1874–1958) and her older brother Ermanno—Hermann— Loevinson (1863–1943) shall be the focus of this chapter.9 But they shall also be the prism of a wider family network, equally complex and intimate, that connected far-flung coordinates from Germany to Italy, from

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Figure 5.1  Protagonist Schema of the Lövinson family. Source: By Asher Biemann

Palestine to Argentina, from the United States to Shanghai (Fig. 5.1). Such networks are, of course, not unique and have attracted renewed scholarly attention in recent times, where transnational families have become common reality.10 The Loevinson family, in this regard, represents but a case study of a broader experience shared by many Jewish families at the time and, under vastly different circumstances, by many families of the so-called Global South in our day. What makes the stories of Johanna and Hermann Loevinson noteworthy are not the individual paths of their migrations but the non-linear complexity of their respective cultural allegiances and translations: For Hermann, becoming Italian in times of peace meant allegiance to a liberal ideal he would passionately translate back to his German readers, and which would later blur his vision of fascism, whereas for Johanna, becoming American in times of war would allow her to translate German ideals of universal humanism to her American and German emigre readers—ideals, as we shall see, that were shared by Italian emigre anti-fascists as well. For both, however, their sibling relationship and rootedness in Judaism served as an anchor amidst conflicting worldviews and experiences. It is

86  Asher D. Biemann only through a parallel reading of their life stories that we can grasp the continuities, as well as creative self-fashioning, of cultural identity.11 The following essay, then, is as much about networks of family as it is about networks of multiple cultural and intellectual affinities held together by tenuous bonds of sensibility and the implicit assumption that culture, as Ernst Cassirer, another German Jewish emigre to the United States, wrote in 1942, is defined not only by shared knowledge but also by shared action and the “knowledge of each other.”12

5.2  Family Matters The Loevinson family was a typical family of the German Jewish bourgeoisie shaped by ideals of Bildung and cultural literacy, which ultimately became, as Amos Elon put it, their only “true” homeland.13 In their religious practice, the Loevinsons embraced, like most members of their class, the progressive Jewish Reform and its program of acculturation; with respect to their family identity, however, they cherished traditional values and the importance of Jewish continuity. Thus, when the family’s patriarch, Moritz Lövinson, a successful physician who had moved to Berlin from Danzig in the 1830s, established a modest family foundation to support members in need, he added a final clause to its bylaws that no member of the family should be entitled to any part of his fortune unless they had “not only been born Jewish but also remained Jewish.”14 In 1937, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Moritz Lövinson’s death, the family issued a small typewritten volume celebrating his philanthropic spirit, his unflinching loyalty to German culture and science—and his complete devotion to the family: In the family, Ermanno Loevinson wrote in his contribution to the volume, “he rightly viewed the conditio sine qua non for human civilization. On [the family] alone society and state can be established…Therefore, caring devotion to the family and to the religious traditions of Judaism, and to Judaism itself, formed, for Moritz Lövinson, an inseparable whole.”15 A humanist steeped in German letters, Ermanno Loevinson, may well have been thinking of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s 1792 treatise on the Limits and Effectiveness of the State, in which family relations and, in fact, marriage functioned not only as the archetype of the state but also as its moral mirror. Where families exist in solidarity and mutual support, and where the institution of marriage is defined not by unfreedom and force but by free volition and love, there, argues Humboldt, a polity will be founded on principles of empathy, liberty, and security. And he concludes with what seemed perfectly evident to him: That, as experts in matters of family and love, women are not only better citizens but closer to the ideal of humanity itself.16 As an historian and admirer of the Italian Risorgimento, however, Loevinson

Archives of Imagination 87 may also have been thinking of Giuseppe Mazzini’s Doveri dell’uomo (Duties of Man), where the family is famously dubbed the patria del cuore—the fatherland of the heart, and where la donna is passionately revered as carezza della vita, the caress of life, watching with “loving providence” over the future of a better umanità.17 To be sure, neither Humboldt, nor Mazzini, nor, for that matter, Ermanno Loevinson, truly took interest in the family or would have lived up to today’s understanding of feminism. Yet, Loevinson’s remark on the role of family gives us, as historians, a telling cue about kinship and solidarity in a German Jewish family of altogether seven siblings during the most trying years of the 20th century.18 Jewish kinship and family solidarity are subjects frequently fraught with stereotypes, jealousy, and suspicion. The ultraliberal Jewish philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen likened the proverbial Jewish “love for family” to Teutonic tribalism, while the sociologist Stanley Rosenbaum, writing in 1940, tackled this theme in a small-town case study on Jewish Family Solidarity: Myth or Fact? concluding, not without some hesitation, that Jewish family solidarity was indeed “relatively superior” to its non-Jewish peer group, yet far from unique or necessarily enduring.19 More recent scholarship has returned to the idea of family in comparative perspective, identifying universal patters of solidarity and emotional support, but also of control and “repressive conformity.”20 An inherently conservative institution, the family seems to exist in irresolvable tension to liberal societies which emphasize the rights and choices of the individual rather than the privileges (or disadvantages) of kinship and descent. “Whatever families do,” Daniel Boyarin writes in the introduction to a volume on Jewish Families, “they are in the business of inclusion and exclusion—and the exclusions, more often than not, are done silently.”21 In this respect, he continues, families “persist somewhat against the state,” if such a perfectly liberal state truly existed, and it is, accordingly, conservative society that feels most threatened by the decline of “traditional” family structures. 22 At the same time, however, families can function also as liberal institutions of loyalty, or what Boyarin calls “open source” families, where membership is invented by participatory association and where belonging is fluid without necessary family resemblance. 23 A system of kinship, then, can be inclusive in its own right, just as in common parlance strangers can “become family.” Rather than being necessary units of ethnic or religious parochialism, families constitute complex communities of strategy perpetually negotiating their own coherence in a world of centrifugal forces. This strategic aspect, as Herbert Gutman has shown in his classic study on The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, tends to be even more persistent in situations of physical separation, distance in time, and loss of home. 24 Like national identity, a family’s collective self does not solely depend on place or descent, but

88  Asher D. Biemann needs also a sense of “spiritual” lineage and emotional cohesion forged by experience and active identification. Family intimacy and affection, then, require a conscious agency rooted in a sentiment, and purpose, of portative kinship. It does not need, in other words, a physical “kitchen table.” The figure of the kitchen table, however, has long defined the association of family with everydayness, home, and not least with the domestic role of women. Marion Kaplan, in her landmark study on the Making of the Jewish Middle Class, has rightly questioned this thoroughly stratified and gendered paradigm of history, where family is relegated to the realm of the mundane, while the production of high culture and ideas seems to be the domain of exceptional individuals. That there existed a “dialectical relationship” between the public and the domestic, and that (Jewish) women assiduously “negotiated and revised gender roles within the family and the community,” is one of Kaplan’s important conclusions, which she illustrates, in fact, with a tangential reference to the early memoirs of Johanna Meyer Loevinson. 25 This dialectical relationship has been further developed in Harriet Freidenreich’s study Female, Jewish, Educated, which looks at the lives of Central European “university women” and their efforts to negotiate career and family in times of emancipation and, later, under persecution and emigration. 26 But while Kaplan leaves unquestioned the structure of family itself, which, in Imperial Germany, was still tied to the sheltered intimacy of home, but which would be fundamentally transformed in periods of forced emigration and exile as family intimacy came to be maintained—or restored—without the certainty and unity of place, Freidenreich leaves unquestioned the relationship between Bildung and the university. Not all Bildung, as we must readily acknowledge, originates in academia, and if we learn anything from German Jewish culture, then it would be the astonishing number of Jewish autodidacts, adult learners, amateurs, and dilettantes. 27

5.3  Multiple Affinities The Loevinson family is one such example of displaced affection among its dispersed members: It is an example of how a family reclaimed its collective history at the eve of destruction and of how it sought to reconstitute itself in distant places of exile and new homelands. But it is an example also of an expanded sense of Bildung, both formal and informal, that generated multiple cultural affinities, cultural translations, and even cultural conversions. It has often been noted that the German Jewish soul was a “bifurcated” (zweiseitig) one, as Walter Benjamin put it alluding, of course, to the Faustian Zwei Seelen. 28 Yet the bifurcation of the German Jewish

Archives of Imagination 89 soul was rarely a dilemma of only two cultures. German Jews, as recent scholars have emphasized, could feel deeply German and still harbor multiple affinities—to Andalusia, Asia, Eastern Europe, or the Promised Land. German Jews, especially of the upper middle class, could feel at once culturally German, intellectually European, and sentimentally “Oriental” or Mediterranean. They could at once embrace German and decidedly un-German identities. 29 And like their German compatriots, they could fall in love with countries and cities that offered tangible alternatives to their Germanness, such as Paris for Heine or Benjamin, or such as Rome, which occupied a special place in the German Jewish imagination from the 19th century onward.30 Indeed, to many Germans and German Jews alike, Italy represented not only the land of sunshine and citrus trees, but an idea which, since Goethe’s Italian journeys, epitomized both the German Bildungsbürgertum and the search for a freer and unfettered life, which Goethe had described as second birth and cultural Umgeburt.31 Some have suggested that Italy represented—especially to the female visitor—a “place of transgression, voluptuousness, and sensuality,” offering a sort of “alternative life” to the repressive norms of the north. 32 But the opposite can be argued as well: That Italy, in German and German Jewish imagination, represented a place not of exotic transgression but of normalization, a place, as the German Jewish “feminist” Fanny Lewald wrote in her 1845 diaries, where everyone—including the rather naughty colony of Deutschrömer—lived elevated above the “petty accidents” of nationality, “natural and unconstrained,” free to live “as they pleased.”33 Italy thus became a locus of life as it should be, and it was especially the German Jewish italophile who experienced a culture of intuitive acceptance unknown to Northern societies. “We can state with great satisfaction,” Ermanno Loevinson wrote in 1913, “that the most unsanitary product the cultures of central and eastern Europe have exported— the product of modern antisemitism—has found little appeal among the Italian people, mostly because their common sense has exposed it as no more than simple envy and ordinary racial prejudice.”34 Still in 1940, the philosopher Karl Löwith fondly remembered the “authentic humanity of the simple Italian people” which he experienced as a wounded prisoner during World War I, and which he experienced again as a German emigre in Rome in 1933: “In Rome, as in every small Italian village,” Löwith wrote notwithstanding his own flight from Italy in 1938, “one is more Mensch than in the North, endowed with an indestructible sense for personal freedom and with a tolerance for the very human weaknesses of which the Germans seek to cure us.”35 I am not suggesting that these sentimental images of Italian humanity and Mediterranean Menschlichkeit are unqualifiedly “true.”36 They may

90  Asher D. Biemann well have been daydreams projected onto distant lands. But daydreaming, as Ernst Bloch already knew, does not necessarily mean mere illusion: It can also be a “dreaming forward,” a clairvoyant reckoning with reality, an “active anticipation,” which Bloch called the Wachtraum der Weltverbesserung.37 It can, in short, be a form of social, cultural, and political critique constituting its own realism.

5.4  An Italian Conversion It may well have been this anticipatory imagination of Italy as a softer and more menschlich place that inspired the young Hermann Loevinson to leave behind his native Berlin shortly after earning his doctorate in history and permanently settle in Rome in 1891. Fully naturalized as an Italian citizen in 1896, Loevinson later married the Berlin born artist Wally Buetow (1880–1943) and eventually rose to the ranks to Director of State Archives in Bologna until his retirement in 1935 and return to Rome in 1938.38 From 1886 onward, when he was still a doctoral student at Berlin’s Humboldt University, Loevinson kept a diary, which has been preserved, albeit incomplete, through 1919.39 With the usual hubris of a beginning diarist, Loevinson promised to his readers a “mixture of family affairs and contemporary reflections,” but he revealed little of his personal self, let alone a deep degree of introspection. If there is a truly revealing moment, then it occurs as Loevinson abandons his native German to write solely in Italian. The most intimate of books had thus become a testimony to his new identity, indicating that, by the turn of the century, Loevinson had completed not only the process of naturalization but also an inner cultural conversion—that Hermann had fully become Ermanno. Charles Taylor has written about modern conversion experiences as modes of “self-authentication” which, in late modernity, affected mostly “writers and artists.”40 Granted, Taylor’s insights are drawn from religious conversions, echoing what William James, in the Varieties of Religious Experience, described as the sudden or gradual conversion of a “divided self.”41 But to the extent that for many German Jews the bourgeois ideal of Bildung served not only as their true homeland but also as their “true religion,” to recall again Amos Elon, cultural conversions, I argue, follow a similar logic, where, as Taylor puts it, the “convert’s insights break beyond the limits of the regnant versions of immanent order, either in terms of accepted theories, or of moral and political practice,” breaking, therefore, into “a larger, more encompassing one” that both includes and disrupts the order the convert transcends.42 Becoming Italian, then, for the German Jew Hermann Loevinson, was an act of self-fashioning that both included and disrupted his German cultural identity in search for a new, more encompassing, authenticity—for something “beyond the frame.”

Archives of Imagination 91

5.5  Too Happy to be Jews Reframing Italian history was indeed the focus of Loevinson’s lifelong scholarship. As royal archivist, he enjoyed access to a wide range of documents from modern Italy’s foundational moment: The risorgimento and the unification under Giuseppe Garibaldi. Thus, Loevinson took great interest in the multiyear edition of Giuseppe Mazzini’s correspondence, in Garibaldi’s military campaigns, and in Camillo Benso, the Count of Cavour, who became the first prime minister of the newly formed Italian kingdom under Vittorio Emanuele II, in 1852. But it was not Italian history per se that drew Loevinson to this time period, nor the pretense of writing a history of Italian Jews: Rather, it was Italian history in a Jewish key.43 The role of Italian “Israelites” in the making of a modern nation, the formative interactions of the revolutionaries and political leaders, the complete integration of Italian and Jewish history, remained the guiding principles of his work. For the Italian reader, Loevinson created a harmonious picture of unification that portrayed its Jewish participants—such as Giacomo Dina, Davide Levi, Giuseppe Finzi, and Isacco Artom—not only as unwavering patriots, but also as co-creators of the Italian Republic. For the German, in particular the German Jewish reader, Loevinson offered an image that expanded the Italian frame and served as a critical mirror to German society: “A glimpse at Isaak Artom’s career,” he writes in a German version of his essay on Camillo Cavour and the Israelites, “will be especially instructive to the Prussian reader, for it shows that already fifty years ago freedom of conscience, to an Italian official, was a right not merely on paper.”44 Even though the Catholic religion remained the official religion of State, “it would not have occurred to anyone in Italy to conclude that a Protestant or a Jew could not rise to the rank of government official, or even minister!”45 Comparing the Count of Cavour to his Prussian counterpart, Otto von Bismarck, Loevinson finds a “world of difference” in their treatment of Jews. Whereas Bismarck still voted against equal rights for Jews in 1847, Camillo Cavour already lamented the injustice of the Jewish ghetto as a young man calling for “freedom and tolerance” and forging friendships with members of the Jewish community. And, being a charming man of Mediterranean temper, as Loevinson reminds us, the Count also seems to have had interest in many a beautiful Jewish woman, including the “immortal actress Rachel,” whom he had seen on stage between 1842 and 1843.46 And whereas Bismarck’s Germany produced intellectuals and cabinet members such as Heinrich v. Treitschke (whose angry lectures Loevinson knew from Berlin), Cavour’s Italy took “complete equality” as something “self-understood” allowing for Jews to serve as prime minister (Luigi Luzzatti) or mayor of Rome (Ernesto Nathan) “without raising the slightest stir among the people.”47

92  Asher D. Biemann Between 1912 and 1913, Loevinson published a series of articles for the German Jewish magazine Ost und West on “The Jews of Italy,” which painted a similar image of a liberal society that knew no pogroms in modern times, because Jews and Catholic Italians are—thanks to their “Arab and Oriental Beimischung”—indistinguishable from each other; a society of bunte Vielfalt that rendered racism nonsensical, and a country where religions lived side by side peacefully.48 The Italian case, in this respect, was both exceptional and normal: Exceptional if judged by the history of Jews in Europe, and normal if seen through the spectacles of a liberal lover of Italy. But normalcy came also as a liability to Jewish identity, and Loevinson could not hide his German Jewish sensibilities as he described the Italian Jewish community— small as it was (about 45,000 souls in a country of then 35 million)—as in a state of constant decay either because of “apathy” and poverty, or because of intermarriage and complete assimilation. The Jews of Italy, as Max Nordau observed already in 1898, were simply “too happy” to be Jews.49 Unlike their German brethren, Italian Jews had no taste for Reform, little sense of innovation, and almost no interest in Wissenschaft des Judentums, complained Loevinson. Attendance at the new Roman temple is sparse, despite its lavish liturgy and organ music, and to Loevinson’s great dismay, children will come to services only if rewarded with little goodies. “Considering the thousand-year long history of the Italian peninsula,” Loevinson concludes his essay, “it almost seems as if the climate forces its inhabitants to either completely abandon religion or to embrace the intoxicating sensual cult of Catholicism.”50 This sensual cult and incorrigible Heidentum, however, was still more preferable, to Loevinson, than the Scheinmoral des Nordens (pseudo-morality of the North). But it was Judaism that represented for him the last “reservoir of true monotheism” and as such an important pillar in Italy’s “innate” rebellion against tyranny and unwavering commitment to a democratic order. 51

5.6  In Praise of the Duce It was this very faith in Italy’s innate commitment to democracy and resistance to tyranny that would later attract Loevinson to Mussolini’s political agenda. Like many Italian Jews at that time, he viewed Mussolini’s leadership as deeply compatible with the ideals of the Risorgimento, with the interests of Jewish citizens, and not least with Zionism. 52 In his 1927 German book Roma Israelitica, a Jewish Cicerone of sorts featuring also drawings by his wife Wally, Loevinson explored these curious affinities with a narrative consciously interweaving fact and fiction. 53 Thus, the first person narrator is a North American envoy traveling on behalf of an “Israelite organization” on a mission to “reborn Palestine.” With only a day to spare, he stops in

Archives of Imagination 93 the Eternal City at the Tiber and is offered a novel and speedy way of sightseeing: A tour by airplane giving him a bird’s-eye view of history that illustrates how one culture is built upon another. As they cruise some 500 m above the Arch of Titus—the ultimate form of historical justice—the pilot reveals himself as a fellow Jew and decorated World War I veteran of the Royal Italian Airforce. Had he ever experienced any discrimination? the narrator asks. No, replies the pilot: “A racial law or religious limitation, as we know them from other countries, does not exist here.”54 Inspired by his first visit and the friendship of the Jewish Luftcicerone, our narrator returns to Rome the following year to make an even more surprising discovery: That the Italian capital could serve as an inspiration for the resurrection of Palestine, that Italy and Palestine are two Mediterranean countries sharing a symbiotic destiny, that Italy ought to be the rightful colonial power in Palestine, and that the Italian language would be a splendid lingua franca for the Middle East.55 Italian Jews, then, especially those living in Trieste, could assist the migration of their less fortunate brethren to the Promised land, and if some Jews from Italy should themselves choose to settle in Palestine, they would not be lost to the Italian people, no more than the millions of Italian Catholics living in North America while remaining connected to their motherland across the Atlantic.56 This insight strikes the American traveler and ambassador of Zionism, who has now experienced Italy not only as site of rich history but also as a model country of freedom and equality, like an epiphany. And he realizes with great affection that the handsome “restorer of Italy as a superpower,” the Duce, has proven himself a great friend to the Jews, that he, the Duce, enjoys Hebrew melodies, kisses Jewish children, and flirts with Jewish women, and that fascism has “received great sympathy among Italian Jewish circles.” In fact, the reader should be glad to know, Jewish fascists now officially attend the Roman synagogue breathing new life into the otherwise anemic community.57 Why, wonders the narrator, should a “well-conceived and implemented imperialism not be in harmony with the Jewish element and use it for its own purposes?”58 Leaving the city, the now enlightened traveler glances at the surrounding flatlands and undulating hills, imagining how these fallow lands will soon be turned into fertile fields and blooming meadows, just like the deserts in far-away Palestine.59

5.7  The Manifesto on Race The story of Jewish support for Mussolini’s fascism has much complexity and should be treated without sensationalist temper. The Duce himself continuously flip-flopped on the so-called “Jewish question” during his early years as a socialist and after his fascist “conversion” in 1920.60 But despite his many antisemitic remarks, he also issued a string of

94  Asher D. Biemann public declarations that vehemently distinguished “authentic” (Italian) fascism from the “pseudo-fascist” movements in other countries, especially Germany, which were fueled by “blind and unbridled hatred of the Jews.”61 To reassure the Italian Jewish communities, Mussolini, at an official meeting with the chief rabbi of Rome in November 1923, formally declared “that the Italian government and Italian Fascism have never had any intention of following, nor are following, an antisemitic policy, and further deplore that foreign antisemitic parties should desire to exploit in this manner the spell which Fascism exercises in the world.”62 Nearly a decade later, in his famous conversations with Emil Ludwig, the Duce unequivocally declared: “Antisemitism does not exist in Italy. Jewish Italians have always been loyal citizens and brave soldiers for our country.”63 Undoubtedly, such declarations instilled enormous confidence among Italian Jews, even as racializing discourse shaped public opinion during Italy’s brutal Abyssinian war, known as the 1935 “Rape of Ethiopia.”64 It was only a logical sequence of steps from that public discourse to the fateful Rome-Berlin Axis of 1936 (which proved, as so often in history, the mutual attraction of dictatorial leaders), Mussolini’s “Manifesto on Race” of July 1938, and the official promulgation of racial laws in October of the same year.65 But this sequence involved such a radical turn in the Duce’s official position on antisemitism, that it struck the Jews of Italy—and, as Augusto Segre recalls in his memoirs, many Italian “Aryans” as well—like a bolt of lightning.66

5.8 A Funkprinzessin of Her Own We have no record of Ermanno Loevinson’s reactions to these events. There are no diaries preserved from this period, and only a few pieces of correspondence with Ermanno’s younger sister Johanna remain after her successful emigration to the United States. As a young woman in Berlin, Johanna had pursued a career in acting while working as an “afternoon governess” for an orthodox Jewish family.67 But her unconventional life-style soon aroused suspicion, and the Loevinson “family council” saw itself compelled to do what one does with unruly daughters: To send her, at age 19, to her older brother in Rome to study music and art history. Like Ermanno, she fell in love with Italian culture, yet, much to her brother’s relief, her even greater love for the theater and for German literature made her return to Berlin in 1895, where she became a student of the actor and later film director Max Pohl at the Deutsches Theater. Lacking, however, the “aggressive personality” required to succeed in the savage world of the stage, Johanna abandoned her acting dreams and embarked on a career as Vortragskünstlerin reciting German poetry and reading prose in schools, in high bourgeois “Reading Circles,” at birthday parties, weddings, and wedding anniversaries, while giving her

Archives of Imagination 95 own lessons in voice formation and speech therapy and fashioning herself as a literary scholar in her own right. One of her students was Wally Buetow, Ermanno’s future wife.68 In 1916, the Berlin Speakers Bureau of the Jewish Literary Societies listed Johanna as 1 of 50 experts qualified to lecture on a wide array of topics from “New Jewish Religious Lyrics” to “Women in the Bible” and from the “Songs of the Ghetto” to the works of Franz Werfel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Ernst Toller, and Stefan Zweig, whom she visits in Salzburg during an extended trip to Austria in 1925.69 In fact, Johanna maintained cordial friendships with many of the authors whose work she performed, and some of them would later become her extended “family” in exile. It was this career in performance and network of contemporary writers that ultimately, in 1924, brought Johanna to the pioneering new medium of radio, where she designed programs on literature, parenting, pacifism, and social topics for the Berliner Funk-Stunde AG, soon earning the title of Funkprinzessin.70 Barred from the airwaves in 1933, Johanna became active in the Kulturbund and the Jüdische Frauenbund, which her older sister, Henriette, had helped found in 1904 together with the German Jewish suffragette Bertha Pappenheim, and which operated until its dissolution by the Nazis in November 1938.71 In October 1938, the Blätter des jüdischen Frauenbundes published a short farewell to her: Johanna Meyer, the youngest sister of Henriette May, is well-known to Jewish women beyond her native city of Berlin and has always been a welcome presence throughout Germany. Her art of entertaining, teaching, and elevating through lectures and public readings was a great gift to us and, in recent years, also a source of solace… This past July she left us for Chicago—surely with a heavy heart, yet also as fortunate emigrant.72

5.9  No Manners in Pennsylvania Indeed, thanks to her son Paul and her daughter Leonore already living as an American citizens in Chicago and Reading, Pennsylvania, respectively, Johanna managed to apply for a visa in 1933, which, after a failed first attempt, was granted in 1938, allowing her to enter the United States and eventually settle in Philadelphia in 1943.73 Almost immediately upon arrival she begins to work on an affidavit to get her nephew Sigismondo, barely 20 years of age, out of fascist Rome. But the efforts remain unfruitful and become even harder with the US entering the war in 1941. Meanwhile, Johanna’s niece Käthe, an economist— and ardent feminist—who, in 1926, had published a book on women in banking, settles in Shanghai in 1939, where she becomes active in the Jüdische Hilfskommitee, while her nephew Hans makes it to

96  Asher D. Biemann Dairen (today Dalian).74 By the end of the war, the Loevinson family is dispersed across four continents, but the relatives make every effort to remain in contact, and it is thanks to Johanna’s archive of letters and newspaper clippings that we can reconstruct some of their stories. Johanna’s own story is perhaps the most inspiring of all, for it exemplifies remarkable resilience and fearless self-fashioning in a new and foreign culture. Her handwritten “Early Impressions of Life in America” are filled with observations of the everyday, of vexing cultural differences, the hardships of finding work, the shallowness of the word “friend,” the relentless work ethic and habit of empty conversations, and the small irritations that offended her Prussian manners, such as speaking with a toothpick in one’s mouth.75 But it is again her astounding adaptability which, at the age of 65, allowed her to embrace a new social environment while creating new networks to nourish her German, Jewish and, most of all, humanistic sensibilities. Pennsylvania is a state with a large German heritage population, and after successfully working for the Germania Broadcast in Chicago, Johanna quickly approaches the Philadelphia-based German-American Broadcasting Company, which described itself as “Pennsylvania’s most powerful German voice” with half a million listeners.76 But Johanna’s programs and radio plays were not always simple and volkstümlich enough, as a letter from the German-American Broadcasting Company attests. During the war years, German broadcasting in America becomes also increasingly controversial and, in some cases, tainted by Nazi sympathies, all of which might have been the reason for Johanna’s later transition to the Franklin Broadcasting Company (WFLN) in Philadelphia. Nevertheless, her recitations of German literature and programs about literature developed a constant following, especially among recent German and German Jewish emigres. For her 70th birthday, she receives greetings from Thomas Mann, Julius Bab, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Emil Ludwig, Franz Werfel, Friderike Zweig, among many others. Greetings come also from various Jewish organizations in Philadelphia and beyond. The New York-based emigre journals Aufbau and The Jewish Way publish congratulatory notices of her birthday. Family members compose a German poem to the refrain of Yankee Doodle. And she receives a personal letter from the White House signed by Roosevelt’s secretary excusing the President for not attending the ceremony, as he was too occupied with the affairs of war.77

5.10  16 October 1943 Less than a year before, in June 1943, Ermanno had celebrated his 80th birthday, and a small note written by his wife Wally reached Philadelphia via Apostolic mail indicating that the Roman relatives were, under the

Archives of Imagination 97 circumstances, doing well. Mail travels slowly and has to be channeled through the American Red Cross. A brief “civilian message” from Johanna to Ermanno, dispatched in December 1942, arrives only in April 1943 and receives an answer in August of that year. Johanna immediately replies: Thank you for your greetings of April. We constantly worry about you and would like to know more about Ruth and the family. Everything here is well, unchanged, and content. Sisterly greetings, and also from everyone, in innermost unity. Hanne78 There is no record of another reply from the “Ermannos” in Rome. A year later, at the end of September 1944, Ruth Loevinson Tatti sends a letter to her aunt recalling the events of October 1943 in broken German and in a handwriting that reverts to the old Sütterlin script as she become emotional: We had a terrible winter here and the Germans were schrecklich. My parents were hidden with an Italian Family. Then the Germans demanded 50kg of gold from the Jews. And my parents and [Sigis] Mondo went back to [their house] in Via Porta Maggiore 38, because the family who hid them was too afraid of the Germans. So, on October 16, at 3:30 at night, German S.S. soldiers came […] and gave them 20 minutes to get dressed. They asked my parents to pack things for eight days and took them away on a truck. All day long the Germans went to Jewish homes and took everyone they found. Nobody heard of them again. I was told that Mama cried and worried about me. Papa said: “Look, the strong Germans are afraid of an 81-year old man!”79 The events of 16 October 1943, including the demand for gold and the nightly deportations, are by now well documented.80 At the time, however, they were shrouded in obscurity and left many relatives frantically placing search ads in the newspapers. One such richiesta came from Ruth who suspected then that her parents and brother had been taken to Austria.81 In October 1944, presumably at Johanna’s behest, the New York Aufbau published a short news item on Ermanno and his family assuming that they were still alive and concluding that “one can only hope that the 80-year old scholar will survive the ordeal of deportation.”82 In October 1945, Il Giornale del Mattino printed a detailed account of the events, including the final destination of the Roman train: Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of the 1100 Jews deported that day, reports the paper, only 23 men and one woman had returned.83

98  Asher D. Biemann Ruth Loevinson Tatti eventually succeeds reclaiming the property of her parents in Italian courts. Among the papers she rescues from Ermanno’s old apartment is a simple note in German written most likely by Wally: “Apartment. Arrest. 1943.” It is signed in unsteady letters “Ermanno”—as if in a last effort to reclaim an Italian identity built on idealism and defiance. In the meantime, Johanna Meyer has become the matron of the family and the family’s chief archivist. After reading Robert Katz’s meticulously researched book Black Sabbath of 1969, which includes a complete list of the October 16 victims murdered by the Nazis, her daughter Leonore adds another note to the family archive confirming the deaths of Ermanno, Wally, and Sigismondo in Auschwitz.84 It brings to a tragic close the story that began with Ermanno’s move to the dreamland of his imagination, and which seemed epitomized in the motto of a fictional book he invents for his own fictionalized history Roma Israelitica—an anonymous book written by a German scholar who, as legend has it, had crossed the Alps to find the city of justice and freedom: “Dilexi iustitiam et odi iniquitatem,” the motto goes, “proptereo gaudeo Urbem” [I love justice and detest inequality, therefore I find happiness in this city].85

5.11  A Kinder Fate For Johanna, however, who died in 1958 at age 84, the fate of her older brother did not deter her own commitment to justice and equality. A strong voice for women’s rights, she became a presence in the local Jewish Reform community Rodeph Shalom, as well as in the Quaker run Philadelphia Fellowship House, which was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are equal.”86 She was asked—but felt inadequate— to translate one of the works by Leo Baeck (with whom she entertained a small correspondence), began modeling at age 72 for the Philadelphia College of Art, and, in 1949, became one of the chief organizers for the bicentennial celebration of Goethe’s birthday on the American airwaves. It is one of history’s eerie symbolisms that, in 1932, Johanna had written programs honoring the centenary of Goethe’s death for a Berlin radio audience that would soon exile her from the airwaves and from the land she had loved so deeply while, in 1949, she became again the voice to celebrate Goethe’s legacy. But this time, it was to celebrate Goethe’s (re-)birth for an audience of German and German Jewish emigres living in America and learning the ropes of another culture while holding on to remnants of their own. The Goethe-Jahr of 1949 allowed these emigres, who had been enemy aliens only a few years before, to connect to their German pasts and bring that elusive, portative homeland closer to their American neighbors. To prepare for her radio programs, Johanna kept countless excerpts and translations from Goethe’s works and letters,

Archives of Imagination 99 including an often quoted poem of 1827 that reflected Goethe’s affection for America: America, thy fate is kinder Than that of our old continent. No ruined keeps are the reminder Of ages all misspent.87 In Ludwig Lewisohn’s translation, these words resonated with a community of listeners, who had lost their faith in the old continent, yet also longed for its belle lettres. Goethe, in this sense, represented both, the best of the old continent and the most meaningful endorsement of the new. In Goethe’s legacy, Germans and Jews seemed reunited, albeit in distant lands, a symbiosis of the mind and on the air mediated by American values and forged on the promise of a new cosmopolitan order. It was Goethe who emerged, not least thanks to Johanna’s radio programs and recitals, as a powerful prophet of humanity and, at the same time, as an enduring monument to “true” German culture reenvisioned by its exiled custodians.88 “Goethe appeals to mankind by the fullness of his life,” reads Johanna’s script for the Franklin Broadcasting Company. “He was universal…Believing deeply in the lasting regenerative power of the creative human spirit, Goethe endowed the world with a model of a universal man upon which future generations could base their standard of human conduct.”89

5.12  Goethe, Mazzini, and American Pacifism Johanna’s radio hour on Goethe, which aired on August 28, became a big success. The Aufbau dedicated a laudatory review to the program praising her “unusually tasteful and impressive” presentation and noting the high intellectual quality of her work: “A rare flower in the usual cabbage field of radio.”90 The general manager of WFLN sent her a congratulatory note indicating that he had received “several complimentary letters concerning your program.”91 And the World Affairs Council in Philadelphia asked for her “continued cooperation” after her successful speaking engagements which had facilitated the Council’s appointment to the official Speakers Bureau of the United Nations.92 Considering her audiences—American, German heritage, and German Jewish emigrée—one might well conclude that Johanna Meyer acted not only as a cultural translator but also as a cultural triangulator using a universal medium that allowed her to connect worlds of sentiment torn apart by history and human folly. If Ermanno had been a daydreamer in a city that represented for him layers of the past adding up to an ideal and exceptional present, even a fascist one, then Johanna, it seems, was a woman tirelessly dreaming forward, dreaming Bloch’s Wachtraum

100  Asher D. Biemann der Weltverbesserung and joining, in her own idealism, a group of American and emigre pacifists agitating for a larger human family. In another of history’s sad ironies, the circle around the short-lived journal Common Cause, which sought to establish a peaceful “republic of the world” and with which Johanna deeply identified, included the Italian writer Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, who had fled Rome in 1931 because of his opposition to Fascism and who later joined the American Mazzini Society, named after the great hero of the Risorgimento, so revered by Johanna’s older brother Ermanno.93 Together with another Italian emigre, the writer and Mazzini scholar Gaetano Salvemini, who in 1927 already published a scathing critique of Italian fascism, Borgese joined a group of prominent American and emigre signatories to draft a manifesto on “world democracy,” which appeared as The City of Man in 1941.94 A few years later, he helped establish Common Cause, the editor of which was his wife Elizabeth Mann Borgese, and to which Johanna, as her correspondence suggests, seems to have subscribed.95 Thus, a peculiar spiritual alliance of Italian, American, German, and Jewish intellectuals emerged, which would solidify once again around the figure of Goethe. In October 1949, Common Cause published a special issue on the Goethejahr with speeches from the bicentennial Goethe celebrations held in Aspen, Colorado, in the summer of that year.96 Borgese, who had written already on Goethe’s heritage for humanity in the dire year of 1933, renewed his admiration for Goethe as a model citizen of the world, as a “One-Worlder,” adding that “the permanent ambassador of the German community to the community of man is Goethe, not Hitler.”97 And Robert Hutchins, the festival’s principal organizer, invoked Goethe’s faith in goodness, in humanity and, in almost Buberian language, in a “Civilization of the Dialogue.” “Through this faith,” Hutchins concluded, “we may bring about that moral, intellectual, and spiritual revolution which unites mankind in lasting peace.”98 A year later, the Jewish legal scholar Milton Konvitz, wrote in the Reconstructionist: “If mankind has a future in which there will be room for the values we associate with Judaism and Christianity, with humanism and enlightenment, with morality and democracy, with science and human progress, it will be only because we shall hold in reverence the spirit of Goethe.”99 Johanna’s efforts, then, to restore Goethe as the epitomized cosmopolitan to multiple audiences of shared affinities echoed and, perhaps, helped stimulate a broader sentiment of “dialogue” across cultural and linguistic boundaries. And even if she tried in vain to persuade the RCA Victor Company to produce a recording of her in German, she still succeeded in sharing her own sentiments that there existed a distinctly German tradition of enduring humanism and pacifism. Indeed, at the time Ermanno still dreamt of a new Risorgimento in Mussolini’s

Archives of Imagination 101 Italy, Johanna had already been attending lectures at the Internationale Frauen-Liga für Frieden und Freiheit in Berlin, Friday evening talks at the Internationale Anti-Kriegsmuseum, and a public declaration on the Überwindung der Kriege (the overcoming of war), organized in April 1930 by an interconfessional working circle on peace in BerlinSchöneberg.100 Her pacifism began long before the war and moved with her from the old continent to find new ground in a circle of intellectuals who had in common a love for Goethe, a love for Italy, and a love for peace.

5.13  Mother Meyer We are not entitled to judge choices and measure dreams against the capricious book of history. The lives of Johanna and Ermanno Loevinson took different turns and are each filled with their own tragedies and their own expressions of idealism and strength. In his unpublished autobiography written on the occasion of Johanna’s 50th birthday in 1924, their oldest brother Martin, called this idealism an “hereditary family optimism” common to all Loevinsons.101 To be sure, Martin did not live through the family’s darkest times (he died in 1930), but reference to this optimism becomes a recurring trope in the later family correspondence. Optimism, as the philosopher Hermann Cohen wrote in 1918, is no empty naiveté, nor a “wicked way of thinking.” Rather, it is the “practical reform of our earthly existence,” the unending aim “to improve the state of the world according to its moral destiny and thus to reduce humanity’s suffering.”102 In this sense, the Loevinson family optimism received its strength from a vision of the future, a vision that transcended family, nation, and even religion, yet remained rooted in all of them. Together with its hereditary optimism, the Loevinson family shared a hereditary devotion to the diary, a veritable “archive fever” which was both a fever of conservation and rebellion.103 But whereas Ermanno understood the archive as an institution and, as such, as the secret conscience of the people and the state, Johanna created an archive of intimacy and affection which would not only tell the story of her family but also become the family’s imaginary home. To the surviving relatives, Tante Hanne was the matron of memory. For her 80th birthday, the International Institute in Philadelphia, the mission of which was to help European refugees and immigrants integrate into American culture, organized a special event for Johanna at which the Rabbi of the Reform Temple Rodeph Shalom spoke the opening words. He praised her uncompromising integrity, her devotion to the “sweetness and loveliness of life,” and human relationships, old and new. Turning to the Psalms he observed that “we become like the thing with which we busy ourselves,” and that Johanna had become indeed an image of her passions.104 After the rabbi’s traditional Hebrew blessing,

102  Asher D. Biemann the cantor of another synagogue steps onto the stage to congratulate “Mother Meyer,” as she is known to her friends. “I have never been so excited in my whole life,” says Cantor Edgar Mills from New Jersey, perhaps with a slight Viennese accent, “[as] to come here today and sing for my Mother Meyer whatever she loves.”105 And then he performs, in a cantor’s best voice, Händel’s Dank sei Dir, Herr, Schubert’s An die Musik, and an aria from Mozart’s La Nozze di Figaro.

Notes 1. The present essay is based on a paper presented at the 2019 conference Imaging Emigration—Translating Exile held at the University of Performing Arts in Vienna. I thank the organizers, Susanne Korbel and Philipp Strobl, for their invitation and for their valuable feedback on this essay. Thank you also to my University of Virginia colleagues James Loeffler and Jeffrey Grossman for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. 2. Alvin Solomon, Letter to Jane Meyer (Johanna Meyer-Loevinson), 11 October 1944. Papers of Johanna Meyer-Lövinson, Leo Baeck Institute Archives, New York: AR 299, Box 1/33. Henceforth as LBI-JML: AR 299. 3. Ruth Loevinson-Tatti, Postcard to Johanna Meyer-Loevinson (“Tante Hanne”), 23 October 1944. LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 1/33. 4. Ruth Loevinson-Tatti, Letter to Johanna Meyer-Loevinson, 25 November 1944: “Mein Mann ist noch nicht zurückgekommen. Der Rabbiner von Rom hat für meinen Mann im amerikanischen Büro bei Colonell Poletti für ihn gesprochen. Er hat gesagt dass ich lungenkrank bin, dass mein Mann mir das leben in dem er im Dienst geblieben ist, mir gerettet hat, dass er niemals den Deutschen geholfen hat...Ich bin zu der Amerikanischen Polizei gegangen, sie antworteten mir, sie haben nichts gegen ihn, es sind die Italiener. So ist er im Gefängnis geblieben...da ist er mit vielen anderen Offizieren in einem englischen concentration camp gebracht hier in Italien. Jetzt hat endlich die italienische Commission sein ‘case’ examiniert und beschlossen dass er für die Italiener frei sein kann...” 5. Ibid.: “Aber meiner Gesundheit geht es viel besser, da ich keine Angst mehr von den Deutschen zu haben. Monate Angst zu haben nie ruhig schlafen immer denkend, Morgen vielleicht bin ich nicht mehr hier, immer Angst zu haben sie könnten mich den Deutschen verkaufen, die bezahlten für jeden Juden 5000 Lire, für den Rabbiner hätten sie 300.000 bezahlt, der aber war versteckt bei den Partisanen, und sich so gerettet.” 6. Antonio Tatti to Johanna Meyer-Loevinson, 2 February 1949. LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 1/33. 7. Antonio Tatti to Johanna Meyer-Loevinson and Leonore Meyer (Tante Hanne and Lore), 14 January 1958. LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 1/33. 8. Ermanno Loevinson, Il Campo Verano (Rome: Nuova Antologia, 1914). 9. Most of Johanna Loevinson Meyer’s biography is recorded in Leonore Meyer, Velvet and Steel: The Life of Johanna Meyer (Upper Darby, Pennsylvania: Published by Author, 1989). Many sources list her dates as 1874–1957. The family papers and Leonore’s biography, however, clearly state 1958. For basic biographical information on Hermann (Ermanno) Loevinson see Maurizio Cassetti ed., Repertorio del personale degli archivi di stato, vol. 1 (Rome: Elio Lodolini, 2008), 464–468. The papers of Johanna and Ermanno Loevinson, as well as several other Loevinson family members, are archived at the Leo Baeck Institute Archives in New

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York, under Papers of Johanna Meyer-Lövinson (AR 299). Cited here as LBI-JML: AR 299. Note the alternate spelling of the family name as Lövinson and Loewinson. 10. See, for instance, Ulla Vuorela, “Transnational Families: Imagined and Real Communities,” in The Transnational Family: New European Frontiers and Global Networks, eds. Deborah Bryceson and Ulla Vuorela (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002), 63–82. 11. On the possibility of maintaining personal identity in an ever changing milieu of cultural identities see Bernard Berofsky, “The Identity of Cultural and Personal Identity,” in Jewish Identity, eds. David Theo Goldberg and Michael Krausz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 35–49. 12. Ernst Cassirer, Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2011), 56 and 112. 13. “Their true home, we now know, was not ‘Germany’ but German culture and language. Their true religion was the bourgeois, Goethean ideal of Bildung.”; Amos Elon, The Pity of it All: A History of Jews in Germany, 1743–1933 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), 9; on the prevalence of the Bildungsideal among German Jews see George Mosse’s classic study, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), esp. 1–20. Also Paul Mendes-Flohr, German Jews: A Dual Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), esp. 1–15. 14. “Blätter der Erinnerung an Dr. Moritz Lövinson zum 50. Todestage,” gesammelt von Heinrich Hersch, Johanna Meyer, and Käthe Lövinson. Self-published typescript (Berlin: 1937), 28. LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 2/20. 15. “Blätter der Erinnerung,” 3–4. 16. Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Gränzen und Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen,” in Werke in Fünf Bänden I: Schriften zur Anthropologie und Geschichte, eds. Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980), 79–81. 17. Giuseppe Mazzini, Doveri dell’uomo (Rome and Milan: Società Editrice Dante Alighieri, 1907), 44–45. 18. On the Loevinson siblings see Meyer, Velvet and Steel, 19–20. There were, in fact, ten siblings, but three of the children (Fanny, Albert, and Alexander) died during a diphtheria epidemic in 1870. 19. Morris R. Cohen, “Zionism, Tribalism or Liberalism?” (1919), in Zionism Reconsidered: The Rejection of Jewish Normalcy, ed. Michael Selzer (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1970), 67; Sidney R. Brav (Rosenbaum), Jewish Family Solidarity: Myth or Fact? (Vicksburg, Michigan: Nogales Press, 1940), 69. To accomplish his study of family solidarity, Rosenbaum interviewed 130 members in Jewish and 149 members in non-Jewish families with questions ranging from “The birthday of what family member do you remember with a message?” to “What member of a family have you ever helped financially at a great personal sacrifice?” to “What members of the family do you greet with a kiss?” 20. Betty Farrell, Family: The Making of an Idea, an Institution, and a Controversy in American Culture (London: Taylor & Francis, 2018), 9–10; For an historical overview of family studies see Tamara K. Hareven, Families, History, and Social Change: Life Course and Cross-Cultural Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2000), esp. 3–30; Also idem, “The Impact of Family History and the Life Course on Social History,” in Family History Revisited: Comparative Perspectives, eds. Richard Wall, Tamara K. Hareven, and Josef Ehmer (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press, 2001), 21–39.

104  Asher D. Biemann 21. Daniel Boyarin, Jewish Families (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 3. 22. On this point see Farrell, Family: The Making of an Idea, 2–3; Similarly, Paula Hyman has argued that, as an ideological construct, the modern Jewish family has become “the symbol for the deleterious consequences of assimilation, for the discontinuities of modern Jewish history.”; Paula E. Hyman, “The Modern Jewish Family: Image and Reality,” in The Jewish Family: Metaphor and Memory, ed. David Kraemer (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 190. 23. Boyarin, Jewish Families, 14–16. 24. Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976). Gutman’s work was in important corrective to the mistaken notion that African American families lack solidarity; Another approach to family structure in times of duress is Joanna Beata Michlic’s volume on, Jewish Families in Europe: 1939–Present (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017), which looks at intergenerational solidarity and memory. 25. Marion Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 60; 228–229. 26. Harriet Pass Freidenreich, Female, Jewish, Educated: The Lives of Central European University Women (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002). Among the many memoirs Freidenreich references in her impressive study is Leonore Meyer’s Velvet and Steel. But she chooses not to include Johanna Meyer Loevinson among her protagonists, perhaps for lack of a formal university degree. 27. This may have prompted the writer Egon Friedell, who himself was known as the geniale Dilettant, to publish an essay in praise of the amateur and dilettante in 1918, and Rudolf Kassner to publish (a less sympathetic) study on Der Dilettantismus in Martin Buber’s series Die Gesellschaft in 1910; Egon Friedell, “Über Dilettantismus,” in Abschaffung des Genies. Essays bis 1918, ed. Heribert Illig (Wien: Kremayr & Scheriau, 1993), 266–270; Rudolf Kassner, Der Dilettantismus (Die Gesellschaft: Sammlung sozialpsychologischer Monographien, vol. 34), ed. Martin Buber (Frankfurt/M.: Rütten & Loening, 1910). 28. Letter of Walter Benjamin to Ludwig Strauss, 11 September 1912. Ludwig Strauss Archive, Jerusalem. Quoted in Paul Mendes-Flohr, German Jews: A Dual Identity, 50. 29. See, for instance, Stefan Zweig, Triumph und Tragik des Erasmus von Rotterdam (Vienna: Reichner Verlag, 1935), Emil Ludwig, Am Mittelmeer (Berlin: Ernst Rowohlt, 1927), Arnold Zweig, Herkunft und Zukunft (Wien: Phaidon Verlag, 1929), and Eugen Hoeflich Die Pforte des Ostens (Berlin: B. Harz, 1923). 30. On Paris see, most recently, Jeffrey A. Grossman, “France as Wahlheimat for Two German Jews: Heinrich Heine and Walter Benjamin,” in Spiritual Homelands: The Cultural Experience of Exile, Place and Displacement among Jews and Others, eds. Asher Biemann, Richard Cohen, and Sarah Wobick-Segev (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2019), 153–182; on Rome and Italy see Asher Biemann, “‘Thus Rome Shows Us Our True Place’: Reflections on the German Jewish Love for Italy,” in German-Jewish Thought Between Religion and Politics, eds. Christian Wiese and Martina Urban (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 241–262; also, for a fuller account of this phenomenon, idem, Dreaming of Michelangelo: Jewish Variations on a Modern Theme (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 1–35.

Archives of Imagination 105 31. For the many references to “rebirth,” “second birthday,” and “new life” see Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Italienische Reise,” in Goethes Werke 11: Autobiographische Schriften 3 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1981), 147; 386; 399; 489; Also Richard Block, The Spell of Italy: Vacation, Magic, and the Attraction of Goethe (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006) and the earlier study by Klaus H. Kiefer, Wiedergeburt und neues Leben: Aspekte des Strukturwandels in Goethes Italienischer Reise (Bonn: Bouvier, 1978). 32. Liana Borghi, Nicoletta Livi, and Uta Treder eds., Viaggio e Scrittura: Le Straniere nell’Italia dell’Ottocento (Florence: Libreria delle donne, 1988), 17; 29. 33. Fanny Lewald, Römisches Tagebuch, 1845/46, ed. Heinrich Spiero (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1927), 40; 89; the subject of German artists settling in 19th-century Rome is well studied. For our purposes we should note Ermanno Loevinson, La vita degli artisti Tedeschi in Roma (Rome: Nuova Antologia, 1907). 34. Ermanno Loevinson, “Die Juden Italiens,” Ost und West 13, no. 7 (1913): 560. 35. Karl Löwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933: Ein Bericht (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), 8, also 89–91; for broader context see Klaus Voigt, Zuflucht und Widerruf: Exil in Italien 1933–1945 (Stuttgart: Klett, 1996). 36. Nevertheless, some scholars have tried to retrieve the image of a more “humane” Mediterranean. See, for instance, David Ohana, “Mediterranean Humanism,” Mediterranean Historical Review 19, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 59–75. 37. Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung I (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1985), 85; 107. 38. Little is known of Wally Buetow. In a letter to the Centro di documentazione Ebraica contemporanea in Milan, Joel Sartorius, a librarian at Philadelphia’s Free Library, who became a family friend of the Meyers, notes that “Wally Buetow era une studentessa della madre di Leonore Meyer, Johanna Loevinson Meyer, a Berlino. Durante le nozze dei genitori di Leonore Meyer, Wally a fatto la conoscienza di Ermanno Loevinson, il fratello dell madre di Leonore Meyer.” And he adds, to avoid confusion: “Wally Buetow era ebrea.” JML-LBI: AR 299, Box 1/33. The Centro di documentazione Ebraica contemporanea maintains today an online database I nomi della Shoah Italiana, which lists—under the name Loewinson—Ermanno, Wally, and their son Sigismondo (Sigmund-Walter). 39. Loevinson’s diaries are now at the Leo Baeck Institute Archive, New York. Henceforth cited as LBI-EL: ME 826, Box 1/1-19. 40. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), 732. 41. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: The Modern Library, n.d. [1902]), esp. 185–186. 42. Taylor, A Secular Age, 732–733. 43. For a rudimentary list of Loevinson’s publications in German and Italian see Cassetti, Repertorio del personale degli archivi di stato, 466–468; Loevinson’s work became the source for many historians of the “Jewish” Risorgimento, including Salvatore Foà, Gli ebrei nel risorgimento italiano (Rome: B. Carucci, 1978 [1922]); Attilio Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 1963). See also Hans Baron, “The Revolution of 1848 in Jewish Scholarship: France, the United States, and Italy,” in Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, vol. 18 (1948–1949),

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1–66; More recently: Elizabeth Schächter, The Jews of Italy, 1848–1915 (London and Portland: Valentine Mitchell, 2011); Shira Klein, Italy’s Jews From Emancipation to Fascism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 44. Ermanno Loevinson, “Graf Camillo Cavour und die Juden,” Im Deutschen Reich 16, no. 10 (October 1910): 658. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 645. Loevinson seems to be referring here to the French Jewish actress Elisa Rachel Félix (1821–1858), who became one of the most famous voices of the 1848 revolution. See The Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (New York and London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1901–1906), 360–361; more recently, Rachel M. Brownstein, The Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Comédie Française (Durham and New York: Duke University Press, 1995). 47. Loevinson, Graf Camillo Cavour und die Juden, 661. 48. Loevinson, “Die Juden Italiens,” Ost und West 12, no. 9 (1912), 846: 854; Ost und West 13, no. 3 (1913): 244; Ost und West 13, no. 7 (1913): 560. 49. Max Nordau, “Brief an die Juden Italiens” (April 1898), idem, Zionistische Schriften (Köln and Leipzig: Jüdischer Verlag, 1909), 371–373. 50. Loevinson, “Die Juden Italiens,” Ost und West 13, no. 7 (1913): 560; The myth of extreme assimilation has been questioned recently by Shira Klein, “Challenging the Myth of Italian Jewish Assimilation,” Modern Judaism 37, no. 1 (February 2017): 76–107. 51. Loevinson, “Die Juden Italiens,” Ost und West 13, no. 7 (1913): 560. 52. On the initial Jewish support for Mussolini see Michele Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: From Equality to Persecution (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007); Also, idem, “Italy’s Fascist Jews: Insights on an Unusual Scenario,” Quest: Issues on Contemporary Jewish History (Special Issue on Italy’s Fascist Jews, ed. Michele Sarfatti), no. 11 (October 2017): i–xvii; for an earlier, though not unproblematic, account see Renzo de Felice, Storie degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo (Turin: Enaudi, 1993 [1961]); for the ideological conflation of Fascism and the Risorgimento see Mario Toscano, “Italian Jewish Identity from the Risorgimento to Fascism, 1848–1938,” in Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922–1945, ed. Joshua D. Zimmerman (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 35–54; on the Italian affinities to Zionism, especially, its revisionist camp, see Vicenzo Pinto, “Mitologie del realismo? La galassia del revisionismo sionista dell’Italia fascista,” in Gli ebrei e la destra: Nazione, Stato, identità, eds. Paolo L. Bernadini, Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, and Piergabriele Mancuso (Rome: Aracne, 2007), 95–140. 53. Ermanno Loevinson, Roma Israelitica: Wanderungen eines Juden durch die Kunststätten Roms (Frankfurt/M.: Kauffmann Verlag, 1927). 54. Loevinson, Roma Israelitica, 8. 55. Ibid., 16. 56. Ibid., 17. 57. Ibid., 138; 211–212. 58. Ibid., 267. 59. Ibid., 278. 60. See especially Meir Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews: German-Italian Relations and the Jewish Question in Italy, 1922–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 10–56; Also Giorgio Fabre, “Mussolini and the Jews on the Eve of the March on Rome,” in Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, ed. Zimmerman, 55–68.

Archives of Imagination 107 61. Thus, the Rassegna Mensile di Israel devoted an editorial to the decennial of Mussolini’s March on Rome reiterating this fundamental difference. “Decennale,” in Rassegna Mensile di Israel, 27 October 1932. 62. “Fascismo e anti-semitismo: le rassicuranti dichiarazioni dell’on. Mussolini in un colloquio col Rabbino Maggiore di Roma,” Rassegna Mensile di Israel, 6 December 1923. Quoted in Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews, 24. 63. Emil Ludwig, Mussolinis Gespräche mit Emil Ludwig (Berlin et al.: Paul Zsolnay, 1932), 76; Also Rudolf Borchardt, “Besuch bei Mussolini,” Kölnische Zeitung, 16 April 1933; See Wolfgang Schieder, “Audienz bei Mussolini: Zur symbolischen Politik faschistischer Diktaturherrschaft, 1923–1943,” in Italien, Blicke: Neue Perspektiven der italienischen Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Petra Terhoeven (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), 107–132; And idem, Mythos Mussolini: Deutsche Audienz beim Duce (München: Oldenburg, 2013). Curiously, in 1936, the Vienna-based Volksschriften, whose editor in chief was the prolific writer Eli Rubin, issued an English pamphlet on The Jews in Italy, “a work,” as the editor writes, “which by incontestable facts confirms and affirms that in all questions of religious and racial tolerance the fascist Italy is continuing the old and human traditions of the Roman Empire of the days gone by and cannot in matter of tolerance be surpassed by any other nation of the world.”; Sozius (Eli Rubin), The Jews in Italy (Vienna: Volksschriften, 1936), 3. 64. For detailed documentation of Italy’s racialized discourse see Mauro Raspanti, “I razzismi del fascismo,” in La monzegna della razza: Documenti e immagini del razzismo e dell’antisemitismo fascista, ed. Jesi Centro Furio (Bologna: Grafis, 1994), 73–89. 65. The Contemporary Jewish Record, published by the American Jewish Committee, chronicled the events in remarkable detail noting, for instance, that on 19 November 1938, some 15,000 Jews were reported “discharged from government and private jobs.” The Contemporary Jewish Record 1, no. 2 (November 1938): 89–92, and 2, no. 1 (January 1939): 109–111; and ibid., 79–82 for a translation of the November 17 “Definition of Status of Jews.” See also Michele Sarfatti, Mussolini contro gli ebrei: Cronaca dell’elaborazione delle leggi dal 1938 (Turin: Zamorani, 2007) and Michael A. Livingston, The Fascists and the Jews of Italy: Mussolini’s Race Laws, 1938–1943 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); also Iael Nidam-Orvieto, “The Impact of Anti-Jewish Legislation on Everyday Life and the Response of Italian Jews, 1938–1943,” in Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, ed. Zimmerman, 158–181. 66. Augusto Segre, Memories of Jewish Life: From Italy to Jerusalem, 1918–1960, trans. Steve Siporin (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 209. See also the interview with Augusto Segre in Nicola Caracciolo, Uncertain Refuge: Italy and the Jews during the Holocaust, trans. Florette Rechnitz Koffler and Richard Koffler (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 109–114. 67. Meyer, Velvet and Steel, 22. 68. Ibid., 31; 37. Ermanno Loevinson met Wally at Johanna’s wedding to the (apparently less than successful) businessman Eugen Meyer (1861–1933) in 1901. 69. Johanna kept a detailed Reisetagebuch of her travels to Austria (April 4–24, 1925), which offers insights into cultural life in 1925 Vienna. Apart from her enjoying theater performances, visiting museums and

108  Asher D. Biemann monuments, attending lectures, including a lecture on “Das heutige Europa” by Georg Brandes on April 8, and reading newspapers at Cafe Museum, she also collected information for her radio programs, visited the grave of Theodor Herzl, and met several times with the folklorist, historian, and district Rabbi Max Grunwald. LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 1/1-3. 70. The title “Funkprinzessin” belonged originally to Adele Proesler who, between September 1924 and April 1925, read a biweekly program of fairytales at the Funk-Stunde before being abruptly dismissed. She later joined the NSDAP and renewed her career as a radio broadcaster; Andreas Splanemann, “Auf den Spuren der ‘Funkprinzessin’ Adele Proesler,” Rundfunk und Geschichte 41, no. 1–2 (2015): 35–46. In a radio script for the Philadelphia-based station WFLN of 28 August 1949, Johanna Meyer recalls how she became “indeed the first woman to talk to the small group of listeners existing at that time.” Then she shares her memory of a broadcast during Christmas 1928: “The performance took place under a Christmas tree—and the commentator, Alfred Braun, sent his greetings to a few blind people to whom the ‘Funkstunde’ had presented a receiver. All of us had tears in our eyes when we tried to imagine the feelings of the listeners who lived in entire darkness and to whom we brought light and joy by the miracle of our voices.” (LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 4/9). A letter from the Jüdische Blindenanstalt in Berlin-Steglitz of 29 June 1938, written as a farewell on the occasion of Johanna’s emigration, mentions that very Christmas program: “Unvergesslich werden uns auch die Festtage bleiben, an denen Sie stets die richtigen Worte und Verse fanden, die den Ernst und die Feierlichkeit einer Situation erfassten.” (LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 4/7). Whether Johanna was indeed the “erste Frau” in Berlin, “die überhaupt vor dem Microphon gestanden hat,” as she indicated in a letter of 9 September 1949 (LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 4/9), is questionable. Following the query of her son Paul, the Deutsches Rundfunk Archiv in Frankfurt responded in 1976 that this claim was “zweifelhaft.” Harald Heckmann to Paul Meyer, 21 June 1975 (LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 4/7). In a letter to RCA Victor Records, however, Johanna gives the date of her first broadcast as 21 April 1924. Johanna Meyer to [Richard] Wedell, 30 September 1949 (LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 4/9). Curiously, Kate Lacey, in her authoritative study on Weimar broadcasting, Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio, and the Public Sphere (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), makes no mention of her. On the other hand, the Funk-Stunde employed more than 200 “Rezitatoren,” some of whom were well known actors and actresses. Among its prominent broadcasters was also Walter Benjamin who, between 1927 and 1933, hit the Berlin airwaves with numerous programs, including Aufklärung für Kinder (und Erwachsene). His radio scripts are now published in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 7 (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1991). For a general discussion and helpful statistics on Weimar broadcasting see Karl Christian Führer, “A Medium of Modernity? Broadcasting in Weimar Germany, 1923–1932,” The Journal of Modern History 69, no. 4 (1997): 722–753. 71. See Marion Kaplan, The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany: The Campaigns of the Jüdischer Frauenbund, 1904–1938 (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1979). Also Freidenreich, Female, Jewish, Educated, 146–148. Neither Kaplan nor Freidenreich, however, mention Johanna’s role in the Frauenbund. Johanna’s older sister Henriette May, née Lövinson (1862–1928), was the co-founder of the jüdischer Frauenbund together with Bertha Pappenheim and Sidonie Werner. See Marianne Brentzel, Anna O.—Bertha Pappenheim: Biographie (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2014), 114.

Archives of Imagination 109 72. Blätter des jüdischen Frauenbundes 14, no. 10 (Oktober 1938): 3. 73. Meyer, Velvet and Steel, 59. 74. Käthe Lövinson, Frauenarbeit in Bankbetrieben: Ein Beitrag zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte unserer Zeit (Berlin: Siruppe und Winckler, 1926). A short synopsis appeared also in Ada Schmidt-Beil ed., Die Kultur der Frau: Eine Lebenssymphonie der Frau des XX. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Verlag für Kunst und Wissenschaft, 1931), 139–144. Käthe’s activities are well documented in her 1940 “Geschichte und Tätigkeitsbericht des Jüdisches Hilfskommitee in Shanghai,” excerpts of which were published in a Sondernummer of the Shanghai Jewish Chronicle (1940). She also left vivid descriptions of everyday life in Shanghai, in her short essay “Harbin in Manchouko” (LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 2/16). Käthe Lövinson’s observations complement the material collected in Jennifer E. Michaels, “The Struggle to Survive: German and Austrian Refugee’s Depiction of Daily Life in Their Shanghai Exile,” in Exile and Everyday Life, eds. Andrea Hammel and Anthony Grenville (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), 132–153. Käthe later settled in Jerusalem. Like Johanna, Hans Lövinson was also a Vortragskünstler and poet, living in Hamburg. The Hamburg Israelitisches Familienblatt, for instance, noted that on 17 December 1936, Hans Lövinson read during an Oneg Shabbat from Lessing’s Nathan der Weise “und er wusste vom ersten Wort die Hörer in seinen Bann zu schlagen.” 75. “Zahnstocher im Mund, während einer Unterhaltung. Häufig.” LBI-JML (AR 299, Box 4/15). 76. The Germania Broadcast was founded in 1927 by William L. Klein, a second-generation American who had spent his childhood in Berlin before returning to Chicago after World War I. As a foreign language program, Germania Broadcast needed a special government permit to operate, yet was able to lure some of the celebrities of the time to the microphone, including the Austrian actor Alexander Moissi, the Austrian born Ernestine Schumann-Heink, hailed as the “world’s greatest contralto,” and Johann Strauss III. From 1941 till the end of the war, William Klein worked for the American broadcasting Station in Europe (ABSIE) located in London. During that time Germania Broadcast was directed by Franz Gerstenberg and offered also “Americanization programs” for German speaking immigrants. Still popular in the 1950s and broadcasting also in Europe, Germania Broadcast stopped producing in the early 1970s. I am indebted to Mr. Leo Robert Klein of Chicago for sharing additional information about his father and the Germania Broadcast with me. See also two letters of 1940 from William Klein to Johanna confirming that she had participated in radio programs at the Germania Broadcast (LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 4/7). The GermanAmerican Broadcasting Company seems to have been shorter lived. Most of its listeners came from the Reading, PA, area, where the German American Bund was very strong. In the late 1930s, the Bund flirted with Nazism, some of its members expressing outright sympathies for Hitler and Goebbels, such as Gustav Oberlaender, the co-founder of The Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation which, in 1937, sponsored a Germany trip of the Broadcasting Company’s director to collect “material” for programming. See Philip Jenkins, Hoods & Shirts: The Extreme Right in Pennsylvania, 1925–1950 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), esp. 136–164. 77. Meyer, Velvet and Steel, 67. Also LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 1/12. 78. Johanna Meyer Loevinson to Wally and Ermanno Loevinson, 18 September 1943. LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 1/33.

110  Asher D. Biemann 79. Ruth Tatti to Johanna Meyer, 29 September 1943 [read 1944]. Ruth herself, we learn from another letter, was hidden with an Italian family during the deportations. For the correspondence see LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 1/33. 80. One of the earliest accounts is Giacomo Debenedetti, 16 Ottobre 1943 (Rome: Enaudi, 2015 [1945]). Also Robert Katz, Black Sabbath: A Journey Though a Crime Against Humanity (New York: Macmillan, 1969); Fausto Coen, 16 Ottobre 1943: La grande razzia degli ebrei di Roma (Rome: Giuntina, 1995); Susan Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, and Survival (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), esp. 101–138. A recent exhibition catalog includes reproductions of many original documents, select individual stories, and a list of names of the deported: Marcello Pezzetti ed., 16 Ottobre 1943: La razzia degli ebrei di Roma (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2013). For a broader context see, most recently, Liliana Picciotto, “The Shoah in Italy: Its History and Characteristics,” in Jews in Italy under Fascist Rule, ed. Zimmerman, 209–223; and Simon Levis Sullam, The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). 81. The ad was placed on 27 July 1945 in an unidentified Italian newspaper (LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 1/33). Ruth’s speculation that her family might have been sent to Austria was not entirely far-fetched. More than 3000 Italians (Jews and political prisoners) from various cities and transit camps, including Bolzano and Fossoli, arrived between February and September 1944 at the Mauthausen and Gusen camps in Upper Austria. 82. LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 1/33. 83. “16 Ottobre 1943,” Il Giornale del Mattino, 16 October 1945. The actual number of people deported on October 16 is now given at 1259, including 896 women and children. Some 250 persons qualifying as “non-Jews”—such as children of mixed marriages, non-Jewish spouses, or Jewish spouses of mixed marriages—were released the next morning. The remaining detainees, many still in their pajamas, were put on a train on 18 October and arrived in Auschwitz on Friday night, 22 October. The following day, after the notorious selections, 149 men and 47 women were registered as inmates in the camp. The rest, more than eight hundred souls, were taken immediately to the killing facilities (Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust, 116–123). 84. The note of 25 April 1978 reads: “Ermanno Loevinson, Wally BuetowLoevinson, Sigismondo Loevinson were among those Jews rounded up in Rome on 16 October 1943 and taken to Auschwitz where they were gassed. See: Black Sabbath by Robert Katz.” (LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 1/33). Born in Brooklyn, New York, Robert Katz was an investigative journalist, novelist, and screenwriter, who later settled in Italy and wrote several books about Italy and World War II. Katz’s Black Sabbath received praise for its detailed chronicling of events, but also drew some severe criticism. Thus, the New York Times reviewed it as at times “uninformed, if not downright offensive,” especially with respect to its portrayal of Jews taking part “in the system that created Nazism.”; Michael M. Bernet, “Black Sabbath” (Review), The New York Times, 31 August 1969. See also the obituary by Bruce Weber, “Robert Katz, Who Wrote About Nazi Massacre in Italy, dies at 77,” The New York Times, 22 October 2010. 85. Loevinson, Roma Israelitica, 15. The motto is a play on the famous last words by Pope Gregor VII in 1085: “Dilexi iustitiam et odi iniquitatem: propterea morior in exilio” (I have loved justice and hated inequity, therefore I die in exile).

Archives of Imagination 111 86. Originally known as The Young People’s Interracial Fellowship of Philadelphia, the Fellowship House (later: Farm) was established in 1931 as a place of interracial Christian education and worship. In 1940, Jews officially joined the Fellowship movement, and Philadelphia’s progressive Rabbi regularly took the pulpit. Beginning in 1951, the Fellowship Farm offered summer seminars on non-violent protests to support the CivilRights movement. See Stanley Keith Arnold, Building the Beloved Community: Philadelphia’s Interracial Civil Rights Organizations and Race Relations, 1930–1970 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2014). Also, more recently, Victoria W. Wolcott, “Radical Nonviolence, Interracial Utopias, and the Congress of Racial Equality in the Early Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of Civil and Human Rights 4, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2018): 31–61. Founded in 1795, Rodeph Shalom was first known as the “Hebrew German Society.” It was progressive for its time and took a lenient stance on controversial issues, such as intermarriage. When Johanna arrived in Philadelphia, Rodeph Shalom’s rabbi was Louis Wolsey, a radical reformer, who—like other Reform leaders at that time—opposed the creation of a State of Israel (the official stance of the American Jewish Reform movement was “neutral” from 1935, and effectively pro-Zionist from 1937 on). Wolsey retired in 1947. 87. LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 4/9. The original text reads: “Amerika, du hast es besser/Als unser Kontinent, das alte/Hast keine verfallene Schlösser/und keine Basalte.” Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Zahme Xenien. Den Vereinigten Staaten,” idem, Sämtliche Werke 2: Gedichte aus dem Nachlaß, ed. Ernst Beutler (Zurich and Munich: Artemis/dtv, 1977), 405–406. Quoted in Ludwig Lewisohn ed., Goethe, the Story of a Man: Being the Life of Johann Wolfgang Goethe as Told in his own Words and the Words of his Contemporaries, vol. 2 (London and New York: Bodley Head, 1949), 301. Lewisohn himself was born in Berlin and emigrated to the States already as a child. A well-known literary scholar of his time, who was also a strong voice on behalf of Zionism, he became one of the founding members of Brandeis University. See Ralph Melnick, The Life and Work of Ludwig Lewisohn, vols. 1 & 2 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998). The subject of Goethe’s admiration for America was popular not only during the 1949 Goethe year. For example: Walter Wadepuhl, “Goethe and America,” Jahrbuch der Deutsch-Amerikanischen Gesellschaft von Illinois (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1924), 77–108; and idem, Goethe’s Interest in the New World (Jena: Frommann, 1934); Christian Melz, “Goethe and America,” College English 10, no. 8 (May 1949): 425–431; William Rose ed., Essays on Goethe (London: Cassell, 1949); Frank Wolf, “Goethe for America,” American Scholar 20 (1950), 206–214. 88. For an intimate account of Goethe’s role for German Jewish emigrants see, most recently, Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich, “Father, Goethe, Kant, and Rilke: The Ideal of Bildung, the Fifth Aliyah, and German-Jewish Integration into the Yishuv,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 35, no. 2 (Winter 2017): 21–53. 89. Johanna Loevinson, Script for WFLN, 28 August 1949 (LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 4/9). 90. Aufbau 36 (9 September 1949): “[E]ine seltene Blume im üblichen Krautund Rübenfeld des Radios.” 91. Raymond S. Green to Johanna Meyer, 12 September 1949 (LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 4/9). 92. John W. Nason to Johanna Meyer, 13 October 1949 (LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 4/9).

112  Asher D. Biemann 93. Borgese, who published his important critique of Italian Fascism in Goliath: The March of Fascism (New York: Viking Press, 1937), joined the Mazzini Society in 1939 along with other prominent Italian exiles, such as the journalist Tullia Calabi Zevi, who would later report on the Nuremberg Trials. See Tullia Calabi Zevi, “My Political Autobiography,” trans. Inga Pierson, now available at the Centro Primo Levi Online Monthly (26 March 2011). Founded by Gaetano Salvemini, author of The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy (New York: Holt, 1927) and earlier studies on Giuseppe Mazzini, such as La Formazione di Pensiero Mazziniano (Firenze: Tip. Adino, 1910) and Mazzini (Catania: Franceso Battiato, 1915), which were published under the auspices of La Giovine Europa, the Society issued the Mazzini News (later Nazioni unite) and created a unique network for anti-Fascist Italian emigres. On the Mazzini Society see Spencer M. Di Scala, “Salvemini in the United States,” in Italian Socialism: Between Politics and History, ed. idem (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 167–182. Also, Antonio Varsori ed., L’antifascismo italiano negli Stati Uniti durante la seconda guerra mondiale (Rome: Archivio Trimestrale, 1984); Alessandra Baldini and Paolo Palma, Gli antifascisti italiani in America, 1942–1944: la Legione nel carteggio di Pacciardi con Borgese, Salvemini, Sforza e Sturzo (Florence: Le Monnier, 1990); Charles Killinger, “Fighting Italian Fascism from the Valley: Italian Intellectuals in the United States,” in The Dispossessed: An Anatomy of Exile, ed. Peter I. Rose (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), 133–157. On Borgese see also Edouard Roditi, “G. A. Borgese,” The Sewanee Review 50, no. 1 (January/March 1942): 57–68. On Salvemini see especially Alessandro Galante Garrone, Salvemini e Mazzini (Messina: G. D’Anna, 1981). That Mazzini influenced not only Italian emigres is evident from his hopeful reception in America. Thus the San Francisco Unitarian Joseph Hutchinson wrote already in 1909 that against the “black picture” of the present one should “set the white light of Mazzini’s personality, glowing with God incarnate, faith in man, the soul, immortality, reverence for the family, the nation, humanity, his gaze fixed upward towards ideals, which he will not relinquish,—and the gloom of an impossible pessimism is dispelled.” Joseph Hutchinson, Joseph Mazzini: An Essay Read at the April (1909) Meeting of the Chit Chat Club of San Francisco (San Francisco: Murdock Press, 1909), 31. And it is no accident, perhaps, that in 1913, the Boston Bibliophile Society posthumously published Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Ode to Mazzini along with his short manuscripts The Saviour of Society and Liberty and Loyalty (Boston: Bibliophile Society, 1913), while, in 1919, a brief excerpt from Mazzin’s “International Sympathy” appeared in the “proposed covenant” of the League of Nations. Henry E. Jackson ed., The League of Nations: A Document Prepared to Stimulate Community Discussion and Promote Organized Public Opinion (New York: Prentice Hall, 1919), 179–180. On the other hand, American ideas also stimulated the Italian Risorgimento, see, most recently, Axel Körner, America in Italy: The United States in the Political Thought and Imagination of the Risorgimento, 1763–1865 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). 94. G. A. Borgese et al. eds., The City of Man: A Declaration on World Democracy (New York: Viking Press, 1941). The manifesto was, in fact, first published in November 1940 and included, among other signatories, Hermann Broch, the American feminist educators Ada Comstock and Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Hans Kohn, Lewis Mumford, Thomas Mann, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Gaetano Salvemini. A recent essay on the City

Archives of Imagination 113









of Man is Adi Gordon and Udi Greenberg, “The City of Man: European Émigrés and the Genesis of Postwar Conservative Thought,” Religions 3 (2012): 681–698. Gordon and Greenberg rightly interpret the manifesto as an overall conservative critique of “laissez-faire liberalism,” but fail to see the connections that existed to the Mazzini Society and the later circle around Common Cause. 95. Elizabeth Mann Borgese was, in fact, Thomas Mann’s daughter. Common Cause: A Journal for One World was the mouthpiece of the Chicago based Committee to Frame a World Constitution, whose members included, apart from Borgese, the Dean of the Chicago Law School Robert M. Hutchins and the Catholic philosopher Mortimer J. Adler (who was the son of German Jewish immigrants). The Committee published its first draft of a “world constitution” 1947 and an expanded version in March 1948. See Robert Hutchins et al., Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948). On the history of the circle, see Robert L. Tsai, America’s Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions of Power and Community (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2014), 185–217. Tsai offers important archival sources on the Chicago group, but, much like Gordon and Greenberg, fails to the see the larger context of Hutchins’s and Borgese’s intellectual circles. 96. The issue included essays by Albert Schweitzer, Ernst Simon, Geraardus van der Leuw, José Ortega y Gasset, and many others. The bicentennial convocation in honor of Goethe’s birthday took place in Aspen, Colorado, from 27 June to 16 July 1949. Its chief organizer was Robert Hutchins and its honorary chairman the former US President Herbert Hoover. The festival included lectures, dramatic readings by Ludwig Lewisohn, and musical performances featuring among its illustrious musicians the pianist Artur Rubinstein and the Viennese born mezzo soprano Herta Glaz. See the program of Goethe: Bicentennial Convocation and Music Festival (Chicago: Goethe Bicentennial Foundation, 1949). Also, Heinrich Henel, “The Goethe Bicentennial Convocation at Aspen,” Monatshefte 41, no. 6 (October 1949): 295–302. The complete speeches were later edited by the German political scientist Arnold Bergstraesser (then teaching at the University of Chicago) and published by the conservative publisher Henry Regnery. See Arnold Bergstraesser ed., Goethe and the Modern Age: The International Convocation at Aspen (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1950). For a detailed account of the Aspen conference, see James Sloan Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture: Capitalism, Modernism, and the Chicago-Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 147–200. Also, Milton Mayer, Robert Maynard Hutchins: A Memoir (Berkeley et al.: University of California Press, 1993), esp. 386–387. 97. G. A. Borgese, “The Message of Goethe,” in Goethe and the Modern Age, ed. Bergstraesser, 19. Also idem, “L’eredità di Goethe,” Corriere della Sera, 1 January 1933 (Literary Supplement), 29–35. For another “Italian” perspective on Goethe see the essay by the Italian emigre Vico scholar Elio Gianturco, “Goethe and the Italian Mind,” in Goethe and the Modern Age, ed. Bergstraesser, 158–176. Note that Senator Joseph McCarthy would later repeatedly assail the “One-Worlders.” Tsai, America’s Forgotten Constitutions, 213. 98. Robert M. Hutchins, “Goethe and the Unity of Mankind,” in Goethe and the Modern Age, ed. Bergstraesser, 402. Hutchins’s conclusion of the volume may well have been inspired by Martin Buber’s short contribution “Remarks on Goethe’s Concept of Humanity” (ibid., 227–233) which

114  Asher D. Biemann served as a sort of companion piece to Ernst Simon’s longer essay on “Religious Humanism” (ibid., 304–325) and was, in fact, read by Simon himself (since Buber was unable to attend the convocation). See also the brief mention of the Aspen convocation in Paul Mendes-Flohr, Martin Buber: A Life in Faith and Dissent (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019), 270. 99. Milton R. Konvitz, “To Whom Does Goethe Belong,” The Reconstructionist 16, no. 3 (March 1950): 23–24. 100. LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 3/25. On the Internationale Frauenliga, which was founded in 1915, see Gertrude Bussey and Magaret Tims, Pioneers for Peace: Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915–1965 (Oxford: Alden Press, 1980). The Internationale Anti-Kriegsmuseum was founded in 1923 by the German pacifist Ernst Friedrich, an associate of Erich Mühsam. 101. “Ererbter Familien-Optimismus” Martin Loevinson, “Die Geschichte meines Lebens” (typescript, 1924), 127. LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 2/17. 102. Hermann Cohen, Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (Frankfurt/M.: J. Kauffmann, 1929), 20–21. 103. Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” trans. Eric Prenowitz, Diacritics 25, no. 2 (1995): 12. 104. David H. Wice, Words to Johanna Meyer at the occasion of her 80th birthday, 10 January 1954. LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 1/4. Wice was rabbi at Rodeph Shalom from 1947 to 1981. The International Institute, where Johanna had volunteered as a translator, was part of a larger movement originally founded by the Young Women’s Christian Association in 1910. Initially an evangelizing organization to help immigrant women, the movement later merged into the American Federation of International Institutes (AFII) with a deliberately pluralist approach shaped especially by the ideas of Horace Kallen, Isaac B. Berkson, and Julius Drachsler, all of whom were prominent Jewish social thinkers at that time. See Raymond A. Mohl, “Cultural Pluralism in Immigrant Education: The International Institutes of Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, 1920–1940,” Journal of American Ethnic History 1, no. 2 (1982): 35–58, esp. 39–42. On Kallen, Berkson, and Drachsler see also R. Fred Wacker, “Assimilation and Cultural Pluralism in American Social Thought,” Phylon 40, no. 4 (1979): 235–333; and Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), esp. 169–185. On Johanna’s 80th birthday celebrations see also Meyer, Velvet and Steel, 74 and 84–85. 105. LBI-JML: AR 299, Box 1/4. Edgar Mills, who was born in Poland and raised in Vienna, served first as cantor in Reading, PA, where he met Johanna, then as cantor at the Oheb Shalom Synagogue in Newark, New Jersey. A founder of the Cantors Assembly of America, he made several recordings of Jewish liturgical music. See his obituary in the New York Times, 5 July 1989.

Part II

Strategies of Cultural Translation and Knowledge Transfer

6

Translating Modernism Hedy Krilla’s Theater Work Through the Lens of Exile Christina Wieder

Hardly any other South American city offers such an enormous variety of alternative, underground, independent, and popular stages as Buenos Aires. The history of popular and independent theater1 in the Argentinean capital goes back to the early twentieth century and was, since its beginning, significantly influenced by interacting migrant communities. This cultural diversity, introduced by various migrant groups, was strongly reflected in the city’s cultural production and remarkably enriched its theater life. 2 Later, with the strong cultural commitment of Jewish and political refugees, who have arrived in Argentina in the 1930s and 1940s, a similar process began that initiated a new phase of independent theater.3 In this chapter, I will discuss the work of the actress, director, and acting teacher Hedy Krilla (née Hedwig Schlichter, also known as Hedy Crilla),4 who was born on 26 September 1898 in Vienna and forced into exile during National Socialism due to her Jewish background. After leaving Europe, Krilla became one of the pioneers of modern theater in Argentina, mainly through her teaching and directing work for the independent stage La Mascara. I will argue that Krilla’s work had a fundamental influence on the modernization of independent theater in Argentina. She not only dedicated herself to translating modern European plays into Spanish, 5 but also she practiced a form of cultural multilingualism and introduced her own exile experiences as much as an understanding of modern theater to the Argentinean cultural scene. In the following, I will provide some biographical information on Hedy Krilla and give insights into her different stations of exile, namely Paris and Buenos Aires. I will then discuss her teaching work for La Mascara, elaborate on how it can be understood as a form of cultural translation, and examine its impact on the development of independent theater in Argentina. Following Doris Bachmann-Medick’s concept of cultural translation,6 I pursue an approach that draws attention to specific translation processes and therefore highlight elements within Hedy Krilla’s teaching work that facilitated translation. Although Hedy Krilla’s cultural

118  Christina Wieder translation of modern European theater was generally successful, in the sense that it reached a broad audience and had a fundamental influence on the modernization of Argentinean independent theater, I will also take into account differences and difficulties in the translation of certain ideas, concepts, or categories. Analyzing Hedy Krilla’s teaching work for La Mascara, I focus on what Sigrid Weigel describes as ‘transitions’ 7 with regard to the studies of culture, or what, in a more specific context of cultural translation, might be framed as ‘in-between spaces’.8 To focus on transitions and at the same time shed light on the difficulties of cultural translation requires not only analyzing the results of translational processes, i.e. the translation itself, or to merely locate where the translation takes place. Instead, it is important to consider all the mechanisms, dynamics, and negotiations that run in parallel and affect translation, leading to a particular result (or in some cases, even to no result at all). The focus on transitions, which Weigel defines as crucial for the studies of culture, allows practices of comparison and forms of interlinking or reorganizing structures to be highlighted, all of which influence translation processes. Even though this does not offer an all-encompassing definition of cultural translation and inevitably accepts the vagueness of the concept,9 it allows the understanding of translation as a process and an activity, which, in the case of Hedy Krilla, opens up a space for progress and change. Such a translational approach to exile studies and, in this specific case, to the work of Hedy Krilla in Argentina opens up new paths and enforces not only a more dynamic understanding of translation but also of culture(s); culture(s) as non-static products of constantly ongoing and border-crossing processes of interaction, which are able to transfer knowledge into situations of exile.

6.1  From Vienna to Paris: First Steps in Theater Hedwig Krilla was born in 1898 in Vienna, grew up in a Jewish, middle-class family, and attended the famous Schwarzwald School, where she received a progressive education that enforced the ideas of female emancipation. In fin de siècle Vienna, Hedy Krilla frequently visited the opera and the theater together with her family. Among the theatres, she visited was the Wiener Freie Volksbühne, a young stage, founded in 1906, that followed the organizational structure of an association and pursued the goal of offering access to the dramatic arts and modern literature to a broad, mainly working-class audience.10 At this theater, Hedy Krilla first came into contact with the work of dramaturge and director Berthold Viertel. As she later described, it was her first visit to the Wiener Freie Volksbühne, which sparked her desire to become an actress and fostered her decision to study acting at the University of Music and Performing Arts, in 1918.11 After two years

Translating Modernism 119 of studying, Hedy received her first engagement at the city theater of Stettin and subsequently worked in Klagenfurt, Munich, and Hamburg, before moving to Berlin in 1923. This is also where she again met with Berthold Viertel, who had just founded the theater group Die Truppe together with Ernst Josef Aufricht.12 Die Truppe, a cooperative ensemble that, like the Wiener Freie Volksbühne, dedicated itself to performing modern plays and literature, formed part of the many avant-garde theater projects that emerged in Berlin and Vienna in the 1920s and early 1930s. Although the theater group existed only for a very short period and was finally dissolved in March 1924 due to internal conflicts and financial problems, Viertel managed to convince stars such as Fritz Kortner, Rudolf Forster, and Sybille Binder to participate in his experiment.13 Hedy Krilla, too, was fascinated by this ensemble and successfully sought the opportunity to participate in several plays. Even though she only appeared in some minor roles, Krilla often emphasized the importance the work with Die Truppe had on her future career, in that it not only helped her to improve her acting style at the time but also significantly influenced her own directing and teaching work in Argentina. Many years later she would still refer to Berthold Viertel—in some cases also to Fritz Kortner—as her artistic mentor,14 mainly for his understanding of theater as a political space that was meant to reach out to a broad audience and create a form of popular theater able to reduce class restrictions rather than reproducing hierarchical structures and social inequality.15 Although Hedy Krilla never actively participated in any political organization, she supported the left-wing movements of the time and promoted ideas of female emancipation,16 which becomes obvious in her film performances in the early 1930s. Parallel to her work at various theaters, Krilla also took on small roles in German film productions since 1929, e.g., 8 Mädels im Boot (Eight Girls in a Boat), 1932, D: Erich Waschneck; Das erste Recht des Kindes (The First Rights of a Child), 1932, D: Fritz Wendhausen; Eine Tür geht auf (A Door Opens), 1933, D: Alfred Zeisler, and Was wissen denn Männer/ Ein Kind will leben (A Child Wants to Live), 1933, D: Gerhard Lamprecht. Hedy Krilla’s most notable performance, and that which was to be crucial for her later engagement in film in France and Argentina, was her role as Ms. Kesting in Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform) (1931). The film, which is based on the play Gestern und heute (Then and Now) by Christa Winsloe, tells the story of Manuela von Meinhardis, a young girl who falls in love with her teacher Ms. von Bernburg. It became an international cult classic for being one of the earliest movies to show a lesbian relationship between a student and a teacher on screen. The film is an analytically precise masterpiece that articulates a harsh critique of the prudish

120  Christina Wieder and cruel Prussian educational system as much as of the exclusion of homosexual desires in cinema.17 The other films in which Krilla performs were also quite progressive for their time, dealing not only with female desire but also with homosexuality or abortion—taboo topics at that time—that Hedy Krilla would also treat in her later theater work in Argentina.18 In 1936, due to increasing antisemitic politics and the impossibility of finding work in Germany, Krilla decided to move back to Vienna and shortly after, in 1937, emigrated to Paris. At that time, her brother Victor, a composer, and her sisters Fritzi and Dolly, both singers who were known as ‘The Singing Babies’ and run a piano bar called L’Atellier, already lived in Buenos Aires.19 Still, Hedy Krilla was not yet willing to leave Europe and tried to find work in Paris. As she did not have an official residence or work permit, she lived through a difficult time in France. Yet, after some time, as she spoke almost perfect French, and with help from refugee aid organizations, Krilla was able to establish contacts with other, already well-connected German and Austrian émigrés in Paris, and finally managed to find work in French film projects. Initially, she worked in the script department, probably facilitated by the fact that she managed to acquire a typewriter from one of the refugee aid organizations. 20 Later, she was hired for a small acting part in Léonide Moguy’s Prison sans barreaux (Prison Without Bars) (1938), a French remake of Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform. Besides Hedy Krilla, many other German and Austrian émigrés participated in this film, e.g., Hans Wilhelm, Gina Kaus, Egon Eis, Arnold Pressburger, and Will Grosz. Due to a lack of documents that could provide more insights into her life in Paris, it can only be speculated how close or loose Krilla’s relationships with the other émigré crew members of Prison sans barreaux were. Yet, in a letter to her sister Dolly, which is undated, but most likely from that period, she wrote that she felt happy in Paris because she had found work and made good friends. 21 Through her film projects and by participating in the Parisian theater life, especially in the Künstler-Klub Wien-Paris, 22 a newly founded exile stage, where Leon Askenasy, Lilli Palmer, Max Kolpe, Walter Mehring, and other German and Austrian stars performed, Krilla was able to engage with the exile community in Paris and stabilize her economic situation. 23 It was also in Paris that Hedy Krilla experienced the beginning of World War II—an experience that she later described in her first article for the German-speaking newspaper in Argentina 24 and to which she repeatedly referred in interviews, statements, and even in her teaching work. 25 This activity of consciously sharing experience is an important factor for the impact Hedy Krilla had on Argentinean independent theater. As I will elaborate later in this text, it is not only a way to introduce or translate

Translating Modernism 121 the experience of exile to the Argentinean cultural scene, but also a strategy to transfer knowledge, ideas, and concepts into another cultural context.

6.2  Buenos Aires: Exile Stages and Staging Exile With the beginning of World War II, Krilla decided that it was time for her to leave Europe. As most of her family already resided in Buenos Aires, it seems as though there was no serious alternative to choosing Argentina as her second station of exile. Krilla’s brother Victor would vouch for her and find her work, so that she could comply with the conditions of the so-called llamada, a decree that regulated immigration to Argentina, more precisely, family reunification matters. After renewing her passport, which turned out to be challenging at a time when thousands of people were trying to escape Europe, and a train journey to Bordeaux, Krilla was finally able to board the steamer Kerguelen that would bring her to Argentina. When she arrived in Buenos Aires on 12 February 1940, Hedy Krilla reunited with her family after years of separation. In that same year, she joined the ensemble of the Freie Deutsche Bühne in Buenos Aires, a German-speaking exile stage founded by Paul Walter Jacob. Hedy Krilla started at the Freie Deutsche Bühne as an actress but was soon able to direct plays on her own, which turned out to be an important experience for her following career. The Freie Deutsche Bühne was an anti-fascist stage with high cultural standards and gave Germanspeaking actors in Buenos Aires the opportunity to work in their native language as much as it gave the audience the opportunity to see plays in German. 26 This engagement at the Freie Deutsche Bühne was Hedy Krilla’s first step into Argentinean independent theater, which not only allowed her to work on her directing skills and establish contact with other independent stages (e.g., the Idish Folks Teater and the Compañía Francesa), but also to establish a broad network of other exiles, anti-fascists, and artists in Buenos Aires. The audience and the critics loved Hedy Krilla, which is why she soon became famous even beyond the non-Spanish-speaking exile stages. Balder Olden, who had become a central figure in the antifascist exile community in Buenos Aires due to his journalistic and political engagement, for example, wrote about Krilla’s performance in his critique in Ernesto Alemann’s German-language newspaper Das Argentinische Tageblatt: In the last four weeks, I saw Hedwig Schlichter [Krilla] in four parts that correspond to four completely different types of characters. […] And yet, she is not an actress who disguises herself, she is an actress

122  Christina Wieder that can be renewed every time, one that transforms from the soul, that is able to create every time new facets from her own substance. Her art is not recreation but creation. Her lively and intelligent face is able to reflect beauty, tenderness and disgust, according to the demands of the character. […] She always surprises us with every performance. 27 It was also no later than 1942, when Krilla was first hired to participate in an Argentinean film production, Ceniza al Viento (Ashes to the Wind), directed by Luis Saslavsky, where she appears as one of many refugees who were not allowed to leave the boat that was waiting just outside Buenos Aires on the Rio de la Plata in order to enter Argentina. Ceniza al Viento is a critical statement on the political situation of the 1940s and an open plea for a liberal asylum policy. Through this role, she is clearly marked as an exile in the film, which had a significant impact on her subsequent work. Hedy Krilla had not chosen to represent an exile in former theater appearances. However, it had the effect of making a particular biographical aspect—her own experience of exile— visible, which would later grant her an expert status when working on other independent stages and during her teaching activity. In other words, sharing the experience of being a Jewish woman in exile, 28 in the case of Hedy Krilla, did not become a disadvantage for her career but was received positively because it attributed her with skills, knowledge, and experience gained in an international context. The very fact that Krilla was able to contribute to the Argentinean theater and cinema in at least four languages29 made her an expert on many levels. Still, it should be emphasized that Hedy Krilla’s practice of multilingualism and its introduction to the Argentinean independent theater was the result of many years of studying and hard work necessary to achieve the same level of linguistic expression in Spanish that she had in German, French, and English.30 Having had only a short line in German in Ceniza al Viento, in 1945, Hedy Krilla made an important decision: ‘When the war ended, in 1945, I said to myself: Enough of German, enough of French, I’m going to work in Spanish. And I started teaching and to make theater for children’. 31 She started with acting classes for children at the Sociedad Hebraica Argentina (Jewish Community in Argentina) and shortly after founded her own studio called Teatrito (Little Theater) and even wrote her own children’s plays, e.g., Las Aventuras de Andresito (The Adventures of Andresito). After a few years of working with children, in the mid-1950s, a group of actors from the independent stage La Mascara came to visit Hedy Krilla in her studio and asked her to teach them. At that moment, it was already known that Krilla’s teaching was mainly based on the Stanislavsky method, in which the group showed great interest.

Translating Modernism 123

6.3  Dramatic Training as Cultural Translation Before elaborating on the Stanislavsky method and Hedy Krilla’s teaching work for La Mascara, I would like to give a brief insight into the history of Argentinean theater in order to explain why Krilla was so influential in shaping the Argentinean independent theater at that moment, or, to frame it differently, why those young actors from La Mascara became interested in working with Hedy Krilla and reached out for new influences. Despite the end of Spanish colonial rule in Argentina in 1810 and the country becoming an independent republic in 1853 through the introduction of a new constitution, the aftermath of over three hundred years of colonial domination continued on many levels. The aftereffects of Argentina’s colonized past can also be found in the field of theater, which was strongly influenced by the Spanish tradition. The Spanish influence continued in the 1940s and 1950s, since most of the theater classics were translated in Spain and the same translations were brought to South America, despite fundamental differences in the spoken language and other cultural specificities. Moreover, Argentinean independent theater began to develop its own style relatively late32; it was in the early 1930s when the first independent theater, the Teatro del Pueblo, was founded by Leónidas Barletta33 and initiated a new phase of theater in Argentina. In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, besides La Máscara, many other independent groups founded their own stages. However, they had still not yet elaborated their own characteristics nor begun the process of modernization, which following Osvaldo Pellettieri, started only with Hedy Krilla’s teaching activities at La Mascara and her direction of the play Cándida (written by George Bernard Shaw) together with Carlos Gandolfo in 1959.34 Hedy Krilla was certainly able to contribute a wide range of experience and knowledge to the Argentinean independent theater. It is not only because she knew the German, Austrian, and French theater tradition, thanks to her own training and early career as an actress, but also because she had participated in exile and non-Spanish-speaking stages in Buenos Aires, e.g., in the Freie Deutsche Bühne and the Compañía Francesa. These also brought her to many other South American cities through guest plays. Why, though, was Krilla’s work so influential in that particular period in history? To what extent can it be understood as a cultural translation of the ideas of modern European theater beyond a mere literal translation of plays? What role did her own experience of exile play? And how could this, at the same time, support the Argentinean independent theater to develop its very own characteristics? I argue that Krilla’s cultural translation of the ideas of modern European theater and her own experience of exile was so significant

124  Christina Wieder at the time for three reasons. First, her activities coincided with a situation that Osvaldo Pellettieri describes as a transition phase in the Argentinean independent theater from ‘nationalization’ to ‘modernization’35. Consequently, many young actors and actresses were searching for new ideas and input to further develop their own theater work. Second, the audience, too, showed great interest in the European theater, which fostered the influence of Hedy Krilla, who was seen as an important representative of European modernity in Buenos Aires. And third, Krilla worked with an acting method that is fundamentally based on each individual’s own experience—widely known as Stanislavsky’s system or the Stanislavsky method. By doing so, she provided not only the opportunity for the actors to explore their experiences but also took the opportunity to share hers. In this case, though, the exilerelated transfer of knowledge does not consist in the introduction of the Stanislavsky method itself, because, according to Hedy Krilla, she first learned about Stanislavsky after having left Europe. 36 By adapting the Stanislavsky method, however, Krilla not only benefitted from a transition phase in the Argentinean theater, but also created a transition space, finding a medium through which she could communicate her knowledge and her experiences brought from Europe, translating them, and in this way, introducing them to the Argentinean theater. Konstantin Stanislavsky was a Russian theater director and theorist who strove for a theater performance that should be as realistic as possible. The actor was the key element in Stanislavsky’s theory, which was developed by trial and error over many years and would become highly influential in the field of dramatic training. According to the Stanislavsky method, the actor was required to activate his emotional memory, in other words, he had to work with the recollection of his own emotions and his individual experiences. Consequently, the actor’s performance and his entrance into the scenario could not be reduced to the mere act of stepping into the character but had to also be understood as a continuation of his own emotional history. 37 Given that this acting method always involved the risk of causing unpredictable inner impulses in the actor and that the activation of emotional memory implied possible changes or new directions for the play, many directors, actors, and theorists strongly criticized Stanislavsky’s system. Yet, the Stanislavsky method was very popular, not only in the Soviet Union but also in the United States, where Lee Strasberg, together with Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, founded New York’s Group Theatre in the early 1930s. Strasberg’s elaboration of the Stanislavsky method became known as Method Acting and was widely practiced in New York’s theaters just as much as by famous Hollywood actors. 38 In Argentina, with a few exceptions, it was only in the 1950s that Stanislavsky’s work was discovered. The Escuela Nacional de Arte Dramático, which was founded in 1958, found

Translating Modernism 125 an important representative of the Stanislavsky method in its director and teacher Antonio Cunill Cabanellas. However, it was mainly independent groups such as La Máscara with Hedy Krilla or the Idish Folks Teater with Oscar Fessler, which started to use his techniques and offered their own courses, even before Stanislavsky’s approaches entered the process of institutionalization through official dramatic training programs. 39 To understand Hedy Krilla’s approach to dramatic training, it is essential to know that her teaching was based on intensive, meticulous work with language, starting from the most basic to a profound understanding of the meaning and the message that a word, a sentence, or a play aimed to transmit. She therefore developed her teaching concept, La palabra en acción (The word in action), which can be described as her own elaboration and interpretation of the Stanislavsky method and which she advanced over many years. Parts of Krilla’s own manuscript, as much as some of her notes and comments on La palabra en acción have survived thanks to the private collection of her nephew Andrés Schlichter. Based on these documents and her own experience as one of Hedy Krilla’s students, the Argentinean actress and theater scholar Cora Roca, who was also part of the ensemble of La Mascara, later published La palabra en acción as a study book for actors. On reading La palabra en acción, it is easy to forget that one is reading a study on dramatic training and not an autobiography. This perception is caused by the many anecdotes, histories, and personal elements, and the wide range of own experiences that Hedy Krilla shares with readers in La palabra en acción, starting from how she first discovered Stanislavsky to learning from Fritz Kortner and Berthold Viertel in Berlin, and, as already mentioned, how she experienced the beginning of World War II in Paris. One of her acting students, Beatriz Matar, also described in an interview how she once asked Hedy Krilla where her love for the word, for language in general, came from. Krilla responded that it was exactly this experience of exile, the experience of having to leave Europe at a moment when she was already more than forty years old. At the same time, having to go to another country forced her to learn a new language that had absolutely nothing in common with German and obligated her to train and play with the language, just as a child does when first learning to speak.40 Still, I assume that it was also this ‘distance’ from Spanish, as her second or even third language, that allowed Hedy Krilla to break with certain established, almost untouchable rules of stage language, and to offer actors an opportunity to develop their own approaches to a play. To support this development, though, Hedy Krilla also needed a profound knowledge of Argentinean theater, which she had gained through her early participation in exile and independent stages, and her work as a dramatic arts teacher over many years.

126  Christina Wieder One of the most essential aspects of Krilla’s teaching was her continual criticism of the bourgeois and opulent, even snobbish style of the Argentinean theatre, which was inherited from the colonial history and the Spanish theater of the Golden Age—a critique that she did not limit to the larger, established stages.41 With regard to this, Krilla, through her teaching, opened up a discussion that had, in a similar way, already begun in the 1920s and early 1930s Central-European theater and that centered around the question whether stage language should represent the everyday language of the audience or whether it should preserve a distance through a conscious use of alienating language, which consequently would be the opposite of everyday speech and prevent the audience from taking on imposed opinions.42 Krilla definitely favored the first position of using a popular language, more accessible to the audience. For this reason, she constantly encouraged her students to question not only the use of opulent or distancing stage language but also to scrutinize the translations of the plays and to find new approaches that would better reflect their own theater tradition. Most importantly, Hedy Krilla frequently discussed with her students, why they would use the Spanish form of tú (you) on stage, instead of the vos (also you) form commonly used in Argentina and in every other offstage conversation. Due to Hedy Krilla’s insistent call for the use of the so-called ‘voseo’ on stage, more and more of her students incorporated it into their stage language, with many others following. This seemingly minimal change of stage language had an enormous impact on several levels: (1) As mentioned before, the problem with the translations of plays coming from Spain was that Argentinean audiences could not entirely relate them to their language because of dissimilarities in the usage of certain words, metaphors, or pronunciation. To many people, this language seemed unfamiliar and strange, not just because it was theater language, but also because it was a Spanish, but not an Argentinean theater language. Replacing the túform in dialogues with the ‘voseo’ enabled a linguistic gap resulting from the Spanish translations to be closed and instead the exploration of the characteristics of Argentinean theater. (2) At the same time, this led to an approximation of independent theater to more popular forms of theater. In Argentinean popular theater, for example, in the criollo grotesco or the sainete criollo, both versions of the Spanish sainete, which bear certain similarities to the German and Austrian tradition of cabaret, the ‘voseo’ had already been in use since its beginning. By adapting this more popular way of speaking not only on the stages that performed popular theater but also on the independent stages, these two forms of theater moved closer together. As we have seen in the artistic and political debates led by Die Truppe, this is a development

Translating Modernism 127 that can similarly be found in the 1920s and 1930s Central-European modern theater. (3) Consequently, this development, initiated by this minimal change of using the ‘voseo’ on stage, allowed the strict boundaries between high and popular culture to be dissolved and for classical plays to be approached in a new, more popular, independent, or modern way. This means that Hedy Krilla stood for liberation from the strict rules of stage language and at the same time espoused a remarkably modern concept of translation that problematizes the sacrosanct position of the ‘original’. It was only in the early 2000s, with the so-called translational turn,43 that scholars introduced translation as a significant category for Cultural Studies and consequently also rediscovered the theoretical work of Krilla’s contemporaries, e.g., Walter Benjamin and his text on ‘The Task of the Translator’, which may be referred to as an early study on cultural translation. Thanks to a new focus on translation and more dynamic approaches to translation processes, the significance of the original was transformed and asymmetries in the global ‘regime of translation’44 reduced. Yet, it was also the work of those who actually practiced cultural translation that supported this development. Hedy Krilla, for example, had practiced such a form of translation already many years earlier and, moreover, had even provided multilingual spaces for cultural encounters. Krilla’s culturally open and analytic approach to stage language, as much as her criticism of the bourgeois acting style of the established theater houses, was probably a result of her admiration for Berthold Viertel and her experience in Die Truppe in Vienna. Viertel was known for his critical perspectives on high culture as much as for his spirit of reform. For this reason, he played a significant role in the debates about modern theater in Austria and Germany.45 Through her teaching activity, Krilla introduced her students to these debates and encouraged them to practice a cultural multilingualism, which for her, through the experience of exile, had become an important part of her artistic and personal biography. At the same time, she enabled her students to approach these discussions about stage language from the perspective of their own, national theater, e.g., from the criollo grotesco, which was itself fundamentally influenced by interacting migration communities (mainly Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian).46 Krilla, in a way, built her teaching concept on a tradition in theater that emphasized Argentina’s cultural openness and its receptive stance toward new ideas. She activated precisely the part of the country’s collective memory that encompasses many different influences that had shaped the Argentinean theater, the multiple cultural contexts, that had found a common ground on which to interact with each other in the theater and became the foundation of Argentinean cultural production.

128  Christina Wieder In this sense, adapting the concept of cultural translation for Krilla’s teaching activity allows us to read her work, especially her work in the classroom, as a ‘mode of agency’, in the words of Martin Fuchs, as an active ‘reaching out to others’,47 because she created a multilingual space in order to include and mediate all the possible and accessible experiences that she and/or her students could share. Here I refer to a form of multilingualism that has to be understood on a more general level, that is a multilingualism that practices both the established theater language and the popular one, and that reflects a European as well as Argentinean tradition. But Hedy Krilla also quite frequently used her excellent language skills to stimulate a visual imagery of a word’s meaning or to encourage her students to sensitize their speech.48 One example might help to illustrate not only to what extent Hedy shared her personal experiences with her students, but also which struggles and difficulties of cultural translation she faced in these multilingual contexts: In one particular exercise, Hedy asked her students to read a poem of Federico García Lorca. The poem Rosa Mudable works intensively with nature and animal metaphors to describe the aging process of a woman, Doña Rosita. According to other interpretations, it can be read as an auto-reference to García Lorca’s theater work and the process of writing a play. With both interpretations in mind, it is not only interesting that Krilla chose this poem as an exercise for her students, but also how she taught them to read it. A student started to read the poem but repeatedly failed to correctly pronounce the word pájaro (bird). So, Hedy Krilla delivered an anecdote about her filming of a movie in the south of France, and how, when she left the set, she passed by the ocean. There, she saw a reflection of light in the sea that made it seem almost purple while birds were flying over the ocean. She then described how this image had aroused a feeling of liberty in her. Interestingly, the student reacted to the anecdote with rejection and responded that this would perhaps have happened in Europe, but in Argentina, he had never seen an ocean or birds like this. Not until Hedy offered him several words for pájaro (bird)— Vogel in German, oiseau in French, uccello in Italian—did the student begin to accept that the Spanish word for bird just seemed harder than those in other languages. Likewise, the student began to understand that by transmitting the lightness of a bird through pronunciation and annotation even the Spanish word pájaro was able to convey the poem’s meaning.49 In this exercise, Krilla shared not only her excellent language skills gained through her own exile experience and a personal anecdote which, too, was connected with her years in Paris, but also an awareness of how to approach stage language, articulate sentences, and emphasize words,

Translating Modernism 129 which, as she repeatedly stated, she had learned while acting together with Fritz Kortner.50

6.4 Conclusion In La palabra en acción, Krilla frequently connects the experiences shared by her students with her own experience of exile and implicitly relates them to other important figures of European theater. When speaking about the bourgeois or the relation between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture, for example, she implicitly refers to how she learned from Berthold Viertel, when discussing the relation between actor and audience, she alludes to Bertolt Brecht, when reflecting space and hierarchies, she refers to Leopold Jessner, etc. In this way, Hedy Krilla introduced her students to important representatives of theater from the time when she was beginning her career in Europe. In other words, her teaching was a reflection and a cultural translation of the multiple debates and ideas that prevailed about modern theater in Central Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. Still, Hedy Krilla did not just force methods, theories, or ideas that circulated in modern European theater on Argentinean independent theater but also created in her classes a multilingual space for cultural encounters, different experiences, and various approaches. While for Krilla, who had passed through different stations of exile until she finally settled in Buenos Aires, cultural encounters and multilingual exchanges built a lifelong constant, they had already been inherent in Argentinean (popular) culture (e.g., in the criollo grotesco or even in Tango), since the mid-nineteenth century. Yet, it was Krilla’s teaching, her cultural translation of modern European theater and debates going on in (mainly left wing) theater circles, and her modernist belief in progress that finally led Argentinean independent theater to explore its own traditions and set out on the path of modernization. To this day, Hedy Krilla is a well-known and recognized figure in the Argentinean theater scene, one that—and here all the theater historians agree—significantly impacted on the development of independent theater. After she stopped teaching, many of her students, for example, Carlos Gandolfo, Augusto Fernández, or Augistín Alezzo, kept disseminating the methods and theories they had learned while studying with Krilla. In doing so, they also carried this knowledge from the independent to the more established stages. Additionally, as testimonies of Federico Luppi and Fernando Solanas—both very important representatives of the Argentinean cinema and students of Krilla—prove, 51 traces of Hedy Krilla’s work can even be found beyond the theater sphere, and the search for them is a worthwhile pursuit.

130  Christina Wieder

Notes 1. Independent theater, as Maria Funkelman accurately points out, is quite diverse regarding its artistic approaches as much as its organizational structures, making it difficult to formulate a universal definition. Yet, Funkelman argues, there are some common characteristics that define past and present articulations of Argentinean independent theater: (1) independent stages in Argentina are generally nonprofit organizations that do not follow the logic of capitalist systems, (2) they are artistic spaces with high esthetic standards, and (3) most importantly, they are spaces that claim ideological autonomy from the state. In other words, Argentinean independent theaters strive for political, financial, and artistic independence from the state institutions. See Maria Funkelman, “Programa para la investigación del teatro independiente”, in Teatro independiente. Historia y actualidad, ed. Jorge Dubatti (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del CCC, 2017), 14–15. 2. See Maria Funkelman, “Programa para la investigación del teatro independiente,” in Teatro independiente. Historia y actualidad, ed. Jorge Dubatti (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del CCC, 2017), 13–25; Osvaldo Pellettieri, El sainete y el grotesco criollo: del autor al actor (Buenos Aires: Galerna, 2008). 3. Jorge Dubatti, Cien años de teatro argentino. Desde 1910 a nuestros días (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblios, 2012), 91. 4. In the following, I will refer to the actress as Hedy Krilla, because in this text I am primarily focusing on her work in exile and Krilla was the name she chose for her stage career in Buenos Aires. Born as Hedwig Schlichter, she changed her name to Hedwig Krilla when she married actor and director Anton Rómulo Krilla in 1927. After their divorce in 1934, she initially kept using both names. In early documents from her years in Buenos Aires, she is still referred to as Hedwig or Hedy Krilla, Crilla, Schlichter, SchlichterCrilla, etc. interchangeably. According to her own narrative, she later chose Krilla as her stage name in Argentina, considering the problems her brother Victor was facing with a German name in Buenos Aires and the difficulties Argentineans had in pronouncing “Schlichter”. See: Testimony of Hedy Krilla, in Historias de artistas contadas por ellos mismos, ed. Julio Ardiles Gray (Buenos Aires: Editorial de Belgrano, 1981), 112. 5. Hedy Krilla actually dedicated herself intensively to translating modern European and US-American plays into Spanish and also staged them together with the ensembles of the Freie Deutsche Bühne and La Mascara. Among her translation works are Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, Frank Wedekind’s Frühlingserwachen [Spring Awakening], Bernard Shaw’s Cándida, and later, Colin Higgins’ Harold and Maude, and Ted Willis’ Hot Summer Night. 6. Doris Bachmann-Medick, “The Transnational Study of Culture: A Plea for Translation,” in The Humanities between Global Integration and Cultural Diversity, eds. Hans G. Kippenberg and Birgit Mersmann (Berlin/ Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2016), 32; See also: Doris Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften (Hamburg: Rothwohl Taschenbuch Verlag, 2014), 144–183. 7. Sigrid Weigel, “Kulturwissenschaft als Arbeit an Übergängen und als Detailforschung. Zu einigen Urszenen aus der Wissenschaftsgeschichte um 1900: Warburg, Freud, Benjamin,” in Erfahrung und Form. Zur kulturwissenschaftlichen Perspektivierung eines transdisziplinären Problemkomplexes, ed. Alfred Opitz (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2001), 125–145.

Translating Modernism 131 8. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 9. For a critical commentary on the vagueness of the concept of cultural translation, see Marie Louise Pratt, “Response,” Translation Studies 3, No 1 (2010): 94–97. 10. Katharina Prager, Berthold Viertel. Eine Biografie der Wiener Moderne (Vienna/Cologne/Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2018), 298–306. 11. Cora Roca, Dias de Teatro. Hedy Crilla (Madrid/Buenos Aires: Alianza Editorial S.A., 2000), 43–66. 12. Roca, Dias de Teatro. Hedy Crilla, 67–113. 13. Salka Viertel, Das unbelehrbare Herz. Ein Leben mit Stars und Dichtern des 20. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg/Düsseldorf: Claassen, 1970), 177. 14. Testimony of Augusto Fernández, in La palabra en acción, eds. Hedy Crilla and Cora Roca (Buenos Aires: Instituto Nacional del Teatro, 1998), 148–149. 15. Katharina Prager, Berthold Viertel. Eine Biografie der Wiener Moderne (Vienna/Cologne/Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2018), 291–309. 16. As Cora Roca states, Hedy Krilla was deeply moved and fascinated by the work of Rosa Luxemburg and educated in the spirit of the principles of Eugenie Schwarzwald. Emancipation, creativity, and nonviolence thus built the foundation of her upbringing and her political ideology. 17. Richard W. McMormick, “Coming Out of the Uniform: Political and Sexual Emancipation in Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform (1931),” in Weimar cinema: an essential guide to classic films of the era, ed. Noah Isenberg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 271–289. 18. To give some examples, Hedy Krilla staged together with the Freie Deutsche Bühne and then later with La Mascara the theater version of Mädchen in Uniform (Then and Now). Cándida (written by George Bernard Shaw) was Krilla’s first directing work for La Mascara and deals with female desire and the institution of marriage in the conservative, Victorian England. Even in one of Krilla’s last acting jobs in Buenos Aires, in her performance as Maude in Sólo 80 (Harold and Maude by Colin Higgins), she breaks taboos by staging a romantic relationship between a young man and an older woman. 19. For further information on Jewish, exiled musicians in Argentina, see Silvia Glocer, Melodías del destierro. Músicos judíos exiliados en Argentina durante el nazismo (1933–1945) (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Gourmet Musical, 2016). 20. Hedy Krilla, letter (1) addressed to her sister Dolly, written in Paris, undated (Private collection of Andrés Schlichter, nephew of Hedy Krilla). 21. Hedy Krilla, letter (2) addressed to her sister Dolly, written in Paris, undated (Private collection of Andrés Schlichter, nephew of Hedy Krilla). 22. “Hedwig Schlichter,” in Handbuch des deutschsprachigen Exiltheaters. 1933–1945: Biografisches Lexikon der Theaterkünstler, Band 2, Teil A-K, eds. Frithjof Trapp, Werner Mittenzwei, Henning Rischbieter, Hansjörg Schneider (Munich: K.G. Saur, 1999), 835; Claudie Villard, “Exiltheater in Frankreich,” in Handbuch des deutschsprachigen Exiltheaters. 1933–1945. Biografisches Lexikon der Theaterkünstler, Band 1: Verfolgung und Exil deutschsprachiger Theaterkünstler, ed. Frithjof Trapp, Werner Mittenzwei, Henning Rischbieter, Hansjörg Schneider (München: K.G. Saur, 1999), 213–214. 23. Cora Roca, Dias de Teatro. Hedy Crilla (Madrid/Buenos Aires: Alianza Editorial S.A., 2000), 137–158.

132  Christina Wieder 24. Hedwig Schlichter-Grilla, “Paris, 1 September 1939,” Das Argentinische Tageblatt, 5 March 1940, 10. 25. Hedy Crilla, in La palabra en acción, ed. Hedy Crilla and Cora Roca (Buenos Aires: Instituto Nacional del Teatro, 1998), 47–48. 26. Gernán C. Friedmann, “La cultura en el exilio alemán antinazi. El Freie Deutsche Bühne de Buenos Aires, 1940–1948”, Anuario IEHS 24 (2009): 69–87. 27. Bader Olden, “Der Vorhang fällt von Fred Heller,” Das Argentinische Tageblatt, 1 July 1941, 6. 28. Even though Hedy Krilla was neither a religious person by socialization nor did she actively practice her religion, she clearly linked her experience of exile to her Jewish background. Unlike many other Jews who would primarily identity as political refugees, Hedy Krilla undoubtfully identified as a Jewess, when she wrote to her sister that “our destiny as the chosen people seems to consist of fleeing, always fleeing, it is part of our condition, of our history as old as the planet itself”. This means, when she speaks about her experience of exile, she speaks about it as a Jewish experience. Hedy Krilla, letter (3) addressed to her sister Dolly, written in Paris, undated (Private collection of Andrés Schlichter, nephew of Hedy Krilla). 29. Hedy Krilla spoke German, English, French, and later Spanish fluently and had probably basic knowledge in Yiddish too. 30. While the Freie Deutsche Bühne was an exile stage that was mainly visited by other German-speaking exiles and earlier immigrants, the Compañía Francesa was already founded in the second half of the nineteenth century and aimed at the francophone audience in Argentina. Both the Freie Deutsche Bühne and the Compañía Francesa also frequently organized guest performances in other South American countries, such as Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Perú. Both stages tried to find the balance between comedy and drama, staged easy and entertaining plays, organized cabaret evenings, and also played French and German theater classics, such as Schiller’s Maria Stuart (1940, FDB), Herzl’s Das Neue Ghetto (1941, FDB), Ibsen’s Ein Volksfeind (1945, FDB), Molière’s Les Précieuses ridicules (1942, CF), and Paul Gavault’s La petite chocolatiére (1944, CF). For example, English plays that Krilla translated, see footnote 5. 31. “Testimony of Hedy Krilla,” in Historias de artistas contadas por ellos mismos, ed. Julio Ardiles Gray (Buenos Aires: Editorial de Belgrano, 1981), 117. 32. Jorge Dubatti, Cien anos de teatro argentino. Desde 1910 a nuestros días (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblios, 2012), 15–24. 33. María Funkelman, “Un recorrido por el Teatro del Pueblo, primer teatro independiente de Buenos Aires,” in Teatro independiente. Historia y acualidad, ed. Jorge Dubatti (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del CCC, 2017), 47–66. 34. Osvaldo Pellettieri, Cien años de teatro argentino, 1886–1990 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Galerna, 1991), 123. 35. Pellettieri, Cien años de teatro argentino, 1886–1990, 261. 36. According to her own account, Hedy Krilla first came into contact with the writings of Stanislavsky when she was already living in Buenos Aires, where she unintentionally found his work in a bookshop. It might also be possible, though, that she learned about his work at the Sociedad Hebraica, where she offered theater courses for children because the Idish Folks Teater, especially the director David Licht, had already worked with the

Translating Modernism 133







Stanislavsky method in the 1930s. See Sandra McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders, Claiming A Nation. A History of Argentine Jewish Women, 1880–1955 (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2010), 92–93. 37. For further information on the Stanislavsky method, see: Jean Benedetti, Stanislavski: An Introduction (London: Bloomsbury, 2008). 38. Mario Beguiristain, The Actors Studio and Hollywood in the 1950s: A History of Theatrical Realism (Lewiston/New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006), 53–86. 39. “Argentina,” in The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre: The Americas, eds. Don Rubin and Carlos Solorzano (London: Routledge, 1996), 47–48. 40. “Testimony of Beatriz Matar,” in La palabra en acción, eds. Hedy Crilla and Cora Roca (Buenos Aires: Instituto Nacional del Teatro, 1998), 154. 41. Agustín Allezo, “Prólogo,” in La palabra en acción, eds. Hedy Crilla and Cora Roca (Buenos Aires: Instituto Nacional del Teatro, 1998), 14. 42. One of the most important figures in this debate was of course Bertolt Brecht by introducing his concept of Verfremdung (alienation) to the 1920s and 1930s theater. While Brecht called for a stage language that should cause alienation effects and a performance that would include “instructional elements”, which “were, so to speak, installed” and “did not result organically from the whole” but “stood in opposite to the whole […]”; Bertolt Brecht, “On the Experimental Theatre,” in The Tulane Drama Review 6, no. 1 (1961): 8; other directors and theorist of the time felt the need to adapt the stage language to the audience’s needs and called for a stage language, to which the audience could connect. 43. For further information on the translational turn, see: Doris BachmannMedick, Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften (Hamburg: Rothwohl Taschenbuch Verlag, 2014), 144–183; Doris Bachmann-Medick, “Introduction: The translational turn,” Translation Studies 2, no. 1 (January 2009): 2–16; Mary Snell-Hornby, The Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms Or Shifting Viewpoints? (Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: Benjamins, 2006); Susan Bassnett, “From Cultural Turn to Translational Turn: A Transnational Journey,” in Literature, Geography, Translation: Studies in World Writing, eds. Cecilia Alvstad, Stefan Helgesson and David Watson (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 67–80. 44. Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity. On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 45. Katharina Prager, Berthold Viertel. Eine Biografie der Wiener Moderne (Vienna/Cologne/Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2018), 99–117. 46. Jorge Dubatti, Cien años de teatro argentino. Desde 1910 a nuestros días (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblios, 2012), 46–60. 47. Martin Fuchs, “Reaching out: or, Nobody exists in one context only. Society as Translation”, Translation Studies 2, no. 1 (January 2009): 21–40, 31. 48. Up to now, scholars have paid little attention to visual forms of translation and the function of images in translation processes. Birgit Mersmann, however, has offered interesting ideas and promising approaches to this topic, especially in the context of interacting image cultures. See: Birgit Mersmann, “Bildkulturwissenschaft als Kulturbildwissenschaft? Von der Notwendigkeit eines inter- und transkulturellen Iconic Turn,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 49, no. 1 (2004): 97–109; Birgit Mersmann and Alexandra Schneider, ed., Transmission Image: Visual Translation and Cultural Agency (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).

134  Christina Wieder 49. Hedy Crilla, in La palabra en acción, eds. Hedy Crilla and Cora Roca (Buenos Aires: Instituto Nacional del Teatro, 1998), 47–48. 50. Testimony of Augusto Fernández, in La palabra en acción, eds. Hedy Crilla and Cora Roca (Buenos Aires: Instituto Nacional del Teatro, 1998), 145–150. 51. “Testimony of Fernando Solanas,” in Dias de Teatro. Hedy Crilla., Cora Roca (Madrid/Buenos Aires: Alianza Editorial S.A., 2000), 323; “Testimony of Federico Lupi,” in La palabra en acción, ed. Hedy Crilla and Cora Roca (Buenos Aires: Instituto Nacional del Teatro, 1998), 151–152.

7

Traveling Knowledge Refugees from Nazism and Their Impact on Art Music and Musicology in Post-1945 Canada Andrea Strutz1

This chapter focuses on selected biographies of refugees from Nazism from Austria, Germany, and Czechoslovakia. The two women and four men described here were influential in the development of the art music scene in post-1945 Canada. From these persons, five were persecuted by the Nazi regime on racial grounds because of their Jewish descent and one person on political grounds. They arrived in Canada between 1937 and 1940, and their escape routes were often winding paths as only few refugees from Nazism were able to flee directly to Canada. Based on available biographical information about education, training, and professional activities before their flight, it will be discussed whether and how the acquired knowledge and skills of the women and men studied in this contribution enabled them to integrate and establish a new life in Canada. This chapter sketches out and analyzes the individual knowledge, skills, and expertise and asks how the refugees used them to trigger or restart their musical careers in a new and different cultural environment. The chapter also questions whether their escape perhaps caused a professional reorientation in Canada. In this chapter, the term “knowledge transfer” does not only refer to the transfer of abstract knowledge, particularly concerning music, music theory, or musicology but further includes the transfer of certain skills, expertise, and practices such as the importance of music education at university level and performing standards. 2

7.1  Canada and the Refugee Crises Canada has been a traditional immigration country since its foundation in 1867.3 With this background, one would expect that the country would have been generous in the acceptance of politically and racially persecuted refugees from Nazi Germany,4 but the opposite was the case. In the interwar period, immigration to Canada became increasingly exclusive. The Immigration Act of 1919 introduced criteria based on ethnicity and culture that allowed the government to reject immigrants,

136  Andrea Strutz for example, on the basis of their political beliefs or religion.5 In the years following, further restrictions and exclusionary measures for certain groups such as Jews, Orientals, or black Americans were established.6 Jews were considered in Canada to be unassimilable. In 1923, Jews were declared a special immigration group. Thus, they needed a special permit from Canadian officials for immigration.7 Besides Jews, citizens of Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Armenia, Turkey, and Syria also fell into the special-permit category. In the wake of the global economic crisis, the Canadian government again tightened entry regulations. In 1931, immigration was limited “to American and British subjects with adequate capital, European agriculturalists with sufficient means to farm in Canada, wives and minor children of Canadian residents capable of caring for their dependents, and those who have received permission to enter through special ordersin-council.”8 The yearly number of immigrants drastically dropped from around 104,000 arrivals to 20,600 in 1932 and sank further. Until 1945, the annual immigration rate fluctuated between 7600 and 17,250 arrivals.9 During the interwar period, xenophobia and antisemitism increased noticeably in Canada and led to an indifference to the plight of Jews in Europe and even hostility.10 In particular, the conservative press fueled fear of alienation and even of an invasion of subversive communist revolutionaries; it was demanded that immigration should not disturb the balance of minorities in Canada and that the ratio of immigrants to “races” should not exceed a certain percentage.11 At that time, Jews in Canada represented only about 1.5% of the total population.12 In addition, a large part of the Canadian population agreed to a closure of the country against further immigrants because of the experience of the world economic crisis. In that context, the life-threatening situation of refugees from Nazism was given no attention.13 The historians Harold Troper and Abella Irving describe in their work the interplay of several factors in those years that ultimately resulted in indifference and a low acceptance of refugees from Nazism in Canada: “Depression, the general apathy in English Canada, the outright hostility in French Canada, the unyielding opposition of certain key officials, the prime minister’s concern for votes, and the overlay of antisemitism that dominated the official Ottawa thinking on the question combined to ensure that no more than a mere handful of Jewish refugees would find heaven in Canada.”14 According to the strict Canadian immigration regulations effective since 1931 (Order-in-Council, P.C. 1931–695), Jewish refugees could seldom fulfill the immigration provisions unless they were wealthy or agriculturalists. Although there was enough information in Canada that Jews in Nazi Germany were persecuted, deprived of their livelihood, and forced to flee,15 “there was no groundswell of opposition,

Traveling Knowledge 137 no humanitarian appeal for a more open policy. Even the outbreak of war and the mounting evidence of an ongoing Nazi program for the total annihilation of European Jewry did not move Canada. Its response remained legalistic and cold.”16 Jewish refugees who wanted to be admitted in Canada had two options, to apply under the existing immigration regulations or to seek a special permit for immigration (order-in-council). Immigration for example was possible, if refugees could prove that they had first-degree relatives residing in Canada (spouses, children, parents if immigrants were under the age of 18, and siblings), who were in a position to receive and care for them, but only a few refugees had first-degree relatives in Canada. The other possibility was to apply as an agriculturalist, which was rather difficult due to the numerous requirements asked for by the Canadian authorities (e.g. proof of farming experience and sufficient capital). However, only a fraction of refugees fulfilled the restrictive immigration regulations. The greater part of the refugees was admitted by special permits (orders-in-council). In order to obtain a special permit, it was necessary to know either someone with enough political influence in Canada or to have sufficient financial capital for an investment in Canada in (new) industries that would not be in competition with preexisting industries. Hence, personal contacts, relatives, and financial means were decisive factors in the opportunity to find refuge in Canada.17 Of those who eventually found refuge in Canada until 1945, only a small number came on a direct route from Germany or Austria; more often, Canada was a second or third flight destination (e.g. via Great Britain or Spain). In September 1939, the possibility for refugees from Nazi Germany to legally immigrate to Canada vanished. Canada declared war on Germany on 10 September 1939, and from then onward, Germans and Austrians were considered “enemy aliens,” who were prohibited from entering the country. Despite closed borders, a group of approximately 2000 male refugees of Nazism, almost all Jewish, arrived in Canada in July 1940. However, they did not arrive as refugees, but as “enemy aliens.” The refugees were deported together with German prisoners of war (POWs), merchant seamen, and civilian Germans and Italians as aliens from Great Britain, where they initially had found refuge after their escape from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, respectively.18 After the outbreak of the Second World War, the British government wanted to avoid mass internment of “enemy aliens” residing in the country. However, in response to the war and military developments on the continent, internment of aliens was ordered in May 1940.19 Moreover, persons considered as “dangerous enemy aliens” should, for security reasons, be send abroad, for example to British Dominions such as Canada or Australia.

138  Andrea Strutz In June 1940, some 6750 men regarded as “dangerous enemy aliens” were shipped to Canada. The group consisted of about 1950 German POWs, 1700 merchant seamen, some 2700 German-speaking, and around 400 Italian civilians, including a group of about 2000 refugees from Nazism. 20 In Canada, refugees were interned alongside POWs, Italian Fascists, and German Nazis for up to three years, because they had arrived as “dangerous enemy aliens” and not as refugees. 21 The group of the interned refugees was a motley crew: they were young (more than the half under 25 years of age), some were even saved by Kindertransports to Great Britain; about two-thirds were from Germany, a third from Austria, and a handful were Jewish refugees from Italy; they had different social backgrounds, many came from the educated middle class, but there were also some farmers, farm laborers, and workers; they were religiously diverse and were of Jewish, Jewish Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant faiths, and some described themselves as agnostic. 22 Some months after the shipping, the Churchill government admitted that the deportation of refugees to Canada had been wrongful. It was offered that refugees, after a review of their cases, could return to Britain if they wished. Over half of the interned refugees accepted and returned with several ship transports to England during the war until June 1941. 23 For those who remained in Canadian internment, the situation changed in July 1941 for the better, when the Canadian government agreed to change their status from “dangerous enemy aliens” to “friendly aliens.” Now, acknowledged as refugees, there was also the prospect for release from internment. Releases began in October 1941, first for refugees with relatives in Canada, students with a Canadian sponsor, skilled workers for war production, farmers, and farm laborers were released. 24 But the release process was slow due to a high bureaucratic burden and lasted until the end of 1943; overall, about 970 interned refugees were released in Canada. 25 It is unclear to date, how many refugees from the Third Reich found asylum in Canada, but it is assumed that between 1933 and 1945 approximately 6000 refugees of all classes were accepted, thereof about 4000 were Jews. 26 Some refugees had great influence on the art music scene and/or contributed significantly to the development of musicology in Canada after 1945. In this context, Paul Helmer’s fundamental study must be mentioned, in which he examines the work and contributions to Canadian music of 121 refugees from the Third Reich and from communist regimes. 27 According to his analysis, there were 50 individuals from Austria, Germany, and Czechoslovakia who arrived in Canada between 1937 and 1940, among them 11 men, who initially landed on Canadian soil as “enemy aliens.” About 70 emigrants in Helmer’s sample arrived in Canada after the end of the Second World War. These were refugees from Nazism, who had survived in, for example, Shanghai/China,

Traveling Knowledge 139 or who decided to move to Canada because of work opportunities. Many of them came from Great Britain or the United States, where they had first found refuge. The other refugees had fled communist countries (e.g. Poland, Latvia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia) and arrived either in the immediate postwar years as displaced persons (DPs) or in the period between 1956 and 1987. Overall, two-thirds of the refugees in the investigated sample were refugees from Nazism. Only a minority fled to Canada directly (16 persons), most escape paths had one, two, or even more stopovers (e.g. Great Britain, the United States of America, Shanghai/China). In regard to gender distribution, it seems that many more men than women fled to Canada. This can partly be explained by the fact that the biggest group of refugees arriving in 1940 – the group of interned refugees – were all males. Helmer’s investigation shows a share of 18% women, which seems to be low, even considered that the music business was then still based on patriarchal structures and men were possibly more likely to achieve leading positions. Of these women, 15 were from Nazi Germany or from occupied territories (eight arrived in Canada before 1945, seven came after the war) and seven women fled communist regimes, and most of them arrived as DPs in the immediate postwar years. 28

7.2 Selected Biographies of Refugee Musicians and Music Scholars in Canada Greta Kraus (1907–1998) was born in Vienna. In an interview, she recalled that she began studying the piano at the age of eight, but the family had little money, wherefore she decided as a young woman to attend the Vienna Academy of Music, which was free. 29 She completed her education at the academy with a Music Teacher’s Diploma in 1930. 30 One of her principal private teachers in Vienna was the musicologist Hans Weisse (1892–1940), with whom she studied piano performance, analysis, and history until 1931. 31 She continued her analysis studies with the music theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935), whose ideas for the analysis of tonal music had great influence on the work of Greta Kraus. 32 Greta Kraus’ concert appearances as pianist began in 1933 in Vienna, and in 1937 she debuted as harpsichordist, somewhat unintentionally. She was asked by her friend Yella Pessl, who had emigrated from Austria to New York in 1931, but was coming back frequently for concerts, to replace her in a harpsichord recital for the Bach Society of Vienna. 33 The reason was that Pessl wanted to return to New York earlier than planned, but she also wanted her new Mendel harpsichord to be heard. 34 After a moment’s hesitation Greta Kraus accepted. She taught herself to play the instrument within a week and “fell in love with an instrument whose rigid tone production she [first] had detested.”35

140  Andrea Strutz Greta Kraus, who was considered half-Jewish according to the Nuremberg Laws, was harassed by the Nazis after the Anschluss (annexation). She decided to leave Austria as soon as possible with the help of her uncle, Hermann F. Mark, who was a chemistry professor at the University of Vienna and an expert in mechanisms of polymerization. After having been dismissed from university in April 1938, Mark accepted the offer of a position as a research director in the central laboratory at the International Paper Company in Hawkesbury, Ontario, which he had already received in 1937, and arranged a position for his niece as his secretary.36 Greta Kraus left Vienna together with Hermann F. Mark, his wife Marie, and their two sons by car in May 1938. They drove via Switzerland and France to Great Britain, where they spent several months in Manchester. Mark traveled from Liverpool to Canada in September 1938, his family and Greta Kraus followed together two months later on the steamer Duchess of Richmond (Canadian Pacific) and arrived in Montreal November 1938.37 In Hawkesbury, Greta Kraus worked as secretary for Hermann F. Mark and looked after his children.38 In 1940, however, Hermann F. Mark was offered a position as Adjunct Professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in New York, whereupon the family moved on to the United States.39 After her arrival, Kraus soon became acquainted with Arnold M. Walter (1902–1973), who was a German-speaking Czech born in a small Moravian village in Austria-Hungary. On the insistence of his father, Walter obtained a PhD in law studies at Prague University in 1926, but then turned to study piano and musicology at the University of Berlin. Then, the city was a thriving place for opera, musical theater, and in particular for contemporary and avantgarde music. Walter could not find work as pianist or composer in Berlin, and so, became a music journalist for the music journal Melos and the left-wing periodicals Die Weltbühne and Vorwärts. In the night of the Reichstag fire in February 1933, the editors of Die Weltbühne were arrested and sent to concentration camp. Walter was warned by phone not to go home and left Germany immediately.40 He emigrated to Mallorca, where he studied folk music and taught at the Ecole Internationale des Baleares. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, he fled to Great Britain and moved on to Canada in 1937 for the post of a music master at the Upper Canada College in Toronto. He quickly established himself professionally in Canada. He founded Canada’s first Opera School at the Toronto Conservatory of Music (subsequently Royal Conservatory of Music, RCM) in 1946,41 became director of the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto (1952–1968), developed the first-degree program for elementary and secondary school music teachers, introduced Orff teaching methods at the RCM, and served as president, among other positions, for the Canadian Music Centre (1959 and 1970), the Canadian Music Council (1965–1966), and the Canadian Association of

Traveling Knowledge 141 University Schools of Music (1965–1967).42 Walter, who died in Toronto in 1973, is remembered as a visionary and innovative leader of postsecondary music education in Canada. For his commitment as music educator, he received many honors including the Order of Canada (1971), which is the highest civilian award of the country. However, he was not very successful as a composer in Canada, which was a source of great disappointment to him.43 Not least because of his professional positions, Arnold M. Walter can be considered as an important mediator for a number of refugees in gaining footholds as musicians in the Canadian music world. He was also a mediator for Greta Kraus. Walter introduced her to the principal of Havergal College for girls, who immediately hired her as piano teacher. She moved to Toronto and taught at Havergal from 1939 until 1943. Furthermore, Walter procured two harpsichords in Toronto and they began rehearsing together for concerts and radio broadcasts of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).44 Greta Kraus, who became a Canadian citizen in 1944, quickly made a name as a chamber musician, accompanist, teacher, and in particular as a harpsichordist, the instrument she had at first disliked. She appeared in numerous concerts as harpsichord soloist, and often in duo with Arnold M. Walter. She was an authority on the music of Bach but also performed modern harpsichord music. Kraus taught piano, harpsichord, Baroque performance practice, and Lieder at RCM (1943–1969) and the University of Toronto (1951–1976), where she also served as director of the Collegium Musicum (1963–1976); at several other Canadian universities she held master classes. Furthermore, she founded the Toronto Baroque Ensemble (1958–1963) and teamed up with the Canadian flautist and composer Robert Aitken in 1964, with whom she performed as the Aitken-Kraus Duo until 1986. Her outstanding work and engagement as a performer and music educator became publicly recognized. In 1973, she won a teaching award of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Association for her outstanding contributions to university teaching.45 She received a Toronto Arts Award (1990) and the Order of Ontario (1991), and in 1992, she was appointed a member of the Order of Canada.46 In the case of Greta Kraus, a transfer of knowledge and of special skills into exile is quite clear. Her education and training at the Vienna Academy of Music as a music teacher, her intensive studies with music theorists in Vienna, and particularly her extraordinary skills as a harpsichordist were a foundation that enabled her to reestablish a professional music career in Canada in her early 30s. Kraus’ music career was interrupted by the expulsion from her birth country for only a short period. An important factor in that context might be that she was quickly able to establish contact with other refugee musicians originating from Austria, Germany, and Czechoslovakia. They had a

142  Andrea Strutz similar Central European cultural background and shared the same fate. It seems that some of them, especially those who lived and worked in Ontario and Quebec, formed a kind of loose network, to which Greta Kraus also belonged, and in which Walter, due to his positions, played an important role as a mediator. Greta Kraus died in Toronto in 1998. She is vividly remembered until today as “a prominent advocate of revival harpsichords,”47 whose teaching abilities, technical skills, and expertise in Baroque music as well as contemporary harpsichord music strengthened the classical music community of Canada and in particular in the Greater Toronto Area. Ida Halpern (1910–1987) also arrived in Canada before the outbreak of the Second World War, but she and her husband arrived after a detour through Asia. Ida Halpern (nee Ruhrdörfer48) was born into an education-oriented and emancipated Viennese Jewish family.49 Her parents, Sabine and Heinrich Ruhrdörfer, often took her to concerts and operas, and she began playing the piano at the age of six. After her parents’ separation, Ida lived with her mother in a small apartment in the fifth district (Margareten). Although money was in short supply, her mother “made every possible sacrifice for her daughter, sending her to private school and to piano teachers she could scarcely afford.”50 Ida Ruhrdörfer graduated from the Reform-Realgymnasium for girls in 1929, but during the final exams, she fell ill with influenza. The illness turned to a rheumatic fever, caused hospitalization for almost a year, and left her with a permanently weakened heart. After recovery, she enrolled in musicology at the University of Vienna and attended a variety of classes, including music history, opera history, history of modern orchestra, history of dance, Byzantine music, instrumentation, music esthetics, composition, psychology of music, German philology, pedagogy, and philosophy. 51 The most stimulating lecturer for her was Egon Wellesz (1885–1974), who was a specialist in Byzantine music and a scholar with a great interest in contemporary music. 52 She “wished to do her dissertation research under Wellesz, but he advised against it. She should not, he warned, make things difficult for herself in the department by becoming a student of the one member of the institute disliked, even resented”53 by the head of the department Robert Lach (1874–1958). In 1936, Ida Ruhrdörfer married the chemist George R. Halpern (1902–1989). The couple moved to Milan, Italy, because George Halpern had found a position in a new pharmaceutical business. The business did not go well, though, and they returned to Vienna within a year. Ida Halpern registered for the final exams in musicology in November 1937. She defended her dissertation “Franz Schubert in der zeitgenössischen Kritik” in June 1938 and received her doctorate on 21 July 1938 with a discriminating ceremony of a “Nichtarierpromotion,” which also meant that she was banned from her profession.54

Traveling Knowledge 143 The couple wanted to leave Vienna, but securing visas was extremely difficult. In October 1938, they emigrated to Shanghai, where the elder sister of George, Fanny G. Halpern, 55 lived and worked as a neurologist and psychiatrist at the National Medical College since 1933; Shanghai required no visas. While there, Ida Halpern had a temporary lectureship in music at the Shanghai University, but George Halpern could not find a position as an industrial chemist. The political situation in Shanghai was fragile, the city suffered from the Sino-Japanese war, and there were thousands of refugees from Nazism who could hardly make a living. 56 Because of these uncertainties, they wanted to leave. A friend of Fanny G. Halpern, Robert D. Murray, who was a Canadian and the manager of the Shanghai branch of the Chartered Bank of India, Australia, and China, offered help for immigration to Canada. To secure their admission, he guaranteed £1000 for George Halpern to establish a cosmetics firm in Canada, and during a visit in Canada in summer 1939, he also spoke to the district superintendent of immigration in Vancouver about them. Murray advised the Halperns to take the risk of coming to Vancouver on tourist visas. Before they left Shanghai, they were baptized and married again in a Catholic service. However, Ida and George Halpern where immediately detained at their arrival in Vancouver on 7 August 1939. It was argued that they would not meet Canadian immigration requirements, and the immigration authorities did not believe George Halpern’s claim about the proposed money. To save the Halperns from deportation, Murray had to intervene at the highest level of the immigration branch in Ottawa and succeeded a few days before the outbreak of the Second World War. 57 The Halperns settled in Vancouver. In the following years, Ida Halpern, who was the first woman in Canada holding a doctoral degree in musicology, 58 established herself in the community as music educator, music patron, music critic, and scholar. She bought a piano and gave lessons at her home. She also held classes in music appreciation at the University of British Columbia, UBC, from 1940 to 1961.59 Then, there was a classical music scene in Vancouver, but hardly any chamber music. Albert Steinberg (1910–2003), who was the concert master of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, therefore wished to establish a chamber orchestra. He invited interested persons, including Ida Halpern, to a meeting in March 1948.60 As a result, “The Friends of Chamber Music” were founded and Halpern became the society’s first president (1948– 1952, honorary president until 1987) and served as program chair until 1958. From 1960 to 1962, she presided over the Vancouver Women’s Musical Club. She also worked as music critic for the “Vancouver Province” (1952–1961), participated in radio and TV broadcasts, and engaged in 1958 in directing of the Metropolitan Opera auditions for Western Canada for many years.61

144  Andrea Strutz Ida Halpern’s main interest and most important work as a scholar was the preservation and documentation of the music of the First Nations. It took her six years to establish trust with chiefs and elders that they would sing for this “white woman who appeared uninvited at their remote reservations and asked to record their songs.”62 Between 1947 and 1980, Ida Halpern recorded around 500 traditional songs of the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl), Nuxalk (Bella Coola), Nuuchahnulth (Nootka), Haida, and Coast Salish Indians in exhausting fieldwork, and documented and analyzed 342 of them. Her studies at the University of Vienna, especially courses with Robert Lach, might have triggered interest in comparative musicology. However, theoretical approaches and methods she acquired in that field during her education in Vienna were based on a Eurocentric view and no appropriate tools for the analysis of traditional songs of the First Nations. Halpern had to develop her own approach, and gradually broke “free from the constraints of her […] training to place this music within its unique cultural and social context.”63 Halpern’s approach to ethnomusicology was criticized by some North American anthropologists as her method of documentation was not within the criteria of ethnography at the time. However, retrospectively she anticipated a postmodernist form of ethnographic representation as her writings include authority and self-representations of the native singers.64 Ida Halpern played a diverse role in the field of ethnomusicology, e.g. she taught the first class in ethnomusicology at UBC (1964), was the Canadian delegate to the International Folk Music Council in Ghana (1966), and chaired the research committee of the Canadian Folk Music Society (1968–1972). In appreciation of her remarkable work in preserving the musical heritage of the Northwest Coast Indigenous Peoples in Canada, she received honorary doctorates from Simon Fraser University (1976) and the University of Victoria (1986) and was named Member of the Order of Canada (1978).65 After Halpern’s death in 1987, her ethnomusicological tapes and materials were deposited in the Royal British Columbia Archive in Victoria. The Ida Halpern collection is extremely valuable in regard to knowledge about indigenous culture and was inscribed in the Canada Memory of the World Register in 2018.66 According to Helmer’s study, 11 men out of the group of interned refugees were very influential in the development of art music and musicology in Canada.67 In the following section, three of them and their achievements will be addressed. In terms of their arrival in Canada, they shared the same fate – flight to Great Britain from Nazi Germany and deportation as “enemy aliens” by the British to Canada in 1940, a story briefly discussed in previous paragraphs. Willy (Wilhelm) Amtmann (1910–1996), born in Vienna, was a violinist and studied at the Vienna Academy of Music (1924–1930). Prior to his emigration to Great Britain in 1938, he performed, for example,

Traveling Knowledge 145 with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra (1928–1931), at the Renz-Varietè (1931–1934), and toured the Far East (1935–1937); his repertoire included chamber music, operas, light music, and dance music.68 He was released from Canadian internment in October 1942 and settled in Ottawa. He joined the Ottawa String Quartet (1943), performed with the Ottawa Philharmonic Orchestra, and served from 1957 to 1959 as their concert master. From 1947 to 1968, he was director of instrumental music for the Ottawa Board of Education. Parallel to these professional activities, he continued academic studies in music that had been interrupted by the expulsion (BA University of Toronto, 1950; MA Eastman School of Music, Rochester, 1952). He received a scholarship from the Royal Society of Canada to complete his doctoral thesis “La Vie musicale en Nouvelle-France” at the University of Strasbourg,69 France (1956).70 The Canadian Centennial in 1967 stimulated the exploration of Canada’s history, including music history. A first music history course was taught at the University of Montreal in 1966, and in 1968, Willy Amtmann taught the first music history course at Carlton University.71 He lectured in music history at Carlton and at Ottawa University until 1978. Amtmann is perceived as one of the pioneers of historical writing on the music of Canada under the French regime, his books Music in Canada 1600–1800 (1975) and La Musique au Québec 1600–1875 (1976) are standard literature in musicology. He died 1996 in Ottawa. The second distinguished scholar of Canadian music history is Helmut Max Kallmann (1922–2012), who was from Berlin. Kallmann, who had learned to play the piano as a child from his father, a lawyer and amateur musician, was sent on a Kindertransport in 1939 to London. As was the case for many other refugees, he was arrested as an “enemy alien” in May 1940 and shortly thereafter deported to Canada. Kallmann and Amtmann knew each other from the internment, where, despite the circumstances, cultural activities such as concerts developed behind barbed wire. Amtmann performed in concerts, while Kallmann recorded these events as a kind of music librarian and was practicing piano whenever the only instrument in the camp for about a dozen of professional or amateur pianists was available.72 Kallmann completed in the camp external exams of McGill University in harmony and counterpoint, but as a music student, he had no special knowledge or skills needed in wartime Canada, which meant that he remained in internment for a considerable time. “In the summer of 1943, his aptitude for mathematics (not music) brought him to the attention of an accountancy firm in Toronto, and he was released with the prospect of a clerk’s position with them.”73 The local branch of the National Refugee Committee assisted him in settling in Toronto and, very importantly, arranged contacts. It was in this way that Kallmann met with Arnold Walter, who referred him to well-known pianist teachers including

146  Andrea Strutz Greta Kraus. Kallmann, who was naturalized in 1946, wanted to study and completed university entrance exams. Arnold Walter coached him again and suggested enrolling for the newly established School Music program at Toronto University.74 After graduation in 1949, Kallmann found employment as music librarian at the CBC in Toronto and began collecting information on Canadian composers and compositions as he had realized during his university studies that no Canadian composers were included in the curriculum. His book A History of Music in Canada 1534–1914 (1960) was the first one of its kind. In 1970, Kallmann was appointed head of the newly established Music Division at the National Archives in Ottawa (today Library and Archives Canada). He acquired numerous archives of deceased and living musicians including exiles and created a unique collection of musical Canadiana until his retirement in 1987. During this time, the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada75 was created under his direction, which is his major and pioneering research work. Kallmann, who also co-founded the Canadian Music Library Association (1956) and the Canadian Musical Heritage Society (1982), was appointed adjunct research professor at Carleton University in 1975. In recognition of his research as a leading historian of music, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada in 1986; Helmut Kallmann died 2012 in Ottawa.76 In December 2017, Carleton University announced the creation of the Helmut Kallmann Chair for Music in Canada with significant funding to honor and remember the foremost scholar and librarian of Canadian music history.77 Franz Kraemer (1914–1999) was the son of a Viennese Jewish family of Lutheran faith; his father was an ophthalmologist in Vienna. After completing high school, he studied harmony, counterpoint, and composition with Alban Berg (1885–1935) for three years. Kraemer was an external student at the University of Vienna, attending classes in music theory and music history, and took a course on musical forms with the composer Anton von Webern (1884–1945). Further, he worked as a clerk at the Vienna branch of the transport insurance company “Schweiz,” which was run by his mother’s family. After the annexation of Austria, Kraemer left in September 1938 for Italy and stayed in Milan for about three months. He then moved to Zurich and worked with composer and conductor Hermann Scherchen (1891–1966), who had left Germany in 1933 on political grounds. Kraemer, who was supposed to become his artistic secretary in Brussels, had to leave Switzerland in July 1939 and fled to Great Britain, where he lived in Kendal, Northwest England, until his arrest as an alien and his subsequent deportation to Canada.78 Kraemer wished to continue his music studies in Canada. Like him, “a number of musicians who came to Canada were closely associated with leading members of the Viennese dodecaphonic school.”79 However, a

Traveling Knowledge 147 student’s release was only possible with a Canadian sponsor. With the help of the Canadian National Committee on Refugees, a sponsor could be found, and Kraemer was released in January 1943 to Toronto.80 He studied composition and conducting briefly at Toronto Conservatory of Music and also worked with Arnold Walter. However, he gave up on his musical studies and the idea of an artistic career in favor of the security of a job. In 1946, he joined the CBC International Service in Montreal as radio producer. When in 1952 the English network of CBC Television was established in Toronto, he returned and worked for CBC as producer until 1970. Kraemer became a pioneer of opera and classical productions on television and was a major figure among the first generation of CBC television producers with many notable productions.81 After the end of the Second World War, the music scene in Canada experienced an extraordinary boom. In addition to favorable economic conditions, reasons for this were, above all, a national pride that grew out of the Canadian war effort and resulted in a will to achieve more and become independent. An enormous ambition also grew from the awareness of the backwardness behind Europe and the United States. Initiators and sponsors of this development were the CBC, the universities and national organizations that were founded in almost every field of music.82 Refugees from Central Europe made an impact on this development, and Franz Kraemer is such an example, who contributed essentially to music theater in Canada with nationwide television broadcasts of opera productions. He left CBC in 1970 and became music director of the Toronto Arts Foundation (1971–1979),83 and from 1979 to 1985, he served as head of the music section of the Canada Council.84 For his outstanding work as a producer of music and other arts programs, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada in 1981 and an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1987.85 As a vital member of the music community, Franz Kraemer stayed lifelong in contact with many other former refugees; he died in 1999 in Toronto.

7.3 Conclusion The women and men studied in this contribution were able to establish themselves successfully in various fields of Canada’s music scene. Essential factors for that were their knowledge and great expertise, but also certain opportunities for education, work, and professional development that occurred particularly in the postwar period, when Canada experienced a significant economic boom (1946–1962). Further, the country changed its political and cultural attitudes toward immigration in that period, also in regard to Jewish immigration.86 The country’s need for highly skilled professionals increased the possibilities of integrating refugees into the majority society. With regard to the younger generations of refugees, whose schooling had been interrupted by the

148  Andrea Strutz expulsion, it is noteworthy that the possibility for education in Canada (i.e. higher education) was not only a key factor for a successful integration, but also triggered some distinguished careers. In the cases examined, however, different individual opportunities can be observed that were caused by the different modes of admission to Canada. Arnold Walter and Greta Kraus were able to immigrate without difficulty due to employment contracts and special permits (orders-in-council) as landed immigrants. This status gave them freedom, and based on their academic education and skills as pianists, they could build careers as music educators and performers, especially in the specialized area of harpsichord music. On the other hand, those who arrived in Canada as “enemy aliens” and were therefore interned had to cope with a career break of several years, or an incomplete training through the expulsion. After being released from internment, Willy Amtmann was able to use his skills as an experienced violinist and his training at the Vienna Music Academy to rebuild a professional life in Canada. He broadened his professional spectrum by studying musicology at universities in Canada and France. In doing so, at the age of 42, he created a new foothold as a music historian, then an emerging research field in Canada. Helmut Kallmann also established himself in this field after he was able to complete his high school education, which was interrupted by the Nazi persecution, after his release from internment in Canada. The newly created course in music education in the field of school music at Toronto University, in the creation of which Walter Arnold played a major role, gave him the opportunity for higher education, which in combination with a great interest and personal commitment lead to an outstanding career in the field of music history. After his release, Franz Kraemer made an extremely successful career as television producer in the world of music theater based on his enormous knowledge, especially in the area of the Second Viennese School. However, the truncation of his promising career after the Anschluss (annexation) and forced emigration generated a loss and a career break insofar as his original desire to become a musician and composer could not be fulfilled in exile. Ida Halpern conducted pioneering research in the field of ethnomusicology based on her musicological knowledge acquired at the University of Vienna. She was able to pass on knowledge in some university courses at UBC and was also in contact with Simon Fraser University, but the “first practicing scholar in Canada to hold a Ph.D. in musicology […] held no university job.”87 It is not known if Ida Halpern perceived this as a disadvantage or whether she preferred to be an independent scholar. Refugee knowledge transfer not only concerned musical expertise, special skills as performers, and intellect, but also organizational knowhow and structural knowledge were transferred. Such knowledge could be incorporated into the creation of relevant music institutions and

Traveling Knowledge 149 associations after 1945, in which some of the studied refugees participated, as well as to create awareness in the necessity of the creation of national and local funding structures in order to strengthen musical life in Canada and academic music education. In regard to the development of the post-45 art music life in Canada, the refugees studied in this chapter, as well as many other refugee musicians, were an “invaluable asset”88 in the interaction with the Canadian society and the Canadian music scene.

Notes 1. The research for this contribution was carried out in cooperation with the University of Graz and the city of Graz at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on Consequences of War, Graz – Vienna – Raabs. The creation of the chapter was supported by the Zukunftsfonds der Republik Österreich in the course of the project “Flight, Deportation, Internment: Tracing Austrian Refugees from Nazism in Canada” (P19-3632) and the Stiftung für Kanada-Studien. 2. Mitchell G. Ash, “Wissens- und Wissenschaftstransfer – Einführende Bemerkungen,” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 29 (2006): 182. 3. For the political, social, and historical development of Canada, see, e.g., Udo Sautter, Geschichte Kanadas (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2007, 2nd ed.); Margaret Conrad, A Concise History of Canada (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 4. From an estimated 500,000 refugees from German-controlled Europe, at least 470,000 (94%) were of the Jewish religion or came from Jewish family backgrounds; Herbert A. Strauss, “Jews in German History: Persecution, Emigration, Acculturation,” in Biographisches Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration nach 1933–1945/International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933–1945, eds. Werner Röder, Herbert. A. Strauss, and Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter 1999), xii. 5. Freda Hawkins, Critical Years in Immigration. Canada and Australia Compared (Montreal et al.: McGill-Queen University Press, 1991 2nd ed.), 17. 6. Ninette Kelley and Michael Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000, 2nd ed.), 202–210. 7. Louis Rosenberg, Canada’s Jews. A Social and Economic Study of Jews in Canada in the 1930s, edited by Morton Weinfeld (Montreal et al.: McGillQueen’s Press, 1993), 127–128; Irving Abella and Harold Troper, “‘The line must be drawn somewhere’: Canada and Jewish Refugees 1933–9,” Canadian Historical Review 60, no. 2 (1979): 182. 8. Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 220; Order-in-Council, P.C. 1931-695. 9. “Table A 350. Immigrant arrivals in Canada, 1852 to 1977”, Section A: Population and Migration, Immigration (Series A350–416), Statistics Canada, https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/pub/11-516-x/pdf/5500092-eng. pdf?st=-ZFedfmj (accessed 31 August 2020). 10. Hawkins, Critical Years in Immigration, 29–30; Ira Robinson, A History of Antisemitism in Canada (Waterloo: Wilfried Laurier University Press, 2015), 63–70.

150  Andrea Strutz 11. Patrick Farges, Bindestrich-Identitäten. Sudetendeutsche Sozialdemokraten und deutsche Juden als Exilanten in Kanada (Bremen: edition lumiere, 2015), 44–45. 12. “Historical statistics, origins of the population,” Table 43-10-0003-01, Statistics Canada, https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action? pid=4310000301 (accessed 31 August 2020). 13. Waltraud Strickhausen, “Kanada”, in Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration 1933–1945, eds. Klaus-Dieter Krohn et al. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008, 2nd ed.), 286. 14. Abella and Troper, “‘The line must be drawn’,” 209. 15. Canada hesitated, but finally took part in the Evian-conference in July 1938; like most participants Canada made no offer to accept refugees; Irving Abella and Harold Troper, “Canada and the Refugee Intellectual, 1933–1939,” in The Muses flee Hitler. Cultural Transfer and Adaption 1930–1945, eds. Jarrell C. Jackman and Carla M. Borden (Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Information Press, 1983), 264–265. 16. Irving Abella and Harold Troper, None is Too Many. Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933–1948 (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2002, 3rd ed.), 281. 17. Annette Puckhaber, Ein Privileg für wenige. Die deutschsprachige Migration nach Kanada im Schatten des Nationalsozialismus (Münster et al.: LIT-Verlag, 2002), 94–102; Farges, Bindestrich-Identitäten, 101–104. 18. Great Britain was one of the major destinations for refugees from Austria and Germany, some 70,000 expellees were admitted; Anthony Grenville, Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria in Britain 1933−1970. Their image in ‘AJR Information’ (London, Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2010), 6–7. 19. By July, some 27,200 Germans and Austrians, mostly Jewish refugees, had been interned in British detention camps; Peter Gillman and Leni Gillman, “Collar the Lot!” How Britain Interned and Expelled its Wartime Refugees (London et al.: Quartet Books, 1980), 131–159. 20. Eric Koch, Deemed Suspect: A Wartime Blunder (Toronto et al.: Methuen, 1980), 262–263. 21. For more details on interned refugees, see Paula J. Draper, “The Accidental Immigrants. Canada and the Interned Refugees, Part 1,” Canadian Jewish Historical Society Journal 2, no. 1 (Spring 1978), 1–37 and Ibid., “The Accidental Immigrants. Canada and the Interned Refugees, Part 2,” Canadian Jewish Historical Society Journal 2, no. 2 (Fall 1978), 80–112; Farges, Bindestrich-Identitäten, 115–153; Andrea Strutz, “Interned as ‘Enemy Aliens’: Jewish Refugees from Austria, Germany and Italy in Canada,” in Refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe in British Overseas Territories. The Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies 20, eds. Swen Steinberg und Anthony Grenville (Leiden, Amsterdam: Brill | Rodopi, 2020), 46–67. 22. Ibid; Farges, Bindestrich-Identitäten, 126–128. 23. Gillman, “Collar the Lot!”, 268–269; Koch, Deemend Suspect, 192–194. 24. Farges, Bindestrich-Identitäten, 141. 25. Draper, “The Accidental Immigrants. Canada and the Interned Refugees, Part 2”, 98–106. 26. Abella and Troper, “‘The line must be drawn’,” 181. 27. Paul Helmer, Growing with Canada. The Émigré Tradition in Canadian Music (Montreal et al.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), 26. 28. Ibid., 23–29. Percentages and number given were determined from Helmer’s investigation.

Traveling Knowledge 151 29. Thomas Hathaway, Greta Kraus, “A Crazy Career − Upside Down From A to Z,” Queen’s Quarterly 89, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 128. 30. Frederick C. Engelmann and Manfred Prokop, “Achievements of AustrianCanadians,” in A History of the Austrian Migration to Canada, eds. Frederick C. Engelmann, Manfred Prokop and Franz A. J. Szabo (Ottawa: Carlton University Press, 1996), 161. 31. Weisse moved to New York for a post at the David Mannes Music School in 1931; David Carson Berry, “Hans Weisse and the Dawn of American Schenkerism,” The Journal of Musicology 20, no. 1 (2003): 104–156. 32. Some of Schenker’s students, who emigrated to North America, established his ideas of tonal music in the Anglo-American music theory; Ian Bent with William Drabkin, Heinrich Schenker, https://schenkerdocu mentsonline.org/colloquy/heinrich_schenker.html (accessed 31 August 2020); Walter Kurt Kreyszig, “Interkulturalität aus musikwissenschaftlicher Perspektive,” in Kanada/Europa – Chancen und Probleme der Interkulturalität/Canada, Europe – Opportunities and Problems of Interculturality/Canada, Europe – Chances et malaises de l’interculturalité, eds. Waldemar Zacharasiewicz and Fritz Peter Kirsch (Hagen: ISL-Verlag, 2000), 200. 33. Yella Pessl (1906–1991) was a Vienna-born harpsichordist, pianist, and organist educated at the Vienna Academy of Music; Aryeh Oron, Yella Pessl (Harpsichord), http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Bio/Pessl-Yella.htm (accessed 31 August 2020). 34. William Aide, Starting from Porcupine (Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1996), 99. 35. Ibid. 36. Herman F. Mark, From Small Organic Molecules to Large. A Century of Progress (Washington, DC: American Chemical Society, 1992), 83–85; Helmer, Growing with Canada, 36. 37. Ibid., 86; UK and Ireland, Outward Passenger Lists, 1890–1960 [database online], Ancestry.com (accessed 31 August 2020). 38. Hathaway, “Greta Kraus,” 131. 39. Mark, From Small Organic Molecules to Large, 87–91. 40. Ezra Schabas and Carl Morey, Opera Viva: The Canadian Opera Company The First Fifty Years (Toronto, Oxford: Dundurn Press, 2000), 14–15. 41. Albrecht Gaub, “Der Beitrag von Exilanten aus Deutschland zur Entwicklung des Musiktheaters in Kanada,“in Musiktheater im Exil der NS-Zeit, eds. Peter Petersen and Claudia Maurer Zenck (Hamburg: Bockel Verlag, 2007), 254–262. 42. Helmer, Growing with Canada, 100–118; 286; Engelmann and Prokop, “Achievements of Austrian-Canadians,” 163. 43. Barclay Mcmillan, Paul McIntyre and Elaine Keillor, Arnold Walter, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca /en /article/arnold-walter (accessed 31 August 2020). 44. Helmer, Growing with Canada, 159. 45. Staff notes, Prof Greta Kraus wins OCUFA teaching award, University of Toronto Bulletin, 11 May 1973, 4. 46. Helmer, Growing with Canada, 271. 47. National Music Center, Greta Kraus, http://collections.nmc.ca/people/ 402/greta-kraus (accessed 31 August 2020). 48. Some biographical entries mention Ida Halpern’s maiden name as Ruhdörfer. According to the entry in the birth register of the Jewish Community Vienna, however, the family name at the time of her birth was written as Ruhrdörfer.

152  Andrea Strutz 49. Comprehensive information on her biography see Douglas Cole and Christine Mullins, “‘Haida Ida’: The Musical World of Ida Halpern’,” BC Studies 97 (1993): 3–37. 50. Ibid, 4. 51. Meldungsbuch of Ida Halpern, University of Vienna, 1931–1938, Halpern Family fonds, F-58-2-0-0-3, file: Biographical Information 1986–1989, Simon Fraser University Archives and Records Management Department. 52. Wellesz found refuge in Great Britain in 1938, was able to reestablish a professional career, but suffered much from the cultural uprooting; Peter Revers, “Egon Wellesz in Oxford,” in Vertriebene Vernunft II. Emigration und Exil österreichischer Wissenschaft, Teilband 2, ed. Friedrich Stadler (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2004), 616–620. 53. Cole and Mullins, “’Haida Ida’”, 4. 54. Katharina Kniefacz and Herbert Posch, Ida Ruhdörfer (Halpern), Memorial book for the victims of National Socialism at the University of Vienna in 1938, https://gedenkbuch.univie.ac.at/index.php?id=index. php?id=435&no_cache=1&L=2&person_single_id=26535 (accessed 31 August 2020). 55. See Nastasja Stupnicki, “Fanny Halpern,” in biografiA. Lexikon österreichischer Frauen, Band 1 A – H, ed. Ilse Korotin (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2016), 1166–1167. 56. Steve Hochstadt, Shanghai Geschichten. Die jüdische Flucht nach China (Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2007), 68–109. 57. Cole and Mullins, “’Haida Ida’”, 10–11. 58. Helmut Kallmann, Musicology, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia. ca/en/article/musicology-emc (accessed 31 August 2020). 59. Helmer, Growing with Canada, 135. 60. Bryan N.S. Gooch, Albert Steinberg, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia. ca/en/article/steinberg-albert-emc (accessed 31 August 2020). 61. Helmer, Growing with Canada, 260; Kenneth Chen, “Ida Halpern: A Post-Colonial Portrait of a Canadian Pioneer,” Canadian University Music Review 16, no. 1 (1995): 43–44. 62. Ibid., 45. The songs belonged to a family or a person, were an integral part of hereditary with strict rules about ownership, performance and use, and could not be passed on from one family to another. 63. Helmer, Growing with Canada, 224. 64. Chen, “Ida Halpern”, 54–55. Halpern also released eight LPs with songs from the collection including booklets with information and analyses (Folkways Ethnic Library). 65. Ibid., 44. 66. Ida Halpern Collection, https://royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/bc-archives/whatwe-have/indigenous-material/ida-halpern-collection (accessed 31 August 2020). 67. Helmer, Growing with Canada, 27. 68. Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives (hereafter ADCJA), UJRA Collection “Interned Refugees”, B series, box 5 (A–K), index card of Wilhelm Amtmann. 69. Then, Canadian universities rarely offered doctoral degrees, wherefore students often moved abroad. Even in the 1970s, a doctor’s degree in musicology was not so widely dismissed and only by five universities; Maria Rika Maniates, “Musicology in Canada 1963–1979,” Acta Musicologica 53, no. 1 (1981). 70. Helmer, Growing with Canada, 247.

Traveling Knowledge 153 71. Elaine Keillor, Music in Canada, Music in Canada: Capturing Landscape and Diversity (Montreal et al.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 4. 72. Helmut Kallmann, “Music in the Internment Camps and after World War II: John Newmark’s Start on a Brilliant Career,” in Mapping Canada’s Music: Selected Writings of Helmut Kallmann, eds. John Beckwith and Ronin Elliott (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013), 126–130. 73. “Helmut Kallmann: A Brief Biography,” in Ibid., 4. In 1944, he found a more challenging job in a Toronto bookstore. 74. Ibid, 4–5. 75. Helmut Kallmann, Gilles Potvin and Kenneth Winters eds., Encyclopedia of Music in Canada (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1981). A second and expanded edition was published in 1992. 76. Helmer, Growing with Canada, 180–182, 265–265. 77. Carlton Newsroom, https://newsroom.carleton.ca/archives/2017/12/12/ carleton-university-creates-helmut-kallmann-chair-for-music-in-canada/ (accessed 31 August 2020). 78. ADCJA, UJRA Collection “Interned Refugees”, B series, case file Franz Kraemer, box 16, Curriculum Vitae, 28 May 1942. 79. Helmer, Growing with Canada, 31. For more on dodecaphony in Canada, see, e.g., Kreyszig, “Interkulturalität aus musikwissenschaftlicher Perspektive”, 201. 80. ADCJA, UJRA Collection “Interned Refugees”, B series, case file Franz Kraemer, letters from 1942, box 16. 81. Michael Schulman and Betty Nygaard King, “Franz Kraemer”, https:// www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/franz-kraemer-emc (accessed 31 August 2020). 82. Helmut Kallmann, “Kanada,” in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Musik, Vol. 4, eds. Friedrich Blume, Ludwig Pinscher (Kassel et al.: Bärenreiter and Metzler, 1996), 1664–1665. 83. During this time, he also produced films and documentaries featuring prominent Canadian and international musicians such as the pianist Glenn Gould (1932–1982) or the conductor and composer Seiji Ozawa (b. 1935). 84. Helmer, Growing with Canada, 193, 271. 85. The Governor General of Canada, https://www.gg.ca/en/honours/recipients/ 146-14338 (accessed 31 August 2020). 86. Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 316–320. 87. Chen, “Ida Halpern”, 57. 88. Helmer, Growing with Canada, 230.

8

Indecent Bathing Suits and Women Who Smoke Austrian Refugees as Cultural Mediators in the Transit Country Portugal After 19381 Katrin Sippel

In a discussion at a conference about Jewish refugees in Basel in 2018, I briefly touched upon the influence of refugees on fashion, habits, and society in Portugal. Philip Strobl, one of the editors of this volume, also assisted. He invited, and encouraged me to write a proposal on this topic for the conference he was planning in Vienna. In my research, I had encountered only brief references to this subject in some articles and monographs, such as Irene Pimentel’s reference book Judeus em Portugal, and in testimonies of Austrian and German refugees. There was, however, no article on the topic itself, i.e. cultural transfer by refugees in Portugal during and after the Second World War. I undertook a thorough investigation through the website of the Hemeroteca, the newspaper library of the Lisbon municipality2 into the magazines published in the years 1937–1946. Two magazines featured articles on my subject: the Mundo Gráfico3 magazine mainly showed fashion novelties and changes in women’s habits in society, whereas the Boletim mensal of the Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina (MPF)4 criticized them heavily. In this chapter, I will provide an overview about refugees from Central Europe in Portugal and Portuguese society, in particular the role of women in Portugal, at the time of the refugees’ arrival before coming to the gradual changes the refugees induced in the areas of habits, morals, and fashion.

8.1  Refugees in Portugal After Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany in 1933, refugees from Central Europe began to arrive in Portugal. Many more followed after the annexation of Austria and the November pogroms in 1938. The largest influx of refugees occurred after the capitulation of France in June 1940. Many had sought refuge there but were now forced to move on and tried to reach Portugal, as Lisbon was one of the last ports in Europe that still offered ship passages overseas. Throughout the war, the Estado Novo, as António de Oliveira Salazar called his corporatist authoritarian government, maintained its

Indecent Bathing Suits and Women Who Smoke 155 neutrality, pursuing a seesaw-policy between the Allies and the Axis powers, presenting itself as an anti-communist bulwark.5 The number of refugees who passed through Portugal is estimated at 50,000–100,000 persons. This discrepancy lies in the fact that many immigrated illegally, and that counts by government agencies and aid organizations were not complete.6 The Portuguese asylum policy was liberal in the years before the Second World War, very restrictive after it began, and more generous again when the Allies’ victory became foreseeable.7 Thousands were saved by being allowed into Portugal. However, for some, the borders were not opened. In the archives of the Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros (the Foreign Ministry), approximately 35 visa applications of Austrians can be found that had been rejected, partly because they were Jews. “Não—judeu!” (“No—Jew!”) is written in red on their files.

8.2  Portugal in the Late 1930s The refugees from Central Europe came to a country that was very different from their home countries. Following the abdication of King Manuel II in 1910 and years of extreme political instability, an authoritarian military regime seized power in Portugal in 1926. In 1932, António de Oliveira Salazar was appointed prime minister and soon consolidated his reign. He coined a famous phrase: “orgulhosamente sós”—“proudly alone.” Indeed, during his tenure, the Iberian country lived in a kind of splendid isolation, and its leader, by the end of Second World War, could only boast a short trip to Paris and two or three visits to Spanish towns near the border.8 According to the historian, Maria João Martins, by the late 1930s, the inhabitants of Lisbon still tallied with the biting observation of Eça de Queiroz who, in 1880, had put into the mouth of one of his protagonists in the novel Os Maias. Episodios da vida romántica the words: “Pois tudo somado, menina, esta nossa vidinha de Lisboa, simples, pacata, corredia, é infinitivamente preferível.” (All in all, my girl, our little life in Lisbon, simple, quiet, smooth, is infinitely to be preferred.)9 Or as the writer José Rodrigues Miguéis put it, “O mundo ficava longe” (The world was far away).10 This self-inflicted isolation from the rest of the world left many refugees puzzled. Friderike Zweig-Winternitz, Stefan Zweig’s ex-wife, stayed in Lisbon and Estoril in the autumn of 194011 and traveled through the country. She called Lisbon “Weltstadt” but observed: “Seltsames Land […] unverhohlene Vergangenheit ist allenthalben zu spüren, auch im Politischen. Ein steriles Stehenbleiben, […] ein verlorenes Großsein, inmitten einer unrettbar neuen, von Portugal nicht akzeptierten Welt. Daher auch heute das Festhalten an dem,

156  Katrin Sippel was einem nicht mehr wahrhaft gehört, an den Kolonien, vergeblich Weltreich vortäuschend. […] Waren wir hier in Europa oder war das ein fremdes Land zwischen den Zeiten?” (A strange country, the past can be felt everywhere, also in the political realm. A sterile standstill, a lost grandeur in the middle of an unstoppable new world that Portugal does not accept. Therefore, also the clinging to what she, in reality, no longer owns, the colonies, trying in vain to feign an empire. Were we in Europe or was this a strange country between the times?)12

8.3  The Situation of Women in Portugal One of the most striking differences between Portugal and Central Europe was the status of women. The female youth group Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina provides a good example of the predominating ideas and ideals about and for women at that time. It was founded in 1937, membership was mandatory for all Portuguese girls between the ages of 7 and 14, and voluntary until the age of 21 for normal girls and until the age of 25 for students.13 The three pillars of Salazarism were Deus, Pátria, and Família. The education policy of the Estado Novo aimed to build a new society that followed these principles. Thus, the young generation had to learn obedience, order, devotion, the spirit of sacrifice, humility, love for work, charity, and devotion to God and the nation. The five pillars of the MPF were (1) moral and religious education (the exaltation of faith and Christian virtues), (2) nationalist education (love for the nation, the rural, maritime, and colonial ideal), (3) family and household education, (4) physical education (order and discipline), and (5) studies and culture (taste for arts, literature, and science).14 The cult of the Immaculate Virgin, the Patron of Portugal, was also of great importance.15 The family was given particular importance in the Estado Novo as the “nucleus of society.” Healthy, happy, united, and disciplined families were synonymous with a strong, cohesive, and obedient nation. The woman played a central role as mother and educator of future generations.16 The MPF girls had to be sensible, chaste, and restrained in their relationships with boys. While love was important, the bond of marriage had to be consolidated by children—the more, the better. The tranquility and well-being of the husband depended on the ability of his wife to educate the children and manage the household.17 Wives and mothers were supposed to be obedient, loyal, docile, tender, vigilant, and ready to sacrifice everything for their family.18 They ought to be educated in order to avoid monotony in the marriage but not have a know-it-all attitude; men do not like women who show themselves to be superior—the wife had to know her place.19

Indecent Bathing Suits and Women Who Smoke 157 Spiritual beauty was what mattered most for an MPF member. As appearance reflected inner beauty, readers of the MPF magazine were constantly reminded to dress, do their hair, and behave in society in a simple and modest manner: luxury and flamboyance in dress, arrogance and vanity, artificial make-up, but also neglect of one’s appearance were criticized. 20 The magazine recommended physical exercise to maintain a slender figure, add elegance to the movements, and stay resistant to illness. The exercises suggested were going for walks with the baby carriage … or running around with small children. Horse riding (sidesaddle); fencing; playing volleyball, basketball, and tennis; swimming; cycling; skating; and walking were considered physically and morally healthy. Developing too much muscle was, however, not considered feminine. 21 What is more, bourgeois women in Portugal had to wear gloves, hats, and stockings unless they wanted to break the rules of good manners. 22 Female Austrian refugees were shocked by the submissiveness of the Portuguese women. Zweig-Winternitz noted, “Ein trauriges Bild, ein fast biblisches ist es, wie kleine Karawanen durch die fruchtlosen Äcker ziehen, der Mann auf dem Esel, die Frau zu Fuß, mit Säcken beladen, barfuß, abgehärmt, trotz allem Feminismus in der übrigen Welt. Im Süden des Landes gingen die Frauen noch mit schwarzen Tüchern, tief über die Stirn gezogen. In den Kaffees am Roccio23 sieht man nur Männer; je vornehmer die Frau, desto verborgener war sie und ist es wohl noch heute, denn dies ist ein Land der Vergangenheit geblieben.” (It is a sad and almost biblical image when small caravans cross the barren fields, the man on the donkey, the woman on foot, loaded with bags, barefoot, careworn, in spite of all the feminism in the rest of the world. In the south of the country the women still wore black scarves, pulled down over the forehead. In the cafés on Rossio square, only men can be seen. The nobler a woman, the more hidden she was, and probably still is today, because this remains a country of the past.)24 Margit Morawetz from Innsbruck was 18 years old when she arrived in Lisbon with her mother in 1940. In her memoir, published in 2013, she wrote: “At the time, young, middle-class Portuguese women were not permitted to go out by themselves. By custom they had to be accompanied by siblings or other family members. I, on the other hand, felt perfectly free to come and go and was therefore frequently accosted on the street by Portuguese men. Most had a very long nail on the little finger of their left hand, an odd fashion they must have thought sexy. I had fun letting them follow me, listening to their come-ons only to pretend in the end that I did not understand Portuguese. […] My landlady’s daughter, Didi, a plain, morose, depressive girl, used to lean out of

158  Katrin Sippel her third-floor-window, enviously watching me walking freely down the street. She spent most of her day on the windowsill.”25 In 1939, the US State Department distributed a leaflet among its diplomats in Lisbon asking them not to speak to Portuguese ladies without the husbands being present or having been formally introduced and stay away from Portuguese women in general to avoid complications. 26 In contrast, Madalena Braz Teixeira describes the Central European women as “[…] ordinary bourgeois women who went to the market, did their shopping and worked without maids to help in the house. These women participated actively in their children’s literary and artistic education. They spoke several languages, played the piano, sang, appreciated opera and ballet and were discerning about what was going on politically in the war and its dramas. They talked openly about the war atrocities they knew of, expressed their views on the most recent moves by the allies that were broadcast on the radio for all to hear.”27

8.4  The New Habits After the occupation of France, the Portuguese population began to experience the effects of the war. There was the fear of a German invasion, leading to strengthening civil defense. Goods became increasingly scarce, and above all, thousands of refugees started to arrive in the country. The female refugees started to question the traditional roles of men and women in Portugal. They changed “the daily rituals” as well as fashion and the role of women in society as a whole. 28 The German refugee Ruth Arons29 recalled a Second World War episode in a 1995 interview. Her mother came to pick her up from school and, while waiting, sat down on a bench on the Avenida. The next day, a schoolmate came over to Ruth to ask her why her mother had been sitting on a bench, and without a hat!30 Apparently, this was considered indecent. Another novelty the refugees introduced was to sit outside in the sun instead of inside the cafés. The writer Alves Redol, in his novel O Cavalo Espantado, describes how in 1939 on the square below the relógio do Carmo “a pedido de estrangeiros sem sol para os aquecer na vida” (at the request of refugees without sun to warm them in life), tables were put outside.31 There they sat for hours: “Uma bica, um carioca ou um garoto davam direito ao encosto de uma mesa para toda a tarde” (an espresso, a thin coffee or an espresso with milk gave the right to a table for the whole afternoon).32 The cafés in Portugal were traditionally meeting points for men. Now, foreign women were sitting there, wearing neither hats, gloves, nor

Indecent Bathing Suits and Women Who Smoke 159 stockings. Rodrigo de Mello, in an article for Mundo Gráfico in May 1941, describes succinctly how these places had changed due to more women being customers: “As mulheres alegram e ornam os ‘Cafés!.’ Há mais pasteis nas mesas; menos copinhos de aguardente bagaceira; há mais perfumes no ar e menos lixo no chão” (Figs. 8.1–8.3). (The women ornament the cafés and make them nicer places. There are more sweets on the tables, fewer cups with spirits, more perfume in the air and less waste on the floor.)33 The Pastelaria Suiça, 34 a popular meeting point of refugees in central Lisbon, was called “Bompernasse” by the Portuguese, because one could see “good legs” there [“bom” for good, “pernas” for legs]. The foreign women used to wear short skirts or dresses, local men came to stare, newspaper boys even tried to get a glimpse from below. 35 In

Figure 8.1  T he 1944 photograph shows men in a café—by then, these places had already been “conquested” by women, Mundo Gráfico 89, 15 June 1944. Source: Hemeroteca Municipal de Lisboa

160  Katrin Sippel

Figure 8.2   According to the magazine article, the times when cafés were places exclusively for men are “long long ago.” The caption calls the cafés the “latest conquest” of women, Mundo Gráfico 16, 30 May 1941. Source: Hemeroteca Municipal de Lisboa

the novel O Cavalo Espantado, a Polish refugee says to her husband: “Parece que estamos no Zoo.” (We seem to be in the zoo.)36 Sometimes, there were protests by the locals, for example when somebody wore sandals in a restaurant.37 As far as the male refugees were concerned, it was noticed that they often did not wear hats, 38 and complaints were made that they wore open shirts without ties.39 In the small beach town Figueira da Foz, one of the places of residência fixa (assigned residence) to which refugees were sent once Lisbon had become “overcrowded” after the fall of France, the locals were dumbfounded when blond refugee women with short skirts and headscarves smoked in the streets.40 In Ericeira, another beach town and residência fixa, it was reported that elderly ladies went on “excursions” to watch refugee women. People were shocked by couples that kissed in public or lived together without being married.41 Alexandra Weber Ramos writes: “Tudo foi uma novidade, e de certa forma, um escândalo para a mentalidade dos portugueses na época.”

Indecent Bathing Suits and Women Who Smoke 161 (Everything was a novelty and in a certain way a scandal for the mentality of the Portuguese people at that time.)42 The refugees seemed to be inhabitants of a different planet, and the Portuguese behaved accordingly. The Diario de Coimbra reported in June 1940 that wherever a foreigner appeared, he or she was instantly surrounded by half a dozen curious locals staring at him or her.43 In Ericeira, the local parson described the foreign women in an alarming sermon as dishonest, and the men as assassins of Jesus, therefore urging the locals to stay away from them.44 Nonetheless, many activities were organized together. At picnics or parties, the locals tried to drink more than the foreigners but usually failed.45 The ladies’ choice practiced by the refugee women at dances caused quite a stir,46 as the local chronicler remembers the first party of locals and refugees together: “Everybody came. They wanted to see the foreigners and dance with the women. When the foreign women asked the Portuguese men to dance, one thing was sure: Nothing like this had ever been seen in Ericeira.”47 Unfortunately, their different habits and moral conduct had, at times, serious consequences. The journalist Eugen Tillinger reported that a father of four had left his wife and children for a Dutch refugee girl. “The Dutch girl was arrested and accused of immoral behavior. She is in Caxias prison waiting for a visa to return to her country.”48 According to the journalist and screenwriter Jan Lustig, a refugee from Brno, the Dutch girl was accused of prostitution and deported to Curia.49 The fate of this unfortunate refugee remains unknown. Lustig also reports that two young refugee girls were imprisoned because they had worn trousers on the Figueira beach and had been seen with a gentleman in a cabriolet. They, too, were accused of prostitution and disturbing public morality and prostitution. No lawyer was permitted to defend them.50

8.5 Fashion The writer Otto Zoff’s assessment of Lisbon bourgeois women was unflattering: “[…] alles ist plump, unschön, provinzhaft. Die Frauen sehen aus, als hätten Bäuerinnen beschlossen, ein Kostümfest >Paris< zu geben” (Everything is crude, unattractive, provincial. The women look as though women farmers had decided to organize a Paris-themed fancy-dress ball.)51 On the other hand, he appreciated the fishmongers’ colorful outfits: “Auffallend die unverhüllte Liebe für grelle Farben; rote Röcke, grüne Blusen, gelbes Halstuch, und eine violett-rosa gestreifte Schürze, das ist nichts seltenes; es wirkt schön” (The undisguised love for garish colors is striking: red skirts, green blouses, a yellow scarf and an apron with stripes in violet and pink are not rare. It looks good.)52

162  Katrin Sippel

Figure 8.3  T he caption states that the woman is a French refugee and does not wear a hat, Mundo Gráfico 1, 15 October 1940. Source: Hemeroteca Municipal de Lisboa

The refugee women wore, for example, sleeveless blouses or dresses of much lighter and flashier colors than those that were common with Portuguese middle- and upper-class women, sometimes with ornaments or large buttons instead of jewelry they no longer owned.53

Indecent Bathing Suits and Women Who Smoke 163 Female refugees also “introduced the use of slacks and even shorts.”54 They kept their hair open, in ponytails, pinned up, or with scarves around their heads, mainly because they lacked money for the hairdresser. 55 One of the refugee women in Ericeira wore a gold chain around her ankle, an idiosyncrasy that was considered nearly an insult by the local women. 56 Some refugees lent their dresses, brought from Western or Central Europe, to Portuguese haute couture ateliers that copied them, sometimes in exchange for a new dress.57 Eight of the around 1700 Austrian refugees registered so far for the research project about Portugal were milliners, and nineteen tailors and seamstresses. Some of them exercised their profession while in Portugal. Franziska and Ludwig Rosenbaum58 from Vienna, for example, stayed in the home of the prominent Jewish Levy family near the Marquês de Pombal square in central Lisbon. Franziska established an illegal dressmaking workshop there. Dr. Samuel Levy, who was a child at the time, also remembers a refugee woman who made undergarments for ladies. Her husband was a shoemaker and repaired shoes. They stayed in Lisbon for one to two years.59 The teenager Margit Morawetz also went into the dress-making business. In her memoir, she remembers: “Quickly I figured out how to earn what we needed. Many of the refugees had lost much of their luggage during the escape and needed new clothes. Through word-ofmouth I became the dressmaker of the refugee crowd. Our landlady had a treadle sewing machine that she put in our room and lent us an iron that was heated with hot coals. […] Some of the women brought me pictures from fashion magazines to copy. One of my specialties was making pleated skirts from pre-cut and pre-pleated material prepared by another emigrant woman; she had learned to work a pleating machine to have a transportable skill when she arrived in America. I turned these skirts into dresses by attaching the blouse top from the matching material. My reputation as a good dressmaker grew among the refugees and pretty soon I was busy enough to support Mother and me. Mother helped me by sewing buttons, hemming and overcasting seams.”60 The changes in fashion were well noted in the press. An article in the Mundo Gráfico magazine is entitled Lisboa a capital da moda: “Lisboa com a guerra converteu-se na capital da moda” (Lisbon became the capital of fashion with the war), “já não há necessidade de ir buscar vestidos a Paris” (you don’t have to look for dresses in Paris any more). “They come by train—naturally on their living models. This contacts with the international world of feminine grace, its wild fancies and its complicated cosmetics, will grant the Portuguese woman, who is so sensitive to taste and so demanding and refined in the harmony of her dress, a longer and more direct vision of outfitting, although within the

164  Katrin Sippel originality that distinguishes her.”61 The caption of a photograph in the article reads: “As portuguesas já se acostumaram a andar sem chapéu. O novo hábito revela-nos novos penteados” (Portuguese women are already used to not wearing hats. This new habit reveals us new hairstyles).62 Another photograph describes a French refugee “sem chapéu” (without hat).63

8.6  The Bathing Suit Problem During their stay in Portugal, which sometimes lasted many months, as visas and naval tickets to overseas were scarce and expensive, the refugees frequented the beaches, especially Costa do Estoril, Figueira da Foz, Espinho, and Póvoa de Varzim. Alexandra Weber Ramos Reis Gameiro writes, “A praia, o sol e o calor, estavam conotados com uma vida menos regrada, mais despretensiosa ou liberal.” (The beach, the sun and the heat were connoted with a life less regulated, more modest or liberal.)64 One special “problem” for Portuguese morality that soon arose was the refugees’ bathing suits, especially those in two parts, bikinis avant la lettre, which some refugee women wore. These were considered scandalous.65 The Ministry of the Interior, in its “zeal for morality,” wanted to safeguard a “minimum of decency.”66 The decreto-lei with detailed rules on how to dress at the beach was posted in the beach resorts.67 According to these rules, male bathing suits had to cover the torso and especially the nipples.68 Women had to wear bathing suits with an overskirt. The cleavage should not be “exaggerated.” Bathing suits that became transparent in the water were prohibited. Girls up to 10 and boys up to 12 years were exempt from these norms, except in cases of precocious development.69 Penalties were laid down and some foreigners, including the Duke of Windsor’s male secretary, were fined.70 The Yugoslav diplomat Milos Tsrnhanski was the target of such an official action by the beach patrol: “When we come out of the water two civilians in bowler hats come to us and measured our bathing suits and ask why I am bare-chested. It is prohibited. Both off to the police. As the young English girl does not know Portuguese and they are touching her, she sits down on the sand, shouting and crying.” He convinces them to leave the girl alone, is taken to the Police, fined 3000 escudos, insists on international law, and is finally released without having to pay.71 For those who were not sure whether their bathing suits were in compliance with the rules, the MPF commercialized its own line of officially approved bathing suits.72 Not very successfully, as it seems. In several articles, the MPF magazine warned its members against the two-part bathing suit73 or praised girls and women who dressed properly. The

Indecent Bathing Suits and Women Who Smoke 165 journalist Maria Joana complains in the Boletim da MPF about the situation at the beach at Figueira da Foz, about “tanta nudez sem pudor a exibir-se em maillots inconvenientíssimos” (so much nudity without shame exhibited in very inconvenient bathing suits), stating that one could hardly tell the difference between foreigners and Portuguese anymore.74 The women’s magazine Eva recommended in August 1941 bathing suits that are “[…] conformidade com as leis naturais da beleza estética e com as leis conservadoras da beleza moral […]” (in conformity with the natural laws of esthetic beauty and with the conservative laws of moral beauty). Those who wore them would not have to pay any penalties.75

8.7  Outdoors, Sports, and the Body The Portuguese were bewildered by the refugees’ habit of going out for walks and considered them stupid for not accepting offers of lifts from the drivers of passing cars.76 The love for nature and open-air exercise was new to them.77 On the other hand, sports activities established bonds between locals and foreigners. In the spa town Caldas da Rainha, another place of residência fixa, an Italian refugee gave boxing classes, and a Russian with the nickname “Papa Urso” founded the male gymnastics group “Os Ursos Brancos”78 and taught foreigners and locals judo, ping-pong, snooker, and singing.79 Some refugees in Caldas played tennis at the Clube do Parque, and locals began to practice this sport. One local said in an interview in the nineties that he started to play tennis because of two French refugee girls he was fond of.80 Male and mixed lawn tennis tournaments were organized at times.81 The historian Carolina Henriques Pereira speaks about “O desporto como estratégia de convivência”82 (sports as a strategy for living together). Another change the refugees brought to Portugal was “the habit of taking showers, washing hair frequently, taking care of the skin with facials that included masks made with natural products such as eggs, rose water, honey and lemon, mixed with almond oil that was also used for massaging the face or the body.”83 The author Salomon Dembitzer writes in his autobiographical novel about the bathtub in the pension in Porto that had apparently not been used in years, and the stir caused when the newly arrived refugee couple wanted to take a bath.84 Leon Kane mentions in his autobiographical novel that bathing in the pension was only allowed in the morning, and that the refugee couple had to pay for an extra bath taken in the evening.85 The Austrian Jewish refugee Gertrud Braun was “specialisée en massage faciale.”86

166  Katrin Sippel

8.8  Influences and Changes Christina Heine Teixeira states that the influence the refugees exerted in Portuguese society was intense in various fields, for example with regard to food and drinks,87 without giving any examples. According to José Caré Júnior, the refugees introduced yoghurt and pizza, whiskey, and the habit of drinking beer rather than wine.88 The very popular Bola de Berlim, a larger version of the German Berliner Pfannkuchen, filled with an egg-yolk-based cream, is also said to have been introduced by refugees from Germany. Young Portuguese women began frequenting cafés without male company and dressing like the refugees.89 The “penteado à refugiada,” according to various sources, either a short cut or a pinned-up hairstyle, became popular with Portuguese women,90 as well as turbans.91 Eugen Tillinger describes the following changes for the Daily Mirror in 1940: “[…] Lisbon clerical cercles are worried about the ‘bad influence’ that many lady refugees coming from Paris, Brussels and Warsaw may have on Portuguese morals. They note that the Portuguese women are wearing more and more makeup and that, which is worse, they are copying fashions in hats and shoes worn by the foreign ladies. On top of this, they are starting to smoke in public.”92 The historian Margarida Magalhães Ramalho writes about the reaction to the changes brought about by the refugees: “The authorities are aware, and try to hold back these modern touches whenever they can. In vain, the seeds were sown and some of them would bear fruit in a short time, particularly at seaside resorts, where […] life was more relaxed. Before the end of the war some Portuguese women will dare to remove their stockings, and at the same time many mothers will start to frequent café terraces with their husbands in order to prevent them being charmed by so many beauties.”93 Christina Heine Teixeira states that some Portuguese men were not pleased at all observing how their daughters and wives imitated the dress and hairstyles of the refugees.94 According to Madalena Braz Teixeira, “The presence of these [refugee] women in Portugal had a great impact and influenced dress as well as customs. The natural ease of the refugees contaminated Portuguese women, who let themselves be seduced by their simplicity and lack of constraint. […] smoked and talked naturally with men, and this dialogue had no sexual innuendo. The refugees introduced a new form of social behaviour.”95 “The refugee was an example and constant influence on Portuguese women and helped them change their mentalities. They helped transform Portuguese bourgeoisie that integrated, gradually, these new ways of living in society.”96 The historian Irene Flunser Pimentel sees the main effects in the changed habits in the public space: sitting outside on the esplanada and

Indecent Bathing Suits and Women Who Smoke 167

Figure 8.4  “Avenida,” Mundo Gráfico 64, 30 May 1943. Source: Hemeroteca Municipal de Lisboa

the more independent attitude of the refugee women were the phenomena that had the strongest influence on the Portuguese.97 In May 1943, the magazine Mundo Gráfico presented a double page with photographs entitled Avenida (see Fig. 8.4). It shows women on café terraces, with skirts that end above the knees. “A saia agora usa-se elegantemente mais curta” (skirts are now worn elegantly shorter),98 legs without stockings, and a woman sewing on a bench with the caption saying that Lisbon women do not care anymore about making a bad impression. “Lisboa descobriu a Avenida” says the article, “Lisbon discovers the Avenida,” meaning the Avenida da Liberdade.99 According to the article, the boulevard was called “a praia de Lisboa” (the beach of Lisbon), “porque as senhoras, como agora é moda, andam sem meias” (because the ladies, as it is fashion nowadays, do not wear stockings) and wear shoes with wedge heels. The article ends with reflections on how the statues on the monument for the nineteenthcentury Queen Dona Maria II., so bashfully covered, would think about modern-day women.100

168  Katrin Sippel An inhabitant of Caldas da Rainha who experienced the stay of the refugees when she was young reckons that her place of residence modernized quicker than other places because of them.101 A male “Caldense” opines that the foreigners had brought with them “a wind of unconstraint and love for life” and “freedom of thought.”102 According to António José Telo, the refugees were seen as a symbol of modernity. The government should not have been afraid of their (leftist) political activities. The long-term effect on habits and the national mentality was immense and most certainly much greater than any political activity.103 Madalena Braz Teixeira also speaks of a “transformation and modernisation of mentalities.”104 The writer Alexandre Babo even discerns an “antes ou depois dos refugiados para indicar um padrão de vida” (before and after the refugees to indicate a standard of living).105 It is clear, however, that the refugees barely had any impact on the high culture and the arts. They saw their stay in Portugal merely as a period of transit, as did the Portuguese authorities. Hardly anybody wanted to settle there permanently, and the laws made it difficult to do so. This may be one of the reasons why the foreigners did not adapt to local customs nor did they wish to integrate themselves into the local society. Thus, no distinct exile culture emerged. Notwithstanding recent developments such as the popularity of the long-distance hiking trail Rota Vicentina, going for walks, or enjoying nature in general are still not very common in Portugal. Thus, during the off-season, one can see many Portuguese driving their cars to the beach and staying inside to eat and drink, kiss, and watch the sea. All in all, Portugal still seems to lag behind with regard to dress codes and women’s freedoms. Women wearing red lipstick in combination with a skirt that ends above the knees must be prepared for turned heads and whistles from passing men. Finally, an online expatriate guide warns: “Keep in mind that going to a bar alone is frowned upon. It may attract unwelcome attention.”106

Notes 1. This chapter is based on the results of the research project Portugal as a country of exile and transit for Austrians 1938–1945, funded by Austrian National Fund, Zukunftsfonds, and David-Herzog-Fonds. 2. The website of this institution http://hemerotecadigital.cm-lisboa.pt/ 3. The biweekly magazine, richly illustrated as its title indicates, was edited in Lisbon between 1940 and 1948. 4. The monthly magazine, the official organ of the youth group and intended for its members, appeared in Lisbon between 1939 and 1947. 5. Michael L. Marrus, Unwanted. European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 263. 6. Patrik von zur Mühlen, Fluchtweg Spanien-Portugal (Bonn: Dietz, 1992), 115.

Indecent Bathing Suits and Women Who Smoke 169 7. Ansgar Schäfer, “Hindernisse auf dem Weg in die Freiheit. Der portugiesische Staat und die Deutsche Emigration,” in Exil 1 (1993): 39–47, 39. 8. António José Telo, “Introducção,” in Ericeira, 50 anos depois. Os refugiados estrangeiros da 2a Guerra Mundial, ed. José Caré Júnior (Ericeira: Mar de Letras, 3rd eds. 1998), 11–21, 12. 9. Maria João Martins, “Sob céus estranhos. O quotidiano em Lisboa durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial,” in Tempo de guerra. Portugal, Cascais, Estoril e os Refugiados (Cascais/Vila Real de Sto Antonio: Câmara Municipal, 2004), 52–67, 52. 10. Martins, Sob céus estranhos, 52. 11. Her guest file can be found in the Arquivo Municipal (community archive) of Cascais: AM Cascais Bol. Al., Casas Particulares do Monte Estoril, CMC, I, 009-0046, 002-1939, 069-S.ind. 12. Friederike Maria Zweig, Spiegelungen des Lebens (Wien/Stuttgart/ Zürich: Hans Deutsch, 1964), 230–231. 13. Isabel Alves Ferreira, “Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina: um ideal educativo,” in Do Estado Novo ao 25 de Abril (Revista de História das ideias 16) (Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra, 1994), 193–233, 193–194. 14. Alves Ferreira, Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina, 222. 15. Alves Ferreira, Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina, 198. 16. Alves Ferreira, Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina, 207. 17. Alves Ferreira, Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina, 208. 18. Alves Ferreira, Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina, 209. 19. Alves Ferreira, Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina, 221. 20. Alves Ferreira, Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina, 199–200. 21. Maria Benedita, “Desportos. Elasticidade, Resistência, Saúde e Beleza do Corpo,” in Boletim da M.P.F. 75–76 (July/August 1945): 7. 22. Alexandra Weber Ramos Reis Gameiro, “A Moda e as Modistas em Portugal durante o Estado Novo—As mudanças do pós-guerra 1945–1974” (PhD diss., Universidade de Lisboa, 2017), 158. Thanks to Xenia Ribeiro from the Museu Nacional do Traje for sending me this thesis. 23. Zweig means the Praça Dom Pedro IV in the center of Lisbon, correct Rossio. 24. Zweig, Spiegelungen des Lebens, 232. 25. Margit Meissner, Margit’s Story (Rockville: Schreiber Publishing, 2003), 122. 26. Telo, Introducção, 18–19. 27. Madalena Braz Teixeira, “The Refugee.” in A Moda do Século. 1900– 2000 (Lisboa: Museu Nacional do Traje/Instituto Português de Museus, 2000), 117–120, 119. Thanks to Xenia Ribeiro from the Museu Nacional do Traje for bringing my mind to this. 28. Weber Ramos Reis Gameiro, A Moda, 375. 29. Ruth Arons was born in 1922, daughter of a lawyer in Berlin, and came to Lisbon in 1935 with her parents and sister. The girls attended the French school in Lisbon. Ruth stayed in Portugal, studied, married, and became the first elected “district mayor” of the Lisbon São Mamede district. In 2015, she was still alive. 30. Martins, Sob céus estranhos, 59. 31. António Alves Redol, O Cavalo Espantado (Sintra: Publicações EuropaAmérica, 1977), 77. 32. Alves Redol, O Cavalo Espantado (1977), 76. 33. Rodrigo de Mello, As Mulheres e os “Cafés,” in Mundo Gráfico 16 (Lisboa, 30 May1941), 12.

170  Katrin Sippel 34. The popular sweets shop on the Rossio had been established in 1922 and closed in 2018. 35. Irene Flunser Pimentel, Judeus em Portugal durante a II Guerra Mundial: em fuga de Hitler e do Holocausto (Lisboa: Esfera dos Livros, 2008), 168. 36. Alves Redol, O Cavalo Espantado, 75. 37. Christina Heine Teixeira, “Lisboa, símbolo de esperança e de liberdade. Escritores alemães e austríacos em trânsito 1940–41 (algumas observações),” in Arquipélago. História 2ª série, V (Ponta Delgada: Universidade dos Açores, 2001) 669–680, 676. 38. Weber Ramos Reis Gameiro, A Moda, 154. 39. Telo, Introducção,19. 40. Luis Cajão, Um Secreto Entardecer (Lisboa, 1998), 45, cited after Margarida Magalhães Ramalho, Vilar Formoso, Fronteira da Paz (Almeida: Câmara Municipal, 2014), 136. 41. José Caré Júnior, Ericeira, 50 anos depois. Os refugiados estrangeiros da 2a Guerra Mundial (Ericeira: Mar de Letras,1998), 34–35. 42. Weber Ramos Reis Gameiro, A Moda, 154. 43. Diário de Coimbra, 28 June 1940, cited after Margarida Magalhães Ramalho, Vilar Formoso, Fronteira da Paz, 144. 44. Fritz Teppich, Um refugiado na Ericeira (Ericeira: Mar de Letras, 1999), 28, 30–31. Cited after Flunser Pimentel, Judeus em Portugal, 245. 45. Caré Júnior, Ericeira, 50 anos depois, 36–37. 46. José Caré Júnior, Ericeira, 50 anos depois, 43–45. 47. Christa Heinrich, ““Von Integration konnte man nicht reden—eher von Zusammenleben…” Über das Leben in Ericeira—residencia fixa für viele vor den Nazis Geflüchtete,” in Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch 44, no. 1 (Regensburg: ifa, 1994), special issue Ein Blick aus weiter Ferne? Zu den Kulturbeziehungen zwischen Deutschland und Portugal, Teil 1: 67–69, 68. 48. Ana Vicente, Arcádia. Notícia de uma família anglo-portuguesa (Lisboa: Gótica, 2006), 180. Unfortunately, the mentioned article cannot be found in the Daily Mirror archive. 49. Jan Lustig, Ein Rosenkranz von Glücksfällen. Protokoll einer Flucht (Bonn: Weidle Verlag, 2001), 92–93. 50. Lustig, Ein Rosenkranz von Glücksfällen, 104–105. 51. He wrote this on 26 February 1941. Otto Zoff, Tagebücher aus der Emigration, hg. v. Lieselotte Zoff u. Hans-Joachim Pavel, mit einem Nachwort von Hermann Kesten (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1968), 114–115. 52. 7 March 1941, Otto Zoff, Tagebücher aus der Emigration, 117. 53. Braz Teixeira, The Refugee, 119. 54. Braz Teixeira, The Refugee, 119. 55. Christa Heinrich, “Zuflucht Portugal. Exilstation am Rande Europas,” in Filmexil 16 (Berlin, 2002), 4–33, 23; Christina Heine Teixeira, Lisboa, símbolo de esperança e de liberdade, 675–676. 56. Caré Júnior, Ericeira, 50 anos depois, 34–35. 57. Interview with Ilda Aleixo, seamstress for Casa Bobone at that time. Cited after Weber Ramos Reis Gameiro, A Moda, 235. 58. Their registration sheets can be found in the Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes in Berlin: DE/ PA AA LIS 377 MB 1586/38 and 1587/38. They lived in Avenida Duque de Loulé 83 and Calçada do Moinho do Vento 5-1, the first adress must have been the Levy’s. 59. Interview with Dr. Samuel Levy at his home, Lisbon, 23 March 2018. 60. Margit Meissner, Margit’s Story, 121.

Indecent Bathing Suits and Women Who Smoke 171 61. “Lisboa a capital da moda,” in Mundo Gráfico, 1 (Lisboa, 15 October 1940), 7. 62. “Lisboa a capital da moda,” in Mundo Gráfico, 1 (Lisboa, 15 October 1940), 7. 63. “Lisboa a capital da moda,” in Mundo Gráfico, 1 (Lisboa, 15 October 1940), 7. 64. Weber Ramos Reis Gameiro, A Moda, 74. 65. Heinrich, Zuflucht Portugal, 23. 66. Decreto-Lei no. 31: 247, Diário do Govèrno, I série, no. 102, 5 May 1941, 397. 67. Weber Ramos Reis Gameiro, A Moda, 74. 68. “Algumas normas para o uso de fato de banho.” MI, Gabinete do Ministro 518, no. 76 (1941). 69. Decreto-Lei no. 31: 247, Diário do Govèrno, I série, no. 102: 5 May 1941: 397. 70. Margarida Magalhães Ramalho, Lisbon. A City During Wartime (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional—Casa da Moeda, 2012), 45. 71. Jorge P. “Santos Carvalho, Lisboa e Estoril no Tempo da II Guerra,” in Revista de História 105, (February 1988): 24, cited after Magalhães Ramalho, Lisbon, 45. 72. Susana Lobo, in “O corpo na praia: a cultura balnear em Portugal no século XX,” O Corpo (Revista de História das ideias 33, Coimbra 2012): 261–276, 275. 73. Flunser Pimentel, Judeus em Portugal, 171. 74. Maria Joana, “Carta Aberta—Queridas raparigas,” in Boletim da MPF 17 (September 1940): 5. 75. “Agosto,” Eva no. 835 (August 1941): 16–17, 17, cited after Weber Ramos Reis Gameiro, A Moda e as Modistas em Portugal durante o Estado Novo, 76. 76. Caré Júnior, Ericeira, 50 anos depois, 45–46. 77. Telo, Introducção,19. 78. “The White Bears.” Carolina Henriques Pereira, Refugiados da Segunda Guerra Mundial nas Caldas da Rainha (1940–1946) (Lisboa: Edições Colibri, 2017), 128. 79. Dulce Soure, Marina Ximenes, “Dos Refugiados em Caldas,” in Marcas da II Guerra em Caldas da Rainha. Catálogo da exposição 1 October to 15 November 1998, Osíris Galeria Municipal, (Caldas da Rainha: Câmara Municipal, 1998), 13–18, 17–18. 80. Soure, Ximenes, Dos Refugiados em Caldas, 17. 81. Henriques Pereira, Refugiados da Segunda Guerra Mundial nas Caldas da Rainha, 118–127. 82. Henriques Pereira, Refugiados da Segunda Guerra Mundial nas Caldas da Rainha, 117. 83. Braz Teixeira, The Refugee, 120. 84. Salamon Dembitzer, Visum nach Amerika. Geschichte einer Flucht (Bonn: Weidle Verlag, 2009), 181. 85. Leon Kane, Der Fallstrick (Wien: Picus, 2006), 116–123. 86. IL/CAHJP Po-Li 507 Baruel/CIL to AJDC, 23 March 1949; Baruel/ CIL to AJDC, List June, 7 July 1949. 87. Heine Teixeira, Lisboa,símbolo de esperança e de liberdade, 676. 88. Telo, Introducção, 20. 89. Flunser Pimentel, Judeus em Portugal, 170; Irene Flunser Pimentel, “O trânsito e a presença de refugiados em Portugal,” in Tempo de guerra, 28–40, 36.

172  Katrin Sippel 90. Caré Júnior, Ericeira, 50 anos depois, 43–45; Maria João Castro, Por entre a bruma dos cais da Europa: Ecos estrangeiros na Lisboa da Segunda Guerra Mundial (Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas: Universidade Nova de Lisboa), 5, available online http://www.fcsh.unl.pt/artravel/pdf/ brumadocais.pdf (accessed 31 August 2020). 91. Flunser Pimentel, O trânsito e a presença de refugiados em Portugal, 36. 92. Cited after Vicente, Arcádia, 180. Unfortunately, the mentioned article cannot be found in the Daily Mirror archive. 93. Magalhães Ramalho, Lisbon, 44. 94. Heine Teixeira, Lisboa,símbolo de esperança e de liberdade, 676. 95. Braz Teixeira, The Refugee, 118–119. 96. Braz Teixeira, The Refugee, 119. 97. Flunser Pimentel, O trânsito e a presença de refugiados em Portugal, 38; Irene Flunser Pimentel, “Dificuldades no ‘paraíso’; ‘os refugiados em Portugal durante a II Guerra Mundial,’” in Marcas da II Guerra em Caldas da Rainha, 7–11, 11. 98. “Avenida 1943.” In Mundo Gráfico 64 (May 30, 1943), 16–17, 30, here 17. 99. “Avenida 1943.” In Mundo Gráfico 64 (May 30, 1943), 16–17, 30, here 16. 100. “Avenida 1943.” In Mundo Gráfico 64 (May 30, 1943), 16–17, 30, here 30. 101. Soure, Ximenes, Das Caldas da Rainha e a II Guerra Mundia, 29. 102. Interview in Gazeta das Caldas, suplemento no. 13, 24 May 1991, Adelino Mamede et alii, Página de História 13, 1991, 2, cited after Henriques Pereira, Refugiados da Segunda Guerra Mundial nas Caldas da Rainha, 75–76. 103. Telo, Introducção,18. 104. Braz Teixeira, The Refugee, 117. 105. Alexandre Babo, Recordações de um Caminheiro (Lisboa: Escritor, 1933), 143, cited after Flunser, Judeus em Portugal, 364. 106. ht tps://w w w.expatica.com /pt /about /culture-history/culture-andsocial-etiquette-in-portugal-106561/ (accessed 31 August 2020).

9

Between the Couch and Two Cultures William Rose, Psychoanalysis, Translation and the Creation of Cultural Capital by Literary Exiles During the Second World War Andrea Meyer Ludowisy

This chapter uses examples from the archive of the British Germanist William Rose (1894–1961) to shed light on strategies used by literary exiles during Second World War to not only “recast” themselves as actors in their new home, but also to reinvent themselves in a new language and promote themselves in their new host society. Rose, who had already established himself as a translator to many German and Austrian authors before their flight into exile, finds himself in the role of facilitator, friend and translator as he assists authors such as Franz Werfel, Alfred Kerr, Else Lasker-Schüler, Stefan Zweig and many others with everyday life in England and with questions of translation. Rose’s archival papers show that he was intimately acquainted with and profoundly affected by psychoanalysis and that he embedded the psychoanalytical approach into the sociocultural context of his wide-ranging networks of exiled writers, professional relations and intelligence officers. The twin roles of psychoanalysis and translation influenced Rose’s approach to his translation work, his publications and intelligence gathering. Even though his archive only represents a part of his academic work, it nonetheless gives an impression of the vast intellectual span of his cultural analysis, which ranges from the investigation of Jewishness in literature, a close examination of the topic of Weltschmerz in literature to a close examination of the growing nationalism in Germany. His findings were initially published in an academic context, but during Second World War, Rose would also utilize his linguistic and cultural skills in the service of cryptanalysis and the general war effort. After 1945, Rose acknowledged that his sense of belonging to the cultural groups of Jewish and British citizens informed his affinity with the plight of the exiled writers, and it is the contention of this chapter that an engagement with Rose’s cultural practices and an examination

174  Andrea Meyer Ludowisy of his mediating role as a translator of the works of literary exiles as well as his engagement with psychoanalysis and cultural cognition applied to cryptanalysis can stimulate new approaches in exile studies, maybe even inspire a paradigm shift.

9.1 The Archive Collection at the University of London The William Rose collection is among the many literary archives of Senate House Library and comprises 56 boxes that roughly span the years from Rose’s school years around the turn of the century to his untimely passing in 1961. They document his education, career, academic research, war service and his tremendously wide-ranging literary, philosophical and political interests. Born to Jewish parents in Birmingham in 1894 and educated at the Birmingham Hebrew School, he remained proud of his Jewish heritage throughout his entire life and devoted many scholarly publications to the topic of Jewishness in literature in the widest sense, ranging from serious research into Heinrich Heine’s Jewishness to a somewhat farcical account of the role of Jews in history and Jewish humour.1 His papers show quite how presciently early Rose took an interest in the change of intellectual climate and society in Germany, as hundreds of press cuttings from international papers bear witness to his concern over the rising nationalism in the 1920s when Rose himself, who had participated in First World War as a student, was still only in his 20s. The preoccupation with this theme in the newspaper output of leading writers is paralleled by a shift in focus of his own print output between 1920 and the early 1930s. His adolescent academic interest in the Ethical and Social Features of the German People in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries—the title of his 1914 MA dissertation 2 —moves to an examination of the historical Doctor Faust theme via his PhD thesis on The Development of “Weltschmerz”3 to the 1931 publication of An Outline of Modern Knowledge, an omnibus volume edited knowledgeably by Rose and published by Gollancz.4 This latter publication intended to survey the full range of human knowledge and was the first collection of essays that attempted to cover such an extensive range. Among its 26 topics, the volume included the first discussions of the disciplines of psychology and psychoanalysis, all carefully edited by Rose. The individual contributions are preceded by a philosophic retrospect “summing up the views held up to the nineteenth Century, and concluding with a survey of recent and contemporary philosophy”5 and with an introduction by Rose that repeated his faith in humanity being able to avoid another cataclysmic war after First World War. 6

Between the Couch and Two Cultures 175

Figure 9.1  Wilhelm Rose served in the Intelligence Corps as one of the many German language specialists and was part of the operations in Bletchley Park, Senate House Library, University of London.

Expressions of this faith in humanity repeat themselves throughout his publications and even though his experiences in First World War and Second World War alter his views, he remains hopeful. A number of speeches, preserved in draft format in the archive document his cautious optimism about the ability of humanity to learn from its past mistakes.7 In 1935, Rose became Reader in German at the University of London and in the same year was appointed Head of Department of Modern Languages at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). In 1949, he was promoted to a Chair of German Language and Literature at the University, while keeping his post as Head of Department at the LSE. During the years 1939–1944, Rose served in the Intelligence Corps as one of the many German language specialists. He was part of the operations in Bletchley Park (Fig. 9.1)8 and, together with two other captains of the Intelligence Corps, Rose joined an interrogation unit, located in the Tower of London.9 He was also, among many other military operations, actively involved in the Dunkirk evacuation. The letter from the Austrian Bohemian novelist Franz Werfel (1890–1945) refers to his heroism during the Miracle of Dunkirk (Fig. 9.2).

176  Andrea Meyer Ludowisy

Figure 9.2  L etter from the Austrian Bohemian novelist Franz Werfel (1890– 1945) refers to his heroism during the Miracle of Dunkirk, Senate House Library, University of London.

9.2 Rose’s Military Service and Academic Work During First World War and Second World War Before, during and after serving as a soldier and intelligence officer in First World War and Second World War, Rose studied German literature, wrote and published extensively on a wide range of topics and translated the works of an astounding number of illustrious German authors into English. Having completed his doctorate in 1922, his thesis on the topic of the development of Weltschmerz in German literature

Between the Couch and Two Cultures 177

Figure 9.3  Cover page of William Rose’s PhD thesis, submitted at Christmas 1922, titled “The Development of Weltschmerz in German Literature from “Werther to the Beginning of the Romantic Movement” (PhD thesis University of London 1922).

(Fig. 9.3), an early example of his burgeoning engagement with psychoanalysis in connection with literary theory, was published in amended form by Routledge in 1924.10 His archival papers contain unfortunately only correspondence relating to his German studies and consist predominantly of letters to Rose, whereas there are only few carbon copies of letters by him, which represents a somewhat one-sided view. Nevertheless, the archive attests to an impressively large array of correspondents with a shared interest in,

178  Andrea Meyer Ludowisy if not passion for, German literature and that in other Germanic languages. Additionally, his enormous collection of press cuttings attests to the fact that he followed Germany’s political and cultural developments closely. In the early 1930s, his support for the welfare of exiled German and Austrian intellectuals became publicly known, foremost by his active engagement in the Pen Club’s and the English Goethe Society’s activities. He publicly condemned the National Socialists’ treatment of Jews in cultural life through his involvement in the formation of the Library of Burned Books scheme, which he joined in 1934.11 However, to call Rose’s circle of correspondents a network would be misleading, as there is no indication of a sense of unity among his many disparate correspondents, who would have been very unlikely to consider themselves as a group with a shared social identity, given that they included the German-Jewish poet and playwright Else LaskerSchüler as well as the first President of the Chamber of Literature of the Nazi state (Reichsschrifttumskammer), Hans-Friedrich Blunck.12 But it can most certainly be said that once his correspondents found themselves as literary exiles in Britain, they were warmly welcomed in Rose’s house and enjoyed his friendship and support in practical and academic matters. The selection of his writings under discussion here span the First World War, the interwar period and Second World War and demonstrate Rose’s interdisciplinary engagement with German literature and culture. In them, Rose critically discusses controversial issues such as psychoanalysis and translation, nationalism in literature and, later on, the thorny issue of German re-education after the war. A common thread throughout his work is his urging academics and lay readers alike to turn to cultural studies as a means for broadening their thinking about translation and cultural identity. The consistency of Rose’s approach to address psychological states such as Weltschmerz (literally meaning world-pain, or worldweariness), which denotes a deep sadness about the inadequacy or imperfection of the world through literature and translation, sees him struggle with the Freudian observation of man’s inverse relationship between civilization and human happiness. Ascribing Weltschmerz as a response to the upheavals of war, revolution and exilic states, Rose concludes that only a deeper understanding of language and cultural phenomena can help explain human discord, aggression and malaise. In the foreword to the 1931 edited collection “An Outline of Modern Knowledge”, he states that: All study is intimately bound up with the fate of man, and these Articles all have a bearing on his provenance and destiny, on both the realised and unconscious purport of his activities and the significance of physical and spiritual forces, the external and internal

Between the Couch and Two Cultures 179 influences, which are affecting him for good or for ill … The composite view of the universe is no longer systematic, or even intelligible, but at the same time it is being widened and deepened, it is growing more confused. In so far as it is possible to construct a clear picture, which must necessarily in the nature of a mosaic, of the present achievements of human thoughts and knowledge, and to summarize the evidence which may point to a directive or purposive agency in the universe, this book attempts to do so13 Rose’s choice of the word “mosaic” to describe the patterned thematic arrangement of the book which combined 26 different contributions by experts in their respective fields is of particular interest in this context as it can be seen as a playful “Freudian slip” by Rose himself, who, having previously devoted a number of academic publications to the problem of Jewish identity,14 would have been aware of the premise that Freudian psychoanalytic theory was judged to be partially rooted in Jewish religion and particularly in the mysticism of the Kabbala.

9.3 Early Engagement with Psychoanalytic Theories and Cultural Reform Through Literature: Weltschmerz and Existential Theories From the archival documents it appears that Rose never subscribed formally to psychoanalytic literary criticism, but instead read heavily around the topic to examine cultural phenomena such as nationalism and antisemitism in the context of psychoanalysis as applied to AngloGerman relations. He engages with a set of theories and therapeutic techniques about the unconscious mind in the context of the development of German literature and specifically German anti-war literature or propaganda. An early result of this approach is his MA thesis entitled Ethical and Social Features of the German People in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, as Represented in the “Volkslied” of the Period which he submitted in 1914. He would later write extensively about his lifelong struggle with the length and composite structure of German sentences, a topic he would pick up on in his lectures on translation two decades later. Rose’s dissertation shows an early engagement with the idea of psychoanalysis as applied to his examination of idealism and revolution, but his PhD thesis of Christmas 1922 not only shows how his thoughts have developed, but is also an early demonstration of how Rose attempts to facilitate greater understanding and point at solutions. This engagement is all the more remarkable if one takes into account that in the years between MA and PhD, Rose had been serving in the Army as a soldier in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment and the Machine Gun Corps (1915–1919), followed by service in the Royal Air Force from June 1918 to March 1920. His military experiences appear

180  Andrea Meyer Ludowisy to have created a keen desire in Rose to better understand the motivation of nations to enter into armed conflict. By the late 1920s, the idea of psychoanalysis had already received serious attention under Sigmund Freud and some of its practitioners been labelled as belonging to the cultural school of psychoanalysis, due to the prominence they attributed to culture for the genesis of behaviour. From the evidence in Rose’s papers, especially in his attempts early on in his career to explain the nationalist tendencies of prominent writers, it appears that this school of thought also appealed to Rose. Press cuttings such as the one given next (Fig. 9.4) demonstrate how assiduously Rose followed and engaged with the writings of the journalist and historian Henry Wickham Steed (1871–1956) who was one of the first English speakers to express alarm about the dictatorial tendencies of Germany. Another influence on Rose was the work of the Danish critic and scholar Georg Brandes (1842–1927) who, with the zeal of a reformer, brought liberal and cultural trends of Western Europe to his Danish compatriots. In the foreword to his unpublished thesis of Christmas 1922,15 Rose quotes Brandes as saying: “Literary history is, in its profoundest significance, psychology, the study, the history of the soul” (Georg Brandes, Main Currents in 19th Century Literature).

Figure 9.4  Press cuttings made by Rose, Senate House Library, University of London.

Between the Couch and Two Cultures 181 It becomes clear that Rose sees literature, intertwined with history, philosophy, sociology and psychoanalysis, as a discipline that uses language as a medium of expression to interpret “man, existence and culture”. Though Brandes has largely sunk into obscurity today, in his time he was one of Europe’s most influential literary critics; his sixvolume publication Main Currents cited by Rose impressed and outraged many of his contemporaries, and Brandes was famous for his liberal and progressive ideas, cosmopolitanism and Jewishness. His declaration that literature must prove its vitality through critical engagement with social issues16 appears to have provided Rose with a focus for his own studies, as he continues in the introduction to his thesis as follows: My aim has been to try and arrive at a proper understanding of a psychological state whose importance for literature has hitherto been greatly under-estimated. Weltschmerz has existed as long as men have sought ideals which this world cannot provide, and a study of it is a study of the soul in one of its noblest aspects, though its practical effects are often pernicious. After the Napoleonic wars, the poets who had seen the old order destroyed and yet could see no signs of the beginning of the new, gave expression to their disillusionment and despair in an outburst of Weltschmerz. A hundred years later we again stand between two worlds; the old world has gone, the new not yet come. If a wave of Weltschmerz should arise, this study of a little-known aspect of the eighteenth century may receive an added interest.17 The new wave of Weltschmerz was already on its way and less than a decade after his thesis’ publication, Rose’s friend Stefan Zweig would begin to write The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European, a tribute to an age of European idealism and humanity that he felt was fading and that he would complete almost a decade later, shortly before his suicide in 1942.

9.4 Rose’s Engagement with Rising Nationalism in Germany: Hassgesang In his examination of the German psyche, Rose was not alone: already at the very beginning of the 1930s did German scholars in London and Oxford examine anti-war novels such as Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues (“All Quiet on the Western Front”) in some detail in the context of the war novel. However, numerous experts mention Rose as leading expert in this field, especially Brian Murdoch.18 In his 1931 publication The Spirit of Revolt in German Literature from 1914–1930, Rose had warned his readers that “there was in Germany a finer kind of patriotic poetry which avoided both the vapourings of

182  Andrea Meyer Ludowisy the armchair warriors and the romantic illusions of the young soldiers who did not yet know the what a modern European war was going to be like”.19 It is however surprising how few lines Rose devotes to the Haßgesang gegen England (“Songs of Hate against England”) by Ernst Lissauer (1882–1937), the German-Jewish poet and dramatist and friend of Stefan Zweig, who is best remembered for coining the slogan Gott strafe England (“May God punish England”), used extensively by the German Army during First World War. It appeared on cufflinks and postcards, was even stamped on coal bricks and was distributed by army order of the Crown Prince of Bavaria, yet Rose maintains that the “Hassgesang is exceedingly well constructed, it possesses concentration and force, and whatever we may think of hate as a theme for poetry, it at least lacks the banality of idea and execution which is to be found in most of the patriotic poetry of the time”. Rose moves on to discuss the poetry “which struck the deepest chord in the heart of the people”, the poetry of Arbeiterdichter. These working class poets he credits with being nobler than other poets as, in his view, they would be more clearsighted about the reality of war and not inspired by hate. The “finest of the workmen poets” and the one who will have “a permanent place in German literature” in his view is Heinrich Lersch, whose best work stands in the tradition of Volkslied simplicity. Writing this in 1931, Rose was not to know that Lersch, whom he calls one of the “most gifted” of poets would soon after the publication of Rose’s book in 1933 be called to the Prussian Academy of the Arts and not only enthusiastically endorse the tenets of Nazism, but also become one of 88 German writers who would sign the Gelöbnis treuester Gefolgschaft, the “Proclamation of faithful loyalty” by German writers. Lersch, who died in 1936, thus entered the circle of artists and writers who the Nazis regarded as politically sympathetic and culturally valuable for their agenda. It seems bewildering that Rose, who by this time had cultivated a presumably politically motivated friendship with members of the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture), the government agency which controlled the entire cultural life in Germany and promoted “Aryan” art consistent with Nazi ideals, appears uncritical of the inflammatory rhetoric and concentrates on the aesthetics of the spirit of revolt, but further research is need here.

9.5 Rose’s Engagement with Rising Nationalism in Germany: Men, Myths and Movements in German Literature In 1931, Rose published books that saw him return to the topic of the German psyche. In Men, Myths and Movements in German Literature, he revisits his earlier preoccupation as to how literature mediates a path between cultures, nations and social groups embroiled in competition

Between the Couch and Two Cultures 183 and can create moral communities that solve the problem of trust between strangers. Revising an earlier paper in the light of contemporary developments, he republishes it as The Spirit of Revolt in German Literature from 1914 to 1930 in a collection of papers with Allen and Unwin in London. 20 In the article, a finely nuanced and non-judgemental assessment, he traces the change of attitude towards war and the spirit of revolt. He sees the new generation of German writers as a “combatant generation” … “ruthless and outspoken practically from the start, and German literature mirrors the emotional effects of the War to an incomparably greater extent than does that of England”. 21 In an earlier chapter titled “The German Drama, 1914–1927,” he had outlined the “feeling of despair which was engendered during the second half of the War, together with the bitterness and hope by the final catastrophe … [which] sought an outlet in a literary movement of unparalleled violence and intensity”. 22 During this period, Rose has already befriended the experimental psychologist and psychoanalyst John Carl Flügel who would contribute to Rose’s bestselling book An Outline of Modern Knowledge. Flügel’s writings showed very clearly the difficulties in the way of instilling supranational loyalties, not disguising his opinion that only few people actually strived to do this.23 Apart from his own successes as a prolific psychologist and psychoanalyst, Flügel had also been the honorary secretary, librarian and president of the British Psychological Society. After undergoing psychoanalysis with Ernest Jones, 24 Flügel and Jones had become friends and Flügel had helped with the re-founding of the (separate) British Psychoanalytical Society. 25 Flügel had also been instrumental in the translation of Sigmund Freud’s Vorlesungen/Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. It is likely that the success of Rose’s publications informed Flügel to name his own books Men and their Motives (1934), followed by Man, Morals and Society (1945)26 and Population, Psychology and Peace (1947), although it appears that both authors are equally fond of alliterations. Men and their Motives consisted of 19 short essays discussing the concepts of ego-ideal, aggression and superego, with special reference to the need for punishment. A modern-day reader feels compelled to make a connection to his earlier contribution to the successful compendium of 1931. 27

9.6  William Rose’s Engagement With Literary Exiles Much of twentieth-century continental European literature has been written in exile and, given the autocratic and populist tendencies in a growing number of European countries, will likely continue to be done so in the twenty-first. Totalitarian political systems of both the left and the right forced the intellectual opposition into emigration from which many chose never to return. Exile literature has thus emerged as an

184  Andrea Meyer Ludowisy almost century-old phenomenon, which acquired new significance over time. It would only slightly be overstating to claim that modern Western culture is in large part the work of exiles, émigrés and refugees. Their achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever. Exile is a basic aspect of the human condition and looms large in literature, both ancient and modern, featuring in various kinds of literature from Homer to our own time. The difference between earlier exiles and those of our own time is scale: our age is the age of the refugee, the displaced person and one of mass immigration. In 2019, Saša Stanišić’s book Origins, a novel that deals with memory, biography and the vagaries of our biographies, won the German Book Prize and subsequent interviews with the author drew attention to the fact that he had fled to Germany as a refugee of the Bosnian War, alongside his family. Stanišić’s summary of the contents of his book, 28 as well as his moral and political statements, such as his criticism of the Nobel-prizewinning writer Peter Handke for his support of Serbian nationalists such as Slobodan Milošević, would have been likely to have chimed with Rose, Brandes and Flügel a century earlier. Separated through language from their foundational texts, a number of prolific exiled writers turned to Rose for advice, translation and practical help. As one of the key actors in the scholarly rescue of German writers in the 1930s and 1940s, and due to his intimate knowledge of the German academic landscape, 29 his deep engagement with German literature and his work on literature and psychoanalysis, Rose was uniquely placed to respond efficiently. In this reciprocal relationship, writers approached Rose to render their work into English and in turn they inspired his writings. The correspondence with Robert Neumann, Franz Werfel, Else Lasker-Schüler, Alfred Kerr, Stefan Zweig and many others provides an insight into the process of the writers’ reinvention that the experience of migration and exile enforced on them. The exchanges with authors, of which we unfortunately merely see one side, show that Rose’s correspondents require assistance with translations of their speeches, novels and poems and highlight the anguish of their predicament in exile whilst underscoring the warmth and innocence of their friendship, which is based on their shared love of language (Figs. 9.5–9.7). Whereas the help provided to Kerr is often of a pragmatic nature, such as the need for a supporting statement to the authorities, the help provided to others, such as Lasker-Schüler, Werfel and Zweig, often combines the practical with the spiritual. This sense of linguistic bereavement echoes through Rose’s papers. Part of the exiles’ cultural capital was embedded in their language skills, and with the aid of Germanists like Rose, whose engagement with psychology and psychoanalysis can be traced back to the 1920s, this cultural capital was transformed into military intelligence and arguably also transformed the exiles’ understanding of themselves.

Between the Couch and Two Cultures 185 I use the term exile in the context of the examination of Rose’s papers to define writers and intellectuals whose professional tool was their language, particularly the German language, and who aimed at preserving and developing the cultural tradition that had produced them. Rose’s translation work does not only conform to the most common meaning of the term translation as the action or process of expressing the sense of a word, passage etc., in a different language, but also on its somewhat obscurer sense of transformation, alteration or adapting to another use. Rose ponders the vagaries and dangers of his translation work in a number of his papers, especially when he repeatedly returns to an examination of the expression “traduttore, traditore” (“translator, traitor”), wondering if in his translation work he truly accessed the multiple layers of meaning of the original texts and if it is possible to remain entirely faithful to the text one translates. The expression “traduttore, traditore” was first applied to the French by irate Italians who felt that many translations of Dante into French failed the original. In the context of Rose’s intelligence work, one cannot but read a further dimension into his clever consonance play upon the worst fears of an international translator. The influential German theatre critic Alfred Kerr (1867–1948) was one of the many correspondents of Rose where the friendship encompassed both families, Rose’s and Kerr’s. Kerr uses an interesting simile to describe his experience of having his words translated by Rose when he likens Rose’s translation as having the effect of aiding him “to glide willingly onto England’s lap” (Fig. 9.5). Kerr’s choice of the term “Schoß” is ambiguous, it can refer to a place of comfort and care, such as the

Figure 9.5  A lfred Kerr describing his experience of having his words translated by Rose, Senate House Library, University of London.

186  Andrea Meyer Ludowisy

Figure 9.6   L etter illustrating Rose’s relationship with Stefan Zweig, Senate House Library, University of London.

bosom of a family; but it is also perfectly possible that Kerr was alluding to the “Bosom of Abraham”, the place of comfort described in the Scriptures where the Righteous await Judgement Day. Rose’s relationship with Zweig, no less suffused with warmth (Fig. 9.6), concentrates predominantly on professional matters. As already briefly mentioned earlier, from 1934 onwards William Rose was a member of the British Committee of the Library of Burned Books and participates in fundraising activities for this cause alongside prominent members such as H. G. Wells, J. B. Haldane and Wickham Steed. On a postcard from 1945 (Fig. 9.7), Alfred Kerr rather informally invites Rose to deliver a lecture on a topic of his choice and Rose obliges with a lecture on translation and psychoanalysis. This lecture, delivered by Rose to the German PEN Club, is a most thought-provoking compendium of advice for writers, translators and anyone appreciative of the relationship between the German and the English language (Fig. 9.8)

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9.7 Rose and Top Secret Ultra: Intelligence and Exile and Translation By 1940, approximately 280,000 Jews had left Germany and another 117,000 had fled Austria. Of the 95,000 German and Austrian Jews who had immigrated to the United States, it is estimated that 9500 served in the US armed forces, many in combat units. Nearly 13,000 Jewish male and female refugees served in the British armed forces. They possessed skills as native speakers of German and first-hand knowledge of the enemy. Some also had, like Rose, a nuanced understanding of the psyche of the German people and detailed knowledge of the country. A large number of Jews were involved in the British cryptanalysis effort. In particular, the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) recruited a large number of Jews whose linguistic and cultural skills would be of great use in covert operations.30 It is entirely feasible that Rose, apart from his own active intelligence service, also involved some of his literary correspondents in this work. What Germanists such as Rose lacked was of course an affinity with dialects, with particular forms of language which are peculiar to specific regions or social groups. The increasing need for the gathering of military intelligence became a focus of government concern, and Rose’s papers document his focus shifting from the cultural pluralism of language studies to a discussion of untranslatability, the property of text, speech or concepts for which no equivalent can be found when an attempt at translating it from German to English is made.

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Figure 9.8  Notes for the Lecture to the PEN Club, 1946, Senate House Library, University of London.

Until the mid-1970s, nobody who had been involved with the Government Code and Cypher School, like Rose, had been allowed to talk about their work. Rose would have signed the Official Secrets Act, and in any case, discretion was encouraged. Some publications have since shed light on the methods used by the Allies to utilize German speaking refugees’ skills and knowledge to gather military intelligence, and many of those were later entrusted with important roles in the occupation of Germany and Austria. In her book on the sustained Second World War intelligence operation which allowed the Allies to gain access to some of Hitler’s most closely guarded secrets, The Walls have Ears, Helen Fry reveals that William Rose was part of the clandestine unit at the Tower of London which performed secret bugging operations from its very inception on 1 September 1939, the day German forces had invaded Poland.31 Wartime Bletchley Park had evolved out of the Government Codes and Cyphers School, and GC&CS had originally been a cryptographic

Between the Couch and Two Cultures 189 establishment which made up codes and cyphers used by others. In the late 1930s, it was converted from a purely cryptographic establishment into a full working partnership of cryptographers and intelligence. This comprehensiveness was a vastly important factor in its success. The fact that it embraced all grades of cypher in all languages brought psychological and technical benefits. 32 An insight into these psychological and technical benefits was first provided by Peter Calvocoressi, who worked with William Rose in Hut 3 at Bletchley Park (and is shown with him in Fig. 9.1), and described the mix of military and non-military working together on a common problem. It was where culture and cypher intersected, as the one was a point of entry into the other. To staff these units, the officers had depleted the colleges of their ablest linguists, classicists and mathematicians. 33 The most useful intelligence needs to be both authentic and prompt and to a large part consisted of overheard talk between German commanders themselves. 34 Calvacoressi goes on to define cyphers as a way of making nonsense of a text to everybody who does not have a key to it. The sender jumbles his text, but the recipient knows he has done this and so can disentangle and restore the original words. Cryptography, according to Calvacoressi, is the search for the key by the man who has not got it and is not supposed to have it. 35 An essential component to a key for a cypher is randomness, and at this point in his memoirs, Calvocoressi provides his readers with a particularly haunting and horrible example of the links between cyphers of different grades: At one point the German cryptographers responsible for finding entirely random settings for an Enigma cypher thought that they had hit on a bright solution. Every day the concentration camps rendered returns giving the numbers of prisoners who had died or been killed, and the number of surviving inmates at the end of the day. These were truly random figures. They were reported in a medium grade cypher and the recipients passed them on their Enigma colleagues who used them in determining the settings of a particular Enigma cypher. Bletchley Park was reading that medium grade cypher and it realized too that these daily concentration camp returns were being used in Enigma. So these sad, grisly statistics of human suffering and indignity played a part in which the piteous victims never dreamed of.36 A detailed analysis of the War Office Reports, memoranda and papers in tandem with Rose’s archive of his literary and academic activities is likely to show that he most fruitfully combined his academic focus on the sociopolitical function of literature with an ability to transfer this to the language of espionage. His early work was undoubtably motivated

190  Andrea Meyer Ludowisy by his critical engagement with social issues, which allowed Rose to be better attuned to German culture than most of the officers he will have interrogated or overheard. His deep expertise in German was likely to have been fundamental to the success of his intelligence work: whatever Rose had learnt from his earlier academic work, his exchanges with exiled writers and his correspondence with the Reichskulturkammer, it gave him an advantage when he would later find himself conducting meetings in Germany, analysing plans of a foreign government, translating foreign broadcasts. His language proficiency and the cultural capital gained through his translation work for exiled writers were keys to accessing foreign societies and decoding secrets.

9.8 Conclusion In her controversial chapter on “The Social Question” from 1963, Hannah Arendt tells us that “If we want to know what absolute goodness would signify for the course of human affairs … we had better turn to the poets”. She then concluded that “at least we learn from them that absolute goodness is hardly any less dangerous than absolute evil”. 37 The problem of fundamental evil that had involved making human beings superfluous as human beings would remain at the core of Arendt’s lifelong attempt to comprehend the events of twentieth-century totalitarianism, 38 just as Rose would state that he had spent his entire life trying to understand the German people. 39 For Arendt, literature’s task consisted of immersing us into our present and sharpening our understanding of our reality, rather than release us from it,40 whereas for Rose, the German atonement for past crimes had to be encouraged and welcomed by the rest of the world in the “spirit of generosity and not without hope”.41 In Arendt’s negative assessment of absolute goodness, it is irrelevant whether the source of violence is absolute goodness or something else entirely. This paper argues for a middle way by showing that members of the British Intelligence Service during Second World War, such as Rose, set aside these fundamental questions in order understand the German psyche and the loss of idealism that had led in parts to the rise of the National Socialists’ mindset and suspended judgment.42 Instead, Rose proceeded to combine his academic knowledge with the findings of his exchanges and translation with exiled writers for the benefit of the war efforts and British Intelligence. Rose used the knowledge that resulted from his longstanding collaborations with literary exiles to create a unique cultural capital: the linguistic abilities and language skills of British-born Germanists were combined with the language skills of literary exiles and, with the addition of insights provided through the psychoanalytical exodus, were “translated” by Rose into useful material for the intelligence services’

Between the Couch and Two Cultures 191 code breaking effort. An additional intellectual background to this was provided by the psychoanalytical exodus that accelerated the worldwide dissemination of the general tenets of Freud’s writings. This would also bring about an Anglo-German knowledge exchange engendered by the encounter between the two academic cultures, German and British, on equal footing. This examination of select correspondence, drafts, notes and writings illustrates the repercussions of the psychoanalytical exodus from Germany to England after 1933 and assesses the impact the newly emerging science of psychology and psychoanalysis had on Rose, beginning with his thesis on Weltschmerz in 1922 and only ending with his death. They show that the problems of truth, language, identity and the responsibility of the individual occupied the Germanist Rose over his entire career. From the 1930s onwards, the vexed questions of the identity of the exile, psychoanalysis and literature and linguistic identity take centre stage in his publications, teaching and lectures and also, intriguingly, in his intelligence work in Bletchley Park during Second World War. When his near-contemporary, the American Fleet Admiral William Halsey, stated that “[t]here are no great men, there are only great challenges, which ordinary men like you and me are forced by circumstances to meet”; he was presumably correct in his assessment of himself, but William Rose was an extraordinary man who was forced by the extraordinary circumstances of two world wars to redirect his focus from the study of languages to using his linguistic skills to save lives by putting his abstract knowledge to use during Second World War in Bletchley Park and contribute to the debate of German guilt and retribution and re-education. There are great men who are forced by circumstances to rise to the greatest challenges, only to return to their initial vocation with an increased understanding of the enormity of the inhumanity of war. In my view, William Rose counts among these. The earlier examples show that William Rose was above all a facilitator who provided the foundations and leverage that allowed exile writers to retain their position in the limelight, in spite of their geographic and linguistic upheaval. While Rose wrote insightfully and perceptively on German literature and thought, his major, but so far unsung, contribution was through his impact on the work of Franz Werfel, Thomas Mann, Alfred Kerr, Stefan Zweig and many others. Whereas the entire extent of his contribution to wartime intelligence will probably never be known, it remains to be seen if future researchers will find further evidence of fruitful collaborations between exiled writers and the intelligence services that contributed to the defeat of the National Socialists. It is, however, perfectly feasible that research that follows Rose’s lead and fuses the examination of cultural practices with translation theory

192  Andrea Meyer Ludowisy and practice that is sympathetic to the tenets of psychoanalysis will inspire a new cultural turn.

Notes 1. William Rose Papers. WRO.3.2.6.6 A History of Jewish Influence, Heinrich Heine, a Jewish Poet. Senate House Library, University of London. 2. Full title of Rose’s MA Thesis is Ethical and Social Features of the German People in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, as Represented in the “Volkslied” of the Period. 3. Rose published a revised version in 1924 under the title The Development of “Weltschmerz” in German Literature (London and New York: E. P. Dutton). 4. This is but a small selection, Rose’s output was prodigious. For a cursory overview see Internationales Germanistenlexikon, 1800–1950, ed. Christoph König (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 1518–1519. 5. Rose, William, ed., An Outline of Modern Knowledge (London: Victor Gollanz, 1931), 4–45. 6. Ibid., xiv: “All study is intimately bound up with the fate of man, and these Articles all have a bearing on his provenance and destiny, on both the realized and unconscious purport of his activities and the significance of the physical and spiritual forces, the external and internal influences, which are affecting him for good or for ill. They show how science, philosophy, psychology, historiography and economics, together with the study of art in its various forms, are delving into the nature of existence, considering it not only the light of what has gone on before, but in view of the goal to which man and the universe may be tending”. 7. Rose ends an undated speech (after 1948, the date when Edgar became a senior minister) to which he had been invited by Rabbi Edgar (this almost certainly refers to Rabbi Dr Leslie Isidore Edgar, a senior minister of The Liberal Jewish Synagogue who had served five years as chaplain to the armed forces in Second World War and had administered a large refugee fund and assisted countless German speaking Jewish exiles) with the following words: “It is for the Germans themselves to atone within their souls and by their future actions for crimes which we must ourselves be forgiven for regarding as irredeemable. But we shall not help them to achieve this atonement, or even to realize the necessity for it, by holding aloof and saying: ‘Touch me not’. It is because I have myself been swayed by horror, humiliation, and vindictiveness that I summoned up the courage to accept Rabbi Edgar’s invitation to speak today on the reasons why I now believe that what the rest of the Western World has to give to Germany in the domain of the spirit should be offered with generosity and not without hope”. 8. Calvacoressi, Peter, Top Secret Ultra (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 54: “the officers of 3a”. 9. Fry, Helen, The Walls have Ears (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019), 8. 10. The book was very well reviewed in Britain and Germany. In 1925, the Germanist at Hamburg University Robert Petsch wrote a review of the book for the Modern Language Review (20, no. 2 April 1925, 226–231) in which he praises Rose’s engagement with psychoanalysis “die moderne Psychoanalyse, deren Hilfe auch Rose ausgiebig herbeiruft lehrt uns tiefer in die Phänomenologie dieser Erscheinung (des Weltschmerzes)

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einzudringen”, 227–228. Rose kept this review in his archive (WRO.3.2.1 GOE). In a twist of fate, Robert Petsch had given a lecture and attended a debate at Birmingham University in 1915 with the 21-year-old Rose in the chair at this debate (WRO.1.2), and in May 1945, it was the British occupying forces who suspended and retired Petsch from his post due to him having joined the NSDAP as early as 1933. William Rose Papers. Senate House Library, University of London. 11. In 1934 a small group of German-speaking anti-fascists met in Paris to plan one of the most unlikely ventures of the decade, the Deutsche Freiheitsbibliothek, which became better known in English as the ‘Library of the Burned Books’. The library is now largely forgotten, but at the time it was the first cogent attempt to make the German book burnings better understood. Rose was a recipient of its early mailshots. 12. The correspondence and exchanges with the latter have to be seen in the light of Rose’s wartime intelligence work and can be classed as “politic” as they are proof of Rose’s shrewdness in dealing with leading figures of the Reichskulturkammer. 13. Rose, William, ed. An Outline of Modern Knowledge (London: Victor Gollanz, 1931), xiv–xv. 14. Rose’s working paper document for the background research for many publications dedicated to the discussion of Heinrich Heine’s Jewish identity (WRO.3.2.3.2 JEW Heinrich Heine, a Jewish poet, or WRO.3.2.3.2 JEW Heine’s Jewishness) or that of Karl Marx (WRO.3.2.3.2 MYT Karl Marx and Jewishness) or coinciding with the publication of An Outline of Modern Knowledge in 1931 is Rose’s address to the English Goethe Society at its meeting at Kings College “Goethe and the Jews” (WRO.3.3.3. EGS) which was published in the Jewish Guardian on 23 June 1931. William Rose Papers. Senate House Library, University of London. 15. Ibid. 16. Julie K. Allen, “Georg Brandes in Berlin: Marketing the Modern Breakthrough in Wilhelmine Germany,” Scandinavian Studies 61, no. 4 (Winter 2019): 459–481, 460. 17. Rose, William, The development of “Weltschmerz” in German literature from “Werther” to the beginning of the Romantic movement. Thesis (PhD). University of London, 1922. 18. Murdoch Brian O., German Literature and the First World War: The Anti-War Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 26–27. 19. Rose William, Men, Myths and Movements in German Literature (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931), 248. 20. A discussion of Rose’s choice of publishers for his many bestselling and tremendously popular publications merits further discussion, but is beyond the scope of this paper. It is, however, worth noting that Rose chose the publishing firm of Sir Stanley Unwin KCMG for this work. Unwin was a successful publisher for the works of Bertrand Russell, Sidney Webb and R. H. Tawney who would publish, much like Rose, bestsellers in the 1930s (Mathematics for the Million, Science for the Citizen) and would publish J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit in 1936, after soliciting a favourable review of the manuscript from his ten-year-old son Rayner. Unwin would remain a lifelong pacifist and was during First World War a conscientious objector who had joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment. 21. Rose, William, Men, Myths and Movements in German Literature, 245. 22. Ibid, 225. 23. Obituary note John Carl Fluegel (1884–1955), British Journal of Psychology 47, no 1 (February 1956).

194  Andrea Meyer Ludowisy 24. Ernest Jones (1879–1958), Welsh neurologist, psychoanalyst and lifelong friend and colleague of Sigmund Freud. 25. The outbreak of war in 1914 had seen the suspension of the activities of the original society which had only been founded in 1913. In 1919, it was re-founded and defined by Jones as Freudian in nature. 26. Flügel, J. C. Man, Morals and Society (London: Duckworth & Co., 1945). 27. A closer reading of the papers relating to the professional working relationship between Rose and Flügel is likely to provide further insights to the development of Anglo-German psycho-analysis during the two world wars. Equally useful would be the inclusion of the correspondence with the contributor of the chapter on psychology, Francis Aveling (1875–1941). Aveling had been a Canadian psychologist and Catholic priest who had served as a chaplain for the British Army in France during First World War, after which he returned to University College London and subsequently to King’s College, where he became a professor of psychology in the very year Rose submitted his PhD thesis in King’s College. 28. At the London Book Fair in 2019, the author would describe the contents of the book as follows: “ORIGIN is a book about the first coincidence in our biography: being born somewhere. And about what happens afterwards. ORIGIN is a book about the places that are my home, the ones in my memories and the ones I have invented. It is a book about language, moonlighting youth and many summers. The summer when my grandfather trod on my grandmother’s foot while dancing in such a way that I was almost never born. The summer when I nearly drowned. The summer when Angela Merkel opened the borders and was very like the summer when I fled across many borders to Germany. ORIGIN is a farewell to my grandmother with her dementia. While I am collecting my memories, she is losing hers. ORIGIN is sad because for me origin has got something to do with what I can no longer have.” 29. Simone Lässig, “Strategies and Mechanisms of Scholar Rescue: The Intellectual Migration of the 1930s reconsidered,” Social Research 84, no. 4 (Winter 2017): 791. 30. Ginsberg, Benjamin, How the Jews defeated Hitler: Exploding the Myth of Jewish Passivity in the Face of Nazism (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), 11. 31. Fry, Helen, The Walls have Ears (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019), 8; “Joining Kendrick in the Tower were Flight Lieutenant (later Group Captain) Samuel Denys Felkin, Squadron Leader Edmund Pollock and three captains of the Intelligence Corps: William Rose, G. Buxton and J. B. Carson”. 32. Calvocoressi, Peter, Top Secret Ultra (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 14. 33. Ibid., 15. 34. Ibid., 4. 35. Ibid., 5. 36. Ibid., 15. 37. Arendt, Hannah, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 77. 38. Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1951) is regularly listed as one of the best non-fiction books of the twentieth century. 39. Rose 3.3.3.2 Spe “As one whose life has been spent in trying to understand the German people, in sharing with a succession of generations of students an appreciation of Germany’s indispensable contribution to European cul-

Between the Couch and Two Cultures 195 ture, who has on two separate occasions, with an interval of only twenty years in between, found himself, each time for a period of five years, on military service against the German nation – I may perhaps be credited with having, by sheer force of circumstance, being compelled to face the problem of my attitude to Germany, both subjectively and objectively, in both a personal and a public capacity.” William Rose Papers. Senate House Library, University of London. 40. Andrea Deciu Ritivoi, “Reading (with) Hannah Arendt: Aesthetic Representation for an Ethics of Alterity,” Humanities 8, no. 4 (2019): 155. 41. WRO 3.3.3.2 SPE. William Rose Papers. Senate House Library. University of London. 42. However, Rose would return to these fundamental questions and express his personal views in the aftermath of First World War and Second World War when he was involved in the British Government’s programme of German Re-education.

Part III

Actors of Transfer and Translation

10 ‘Somehow the Ill Winds of War Have Been Favourable to Me’ Travel, Training and Trauma in the Life and Works of Louis Kahan1 Steven Cooke and Anna Hirsh The contribution of Jewish émigré designers to Australian society is well documented. European-trained practitioners who fled Nazi persecution and antisemitism before, during and after the Holocaust greatly transformed and enhanced Australian aesthetics in a range of arts and design disciplines. This chapter explores the life and work of artist and designer Louis Kahan and forms part of a broader project which evaluates the impact of Jewish émigrés, especially Holocaust survivors, on art and design in Melbourne. Born in Austria in 1905 to Russian émigré parents, Kahan trained as a tailor and costumer in Paris before the Second World War and was immersed in European avant-garde aesthetic practices. Threatened with deportation as an enemy alien, he opted instead to join the French Foreign Legion and spent the remainder of the war in North Africa where he further developed his artist craft before migrating to Australia via Hollywood. In Australia, Kahan became a prominent artist, set and costume designer. Kahan’s migration was not static as he continued to travel; he returned frequently to Paris and worked in theatre design in the United Kingdom. Kahan’s cultural pathways intersected with other creative practitioners, and a dynamic skein of artistic cross-pollination describes his life. Émigrés like Kahan have a history, and this history is intrinsically geographical. Following Huppatz (2014), this chapter outlines an approach to understanding design which engages more fully with transnational and diasporic histories. We chart Kahan’s journey from Austria to Australia and the reception of his work in various contexts. We examine how his training, artistic practice and experiences travelled with him, influencing his work, and its impact in Australia. Connections made with local artists and others at each point of migration in the context of cultural, aesthetic and philosophical exchanges are presented. Louis Kahan’s route of exile encompassed multiple destinations, all important contributions to his oeuvre. We also explore what new approaches in curatorial practice can represent such journeys in museum exhibitions to illustrate a nuanced reading of the impact of Jewish émigré designers in Australia.

200  Steven Cooke and Anna Hirsh

10.1 Introduction The contribution of Jewish émigré artists, architects and designers who were impacted by the Holocaust and the Second World War is well documented. 2 The movement from Nazi occupied or controlled Europe after 1933 to, inter alia, the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia has been seen as transformative, for both the place of departure and the place of arrival, as well as for the artists and their work. The impact was such that Walter Cook from the New York Institute of Art could state in the 1930s that ‘Hitler is my best friend; he shakes the tree and I collect the apples’.3 The impact in Australia has been particularly strong. Although Australia’s reaction—formally, through restricted immigration policies, and socially—to the persecution and murder of European Jewry has been critiqued, it received one of the largest proportions of Holocaust survivors per capita outside Israel.4 These New Australians brought with them new ideas in many areas of cultural, political and social and economic life. For some this destination was an active choice, often reuniting with close or distant relatives; for others, such as those on the 1940 journey to Australia on the British ship Dunera who were classed as enemy aliens, Australia was part of a forced migration. Whichever way these Second World War émigrés came, there are many whose impact on Australian cultural, political, economic and social life has been formally noted. Many more have influenced cultural change, but in more subtle ways, often unrecognised. As Palmer has argued ‘the two decades between 1940 and 1960 belong in many ways to the Europeans’. 5 Further, Butler notes They brought with them different traditions, values and experiences that, together with the work they produced (and the works of arts they brought with them), were to have a profound effect on Australian art practice.6 Traditionally this movement has been seen as a process of exile, and unidirectional, with the recognition of European émigrés and their impact on the periphery receiving significant scholarly attention, but with an underplaying of the impact of non-Europeans back on the colonial centres.7 This has led to the focus being on the loss to Europe, the impact of artists on their new home and the negative connotations on the experiences on artists of trauma and displacement. Such a narrative also often underpins Holocaust exhibitions which deal with the movement of Jews before, during and after the Second World War. A journey from trauma to redemption is enacted in the displays, which focus on the overcoming of the past and the positive contribution that survivors have made to their new society. Such an approach can be seen in the former displays at

Ill Winds of War Have Been Favourable to Me 201

Figure 10.1  Charlotte Newmann, ‘From Holocaust to New Life’, a commissioned artistic response of the survivor journey produced for the Bicentennial Exhibition at the Jewish Holocaust Centre in 1988, remained on display until 2020. Original in colour. Source: Courtesy Jewish Holocaust Centre, Melbourne, photograph A. Hirsh

the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Melbourne which marginalise the continual journeys that many survivors, including émigré artists continued to make, and the ongoing trauma that stayed with them (see Fig. 10.1).8 However, this has been challenged on both conceptual and empirical grounds. Peterson builds on the work of Mieke Bal on ‘migratory aesthetics’ as a way of rethinking this experience.9 For Peterson, migratory ethics is a useful heuristic device in foregrounding the interconnections between art and politics. Empirically, Palmer argues that many artists ‘sustained their cultural and professional European connections with regular international trips, returning with vital European cultural material’.10 As Bal and Hernandez-Navarro state ‘Migratory movement begins before departure, in the imagination, and, conversely, never ends, because no arrival is adequate to the imagined return that is part of the movement’s motivation’.11 Thus, a complex geography emerges of ‘travel and dwelling, home and not-home’.12 This chapter explores this issue through an investigation of the life and work of Louis Kahan. Born in Vienna in 1905, Kahan spent time

202  Steven Cooke and Anna Hirsh in France, North Africa and the United States before migrating in Australia in 1947. He quickly became established as an award-winning artist, costume and theatre set designer but continued to travel, train and teach. While his work rarely presents literal Holocaust iconography, themes of exile, war and geographical displacement are noted throughout the eras of his practice, including in his celebrated drawings of servicemen in North Africa during the Second World War. The examination of Kahan’s life and work helps complicate generalist narratives of the role of Jewish émigré designers and contribute to Paul Virilio’s broader question of contemporary migration ‘how will we cope with this perpetual motion, the perpetual motion of history in motion?’13 Further, how can this ‘perpetual motion’ be represented in exhibition displays to illustrate a nuanced reading of the impact of Jewish émigré designers in Australia?

10.2  Art in Post-War Australia Post-war Australia was according to Heathcote in ‘a period of social and political flux’,14 which included a reimagining of national imagery, fuelled by frustration over British Foreign Policy during the war. However, a post-war slump in cultural production, what Heathcote evocatively calls the ‘cactus years’15 was coupled with a continuing cultural cringe which derided anything home grown. As well as looking increasingly to the United States for economic and military security, Europe as ‘Continental’ became a mark of cultural distinction, with Paris as its centre.16 But this continental influence demonstrated both geographical and cultural fluidity. Artists, including those who were educated in Europe and nurtured and enjoyed professional careers there prior to their displacement, brought with them the outcome of years of training and continental influence, both philosophically and stylistically. This was often beyond their country of birth and into the wider realms of Europe. Many of these émigrés were Jewish, whose lives were disrupted by the rise of Nazism. These émigrés came from all parts of Europe, and many settled into a complex geographical pattern determined by family connections, work opportunities and luck. Many German and Austrian Jews fled before the war, while others, mostly Polish Jews, came to Australia after the war. For example, Melbourne became home to a predominantly Polish Jewish survivor community, whereas many Jews from Hungary settled in Sydney. In addition, 4000 Austrians came to Australia between 1938 and 1948, again, many of them Jewish, and, as Norst argues in the introduction to Strauss to Matilda: It was Hitler’s annexation of Austria which violently wrenched them out of familiar patterns, turned them into refugees and forced them

Ill Winds of War Have Been Favourable to Me 203 to assume the role of involuntary immigrants in an unfamiliar setting on the other side of the world.17 Norst further argues that ‘The Austrian refugees in Australia represent an interesting example of an uprooted urban community with a social cohesion commonly found only in village migration’.18 Most were assimilated Jews,19 with a proportion who had discarded any religious affiliation, and they were, she argues ‘a community of fate’; mainly educated middle class, with mutual acquaintances. Austrian émigrés can be considered within three main waves: late 1930s, pre-war including architects Ernest Fooks and Kurt Popper in 1939; the ‘Dunera Boys’, mainly assimilated Jews interned as Enemy Aliens in the United Kingdom who were transported on the HMT Dunera in 1940, including German artists Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack and Erwin Fabian, and finally, those who arrived in the post-war period, including painter Judy Cassab and Louis Kahan. Adjusting to life in Australia was far from simple. Numerous publications offered a local version of cultural assimilation and schooled what were colloquially referred to as ‘reffos’ on modes of behaviour, dress and speech. Of a sample survey of those that came from Austria, 36% changed careers and 28.5% changed names in order to commence their new lives, avoid local prejudice and integrate. 20 Continuing from its origins as a British-dominated culture, Australia during the 1930–1960 was predominantly ‘constructed as a homogenous culture, one that was emphatically Anglo-Celtic. It was not until the 1970s that multiculturalism entered the political and popular vocabulary and the concept of difference became acceptable’. 21 For the artists, like other migrants, assimilation was encouraged, if not expected, with Butler arguing that their art ‘explored what was uniquely Australian’ i.e. natural landscape (Friedeberger) or Aboriginal arts (Sellheim) or a migrant’s affinity with the ‘local’ outsiders, the indigenous people (Yosl Bergner, who, ironically, had left for Israel in the late 1940s). Such artists became quickly established, evidenced by the ‘New Australian’s’ Art Exhibition (Canberra 1951), and Alan McCullouch writing in 1955 could argue that An important contribution to our own local vocabulary has been made during these twenty years by migrant artists, most of whom have come here from Central Europe. Many of these artists have been trained in the schools of France; some have brought to us the indigenous traditions of their native lands; all are artists in search of peace, freedom and the opportunity to develop their art. 22 For some, acceptance came relatively quickly. By 1961 and 1965, Polish émigré Maximilian Feuerring was one of several artists to be selected

204  Steven Cooke and Anna Hirsh to represent Australia in San Paolo Biennale, which was according to Butler ‘the culmination of Australia’s acceptance of European-based Australian art’. 23 The year 1962 also saw Louis Kahan win the prestigious Archibald Prize for his portrait of the author Patrick White. Not only did émigrés create art, they contributed to the institutional contexts in which it could flourish. For example, Ursula Hoff was born in 1909 in the United Kingdom to German parents and grew up in Germany. 24 Her family, including her Jewish father, fled Germany in 1933 to the United Kingdom where she studied art before migrating to Australia in 1939, which she found ‘liberating’. 25 She began her curatorial career at the National Gallery of Victoria, rising to Assistant Director in 1973. Franz Philipp, the son of a Jewish importer of cloth and manufacturer of suits in Vienna, was imprisoned in Dachau Concentration Camp, before escaping to England where he was interned as an enemy alien. Brought to Australia on the Dunera, he taught art history at the University of Melbourne, 26 setting ‘new critical standards for scholarship in Australian art history’. 27 The biographies of these artists and critics remind us, as Ann Curthoys and Marylin Lake reminds us, of the importance of thinking about history transnationally, understanding the ways in which past lives and events have been shaped by processes and relationships that have transcended the borders of nation states. Transnational history seeks to understand the ideas, things, people, and practices which have crossed national boundaries. 28 The next section will examine some of the ways in which the émigré experience has been conceptualised within understandings of history and cultural identity. The ‘Jewishness’ of émigrés also needs to be understood as non-homogenous, with a range religious, cultural and political affiliations across the spectrum.

10.3 Understanding Émigré Designers: Thinking Topologically Central to transnational history are ‘metaphors of fluidity, as in talk of circulation and flows (of people, discourse, and commodities), alongside metaphors of connection and relationship’. 29 Writing specifically about the history of design, Teasley et al. note the global turn with its ‘expanded geography, both in topic researched by design historian and the sites of design historical practice’. 30 Whilst for them global does not necessarily mean transnational, they also urge a move beyond the national as a frame of reference and use metaphors of networks and connection, noting that historians write of ‘“entanglements” not just to underline the human nature of connections, but also their messiness, complexity and impermanence’, 31 and further that ‘Global design history is not a matter

Ill Winds of War Have Been Favourable to Me 205 of studying “hot spots” of exchange; it demands that all design be understood as implicated in a network of mutually relevant, geographically expansive connections’. 32 Such an approach has become increasingly common with geography in recent years, providing a critique for the influential ‘landscape’ approaches common to geography in the 1980s and 1990s. As John Wylie argues, the focus here is on the ‘relational nature of identities, geographies, economies and natures themselves’. 33 The emphasis, particularly in non- or more than representational approaches34 and using actor network theory is on ‘process, movement and becoming’, 35 of ‘geographies continually on the move and the making, connected and connecting’ (ibid.). He argues that such ‘topological’ thinking sacrifices ‘a certain topographical richness… present[ing] what is a curiously flat and depthless picture’.36 Whilst noting that ‘Landscape reintroduces perspective and contour; texture and feeling; perception and feeling’, 37 and agreeing with Wylie’s caution, the concept of topology does allow a focus on the imaginative spatial connections that come through the biographies and work of émigré designers. We see a link here between the approach of thinking topologically and Mieke Bal’s ‘Migratory aesthetics’ a heuristic device ‘that helps focus discussion on the nexus of art and migration in a way that balances reflections on art’s political content and ethical engagement with a consideration of its aesthetic dimension’. 38 This ‘non-concept’ ‘is not so much concerned with the recognition of the artist’s cultural identity and difference, but, rather with demonstrating the topicality and significance of the work’s content and aesthetic’. 39 Thus, such ‘mnemonic topologies’40 function in the same way, asking new questions about the material and imaginative geographies that are created through the émigré experience. In the rest of this chapter, we aim to illustrate this approach to understanding the life and work of Louis Kahan. We do this by charting Kahan’s continuing travels and the reception of his work in particular contexts, especially how he was geographically defined and defined himself. We then examine how a representation of this journey can be brought together with a critical reading of two iterations of the same image, ‘The Flight into Egypt’ that Kahan created 23 years apart. This will be used to show how the complexities of Louis’ life and work can help think about the émigré experience and create new ways of representing this in museum displays.

10.4  Louis Kahan Like many émigrés, Louis’s is a complex story. He was born in Vienna in 1905 to Jewish parents, Wolf and Dina (nee Kutcherska). The Kahans were immigrants from the Ukraine who understood the nature of forced

206  Steven Cooke and Anna Hirsh Jewish displacement due to politics and violence, having fled a year earlier from the pogroms of 1904, and the nascent war with Japan. Wolf Kahan had witnessed horrific atrocities perpetrated against Jews. Wolf had been a regimental tailor to the Czar’s army41 and became a successful and talented tailor in Vienna who outfitted prominent and famous Austrians and Europeans, including opera singers, politicians and movie stars. Wolf tried to dissuade the young Louis from an artistic career, insisting that his son gain the trade of a tailor, an insistence that would stand him in good stead for the rest of his life. Louis received his Master Tailor Diploma from the Tailor’s Guild in Vienna in 1925 and then promptly moved to Paris, where he worked with leading couturier Paul Poiret, quickly becoming the house designer. During his time with Poiret he designed costumes for famous avant-garde figures, among others the author and actor Collette, and Josephine Baker (actor, dancer, resistance fighter, human rights activist and symbol of the Jazz Age). Louis was immersed in a world of artists, musicians and bohemians and forged friendships that lasted decades. Kahan left Poiret’s in 1928, spending time as a commercial artist in Paris, also attending life classes, and sketching Parisians scenes. He returned to Vienna in 1930 to help with the family business, the clients of which included stars of the films and theatre, such as Conrad Veidt. Kahan made sketches of clients, while again undertaking life drawing classes. During this time he continued to visit Paris and returned there in 1936 to work as a freelance designer and illustrator, capturing the latest Parisian designs to bring back with him to Austria, and again, taking life classes to further polish his technique. The rise of Nazism meant the handover of the (Jewish) family business in Vienna—their livelihood—to Aryan control, as directed by racial laws. Having had first-hand experience of state-sanctioned oppression of Jews as well as witnessing how this quickly turned to violence in the Soviet Union, Wolf and Dina left Europe’s antisemitism behind for Australia, a few months after their daughter Vally and her husband had migrated.42 They reunited in the west coast city of Perth and reestablished themselves in the tailoring and dressmaking industry. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Louis Kahan, as an Austrian citizen living in France, was classified as an enemy alien and briefly interned. He wanted to enlist to fight against the Nazis but had to instead take up the only option as a foreign national and enlist in the French Foreign Legion. As part of the Legion, he was sent to Algeria in 1940 and was in great demand for his artistic skills. When the Armistice was signed between the Vichy French Government and the Germans in 1941, he was demobilised, but due to the precarious situation he would face as a Jewish man in Nazi-occupied Paris, he decided to remain in Algeria. When British and US troops arrived in North Africa in 1942, he tried to join the US army, perceiving the United States rather than

Ill Winds of War Have Been Favourable to Me 207 Britain as fighting for Jewish liberation43 but instead was offered civilian positions. It is in Oran, Algeria, that Kahan held his first solo exhibition, revealing the skills he had honed as a portraitist during his tenure in North Africa, creating sketches of injured servicemen for them to send home to their families. The sketches deal with the ongoing trauma of the injured soldiers but are also reflective of the trauma and uncertainty that he must have been experiencing. His parents and sister had fled Austria, but his aunt Biele and her daughter Frieda remained in Europe. The women were murdered in Maly Trostinec in Minsk by the Nazis or their collaborators. Some years later, Louis located Frieda’s husband and ‘confronted him for not convincing her to leave, or protecting her’.44 Reflecting on this period years later, Louis commented that ‘I very soon found out that I could help the Allied cause, which was mine, by becoming a war artist’,45 and ‘It was my war that the soldiers had been fighting’.46 At the end of the war, Kahan returned to his beloved Paris, where he visited exhibitions and took classes in printmaking at the Academie de La Grande Chaumiere, a prestigious art school in Montparnasse. He was also engaged in more sobering artistic duties, covering war trials of Petain government ministers with illustrations for La Figaro. In 1947, Kahan decided to visit his family in Australia, journeying via the United States due to restrictions on Jews travelling through Syria, then the fastest route. While in the United States, he reconnected with Viennese childhood friends Billy Wilder and Otto Preminger, now both prolific Hollywood directors, and he sketched famous actors such as Gary Cooper and Dorothy Lamour. He continued his journey to Perth via Sydney where he was introduced to artists such as Swiss-Jewish émigré Sali Herman47 and Francis Lymburner. His family were living on the other side of the continent in Perth, and he found the city relaxing ‘just to be reunited after what had happened, or what has thankfully not happened was enough’.48 In Perth, he found a thriving émigré community, including the conductor Henry Krips, a fellow Austrian émigré, who introduced him to the wider artistic community in the city. Kahan quickly became established as an artist and held his first Australian exhibition in 1949 on the suggestion of Robert Campbell, Director of the Arts Gallery of Western Australia. Drawn to the flourishing arts scene in post-war Melbourne, he moved east and held another solo exhibition, which received positive reviews from, amongst others, influential art critic George Bell. He later collaborated with another Viennese émigré, Stefan Haag at the National Opera Company of Victoria (NOCV). Through this connection he brought together his artistic and theatrical backgrounds and designed his first stage set for the NOCV. He also started to become more widely known, winning the Albury Art Prize with a portrait of Max Meldrum.

208  Steven Cooke and Anna Hirsh During the war, Kahan had started to locate himself as an artist, beyond his profession as a designer; and identified himself as a Parisian, rather than Viennese. This is evidenced in the sketches of injured servicemen, which were signed ‘A guy from Paris’, denoting his dissociation with his native Austrian identity. Early Australian responses to his work defined him as ‘other’, both in a positive and a negative way. An article in The Argus newspaper defined him as ‘a French artist now resident in Australia’,49 whist the more sensationalist tabloid Sunday Times called him the ‘Austrian Louis Kahan’ ‘A former dress designer, he has never had a drawing lesson in his life’.50 A year later, he was ‘Paris trained…. Vienna-born’.51 As noted earlier, the term ‘Continental’ often had positive connotations during this period, 52 with Alan McCulloch praising Kahan for ‘introduc[ing] to Australian contemporary art a note of sophistication which springs straight from the boulevard cafes of Montparnasse’. 53 McCulloch noted Kahan’s experimental approach, which he thought was rooted in his journey: ‘For, instead of placing him at the mercy of too many influences (as is usually the case), Mr. Kahan’s nomadic habits seem to have strengthened his convictions and yet, at the same time, to have kept his drawing in an experimental state’. 54 However, contra Heathcote, for some, an artist had to be the right type of ‘Continental’. It could also be a term of abuse: one critic in the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper thought that Kahan’s work could ‘only be described a deadly…. All Continentals, along with other people, have a soul (which is no matter for joking). Central Europe differs only in so far as it never lets one forget it’. 55 Paris was the centre of sophistication, and the cultural cringe was evident in the relish with which one commentator noted Kahan’s appreciation of Melbourne, which was ‘“a lot more stimulating for the artist than Paris”. Mr Kahan should know. He was born in Vienna but has spent most of his life in the French capital’. 56 His biography was also noted in another early report which started he was ‘From Vienna—via places’. 57 He was still being defined as ‘the Viennese artist’ in an article about his set design work, which also suggested that success had come quickly: Kahan was a painter ‘who has succeeded after seven years in this country, in reaching a goal other painters may take a lifetime to achieve. His work is represented in every Australian National Art Gallery’. 58 Louis’ love for Paris and for France was evident in his preferred name over its original Ludwig, 59 his fluency in the French language and his return to France throughout his life. His disassociation from Vienna may be perceived as another element of rejection of Austria’s deadly war-time betrayal of its Jewish population. The positioning of Paris as the centre of creativity was embraced by Louis, and various compositional and aesthetic influences by its most prominent practitioners are evident throughout his life work. Stylistical homages are made to the costume and theatre designs of Leon Bakst

Ill Winds of War Have Been Favourable to Me 209 and Andre Derain, with their dynamic and decorative Parisian-based Ballet Russes avant-garde legacies. Illustrative cues are wrought from the compositions of prominent Parisian fashion illustrators from the early to mid-century including Pauline Traegar, Christian Berard and Rene Gruau and other mid-century fashion illustrators who contributed towards a specific Parisian template of design. This in turn filtered through to Australia alongside Parisian-influenced British émigrés and Australians who trained or worked in Europe, such as theatre designer Loudon Sainthill; the pathways of design influence appear to move outward from the major centres, with practitioners travelling pre- and postwar to and then from the sources. Survivors often wanted to get as far away as possible from the killing fields of Europe, and this motivated many to move to Australia if given options of migration in the immediate post-war period. Disrupting the idea, particularly for this era, that migration is one way, or finite, Louis continued to travel, and often returned to Europe. In 1954, he married Lily Isaac, a friend of his sister’s, and they travelled to Europe for their honeymoon, spending time in Paris, often visiting museums and galleries. He also painted some iconic views of Parisian streets. The same year, they moved to London, and Louis designed costumes and sets for prominent theatre, ballet and opera companies, including the Glyndebourne Opera in Sussex, the Sadler’s Wells Ballet and the Welsh Opera Company. Despite often commenting that he was untrained as an artist, he continued to learn, enrolling at the Hornsey College of Arts, one of the most progressive and experimental art colleges in the United Kingdom, where he studied stained glass. The European trip was cut short in 1958 by family tragedy, the death of his father Wolf, so the family moved back to Melbourne in the late 1950s. Louis reestablished himself within the artistic community, and it is during this period that he achieved his most critical success, winning the Archibald Prize in 1962 for his portrait of Patrick White. He also has another solo exhibition ‘Waltzing Matilda’. This prompted significant debate about whether someone not born in Australia could portray Australia. Kahan acknowledged his ambivalent status: As a foreigner would do, he would take something which an Australian takes for granted and doesn’t pay any attention to, and it struck me much deeper than it would for the casual listener of this Australian song.60 Not only did Kahan continue to learn new skills, he also passed these on to others. In 1966, he taught art at the Albany Summer School of Arts in WA, the College of Adult Education in Victoria, and in later years at printmaking at RMIT University. He also continued to travel: to Europe for one year in 1968 with family, including Cannes, Venice and Paris, encouraging his two daughters to learn French.61 Ten years later,

210  Steven Cooke and Anna Hirsh he travelled again, through Israel, France, the Netherlands, London, Ireland, Italy and the United States, which formed the basis of exhibition ‘Europe re-viewed’ at Georges Gallery in Melbourne in 1978. Kahan’s biography illustrates the complexities of the émigré existence and includes the yearning for ‘home’ after war. Kahan did not stop travelling once he came to the ‘Shangri La’ of Australia,62 and he continued to work up until his death in 2002. Europe, and particularly Paris, was the centre of artistic culture which Kahan had experienced and been inspired by. Kahan’s life was one of continual travel and continual training, a dynamic process of inspiration and education. Examining the dynamism of Kahan’s journeys poses questions. How might we represent these journeys in exhibitions? How does it intersect with the lives of other émigré artists and designers?

10.5  Representing Travel, Training and Trauma One way is to focus on the networks that Kahan’s journeys created. Using Nodegoat software, we have plotted Louis Kahan’s biography, charting his restless journey ‘from Vienna—via places’.63 This illustrates his continual movement through particular nodes, and how his training and trauma travelled alongside his migratory pathways (Fig. 10.2). As the project progresses, this will be overlaid with the biographies of other Jewish émigré artists. This will form a complex geography of

Figure 10.2   Louis Kahan’s journeys, represented in Nodegoat. Original in colour. Source: www.nodegoat.net

Ill Winds of War Have Been Favourable to Me 211 people, places, objects and ideas. Rather than becoming a featureless plain, ‘a surface without relief, contour, morphology of depth’64 such a process will allow the interactions between biographies to become more visible, a creative practice through which the messiness of Jewish émigré designers and their lives can be understood and represented. Such an approach, together with the creativity of exhibition designers and curators, can provide an engaging display, either in a museum or online. The software also provides for the inclusion of artefacts, the work that designers produced. This allows such works to be set much more fully in the context of the biography of the artist. The final part of this chapter will illustrate this by analysing two instances of the same image: The Flight into Egypt. The first instance was painted in 1952 as a submission for the Blake Prize (Fig. 10.3). The Blake Prize was instituted in 1949 to lift the standard of religious art. Kahan’s entry shows the Holy Family, essentially a Jewish family, fleeing danger for Egypt after the birth of Jesus. The carpenter’s tools are portrayed in the car as a contemporary handsaw, and there is a faint image of Australia reflected in the passenger-side headlight. Coils of barbed wire in the foreground denote the possibility of driving

Figure 10.3  The Flight into Egypt, Louis Kahan, 1952.Original in colour. Source: Reproduced with permission of the Kahan Family

212  Steven Cooke and Anna Hirsh

Figure 10.4  Louis Kahan, The Flight into Egypt, etching, 48/50, 1975 JHC Collection, no. 2357–2, presented by Lily Kahan. Black and white. Source: Photo: Jewish Holocaust Centre, Melbourne

through the barrier, or of being trapped. The driver, perhaps Kahan himself, drives away from the ruins, suggesting a flight from the destruction of Europe in the Second World War; the simplified buildings are reminiscent of the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto. The image can be seen as a continuation of the positive narrative of emigration evident in many Holocaust exhibitions where survivors remake their lives in Australia far away from the killing fields of Europe. The second iteration of the image was produced by Kahan in 1975 (Fig. 10.4). This version derives from the earlier painting but returns to its foundations as a drawing through the printmaking technique of etching. Although he had learnt printmaking in Paris at the end of the Second World War, he did not experiment again with etching until he was invited to work at RMIT in 1975. With access to the required equipment and machinery, Kahan revisited earlier subjects, including the Flight into Egypt. The drawing qualities that etching allowed meant that Kahan could incorporate more detail and capitalise on his talents as an experienced portraitist and talented draughtsman. The driver is now obviously Kahan, and the barbed wire restraining the car is clearly broken as the

Ill Winds of War Have Been Favourable to Me 213 Holy Family make their way to the Promised Land of Australia; again, the symbolism is more clearly visible than in the earlier, more ambiguous iteration. What we interpret as the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto are now wreathed in flames, echoing the iconic photographs of the destruction of the ghetto that circulated widely post uprising. The viewer’s eye though is drawn to Kahan. He stares ahead, gripping the steering wheel, his expression of sadness that is missing from the earlier work is clearly delineated. The bilateral mirroring of the print now positions him as driving on the left-hand side of the car: alluding to that it is mainland Europe that he is leaving.65 In the second painting, the trauma that is only obliquely mentioned in his biographical writing (‘It was my war that the soldiers had been fighting’) becomes apparent. The training he received in Paris, and the trauma of a dislocated life and loss of family members in the Holocaust travelled with him. The etching, as well as being able to be read as a landscape of memory, is also topological. It collapses Kahan’s biography, with Europe, Palestine/Israel and Australia touching together in one place, illustrating the complexities of memory work. The reading of these two images create a fold in the spatiality of memory—allowing us, in Allen’s words to understand ‘the intensive relationship which create the distances between things, on the social proximities established over physical distances and the social distances created through physical proximity’.66 This allows us to understand the imaginative, creative, affective response of Kahan and other émigré designers to ‘travel and dwelling, home and not-home’.67

10.6 Conclusion This chapter has sought to argue that a close attention to the networks created by the travels, training and trauma of Jewish émigré designers affected by Nazism and the Holocaust, together with a close reading of their work allows us to think differently about their biographies. Bringing these two approaches together provides methodological and conceptual advantages in understanding the creation of presence and absence in Kahan’s work; how the symbolic and material distance between Australian and the sites of destructions is collapsed. Private mourning has been revealed in visual works, for murdered family as well as for disrupted lives and displacement. Further, Kahan—like many other émigré designers—never stopped travelling, either artistically, imaginatively or physically. This approach combines a focus on the mobility and movement of networked approaches with the depth of a landscape approach: Kahan’s biography is not a flat isotropic plain68 but a rich, complex and nuanced story told through understanding his art in place. Referencing Merleau-Ponty, Wylie argues that through a critical and creative landscape writing practice ‘the painter emerges as a watching,

214  Steven Cooke and Anna Hirsh moving, rapt subject in a tension spun through and with the lines of the landscape’.69 Or as Louis Kahan put it: My subject matter is a very varied one, for the very reason that I consider art and adventure and any path I have trodden before seems to be very often used up, and I need to find a different stimulus and a different subject or combination of ideas.70 Klepac argues that Kahan is ‘in some ways a totally Australian painter’.71 Through understanding Kahan’s migratory aesthetic, we can perhaps understand why this is the case. Although Kahan reflected that ‘Somehow the ill winds of war have been favourable to me’,72 his trauma was an internal one, something glimpsed out of the corner of one’s eye. Neither a celebration of life in Australia, nor a life dislocated by trauma Kahan’s work reveals to us the complexity of Jewish émigré biographies. Using Kahan’s biography as a template, future work will analyse the life stories of other Jewish émigré designers, adding to the nuanced reading of the history of Australian design.

Notes 1. The authors would like to thank the Kahan family for their generous assistance in this research, including the permission to reproduce Louis Kahan’s artwork. 2. Rebecca Hawcroft, “R. Migrant architects practising modern architecture in Sydney, 1930–1960,” Historic Environment 25, no. 2 (2013): 38–47; Rebecca Hawcroft, The Other Moderns (Sydney: NewSouth, 2017). 3. Dan Snowman, The Hitler Emigres. The Cultural Impact on Britain of Refugees from Nazism (London: Pimlico Press, 2002), xiv. 4. Michael M. Blakeney, “The Australian Jewish community and post-war mass immigration from Europe,” in Jews in the Sixth Continent, ed. W.D. Rubenstein (Sydney, London and Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987): 322–336; Paul Bartrop, Australia and the Holocaust 1933–45 (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 1994); Suzanne D. Rutland, “Subtle exclusions: postwar Jewish emigration to Australia and the impact of the IRO scheme,” The Journal of Holocaust Education 10, no. 1 (2001): 50–66; Suzanne D. Rutland, The Jews in Australia (Cambridge University Press, 2005). 5. Sheridan Palmer, Centre of the Periphery. Three European Art Historians in Melbourne (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008), 9. 6. Roger Butler, “Introduction,” in The Europeans. Émigré artists in Australia 1930–1960, ed. Roger Butler (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1997), 7. 7. Anne Ring Petersen, Migration into Art: Transcultural Identities and Art-making in a Globalised World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). 8. Steven Cooke and Donna-Lee Frieze, “Temporary exhibitions at the Jewish Holocaust Centre: shifting responses to race and racism in Australia,” in Holocaust Memory and Racism in the Postwar World, eds. Avril Alba and Shirley Gilbert (Wayne State University Press, 2019); Steven Cooke,

Ill Winds of War Have Been Favourable to Me 215 Avril Alba and Donna-Lee Frieze, “Community museums and the creation of a ‘sense of place’: Holocaust Museums in Australia,” Recollections 9, no 1 (2014), available online https://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/ volume_9_number_1/papers/community_museums (accessed 31 August 2020). 9. Petersen, Migration into Art. 10. Palmer, Centre of the Periphery, 82. 11. Mieke Bal and Miguel Hernandez-Navarro, “Introduction,” in Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture: Conflict, Resistance, and Agency, eds. Mieke Bal and Miguel Hernandez-Navarro (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011), 11. 12. Mimi Sheller and John Urry 2006 in Peterson, Migration into Art, 3. 13. In Petersen, Migration into Art, 1. 14. Christopher Heathcote, A Quiet Revolution. The Rise of Australian Art 1946–1968 (Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 1995), 1. 15. Heathcote, A Quiet Revolution, 4. 16. Heathcote, A Quiet Revolution. 17. Marlene Norst, “Introduction,” in Strauss to Matilda. Viennese in Australia 1938–1988, ed. Karl Bittman (Maryborough: Wenkart Foundation, 1988), xiii. 18. Norst, Introduction, xiii. 19. For a discussion on Jewish identity in Australia, see Forrest, J. and Sheskin, I.M., “Strands of diaspora: the resettlement experience of Jewish immigrants to Australia,” International Journal of Migration and Integration 16 (2015): 911–927. 20. Norst, Introduction. 21. Butler, Introduction, 9. 22. Alan McCulluch, “The drawings of Louis Kahan,” Meanjin 10, no. 1 (1951): 45–47. 23. Butler, Introduction, 11. 24. Irena Zdanowicz, “Obituary: Ursula Hoff, AO, OBE 1909–2005”, https:// www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/obituary-ursula-hoff-ao-obe-1909-2005/ (accessed 31 August 2020). 25. Palmer, Centre of the Periphery. 26. Palmer, Centre of the Periphery. 27. Jaynie Anderson, “Philipp, Franz Adolf (1914–1970)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University (2000). 28. Ann Curthoys and Marylin Lake, “Introduction: connected worlds: history in transnational perspective,” in Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective, eds. Ann Curthoys and Marylin Lake (Canberra: ANU ePress, 2005), 5. 29. Curthoys and Lake, Connected Worlds, 6. 30. Sarah Teasley, Giorgio Riello and Glenn Adamson, “Introduction,” in Global Design History, eds. Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello and Sarah Teasley (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 2. 31. Teasley et al., Introduction, 4. 32. Teasley et al., Introduction, 6. 33. John Wylie, Landscape (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2007), 199 emphasis in original. 34. Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Cambridge: Polity, 2002); Hayden Lorimer, “Cultural geography: the busyness of being ‘more-than-representational’,” Progress in Human Geography 29, no. 1 (2005): 83–94.

216  Steven Cooke and Anna Hirsh 35. Wylie, Landscape, 199. 36. Wylie, Landscape, 205–206. 37. Rose and Wylie, Landscape, 213. 38. Peterson, Migration into Art, 56–57. 39. Peterson, Migration into Art, 58. 40. Steven Cooke, “Crossing Geographical and Professional Boundaries: Temporary Holocaust Exhibitions, Jewish Émigré Designers and new Museum Topologies”, Paper presented at the Association of Critical Heritage Studies Conference, Hangzhou, China, September 2018. 41. Laura Jocic, “Louis Kahan: Art, Theatre, Fashion,” Exhibition Catalogue, Town Hall Gallery Hawthorn (2016). 42. Dena Kahan, Personal communication to the authors, March 2019. 43. Dena Kahan, Personal communication to the authors, March 2019. 44. Dena Kahan, Personal communication to the authors, March 2019. 45. Louis Kahan, “Louis Kahan interviewed by Hazel de Berg”, in the Hazel de Berg collection (1965), audio, National Library of Australia, https:// trove.nla.gov.au/version/21727127 (accessed 31 August 2020). 46. Lou Kelpac, Louis Kahan (Sydney: The Beagle Press, 1990), 10. 47. Katherine Roberts, “Herman, Sali (1898–1993),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 2017, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/herman-sali-19482/text30870 (accessed 31 August 2020). 48. Klepac, Louis Kahan, 11. 49. M.Haysom, “The art of Louis Kahan,” Brisbane Telegraph, 5 June 1951, 5. 50. Sunday Times, “He painted Hedy Lamarr,” 1 July 1951, 5. 51. E. Briggs, “Vigour in this art,” Courier Mail, 30 June 1952, 2. 52. Heathcote, A Quiet Revolution. 53. McCulloch, The Drawings of Louis Kahan, 45. 54. McCulloch, The Drawings of Louis Kahan, 46. 55. Sydney Morning Herald, “Exhibition of paintings by Louis Kahan,” 11 April 1951, 44. 56. P. Golding, “What goes on?” The Argus, 23 February 1952, 4. 57. F. Doherty, “‘From Vienna––via places’, The Argus,” 16 February 1954, 23. 58. Doherty, “‘From Vienna––via places’,” 23. 59. Dena Kahan, Personal communication with the authors, March 2019. 60. Kahan, Interview, np. 61. Dena Kahan, Personal communication with the authors, March 2019. 62. Klepac, Louis Kahan, 11. 63. Doherty, “From Vienna – via places,” 23. 64. Wylie, Landscape, 206. 65. Recent correspondence with Louis’ younger daughter Dena confirms that the representation of Mary is not Louis’ wife Lily, pers comm March 2019. 66. John Allen, “Topological twists: power’s shifting geographies,” Dialogues in Human Geography 1, no. 3 (2011): 283–298, 290. 67. Sheller and Urry, Migration into Art, 3. 68. Wylie, Landscape. 69. Wylie, Landscape, 217. 70. Kahan, Interview 1965, np. 71. Klepac, Louis Kahan, 19. 72. Kahan in Klepac, Louis Kahan, 21.

11 An Unsung Austrian Doyen Erwin Felber and the Transference of Cultural and Musical Knowledge in Wartime Shanghai Jeremy Leong A serendipitous discovery in 2006 at the Shanghai Municipal Archives (No. 9 Second East Zhongshan Road) located in the Bund prompted me to examine a part of human history that defied logic. An event so momentous, yet so highly unimaginable, that brought about the meeting of two different cultures, which under normal circumstances, may not have happened otherwise. Following the “Anschluss” of 1938, countless Austrian musicians, music scholars, and artists became a part of the approximately 18,000 European Jews who reluctantly left their homelands to escape the Nazi pogroms. For many of them, the thought of relocating to Asia was never part of their plan, let alone Shanghai, a treaty port with a dubious reputation for vices. Divided between Western and Japanese powers, the city, however, was the only abode for these displaced Jews.1 Among the new migrants were some of the most outstanding musicians and music scholars in their native countries. Yet we know very little of Dr. Erwin Felber, a notable Austrian music historian, educator, and critic, who was also a well-established member of the Jewish refugee network and the Shanghai Jewish community. His musical and cultural contributions to the city had mostly eluded the attention of scholars in Jewish studies, as well as the general academia. 2 This chapter will begin with a brief biography of Felber, highlighting his academic and professional activities. I argue that the processes of musical knowledge transfer and cultural translation were already an integral part of his activities in Austria and when in Shanghai, it seemed natural for him to continue incorporating those processes into his plans, albeit on a larger scale. Secondly, as a music educator and historian, I will examine how his understanding of the notion of knowledge transfer was crucial to the promotion of spiritual development amongst Austrian and other European Jewish refugees, as well as reinforcing a sense of cultural identity and demonstrating the alacrity of Jewish solidarity under the rule of Japan. Lastly, as a music critic, his writings assessed the level of artistry in Shanghai and reexamined what constituted good taste in music. By so doing, he questioned the process of

218  Jeremy Leong musical knowledge transfer and offered a fresh perspective to the study of migrant knowledge.

11.1 Biography Born in Vienna on 9 March 1885, Felber grew up in a nonmusical family. His father was a businessman and Hugo, his older brother, was a doctor, while his younger brother, Arthur, was a farmer. Furthermore, there was no indication of his mother, Johanna Back, being musically inclined as well. Most, if not all, of the Felber family in Vienna originated in the small town of Strážnice, Moravia (nowadays Czech Republic). 3 Virtually nothing can be found about his early interest in music. Therefore, it was even more remarkable to discover that he had developed a deep passion for researching music and that his scholarly pursuit had not gone unnoticed. At the age of 27, he graduated from the Imperial Academy of Science in Vienna, with a doctoral dissertation entitled Die Indische Musik der Vedischen und der Klassischen Zeit (Indian Music of the Vedic and the Classical Periods). Under the supervision of Professor Leopold Shröder, Felber’s work provided details of oratorical rhythm and recitation techniques used in Indian music, the ethos of old Indian music, and the music psychology of Rigveda, Samaveda-Samhita, and Gana.4 Given that Vienna was among the most important cities for the cultivation of Western art music, Felber’s interest in the music of the “other” would seem rather unusual. 5 Despite his European heritage, he had achieved the highest academic honor by demonstrating expertise in transferring knowledge of ancient Indian music into his native language. Even more so, the cognitive process would have involved a high degree of sensitivity to Indian culture that served as a prerequisite, even before he could comprehend, analyze, and faithfully translate musical nuances that transcend a mere survey of Indian music culture. What seems apparent about his endeavor is that he may not have been born and educated in India, but because of his passion for the music and culture of that country, and through intense effort and study, he became a master of Indian music. In fact, I would argue that his interest to learn about the culture of the “other,” vis-à-vis through his doctoral dissertation, is a positive cultural indicator of his adaptability, one that had already been established prior to becoming a migrant in Shanghai. Because of his well-developed sense of culture, he became a valued cultural broker of the Shanghai Jewish community where his expertise was very much needed as he took on a leadership role in transferring and translating theoretical knowledge of music and culture into reality. This aspect will be discussed in detail later. At this juncture, the concept of the transfer of cultural capital deserves further examination. While still in Vienna, how was Felber received as an expert of Indian music?

An Unsung Austrian Doyen 219 In an article in the Shanghai Jewish Chronicle, Felber revealed that he was an active member of Vienna’s Indian community and had given lectures on Indian music at the Indian Club.6 When it comes to the circular exchange of ideas, there is no doubt that the Indian community would have undergone a degree of assimilation and accepted certain cultural traits in order to be a part of the Viennese society over time. Ironically, it would seem mildly amusing that a reverse process had actually taken place, where as a Viennese, Felber, who likely did not grow up with Indian classical music, became the bearer of Indian cultural capital and his deep knowledge of India’s indigenous music was sought after by Vienna’s Indian community. Granted that not all members of the Indian community were experts of their own music, Felber’s contribution to that community was considered even more significant because it highlighted the complexity involved in the process of knowledge transfer. It affirms that issues of cultural and racial background have no bearing on one’s ability to master a particular field of knowledge outside of one’s cultural upbringing, and the recipients, despite having cultural ties to that knowledge base, may not be well versed in it. Yet, one may further enquire to what extent was the depth of Felber’s knowledge of Indian music? His concept of knowledge transfer was once again put to the test with India’s most prominent poet. One of the most memorable moments in Felber’s life was his meeting with the legendary Nobel laureate Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) who was also a noted musician. Shortly after World War I, Tagore was touring Europe and a reception was organized at the Indian Club in Vienna to honor him. Tagore was born in Calcutta into a Brahmin family. He started composing poems at eight. And in 1913, he became the first non-Westerner to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. The committee cited his collection of poems called Gitanjali (or song offerings) as highly important and deeply spiritual.7 Naturally, Felber was thrilled to meet Tagore at the reception, as the man was as much a poet as he was a humanist. In the town of Shantiniketan (or the Abode of Peace), he founded a school modeled on ancient Indian tapovans, or forest colonies, where young men meditated and involved in other spiritual practices by connecting themselves with their natural environment.8 The private meeting with Tagore, however, did not turn out the way Felber had expected. The initial conversation might have started cordially, with Tagore expressing his personal opinions about the positive and negative aspects of European music and admitting that he was not an expert on Western harmony and counterpoint. The poet had offered to have some of his songs recorded for the record archives of the Academy of Science in Vienna, of which Felber was a collaborator and their music advisor. Apparently, Felber immediately recognized the

220  Jeremy Leong old songs Tagore had sung and proceeded to tell him so, unknowingly that this would hurt his ego. During the conversation, Tagore became visibly exasperated when Felber went on to give an account of the basic melodic tones and their relationship to meters in Indian classical music.8 In this instance, there is no doubt about Felber’s depth of knowledge, where he demonstrated with ease in recalling some of the significant works swiftly. While the transference of knowledge here may not be an issue, his ability to translate the meaning of his message in a culturally sensitive manner was brought into question. This is especially so when the recipient (i.e., Tagore) was a renowned poet who felt that his expertise was challenged, even though Felber’s comments were not ill-intentioned. In the study of cross-border knowledge transfer, it is just as important to examine the recipients and their motivation to learn. The success of the exchange process may be dependent on how well the “receiving partners” can benefit from the new information. As Jan Logemann argued, “divergent expectations of all parties involved have to converge sufficiently to form enough common ground on which a translation can occur.”9 Contrary to Felber’s experience with the Indian Club, where its members were more receptive to him, with Tagore, the social context was different. The two had met for the first time and the poet may not have known Felber well enough to consider him as his intellectual equal. This brings a fresh perspective to our understanding of knowledge transfer. A recipient gladly accepts knowledge when s/he knows it comes from an authoritative source, regardless of the cultural origin of that source. However, when a recipient comes from an elevated sociocultural background, this aspect will affect how knowledge is received. If the goal is to achieve a positive outcome, the tone of the messenger as well as the manner in which knowledge is being delivered should be carefully calibrated, so as to show awareness of the background of such recipient.

11.2  In Exile The lives of European Jews were about to change as they escaped Nazi persecution in search of safe havens. Felber left his familiar life in Vienna and together with thousands of Jews found himself in Shanghai, a city that was a far cry from what he would have envisioned. Due to the large influx of European Jewish refugees in the late 1930s, six Heime (tenements) were built in the poorer district of Hongkew. These were refugee camps of converted schools, barracks, and warehouses that were not equipped with the comforts of a home. Sanitary conditions in the camps were deplorable leading some refugees to describe it as “something out of a bad dream.”10 Furthermore, keeping kosher was a huge challenge to many of them who had to adapt to a more Sinicized

An Unsung Austrian Doyen 221 way of living. Unlike many of the refugees, professionally speaking, for Felber to adapt to a foreign environment would be less of an issue. His scholarly activities and experience with the music of diverse cultures in Vienna, in numerous ways, would have aided him to adapt to the changing conditions much more easily than his counterparts. In addition, by taking advantage of the emerging foreign press industry, he was able to find his niche by continuing to pursue his former career as a writer and researcher and likely made the transition to living in Shanghai less daunting. Despite the hardships, there were many skilled journalists among the Austrian and German refugees who in no time revitalized the German-language newspaper industry in Shanghai. This brought a level of comfort to the educated German-speaking Jews who were able to identify with a cultural past they once belonged to, as middle-class citizens in their respective countries. Newspapers available for the German-speaking community included the Jüdische Gemeinde (The Jewish Gazette), Shanghai Woche (Shanghai Weekly), Die Gelbe Post (The Yellow Post), 8-Uhr Abendblatt (8-o’clock Evening Paper), and the Shanghai Jewish Chronicle. World politics, local and immigration news, cultural affairs, and music were among the many topics covered in these newspapers.11 Felber was perhaps among the most prolific contributors to the Shanghai Jewish Chronicle, a German-language newspaper despite its name and was the only daily allowed by Japanese authority to continue publication after 1943. Along with this newspaper, the European Jewish Artists Society (i.e., EJAS) was established in 1939 to preserve the music culture of Jewish refugees from Europe and its presence had a significant influence on Jewish musical life in Shanghai for quite some time. The chairman was Ossi Lewin, chief editor of the Shanghai Jewish Chronicle and Felber was the artistic director of EJAS.12 Taking advantage of his position and connection with Lewin, the newspaper became a mouthpiece for Felber to articulate his thoughts and views on the role of music in education for the Jewish community. As a versatile scholar who not only had a deep sense of Asian music but also deep knowledge of European musical traditions, he was able to convey his understanding of music, in writing and as an educator, to fit a certain social context. In so doing, he was able to translate musical meanings in such a manner that they helped to reaffirm the cultural identity of the Jewish community, as well as to develop a deeper sense of spirituality in order to empower individuals who faced daily economic and cultural challenges living in the Far East. One can argue that Felber’s life in Vienna was more focused on his self-development as a music historian, publishing on and lecturing about Indian music. In Shanghai, the trying conditions had propelled him into a leadership position, where the needs of the collective took precedence, as he reflected on his mission to

222  Jeremy Leong draw on his musical knowledge in serving a broader purpose of edification and spiritual development for the Jewish community. Lectures on music were very much a part of Felber’s education plan for the Jewish community. These lectures allowed the refugees to gain a better understanding of their own music culture through active listening and studying of music. For Jewish refugees who enjoyed a more in-depth and serious discussion of music, lecture series on the history of piano music, the history of violin playing, and the history of vocal music were taught by Felber and also by Dr. Gerti Elias.13 No doubt, these lectures served to emphasize the close relationship between music and culture. Consequently, by highlighting the high cultural values of music, this implicitly acknowledged a sense of social belonging, familiar especially amongst many highly assimilated Austrian and German refugees who had developed stronger affinity toward their respective cultural identity rather than their Jewishness. In his article “Der kulturelle Aufbau im Distrikt” (Cultural Development in the District), Felber emphasized the urgency in providing intellectual support for the Jewish refugees as they suffered during those oppressive years as residents in the Hongkew ghetto (1943–1945). The youngsters were lacking a sense of direction in life while the adults, after a difficult day at work, sought comfort in frivolous activities. Driven by anxieties of an uncertain future, Jewish migrants in the tenements gradually glided into the abyss and lost their sense of moral duty. While they should continue to work on a regular basis, they should also be distracted from their doleful thoughts. The solution was to engage them in good music, such as chamber music and lectures on music with informative content. Felber believed in chamber music, the appeal of which was not only universal but also had a high intellectual value. Thus, it improved the lives of refugees and at the same time, through music-making in groups, brought about a sense of communal spirit among them. Ideally, implementation of the plan would be carried out in the highest order where each performance should fulfill certain ethical and esthetic requirements, and the program should also be of real value and interest to the public.14

11.3  Music Plans Interestingly, despite not being German, Felber’s ideas displayed some stark similarities to those of Carl Zelter (1758–1832). A German composer and teacher, Zelter was instrumental in the institutional reconstruction of musical life in Prussia. For him, music had a communal purpose just like all other arts. This purpose was Bildung, which he defined as the “activity of inner or spiritual forces, to the end that man realizes his complete existence and becomes nobler.”15 Bildung is about the formation of soul by the cultural environment, whereby a certain

An Unsung Austrian Doyen 223 universality is attained through the comprehension and familiarization of cultural values, with the eventual goal of achieving unity. In short, it is about the cultivation of the mind and spirit through education.16 Felber’s understanding of the notion of Bildung was the governing principle that characterized his music plan for the Jewish community and his teaching at the Asia Seminar (this topic will be covered later). By transferring knowledge of Europe’s chamber music tradition and translating it in a culturally meaningful way, it was Felber’s belief that his plan of chamber music concerts would help to address the dire social condition Jewish refugees had to contend with, by imbuing the Jewish community with a stronger sense of life’s purpose through emphasizing their spiritual development. There is no doubt that Felber was concerned with the social malaise of Jewish refugees. Yet, before his plan could materialize, a major obstacle remained. How did Felber reconcile the dialectical difference of chamber music, a genre that used to belong to social elites of Europe, with a class of mostly poor Jewish refugees who had trouble making ends meet? As Theodor Adorno stated it so aptly: People who think they are musical take it for granted that chamber music is the highest musical species. This convention certainly serves largely for elitist self-affirmation; the limited circle of persons permits the inference that matters reserved for those must be better than what the misera plebs enjoys.17 The notion of intimacy so closely associated with the performance of chamber music obviously had changed over the centuries. In the nineteenth century, chamber music was heard in small concert halls and auditoriums that were more or less still in keeping with the idea of intimacy. Prior to that, chamber music was intimate music, performed at private homes and in rooms of palaces. By the twentieth century, performances of chamber music were heard on radio and records.18 For Felber, the intrinsic value of chamber music was undeniable and the need to stay as authentic and faithful to the performance practice (i.e., the idea of intimacy) of it was unquestionable. Yet the elite status that chamber music once enjoyed was problematic due to the conditions in Shanghai. While it was an established fact that the acquisition of chamber music knowledge was instrumental to the overall spiritual development of the Jewish community, translating its cultural relevance would require a degree of adjustment.

11.4  (Cross-)Cultural Translation German theologian Paul Tillich argued that before any form of cross-cultural translation could take place, a process of “creative

224  Jeremy Leong adaptation” was absolutely necessary in order for a creative idea to have “convincing power” to a community.19 To overcome the cultural “dichotomy,” Felber simply reconstructed the old socio-musical paradigm of chamber music by denying the privileged class their right of ownership. He claimed that the high cultural value of chamber music was too important to those with lesser means and their intellectual and spiritual cultivation should be given top priority. To allow chamber music to reach a wider audience, he recommended that concerts be repeated and the price of admission tickets be lowered. While the spiritual and intellectual values of chamber music may be incapable of fulfilling their immediate physical needs, he reckoned that the nourishment of their state of mind and being by these values was far more important for the future of their economic development. 20 To execute his plan, a series of chamber concerts were introduced to the Jewish community. The first EJAS concert was performed on 22 January 1944 under the auspices of the Cultural Department of the Jüdische Gemeinde that included mainly strings chamber works such as Beethoven’s Trio in C Minor (Op. 1 No. 3) for piano, violin, and cello, and Schubert’s Sonatine Op. 137 for violin and piano. 21 While the audience may not be of noble birth and the small, intimate Aula room of the Shanghai Jewish Youth Association School may not measure up to those opulently designed recital rooms of Europe’s palaces, the Jewish performing venue had great acoustics and in keeping with the idea of intimacy, this and other chamber concerts that ensued helped to promote the inherent intellectual and spiritual values of chamber music to the Jewish community. 22 When the Pacific War broke out, Japan was under constant pressure by its Nazi allies to take antisemitic measures, similar to those in Germany, against Jewish refugees in Shanghai. Japan had already taken full control of Greater Shanghai and part of the International Settlement known as Hongkew. In 1943, Japanese authorities proclaimed Hongkew as the designated area for stateless refugees. While the terms “Jew” and “ghetto” were never used by them, Jewish refugees who had moved into this designated area referred to their experience there as the ghetto period. 23 The livelihood of Jewish musicians, like other refugees, was hampered by the fact that they had to obtain exit passes in order to work outside of Hongkew. Most employers were reluctant to hire workers who had to wait in line, sometimes for hours, just to receive temporary passes. 24 To make matter worse, the task of obtaining a pass could be a terrifying experience for the refugees, as Ghoya, the Japanese official who controlled the passes, was rather unpredictable and took pleasure in the physical abuse of pass applicants. 25 This dispute with Japanese authorities over passes, coupled with challenges many Jewish refugees faced in Shanghai due to differences in cultural practices, prompted the

An Unsung Austrian Doyen 225 Jewish community to think of a new plan. In cosmopolitan Shanghai, the coexistence of various nationalities created a vibrant environment that supported cultural diversity. It would seem beneficial for Jewish refugees to be a part of the larger community of Shanghai for both personal and economic gain. The need to be educated in the cultures of others, including music, thus allowed the market for a new form of institution to emerge in Shanghai. The Asia Seminar, an advanced institution established in 1943, provided adult Jews the opportunity to gain a comprehensive education in Shanghai. Led by Will Y. Tonn, a German-Jewish Sinologist, the goal of this institution was to promote mutual understanding between different cultures. With a staff of 60 that included doctors, artists, historians, and other intellectuals, the school offered a broad range of courses in the sciences, humanities, 16 languages, and even music. 26 Felber was hired as a music lecturer by the institution.27 Apart from Indian music, he was also highly knowledgeable in other Asian music, especially Japanese music, which he taught at the institute. Besides teaching, he also produced two articles on the history of Japanese music.28 As part of his broader mission to promote Bildung in the Jewish community, one can argue that, besides his plan of chamber music concerts, he was hoping that Jewish refugees would take on the study of Japanese music well. Perhaps, on the surface, it would seem rather puzzling as to why one would want to know the culture of the enemy. However, a counterargument can also be made in support of learning the music culture of Japan, as Jewish refugees may find it easier to deal with Japanese authorities that they come into contact with on a regular basis. For the Asia Seminar, it, no doubt, played an important role in transferring knowledge. As for Felber, one can surmise that it would be equally crucial for Jewish refugees to be equipped with an understanding of Japanese music culture for the purpose of translating it into a form of “cultural strategy” for survival in the face of Japanese hegemony. As much as Felber was able to bring positive changes to his community through music education, he was increasingly concerned with the unsettling and precarious political situation that profoundly disrupted Jewish life in Shanghai. During the Japanese occupation, everyone in Shanghai lived under broad wartime constraints, which included censorship in the arts and press, limiting news broadcast, and interdictions on spreading rumors, especially those deemed subversive. In the performing arts, Jewish concerts were not only thwarted by difficult economic conditions in the ghetto but also by ardent censors who would prohibit a performance without providing a reason.29 Highly aware of the oppression of free press under Japanese rule, Felber wrote with acuity, where he subtly unraveled the covert messages embedded in a concert and revealed Japan’s political ambition in Shanghai.

226  Jeremy Leong Japanese authorities made no apologies for exploring music’s potential in staging a political statement. In December 1943, a concert was held in the Grand Theater to commemorate General Yamamoto, an officer who had made his sacrifice to the Japanese military incursions in Asia. The Shanghai Municipal Orchestra’s program opened with Beethoven’s seventh symphony, which was presented with great energy by the Japanese conductor, Takashi Asahina. The second half of the concert was devoted to Japanese music. In his review, while Felber did not reveal whether T. Miyahara’s work Paraphrase was composed as a traditional or Western-style piece, he did mention that this work was filled with themes that took on a dark, mournful soundscape. A Javanese gamelan ensemble performed S. Fukai’s composition Song of Java. The final work was J. Watanabe’s “Fighting Soul,” a symphony aptly named after the heroic act of the deceased general. 30 Beethoven was the only Western composer on the program.31 Thus, it would seem almost impossible to think otherwise, that the coexistence of his music with Japanese composers can reasonably be understood as symbolic of the military alliance between Germany and Japan.32 Furthermore, based on the content of the program, Asahina, who was knowledgeable of Beethoven’s works, would have been aware of the heroic implications associated with the composer’s music. Music scholars, like Adorno, had gone as far as to insist on hearing the revolutionary intent in Beethoven’s music: If we listen to Beethoven and do not hear anything of the revolutionary bourgeoisie – not the echo of its slogan, but rather the need to realize them, the cry for that totality in which reason and freedom are to have their warrant – we understand Beethoven no better than does one who cannot follow the purely musical content of his pieces…32 While in no way is the author trying to insinuate, in whatsoever manner, that Beethoven was a political despot, the usurping of his music as a political ploy by Japanese authorities can neither be denied. At the end of the concert, cannon sounds were heard from afar.33 Although these sounds were a mere gesture to honor the general and other fallen Japanese heroes, they were also an unnerving reminder of Japanese aggressions in China and across Asia, and ironically, Jewish refugees had become unwilling sufferers of their military mission by default as well. Felber’s review was more than just a transference of musical knowledge for the purpose of edification. His analysis of the pieces provided great insights to admonish the Jewish community of the insidious act of the Japanese in translating and projecting political ascendancy through music. In addition to using music to show power and dominance in Asia, the Japanese also exercised control over the Jewish refugees by reviving an ancient Chinese arrangement.

An Unsung Austrian Doyen 227 Japanese authorities governed the Jewish population in the Hongkew ghetto through the implementation of the baojia system. The term literally means “to safeguard the home,” which referred to an old Chinese system that emphasized a sense of duty and mutual responsibility. All males, including Chinese and foreigners, were required to serve a number of hours per week as baojia. As a means to maintain order, Jewish refugees were assigned patrol duties in the ghetto, just like their Chinese counterparts who performed similar duties elsewhere in Shanghai. 34 For the most part, the system worked well. Baojia leaders often tried to help late Jewish returnees into the ghetto, knowingly violating the rules of the pass system, which could make both the culprits and the leaders liable for punishment. 35 While the Baojia system was meant to do good by promoting public safety, the Japanese, through the process of cultural translation, notoriously, exploited this old Chinese system for the purpose of controlling the Jewish refugees and striking fear into the minds of violators. In an act to demonstrate solidarity amongst members of the Jewish community, despite the unsavory condition created by the Japanese, a performance was produced to celebrate the baojia system. A gala concert was held at the Eastern Theater on 27 November 1943 in honor of the services rendered by baojia to residents of Shanghai. The producer was the Jewish Chief Baojia, Dr. Felix Kardegg, who had solicited the aid of Henri Margolinski, vice chairman of EJAS, in putting the event together. It was reported that numerous officials, including Kardegg’s superior Chief Inspector Yasuda and other Japanese officers, and countless music fans from outside the ghetto attended the concert. This special event presented ten of the best Jewish instrumentalists and vocalists of the ghetto, and together they performed a four-hour concert that consisted of 15 appearances and 30 compositions written by 20 composers.36 Overall, the concert exuded an aura of positivism. The violin virtuoso Ferdinand Adler opened the event with Beethoven’s “Spring” Sonata Op. 24 with Margolinski on the piano. This was followed by a flawless rendition of Saint-Saëns’ Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso by Adler, of whom the audience demanded an encore performance. Female Jewish performers, however, were not excluded, as Sabine Rapp challenged her vocal ability in the art songs of Wolf before joining Lisa Robitschek in an operatic duet from Verdi’s Aida. The cantor Josef Fruchter demonstrated his bel canto capability in a series of arias and later joined Mrs. Margolinski in the love duet from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. In contrast, Mrs. Margolinski went on to sing a number of art songs by Brahms and Richard Strauss and dazzled the audience with the famous and celebratory “Alleluia” from Mozart’s Exsultate Jubilate K.165. By the end of this long concert, there was not even a sign of exhaustion from the audience. Jewish refugees and local

228  Jeremy Leong Shanghai residents really enjoyed and deeply appreciated the highquality performance given by these Jewish musicians. 37 While this concert may not mean much to the invited Chief Inspector Yasuda and his Japanese colleagues, culturally, it represents a significant achievement for the Jewish community. As Austrian and European Jewish refugees related deeply to the repertoire that reminded them of a familiar past, it also demonstrated how music could be translated as a form of cultural capital that provided them with a much-needed sense of hope and comfort in trying times. For Kardegg and the Jewish community, this concert, perhaps, could also be seen as a minor artistic victory against Japanese hegemony. Despite the filthy and crowded conditions of the ghetto, where food was often in short supply, the Jewish community, armed with their cultural heritage, managed to rise above adversities and demonstrated their unity through music. 38 As a music educator and historian, Felber was acutely aware of the importance of aiding Jewish refugees, especially those from Austria and other parts of Europe, to connect with their cultural roots. His frequent contributions, in the forms of concert reviews and biographical accounts of Western composers in the Shanghai Jewish Chronicle, served as valuable sources of information where such transference of Western classical music knowledge was indispensable due to a lack of such knowledge made readily available to them in Shanghai. His reviews of the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra’s concerts were known for their perceptive analysis of musical details that were made easy to understand and yet without oversimplifying. For an evening performance of Scandinavian and Viennese music by the Orchestra, Felber praised the beautiful melodic elements in the Scandinavian works (e.g., Swedish Rhapsody No. 1 by Hugo Alfvén and Peer Gynt suite by Edvard Grieg), but his focus was clearly on the Viennese music presented in the second half of the concert. He wrote enthusiastically about the Viennese waltz and especially Johann Strauss II’s The Blue Danube where he elaborated on the origin of the piece, which started as a vocal composition before adapting it for the orchestra. The latter version was the one that became the most popular among Austrians and the rest of the world. 39 Naturally, the review would have a strong impact on Austrian refugees. The transfer of knowledge took place as his words served to evoke a sense of nostalgia about home, as the cultural significance of the Danube River would have been affectionately acknowledged by the refugees. The general tenor of his biographies of Western composers tended to emphasize the deep pride they had regarding their cultural roots. Felber wrote that despite the clear influences of Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert in Grieg’s piano works and songs, respectively, Grieg’s music was still unmistakably Norwegian.40 As for Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, he was one of the greatest Russian composers that had ever lived and

An Unsung Austrian Doyen 229 his The Golden Cockerel remains amongst the most recognized works in Russian operatic repertoire.41 But among these biographies, perhaps the most personal piece was the one on Pyotr IIyich Tchaikovsky. In Felber’s view, this famous Russian composer was a shy, beautiful but troubled soul who tried to find his place on earth. For years, mainly alone, he traveled extensively across Europe and rural Russia, composing and promoting his own works, yet seemingly unable to find a place to call home. Aptly, he believed Tchaikovsky was very much like Ahasver.42 As a mythological character in German writer Stefan Heym’s novel of the same name, Ahasver (or “The Wandering Jew”) was depicted as a highly compassionate and caring person. One can argue that the knowledge gained through these biographies was, perhaps, by highlighting the pride of these three composers as examples. Felber encouraged all displaced Austrian and German Jewish refugees to remain strong by drawing upon the strength of their respective cultures, as they faced daily challenges of living in an unfamiliar Sino-environment as forced migrants yearning for home. While his concert reviews and biographies certainly played a vital role in helping Austrian and other Jewish refugees to connect with their culture, his criticisms of European artists in Shanghai, although drew muchheated controversy, had literally questioned the process of knowledge transfer as well as what constituted success in the transference of musical knowledge. As one who held an influential position with EJAS and a regular contributor to the Shanghai Jewish Chronicle, Felber’s writings were well received and respected by the Shanghai Jewish community.43 However, based on the number of defamatory letters he had received, Felber, as a music critic, lamented the state of affairs where some European musicians who professed to be “artists” demonstrated a total lack of propriety. Although he did not single out any particular musician, the fact that some singers would hide behind the veil of anonymity in these letters, spouting hatred toward him, was indeed a craven act. If perceived musical knowledge is determined by how well a migrant musician markets his/her skills in the host society, Felber would have disagreed with that statement. Some of these European musicians would publicly brag about their impressive credentials, especially of the past, which were unverifiable due to the geographical distance. Furthermore, due to the limited number of them in Shanghai, these foreign musicians enjoyed a “rarity” status and actually thought that they were musically infallible. As such, despite how carefully Felber constructed his critical remarks about their performances, justifiable or not, these “artists” categorically rejected them with contempt. In return, they accused Felber of applying European standards to judge their performances, which he vehemently denied. Taking into account the sociological and economic conditions that shaped the level of artistry in Shanghai, he maintained

230  Jeremy Leong that a certain basic level of musical proficiency must still be fulfilled if one considered himself/herself to be an artist.44 As a music critic who had an advanced degree in music, Felber acted as an intermediary with strong credibility to judge the process of knowledge transfer. Under scrutiny, a performance that proclaimed to be of high artistic “value” actually may very well lack that quality it claimed to embody. In essence, Felber demonstrated that good publicity alone should not be the only factor in determining the success of knowledge transfer. Reading about and understanding the judgment of good taste should also form the basis for evaluating the quality of transferred musical knowledge in the host community.

11.5 Conclusion We know very little about Felber and even less so about his contributions to the history of Jewish migrant knowledge in Shanghai. By addressing this lacuna in knowledge, I demonstrate how important it is to have a firm understanding of the processes of knowledge transfer and cultural translation, especially in times of political instability. Felber’s academic pursuit and involvement with the Indian Club had helped him to develop a level of sensibility toward the music and culture of the “other,” which, I argue, profoundly shaped his perspectives about life and the intimate relationships that could be forged between music and culture. As the artistic director of EJAS, he implemented plans to promote chamber music as a means to cultivate Bildung to address the sense of hopelessness among Austrian and other Jewish refugees living under extremely trying conditions in wartime Shanghai. His efforts to translate difficult music topics to make them more accessible to members of the Shanghai Jewish community and taking on a personal mission to confront the cantankerous issue of artistic decorum can never be overstated. As Margolinski stated: I have no reason to write about myself as a conductor. That has been done in this Almanac by Prof. Dr. Erwin Felber… He forgot, however, to include one personality, and that is Professor Felber himself, who heckles not only professionally – if not with consideration of the musical violations of some of our active artists – but also actively participates in our musical life. It is superfluous to go into the values of his reviews, or the manner in which he, by analysis, attempts to pass on the inner contents of the work to his listeners, the deep observations contained in his feuilletons and essays, in which he succeeds to popularize difficult matters.45 Likewise, understanding the mechanics of knowledge transfer could also bring a level of comfort to the despondent Austrian and other Jewish

An Unsung Austrian Doyen 231 refugees. Being acutely aware of the conditions in Shanghai, Felber’s reviews and biographies chose to highlight critical music information that would empower the refugees and encourage them to take pride in their own culture as they faced an irresolute future in a foreign land. By giving acknowledgment to Felber’s contributions, it will help us to develop a deep appreciation of the complex symbiotic relationship between music and Jewish culture in the Far East, which, without a doubt, will expand our understanding of migrant knowledge in wartime Shanghai.

Notes 1. Renata Berg-Pan, “Shanghai Chronicle: Nazi Refugees in China,” in The Muse Flee Hitler, eds. Jarrell Jackman and Carla Borden (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983), 284. 2. For the history of Jewish migration in Shanghai and Asia, see Chiara Betta, “From Orientals to Imagined Britons: Baghdadi Jews in Shanghai,” Modern Asian Studies 37, no. 4 (2003): 999–1023 and Margaret Kartomi and Andrew D. McCredie, “Introduction: Musical Outcomes of Jewish Migration into Asia via Northern and Southern Routes c. 1780–c. 1950,” Ethnomusicology Forum 13, no. 1 (2004): 3–20. 3. “Erwin Felber,” Geni, https://www.geni.com/people/Professor-Dr-ErwinFelber/6000000015158905388 (accessed 31 August 2020). 4. Erwin Felber, “Die Indische Musik der Vedischen und der Klassischen Zeit,” (Indian Music of the Vedic and the Classical Periods), in Sitzungsberichte der Philosophisch-Historischen Klasse der Kaiserlichen Academia der Wissenschaften (Vienna, 1913). 5. Erwin Felber, “Hinter der Maske,” (Behind the Mask), Shanghai Jewish Chronicle, 3 October 1943, 6. 6. Erwin Felber, “Begegnung mit Tagore,” (Meeting with Tagore), Shanghai Jewish Chronicle, 15 August 1943, 8. 7. Eric Weiner, “In the Land of Tagore,” The Sunday Times (Singapore), 3 February 2013, 11. 8. Felber, “Begegnung mit Tagore,” 8. 9. Jan Logemann, “Consumer Modernity as Cultural Translation: European Émigrés and Knowledge Transfers in Mid-Twentieth-Century Design and Marketing,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 43, no. 3 (2017): 413–437, 421. 10. David Kranzler, Japanese, Nazis & Jews: The Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai, 1938–1945 (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1976), 133. 11. Kranzler, Japanese, Nazis & Jews, 364–366. 12. Yating Tang, “Musical Life in the Jewish Refugee Community in Shanghai: Popular and Art Music,” Journal of Music in China 4 (2002): 167–186, 172. 13. Martin Hausdorff, “Das Musikleben der immigranten” (The Musical Life of Immigrants), Shanghai Herald (Sunday Supplement), 7 April 1946, 16; and Erwin Felber, “Der kulturelle Aufbau im Distrikt,” (Cultural Development in the District), Shanghai Jewish Chronicle, 28 August 1943, 5. 14. Felber, “Der kulturelle Aufbau im Distrikt,” 5.

232  Jeremy Leong 15. Celia Applegate, “How German Is It? Nationalism and the Idea of Serious Music in the Early Nineteenth Century,” 19th-Century Music 21, no. 3 (1998): 274–296, 294. 16. Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1969), 86–87. 17. Theodor Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: The Seabury Press, 1976), 95. 18. John Baron, Intimate Music: A History of the Idea of Chamber Music (New York: Pendragon Press, 1998), 11. 19. Logemann, “Consumer Modernity,” 417. 20. Felber, “Der kulturelle Aufbau im Distrikt,” 5. Interestingly, in spite of being from different countries and times, Felber’s view of Bildung was very much in agreement with and supported by Frede V. Nielsen, an influential European philosopher in music education, who argued that the value of music was context bound and must change with time to reflect the cultural needs of society, see Marja Heimonen, “‘Bildung’ and Music Education: A Finnish Perspective,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 2, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 188–208, 191. 21. Erwin Felber, “Das erste EJAS-Konzert,” (The First EJAS Concert), Shanghai Jewish Chronicle, 28 January 1944, 2. 22. For other chamber concerts, see Erwin Felber, “EJAS-Konzert,” (EJAS Concert), Shanghai Jewish Chronicle, 22 February 1944, 3; and Erwin Felber, “Lieder -und Arienabend Sabine Rapp,” (An Evening of Songs by Sabine Rapp), Shanghai Jewish Chronicle, 1 March 1944, 4. 23. Kranzler, Japanese, Nazis & Jews, 477–491. 24. Marcia Ristaino, Port of Last Resort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 204. 25. James Ross, Escape To Shanghai (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 206–207. 26. “Modern Adult Education at the Asia Seminar,” in Shanghai Almanac 1946–47 (Shanghai: Shanghai Echo Publishing Co., [n.d.]), 63. 27. “Asia Seminar,” Shanghai Jewish Chronicle, 30 January 1944, 7. 28. Erwin Felber, “Hinter der Maske,” 6; and Erwin Felber, “Japanisches Theater,” (Japanese Theater), Shanghai Jewish Chronicle, 14 November 1943, 6. 29. Ross, 207. 30. Erwin Felber, “Philharmonisches Konzert – Japanisches Konzert,” (Philharmonic Concert – Japanese Concert), Shanghai Jewish Chronicle, 10 December 1943, 3. 31. Erwin Felber, “Philharmonisches Konzert,” (Philharmonic Concert), Shanghai Jewish Chronicle, 21 January 1944, 2. Of all the guest conductors the Municipal Orchestra had ever had, Felber considered Asahina to be the best among them. He was an exceptional interpreter of Beethoven’s works and Felber also noted his conducting style as very similar to the famous Munich conductor Hans Knappertsbusch. Felber believed Asahina must have studied with him in Germany before. 32. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, in reference to the Tripartite Pact agreement, 62. 33. Felber, “Philharmonisches Konzert – Japanisches Konzert,” 3. 34. Arch Carey, The War Years At Shanghai (New York: Vantage Press, Inc., 1967), 137. 35. Kranzler, Japanese, Nazis & Jews, 494. 36. Erwin Felber, “Galakonzert der Pao Chia,” (Gala Concert for the Baojia), Shanghai Jewish Chronicle, 30 November 1943, 2.

An Unsung Austrian Doyen 233 37. Ibid. 38. Similar theme where music was seen as an expression of solidarity and survival can be found in Guido Fackler, “Cultural Behavior and the Invention of Traditions: Music and Musical Practices in the Early Concentration Camps, 1933–36/37,” Journal of Contemporary History 45, no. 3 (2010): 601–627. 39. Erwin Felber, “Philharmonisches Konzert,” (Philharmonic Concert), Shanghai Jewish Chronicle, 14 August 1943, 2. 40. Erwin Felber, “Hundert Jahre Edvard Grieg,” (Hundred Years Edvard Grieg), Shanghai Jewish Chronicle, 3 August 1943, 3. 41. Erwin Felber, “Hundert Jahre Rimsky-Korsakoff,” (Hundred Years Rimsky-Korsakov), Shanghai Jewish Chronicle, 12 March 1944, 4. 42. Erwin Felber, “Tschaikowsky,” (Tchaikovsky), Shanghai Jewish Chronicle, 7 November 1943, 5. 43. Henri Margolinski, “Musical Characters in Shanghai Commissions” in Shanghai Almanac 1946–47 (Shanghai: Shanghai Echo Publishing Co., [n.d.]), 68. 44. Erwin Felber, “Unsere Künstler,” (Our Artists), Shanghai Jewish Chronicle, 25 December 1943, 8. 45. Margolinski, “Musical Characters,” 68.

12 Melitta and Victor Urbancic Art in Exile in Iceland Markus Helmut Lenhart

Vor der Flucht Wenn ich mich zum Aufbruch rüste, wird mich keine Reue brennen, werd’ ich keinen Freund erkennen, nichts, was mich zu halten wüßte. Ohne Trost und ohne Klagen, werd’ ich mich von allen trennen, niemandem mein Wegziel nennen, ratlos meinem eignen Fragen. Denn ich gehe im Gebote, weiß ich nur, und unterm Sterne. Unter ihm wird jede Ferne nah, und Lebende und Tote sind in seinem Licht vermischt – Weh uns allen, wenn es lischt. Melitta Urbancic, 19381 Melitta Urbancic wrote this poem on the second occasion that the family escaped from the National Socialists, just after the “Anschluss” of Austria. This time, their chosen destination was relatively exotic compared with other exile destinations: Reykjavík, a choice which was anything but obvious for at least two reasons. First, Iceland was terra incognita from the Central European perspective of the time. Second, Iceland’s entry requirements, like a lot of other states, were very unfavorable. Visas for the Kingdom of Iceland, which was joined with Denmark in a personal union, were very difficult to obtain. However, the Urbancic family was fortunate enough to be able to enter under the precondition of a contract of employment, 2 which Melitta Urbancic’s husband Victor had received. The aim of this chapter is at least threefold: First, the different stations of Victor and Melitta Urbancic’s flight from Mainz to Graz and further on to Reykjavík will be presented as a rather unusual escape route, overlooked by most scholars dealing with emigration in the wake of flight

Melitta and Victor Urbancic 235 from the National Socialist regime. The second part meanwhile focuses on the family’s establishment in Iceland. The importance of especially Victor Urbancic’s employment by various Icelandic music institutions lies in the transformative effect not only on the family but also on the musical institutions and traditions in Iceland, as it resulted in a reciprocal exchange. Last but not least, the work of Melitta Urbancic will be scrutinized. While her husband, because of his position, was personally more visible, she remained in the shadows until she was discovered in scholarship in the last years. However, even while remaining in the shadows, she produced some sources that are important for our perception of emigration.

12.1  Mainz – Graz – Reykjavík Victor Urbancic3 was born on 9 August 1903 in Vienna and died on 4 April 1958 in Reykjavík.4 He completed his education in composition, conducting and piano in Vienna, where he wrote his dissertation in musicology and was like many of his generation in Austria a pupil of Guido Adler (1855–1941), a renowned musicologist of Jewish descent, who initiated several important projects concerning the research of Austrian music. After completing his education, Urbancic was appointed in 1926 at the Mainz City Theatre and then, from 1932 onward, at the Music Academy in Mainz. In 1930, he got married in a civil ceremony to the actress, lyricist and philosopher Melitta Grünbaum (1902–1984), who came from a Jewish, Viennese family. On the occasion of their marriage she did not convert and thus a religious ceremony was not possible. With the National Socialists in power in 1933, Urbancic immediately lost his job, since he was in the diction of the National Socialists “jüdisch versippt” – living in a mixed marriage. In addition, due to the publicly known pacifism of Melitta Urbancic, the family was also politically suspicious to the new regime. 5 Therefore, the family returned to Vienna, and in 1934, Victor Urbancic was employed by the Musikverein für Steiermark to teach at its conservatory in Graz, where he was soon entrusted with the function of Deputy Director. The position included several other obligations, such as teaching musicology at the University of Graz, which back then did not have a permanent chair in musicology and relied on the willingness of suitable employees from the Musikverein to teach at least the basics of music theory and history to interested students. Their time in Graz must have been quite difficult for the family, as the Musikverein had been a hotbed of antisemitism and German nationalism since the late-nineteenth century. The situation became even more difficult when Ludwig Kelbetz (1905–1943), a musician and member of the Nazi Party, which was illegal in Austria at the time, joined the Musikverein in 1936 and vigorously propagated the so-called “Offene

236  Markus Helmut Lenhart Singstunden”, camouflaged meetings for the then still illegal National Socialists in Styria. Due to his position, Victor Urbancic was forced to participate in their organization and performance. Rudolf Habringer, who has done extensive research on the history of the Urbancic family and repeatedly published his results,6 wrote that Victor Urbancic certainly knew about the true nature of these performances.7 One can only guess how this may have made him feel. With the “Anschluss” in 1938, the family found themselves in the same predicament as in 1933. Victor Urbancic immediately explored his options to leave the country and tried to find a job abroad, but his initial attempts to be appointed to a post in the United States or Switzerland failed.8 However, a little later he received the unusual opportunity to exchange his position in Austria with that of a former fellow student, who lived in Iceland. Franz Mixa, a composer and conductor, was invited to Iceland in 1929 to organize the musical program at the Althingfeier in 1930 to celebrate the thousandth anniversary of the Icelandic parliament, following which he stayed in Reykjavík. He was born on 3 June 1902 in Vienna and died on 16 January 1994 in Munich. He studied at the Vienna State Academy of Music, where he graduated in 1927, and received his doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1929; he was also a pupil of Guido Adler. Mixa went to Iceland on the recommendation of his former teacher Robert Heger (1886–1978), who later became a member of the Nazi Party and had a distinguished carrier in the “Third Reich”. Mixa remained in Reykjavík, where he founded inter alia the Conservatory. However, he never lost contact with Austria and returned repeatedly, including for guest engagements in Graz.9 What is not mentioned in the Oesterreichische Musiklexikon10 and in his biography11: In 1932, he also joined the Nazi Party.12 How active Mixa was as a party member cannot be estimated yet, but he made a career during the Nazi period and from 1938 until he had to join the Wehrmacht in 1943 led, inter alia, the local branch of the Reich Chamber of Music.13 After a preliminary exchange of letters, Urbancic and Mixa met in Graz in May 1938 to negotiate the possibility of an exchange of their posts. Indeed, the exchange succeeded: In September 1938, Mixa took over almost all Urbancic’s tasks in Graz. Until then, of course, some negotiations had to take place in order to make this exchange possible. To make matters worse, Urbancic had to negotiate with Kelbetz of all people on behalf of Mixa. Finally, he managed to secure the desired position for Mixa. At the same time, Mixa successfully negotiated for Urbancic in Reykjavík. After the exchange had been arranged, Urbancic initially traveled alone to Iceland to explore the situation and look for an apartment. On 31 July 1938, a few days before his departure, he and Melitta Urbancic married in a religious ceremony, after

Melitta and Victor Urbancic 237 she had converted to the Catholic faith earlier the same day, a decision she did not take lightly.14 On 22 August 1938, Urbancic arrived by boat in Iceland. Just a month later, earlier than planned, his family followed him in a dramatic escape to Iceland: The situation in Graz had become too dangerous for his wife. Not all of the family members could escape, however: Melitta’s father, Alfred Grünbaum, died on 10 March 1938 under dubious circumstances and her mother Ilma Grünbaum, née Mauthner, died in Theresienstadt in 1943.15 In the following years until his untimely death in 1958, Victor Urbancic worked tirelessly for various Icelandic music institutions and did extensive pioneering work in Iceland for which he is still remembered for today. It should not go unmentioned that toward the end of his life, there were certain animosities – some of these with a nationalistic undertone – within the Icelandic musical establishment directed against him.16 In Austria, there was no interest after the war to invite Victor Urbancic and his family back. In a letter from the “Free Austrian Movement in Britain” written by Eva Kolmer on 4 March 1946 to the City Councilor for Culture in Vienna, Viktor Matejka, the author concluded with a reference to Urbancic, “[der sich] nach Österreich sehnt und eine Anforderung braucht. Koennt [sic] Ihr ihn brauchen?”, thus asking whether there was any possibility of employment in Austria. It is not known if this request was ever answered.17 In any case, Urbancic stayed in Iceland. In 1949, he finally applied for Icelandic citizenship.

12.2  Victor Urbancic in Iceland Franz Mixa initiated the establishment of musical institutions that would be continued by Victor Urbancic. The structures chosen by both men were based on those known to them from Austria. In the corresponding research literature, it is emphasized that all the institutions for musical practice and especially for musical education were in fact totally new, so there was no need to transform existing institutions.18 What Urbancic initiated was the attempt to build an independent Icelandic musical tradition in the sense of a national school. Interestingly enough, in the research literature, this attempt has been and continues to be compared to that of Béla Bartók,19 who was particularly keen to establish a national school of Hungarian modern music by integrating elements of Hungarian folk music. In light of Urbancic’s origins in the former Austrian-Hungarian Empire, the reference to Bartók in musical and cultural terms appears interesting and appropriate. On a personal level, which may have been less well-known in Iceland, the reference back to the lost Habsburg Empire is interesting insofar as the Urbancic family came from what is now Slovenia and Victor Urbancic himself was fluent in both Serbian and Croatian. Even though, having grown

238  Markus Helmut Lenhart up in Vienna, he had not lived in the direct vicinity of the Slovene or South Slavic national movement, he must have been quite familiar with the tensions between a transnational musical tradition and the efforts to define a national culture. With its first step toward complete independence from Denmark, Iceland experienced a situation comparable to the one of the smaller nationalities within the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. Urbancic introduced another surprising innovation: The establishment of mixed choirs. Pure male choirs had been the norm until then and it was obviously difficult, apart from occasional collaborations, to establish permanent mixed choirs. In Iceland itself, this fact was registered with astonishment in contemporary writings on the history of music. The phenomenon of extremely strong male bonding was mentioned as a reason for the reluctance of men to join mixed choirs. 20 The fact that choral music was one of the first problems that Urbancic faced immediately after his arrival was due to the fact that he then had to organize the musical part of a festival on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Iceland’s independence21 – albeit Iceland remained associated with the Danish crown until 1944. This celebration confronted Urbancic directly with a (personal) problem that would accompany him throughout his entire time in Iceland: The Icelandic language. The Urbancic family had no knowledge of the language before their emigration. In the context of his professional activities, Urbancic had to conduct a 50-member choir at the above-mentioned ceremony. The program included songs by Icelandic composers with Icelandic lyrics, a language that Urbancic was unfamiliar with and the entire rhythm of which he had to grasp. At the same time, this baptism of fire laid the foundation for his following fruitful examination of the Icelandic language, especially in connection with music. 22 In this context, one project in particular needs to be highlighted, which can also be viewed in the larger framework of the idea of a national musical tradition. This idea gained ground in Europe during the nineteenth century but was far from producing a uniform scholarly approach. One approach was to search for patterns in musical expression and composition, primarily in folk music, which was seen as a genuine expression of a nation; another focused on national language as an inspiration and integral part of a national music. 23 Thus, in 1943, Urbancic performed Bach’s Johannesoratorium in the Icelandic language. As textual basis for the chorales, Urbancic resorted to the Passion poems of the Icelandic pastor and poet Hallgrímur Pétursson (1614–1674). Victor Urbancic was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of the Falcon in 1944 for this performance. 24 The appreciation of this achievement is evident both in contemporary25 and in recent texts. 26

Melitta and Victor Urbancic 239 From a musicological point of view, it is remarkable that the Central European musical tradition was here brought together with a preaching tradition in a Nordic language to produce a single work of art by someone who may have been very familiar with this particular musical tradition, but had just learned Icelandic and was not familiar with the tradition of Protestant sermons from which the texts were taken. It should be kept in mind that Urbancic was a Roman Catholic, but the music and lyrics were intimately part of Protestant religious culture, though it should also be noted that Bach’s music had already transcended narrow (religious) constraints. The importance of the religious aspect must remain open to the current state of research. The fact is that, in Iceland, this question was not raised, even though Victor Urbancic’s religious background was no secret. 27 It is also worth noting that the textual content of the work and Urbancic’s fate as an emigrant were in the broadest sense related to each other. Hallgrímur Pétursson’s work Passíusálmar28 is a sequence of 50 hymns on the subject of the Passion of Christ, partly with references to Hallgrímur Pétursson’s own personal, painful experiences in life; thus, these texts place a history of suffering center-stage. Whether Urbancic identified to some degree with the general idea of suffering due to his forced emigration remains open to speculation. Bitter feelings concerning the emigration and fate of Melitta Urbancic’s parents would not be a surprise. In an interview from 1948, in which both the question of a return to Austria as well as the situation in Austria immediately after the war were raised, Urbancic gave only very guarded answers. Obviously, he no longer expected that he would receive an offer of a position in Austria or Germany, so he saw his future in Iceland. As far as Austria is concerned, he briefly addressed the generally difficult situation of the occupation but did not mention the years of National Socialism. 29 This restraint is also in keeping with the answers to the questions at the very beginning of this particular interview regarding how he came to Iceland, in which he did not reveal the underlying story: These give the impression that it was an ordinary appointment. Mainz and Graz were also mentioned, but again without saying a word about National Socialism. 30 Bitterness cannot be detected in this interview, although private feelings such as disappointment about the loss of his homeland and the fact that he was not invited back as well as the horror concerning the fate of his wife’s relatives can be inferred, even if they are not explicitly tangible. More of these feelings can be detected in the poems of his wife. The fact that Urbancic did not simply forget Austria is evident in many of his actions. He traveled to Austria rather soon after the end of the war.31 He also sought artistic contacts among Austrian artists and invited them to Iceland, mostly for short engagements. For example, when Verdi’s Rigoletto was performed at the inauguration of the

240  Markus Helmut Lenhart Icelandic National Theatre in 1950, the first time in Iceland’s history that an opera was performed almost entirely with an Icelandic cast, the exception within the ensemble was the Austrian soprano Else Mühl.32 Another sign of his attachment to his old homeland was a festive concert with works by Franz Schubert and Franz Schmidt held in Reykjavík on 15 May 1955, which he conducted on the occasion of the signing of the Austrian State Treaty.33 His wife once remarked that her husband “[habe] eine geistige Brücke (geschlagen) zwischen der nie vergessenen Heimat seines Herzens und seiner Kunst und dem Land, das ihm das Schicksal als Ackerboden angewiesen hat” – a statement that emphasized Victor Urbancic’s emotional attachment to his home country and how he formed a bridge to his new home.34 As Victor Urbancic was quite reluctant to offer any hints concerning his own feelings with regard to this topic, as the interview from 1948 made obvious, we have to rely on sources offered by his wife. Whether it concerns Victor Urbancic or Melitta Urbancic, the question of remembering emigration on account of National Socialism is in any case far from straightforward – this applies to Iceland and Austria alike, although for various reasons. Due to his strong public presence, Victor Urbancic became quite well known during his lifetime, but although he was not completely forgotten after his death, he was thereafter barely mentioned in Iceland. Only in the last 20 years have his work and legacy started to be discussed again. This is linked not only to a new interest in the earlier history of Iceland’s musical institutions but also to a new awareness concerning Iceland’s position during the Second World War. Austria has “discovered” him only in these past 20 years. Before that, various older jubilee volumes of the institutions in Graz for which he had worked intensively “downgraded” him to a mere footnote in their history. So it is a novelty that one of those institutions, which traces its existence back to the Musikverein, the Johann-Joseph-Fux-Konservatorium, in 2019 named one of its rooms after him: The Victor-Urbancic-Saal. That it took Austria and in this case Graz so long to be willing to deal with the history of the Urbancic family is no surprise considering Austria’s complicated relationship with its own past. Interestingly in both cases – in Iceland and in Austria – Melitta Urbancic plays an important role in giving a voice to the experiences of her family.

12.3  Melitta Urbancic – Flight and Arrival For a long time, Melitta Urbancic was in an even worse position in public (and scholarly) perception than her husband, both in Iceland and in Austria. An engagement with her person and her work in both countries only began in the last 20 years and was at first closely linked to the rediscovery of her husband. Lately, however, she has begun to receive growing attention in her own right, as it was her who put in words what

Melitta and Victor Urbancic 241 her husband seemingly never could. Thus, her writings have turned out to be our most important source concerning the feelings that accompanied forced emigration as well as the growing acceptance, even love for the new homeland. Yet her importance lies not only in this testimony, but also in her active collaboration in some parts of her husband’s work. Being active is an aspect generally often underestimated when it comes to the role of women within the experience of emigration and translocation or translation of culture. She was born in Vienna on 21 February 1902 and died in Reykjavík on 17 February 1984.35 She studied German philology and philosophy at the University of Vienna and at the University of Heidelberg. Her teachers included Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) and Friedrich Gundolf (1880–1931). She finally completed her studies with a doctorate at the University of Heidelberg. After that, she pursued a career as an actress, for which she had already prepared herself in addition to her academic studies. Under the stage name Makarska, she had her first engagements in Baden-Baden and Koblenz. In 1930, she married Victor Urbancic, lived with him in Mainz and became the mother of two children, until the family had to return to Austria due to the antisemitic policies of the National Socialists. In 1934, the family settled in Graz where their third child was born; another daughter was born in Iceland in 1945. In 1938, Melitta Urbancic had to cope alone with her and her children’s emigration as her husband had already left for Iceland. This turned out to be more dramatic than expected, as she had to leave earlier than planned after being warned of her imminent arrest. The situation was also stressful because of the fate of her parents: Her father died shortly after the “Anschluss” under unclear circumstances, while her mother was not granted a visa for Denmark or Iceland and perished in 1943 in Theresienstadt. In Iceland, Melitta Urbancic pursued rather different activities: She wrote philosophical texts in German, some of which were published after 1945, translated from Icelandic and worked as a sculptor. Her works are still displayed in public buildings in Iceland. Finally – and surprisingly – she became a beekeeping pioneer in Iceland. Professionally, she was a teacher of foreign languages for many decades, not only of German, but of English and French, too. Yet she also collaborated with her husband. Between 1940 and 1956, Victor Urbancic collected Icelandic folk songs, some of them never before written down, and adapted them for mixed choir performance. This collecting activity formed the starting point for various activities that introduced Icelanders to their native singing tradition. In order to allow an international public access to these folk songs, the lyrics were translated into English and German by Melitta Urbancic. However, the planned printing did not take place due to the death of Victor Urbancic. Melitta Urbancic continued to work on this groundbreaking

242  Markus Helmut Lenhart work of Icelandic music culture on her own, but it could not be printed due to copyright issues. It was not until much later, in 1998, that a printed series with 12 selected titles was published by the Icelandic Music Information Centre (MIC). With regard to this collaboration, the question arises to what extent Melitta Urbancic was involved in the adaptation of the Passion poems of Hallgrímur Pétursson for the aforementioned performance of the Johannespassion by Bach in 1943. After all, her husband had already started collecting those folk songs, and she had been actively involved in their translation. Some of her poems, which she wrote privately, indicate that she accompanied her husband on his travels throughout Iceland, surely at least some of them occasions for the collection of local folk songs, and it seems quite possible that she was responsible for some of the transcriptions of the lyrics while her husband concentrated on the tunes. Taking into consideration that she was a quite gifted learner of languages and a poetess, it seems a plausible assumption that she collaborated on or at least discussed with her husband the adaptation of Pétursson’s poems for the Johannespassion. Melitta Urbancic’s own lyrical works were only occasionally published in German but were not noted by the broader public in Austria or presented at all in Iceland. A milestone in this regard was an exhibition in the National Library of Iceland in 2014, in which Melitta Urbancic and her work, especially her lyrical work, were presented in German and significantly also in Icelandic.36 The latter is noteworthy because Melitta Urbancic wrote her poems in German and the 51 selected poems, only a fraction of her extensive work, 37 first had to be translated into Icelandic. The significance of this “rediscovery” for Icelandic society is summarized by the Icelandic author Sjón as follows: I think it is important to hook Iceland into the narrative of the Shoah in the Nordic countries. Even though the number of people is small – both who were allowed to stay and the ones who were turned away – it is as we know a story where every individual counts. Our rediscovery of Melitta Urbancic, her life and writings, is very important as it adds to our understanding of the plight of the exiles who ended up in Iceland and at the same time makes us face our shameful history. 38 The poems impressively reflect the author’s private experience while allowing for a very intimate insight into her engagement with the Holocaust, the fate of emigration and, finally, the acceptance of this fate, including her appreciation of her new homeland. The immediacy arises from the fact that the poems were written in the first years after arriving in Iceland, not after a longer period of reflection. The different emphases in content are reflected in the division into two halves:

Melitta and Victor Urbancic 243 The first part, “Zwischen Gestern und Morgen” (“Between Yesterday and Tomorrow”), essentially deals with the Holocaust and the experience of emigration, 39 while the second part, “Hier und Heut” (“Here and Now”), reflects her increasing esteem of Iceland’s nature and its society.40 While the poem introducing this chapter deals with a theme from the first part, the following reflects a new awareness of Iceland and belongs to the second part of the catalog: Abschied von Akureyri Jetzt weht schon der Abschiedswind durch Gras und Blätter, Der wandelt auch geschwind das gute Wetter. Noch einmal will ich gehn auf Gartenwegen, die Hänge leuchten sehn dem Meer entgegen – Noch einmal, liebe Stadt, Dir danken, du, Die mich bezaubert hat Im seligen Nu. Wie war’n die Tage schön - ! Schnell wird mein Schritt. Ich nehm den Glanz der Höh’n Im Herzen mit! Melitta Urbancic41

12.4 Conclusion The importance of Melitta and Victor Urbancic can be summed up in light of their mutual “rediscovery” in the following respects. Melitta’s remark that her husband “eine geistige Brücke (geschlagen) [habe] zwischen der nie vergessenen Heimat seines Herzens und seiner Kunst und dem Land, das ihm das Schicksal als Ackerboden angewiesen hat”,42 – being a bridge between the old and the new homeland – is also true of herself. Both adjusted their Central European cultural background to Iceland according to the realms of possibility and necessity and in a reciprocal relationship, thereby changing Iceland and allowing themselves to be changed by their new homeland. An important point is the fact that we tend to overlook the contributions of women in the context of the transposition of culture, as most women operated in less visible positions and environments. Melitta Urbancic is a good example of this finding: Not holding an official position within the network of Icelandic musical institutions, she was largely

244  Markus Helmut Lenhart overlooked by contrast to her husband, who was much more visible. Yet her poems are today an important source for our knowledge about private feelings concerning emigration and the adaptation to a new environment. Sjón’s assessment that Melitta Urbancic’s recently published poems for the first time made it clear to Icelanders that the Holocaust, though not central, is also a part of the history of Iceland, is an undeniable contribution to how Iceland sees its own place within European history. In this sense, the Urbancics moreover form a bridge between Iceland and Continental Europe, as they carried one of the most terrible chapters in European history to the edge of the world. Their fate is also a reminder that there are many, still unexpected routes of emigration to be explored in depth.

Notes 1. Melitta Urbancic, “Vor der Flucht,” in In welcher Sprache träumen Sie? Österreichische Lyrik des Exils und des Widerstands, ed. Miguel Herz-Kestranek, Konstantin Kaiser, and Daniela Strigl (Vienna: Theodor Kramer Gesellschaft, 2007), 486. Also: Pétur Urbancic, “Vielseitig, Engagiert, Anpassungsfähig …,” Der literarische Zaunkönig, no. 1 (2008): 55. The poem deals with the emigration and separation from one’s home and one’s friends. In the second part, Melitta Urbancic used the word “Sterne” – stars – quite possibly as an allusion to the Star of David and thus to Judaism and her connection to it. Encompassing the living and the dead with this star, she seems to fear what the future may yet hold. 2. Ursula Seeber, ed., Frá hjara veraldar. Melitta Urbancic (1902–1984) – Í útlegð frá Austurríki á Íslandi. Sýning í Þjóðarbókhlöðunni í Reykjavík, opnuð 8. Mars 2014: Vom Rand der Welt. Melitta Urbancic (1902–1984): Österreichisches Exil in Island. Ausstellung in Islands Nationalbibliothek, eröffnet 8. März 2014. With the assistance of Pétur Urbancic (Reykjavík: Landsbókasafn Íslands – Háskólabókasafn, 2014), 17; Peter Stenberg, “The Saga of Melitta Urbancic,” Scandinavian-Canadian Studies / Études scandinaves au Canada, no. 24 (2017), 211. 3. The name is of Slovenian origin and in the German-speaking context was written “Urbantschitsch”, due to elevation to the peerage “von Urbantschitsch”. In Iceland, the family chose the spelling “Urbancic”. For the sake of simplicity, this chapter uses the spelling “Urbancic” throughout. 4. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, the information on Victor Urbancic is based on Rudolf Habringer, “Vom Treten in der Mühle,” http://www. rudolfhabringer.at/index.php/vom-treten-in-der-muhle/ (accessed 31 August 2020). 5. Eva Weickart, “Dr. Melitta Urbantschitsch (Urbancic): Philosophin, Lyrikerin, Schauspielerin, Bildhauerin,” in Frauenleben in Magenza: Die Porträts jüdischer Frauen und Mädchen aus dem Mainzer Frauenkalender und Texte zur Frauengeschichte im jüdischen Mainz, ed. Frauenbüro Landeshauptstadt Mainz, 4. und vollständig überarbeitete Auflage (Mainz: Landeshauptstadt Mainz, 2015). 6. He even published a novel in 2008, Island-Passion, which retells the history of Victor Urbancic and his family, interwoven with the story of an Austrian student of musicology, who explores this history. Rudolf Habringer, “Island-Passion” (Vienna: Picus Verlag, 2008).

Melitta and Victor Urbancic 245 7. Rudolf Habringer, “In dunklen Zeiten: Über das Wirken des Musikers Victor Urbancic am Grazer Konservatorium,” in Gradus ad musicam: 200 Jahre Johann-Joseph-Fux-Konservatorium, ed. Eduard Lanner, Susanne-Luise Janes, and Klaus Tattermus (Graz: Johann-Joseph-FuxKonservatorium 2016), 51. 8. Habringer, “In dunklen Zeiten,” 51. 9. Georg Zauner, Der Komponist Franz Mixa: Leben und Werk. With the assistance of Hertha Töpper (Tutzing: Schneider, 2002), 27–29. 10. Alexander Rausch, “Mixa, Franz,” in Oesterreichisches Musiklexikon online, http://www.musiklexikon.ac.at/ml/musik_M/Mixa_Franz.xml (accessed 31 August 2020). 11. Zauner, Franz Mixa. 12. He joined the Nazi Party on 16 January 1932, with membership number 782,617. Fred K. Prieberg, Handbuch Deutsche Musiker 1933–1945 (Kiel: Eigenverlag, 2004), 4650–4651. 13. Habringer, “In dunklen Zeiten,” 52, FN 15. 14. Habringer, “In dunklen Zeiten,” 53; see also the parish records: Graz-St. Peter Taufindex 1916–1938, Index G, accessed January 11, 2020, http://data.matricula-online.eu/de/oesterreich /graz-seckau/graz-stpeter/616/?pg=16. Graz-St. Peter Trauungsbuch XVIII 1938, http://data. matricula-online.eu/de/oesterreich/graz-seckau/graz-st-peter/606/?pg=10 (accessed 31 August 2020). 15. Habringer, “In dunklen Zeiten,” 53. 16. Cornelius van Alsum, “Melitta Urbancic: Vom Rande Der Welt,” kalmenzone. literaturzeitschrift, no. 6 (2014): 53. 17. Rudolf Habringer, “Victor Urbancic,” in Lexikon verfolgter Musiker und Musikerinnen der NS-Zeit, ed. Claudia Maurer Zenck and Peter Petersen. (Hamburg: Universität Hamburg, 2006). Accessed January 11, 2020, https://www.lexm.uni-hamburg.de/object/lexm_lexmperson_00001311 (accessed 31 August 2020). 18. Ingibjörg Eyþórsdóttir, “Stríðsgróðinn – Evrópsk hámenning: Erlendir tónlistarmenn á Íslandi á 20. öld. grein II,” Lesbók Morgunblaðsins, 21 Apríl 2007, 5. 19. Árni Heimir Ingólfsson, “Á flótta undan hakakrossinum – 1. Hluti: Victor Urbancic,” Lesbók Morgunblaðsins, júlí 7, 2001, 4. 20. Eyþórsdóttir, Stríðsgróðinn, 5. 21. Eyþórsdóttir, Stríðsgróðinn, 5. Ingólfsson, Victor Urbancic, 5. 22. Eyþórsdóttir, Stríðsgróðinn, 5. Ingólfsson, Victor Urbancic, 5. 23. See e.g. Bohlman, Philip V. The Music of European Nationalism: Cultural Identity and Modern History. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO 2004. 24. Habringer, “Vom Treten in der Mühle.” 25. Habringer, “Vom Treten in der Mühle.” 26. E.g. Eyþórsdóttir, Stríðsgróðinn, 5. Ingólfsson, Victor Urbancic, 5. 27. Eyþórsdóttir, Stríðsgróðinn, 5. It was a non-Icelandic author who raised the same question: van Alsum, “Melitta Urbancic”: 53. 28. Full title: Historia pínunnar og dauðans Drottins vors Jesú Kristí, með hennar sérlegustu lærdóms-, áminningar- og huggunargreinum, ásamt bænum og þakkargjörðum, í sálmum og söngvísum með ýmsum tónum samsett og skrifuð anno 1659. 29. “… Ísland er minn starfsvettvangur …: Segir Dr. Victor Urbantschitsch,” Musica 1, no. 3 (1948): 6. 30. “... Ísland er minn starfsvettvangur...”: 5. 31. “... Ísland er minn starfsvettvangur...”. 32. Ingólfsson, Victor Urbancic, 5. 33. Habringer, “In dunklen Zeiten,” 55.

246  Markus Helmut Lenhart 34. Seeber, Melitta Urbancic, 19. 35. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, the biographical information on Melitta Urbancic is based on Seeber, Melitta Urbancic. 36. Seeber, Melitta Urbancic. 37. Stenberg, “Melitta Urbancic,” 215. 38. Stenberg, “Melitta Urbancic,” 215. 39. Stenberg, “Melitta Urbancic,” 218. 40. Stenberg, “Melitta Urbancic,” 219. 41. Seeber, Melitta Urbancic, 174. Melitta Urbancic describes in this poem the city Akureyri, in the north of Iceland, its surroundings and her own elevated feelings having been there. 42. Seeber, Melitta Urbancic.

13 Ingolf Dahl (1912–1970) Multifaceted Musician—Knowledge and Cultural Transfer Between Central Europe and Los Angeles Melina Paetzold In 1935, Arnold Schoenberg wrote in a letter to the first president of the California Federation of Music Clubs, Bessie Bartlett Frankel: I want to propose you […] come with us […] to the class of ‘Musical Criticism’ at the University of Southern California […] I know what I am doing there is of the greatest importance for everybody who is interested in music […] There will certainly be in perhaps twenty years a chapter in the musical history of Los Angeles: ‘What Schoenberg has achieved in Los Angeles’; and perhaps there will be another chapter, asking ‘What have the people and the society of Los Angeles taken of the advantage offered by Schoenberg?’1 Certainly, Schoenberg had a great impact on the music scene in Los Angeles after his emigration, but can he alone lay claim to the musical developments on the West Coast in the twentieth century? Should we not consider more musicians and pedagogues apart from the famous dodecaphonist? One of these, almost forgotten today, is the multifaceted musician Ingolf Dahl, who, like Schoenberg, fled the Nazi regime in Europe for Los Angeles. These special circumstances of Dahl’s life path were a catalyst for him becoming a mediator between two worlds and musical styles. Regarding cultural and knowledge transfer, this chapter addresses the influences which the American musical style had on Dahl’s European way of composing, and vice versa, Ingolf Dahl’s impact as a translator and teacher on the music scene of the United States, and in particular, Los Angeles. It will address the following questions: what kind of challenges, personal and professional, did Dahl face as an artist after his emigration to the United States? Did his new surroundings have an influence on him as a musician and on his way of composing? If yes, how did he adapt, and what were the crucial influences? Was there a need for Dahl to change his musical style after emigration? How did Ingolf Dahl’s career develop? With what kind of other artists and musicians did he meet and collaborate? How did Ingolf Dahl, as a

248  Melina Paetzold European, have an impact on the music scene of the United States? How did he transfer information and knowledge from Europe to the United States? In terms of translation and teaching, the following questions arise: how did Dahl impact the music scene in the United States with his translations and his teaching? Why was there a need for translations? How did Dahl, as a teacher, transfer knowledge to his students? What kind of role did his European background play here? In Europe, Ingolf Dahl is almost forgotten today, but in the United States, he is still very well known. This is reflected in the available sources. Almost all newspaper articles, papers, and dissertations are in English and published in the United States. In 1975, the musicologist James Berdahl wrote what is most likely the first dissertation about Ingolf Dahl: Ingolf Dahl: His life and work, 2 but there are also recent publications, such as Isabell Woelfel’s Translating the Texts of Vocal Music: Ingolf Dahl’s Performances of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire Opus 21 in Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s (2016). 3 Another source of information is the self-published biography, The lives of Ingolf Dahl,4 by Dahl’s stepson Anthony Linick (1938), who wrote comprehensively about his family history and refers to many of Dahl’s personal documents and correspondences. Professor of music and humanities, Michael Saffle, wrote about the problems and possibilities of this self-published biography. 5 Further insights can be gained from an interview with Dahl’s sister, AnnaBritta Marcus (1918–2020), which I conducted myself, and various websites of organizations or societies for which Dahl worked or from which he received accolades.

13.1  Ingolf Dahl’s Life Path Ingolf Dahl was born Walther Ingolf Marcus in Hamburg in 1912 to his Swedish mother Hilda Marcus (1880–1976), née Dahl, and German father Paul Marcus (1880–1958).6 Although Paul Marcus was Jewish, Judaism played no role in the Marcus’ lives—at least not until the Nazis came to power in Germany. For example, Ingolf Dahl’s parents registered him as “non-religious preference” on his birth certificate,7 and in 2019 his sister Anna-Britta Marcus confirmed in an interview that the family did not actively practice their religion.8 Dahl started very early with his musical education. He had piano lessons and composed his first pieces for his brothers Holger (1916–2008) and Gert (1914–2008) who played the flute and violin, respectively.9 At the age of 18, he gave his debut concert with his teacher Edith WeissMann (1885–1951) in the Hamburger Musikhalle10 and soon thereafter moved to Cologne to study composition with Philipp Jarnach (1892–1982),11 who was one of the modern composers in Germany

Ingolf Dahl (1912–1970) 249 at that time. Only three semesters later, in the summer of 1932, Dahl decided to leave Germany to continue his studies in Zurich.12 Two factors must have been crucial: firstly, that the Nazis gained more and more strength in Germany, and secondly, his asthma, from which he wanted to recover in the surroundings of the Alps.13 In Zurich, Dahl stayed with the Jewish family of his aunt, Else Katzenstein (1877–1932), and continued his music studies at the conservatory.14 Later, in May 1933, he changed his major to art history at the University of Zurich.15 Whether he ever gained a degree in either music or the arts is not clear, but these short periods of education show that he was, presumably, primarily an autodidact. Parallel to his studies, Dahl began to work at the Stadttheater Zürich—today the Opera—and rose in the late 1920s to the position of assistant conductor.16 In the 1930s, the Stadttheater was known for its advanced musical repertoire and played a special role in Europe as numerous composers who were forbidden and suppressed in Germany came to Zurich to have their works performed. These conditions enabled Dahl to be involved in the preparation of several opera premieres and performances by world-class composers such as Alban Berg’s Lulu and Paul Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler.17 The total six and a half years Dahl spent in Zurich were a formative period for him as a composer and musician with European roots. However, Zürich also became an uncomfortable place for Ingolf Dahl. In 1933, Switzerland was already denying Jews the status of “political refugees,” and a few years later, in 1938, the Nazis closed in further with the annexation of Austria. During a difficult time when Dahl was restricted to playing in the Stadttheater orchestra, he met the Californian woman Etta Gordon Linick (1905–1970), with whom he fell in love and followed to Los Angeles in 1939.18 In 1942, to hide his identity in the United States, Dahl officially changed his name from Walther Ingolf Marcus to Ingolf Dahl19 —a combination of his middle name and his mother’s maiden name—and in the following year, he became a US-American citizen. 20 According to Anthony Linick, he was convinced that his “employment prospects in America would be better if he freed himself from such an obviously Jewish name as Marcus.”21 After his emigration, Dahl changed not only his name but also denied his Jewish heritage, claiming, for example, to be a son of Swedish parents, 22 and spreading information that he had come to the United States in 1938. 23 Those uncertain about Dahl’s identity ranged from, for example, the music critic Walter Arlen (1920), who was surprised to hear that Dahl originated from Germany, that he was Jewish, and a fellow refugee, 24 to his stepson Anthony Linick, who first became aware after the death of his parents in 1970, that his stepfather was born in Germany, and that he was one of the many European refugees who fled the Nazi regime. The only person

250  Melina Paetzold who knew about his “true” identity in the United States was his wife, Etta Dahl. His beginnings in Los Angeles presented challenges. Dahl often had to cope with financial difficulties, until he was employed at the University of Southern California (USC) in 1945. In the following years, he established a varied musical career as a composer, pianist, pedagogue, and conductor. Major influences, among others, on his professional musical life, were the “Evenings on the Roof” concert series, the “Ojai Music Festival,” his cooperation with Stravinsky in the 1940s, and his responsibilities at the USC. Dahl’s work has received several awards. Among the honors were two “Guggenheim fellowships for music composition” in 1951 and 1960, 25 the “USC Excellence in Teaching Award” in 1967, 26 and a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1954.27 Dorothy Lamb Crawford who wrote several books about music in Los Angeles describes Ingolf Dahl “as one of Los Angeles’ most admired and loved musicians.”28

13.2  Between Two Worlds As the historians Wolfgang Rathert and Berndt Ostendorf29 indicate, thousands of emigrants from the music industry fled Germany for the United States in the twentieth century—a new homeland that was experiencing a fundamental economic and political crisis. Apart from the difficulties of establishing themselves as artists under these problematic conditions, musicians and composers like Dahl faced additional challenges: they had to cope with differences in the musical styles between Central Europe and US-America. In Central Europe, home to Dahl’s musical roots, the musical style changed decisively in favor of extended tonality or atonality. According to Hermann, 30 at the beginning of the twentieth century, the strict qualitative differentiation between consonant and dissonant and the dependency upon a tonal center, which provided rules for resolving a dissonance, softened. As a consequence, the 12 tones were more equally used; however, composer preferences led to various weightings, resulting in a kind of tonal center. This provoked Arnold Schoenberg to his dodecaphonic technique, with which he intended to make all 12 tones finally equal. Although Europe and the United States were in contact and exchanging ideas concerning contemporary music, the musical developments on each side of the Atlantic moved in very different directions. As Starr31 states, in the 1930s, American composers tried to find an American music style or identity, which could compete with the European developments of modernism. The approach was to combine American vernacular with art music, primarily with the integration of jazz elements and folk music—especially, according to Chase, 32 tribal

Ingolf Dahl (1912–1970) 251 songs of the native Americans, African-American spirituals, AngloAmerican folk music, and melodies of cowboy songs. Two of the most typical and famous American composers of the past and present are George Gershwin (1898–1937) and Aaron Copland (1900–1990). Both had their own—but also very similar—ways of finding their American sound and style. Starr33 determines expansions of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic vocabulary as the characteristics of their compositions and adds that all American composers were mainly oriented toward the “‘tonal’ composers of early European modernism— such as Debussy and Stravinsky—[…], rather than the ‘atonal’ Second Viennese School.” He continues, “‘tonality’ and ‘atonality’ were not central theoretical and stylistic issues [in North America], as they were for many European composers at that time.” With his emigration, Dahl became a link between these two worlds and musical styles through translating Stravinsky’s Poetics of music or the lyrics of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire and teaching at the USC. Both translating and teaching were primarily about familiarizing the American audience with the music of European musicians and emigrants and exposing them to “new” sounds. Before evaluating Dahl’s impact in Los Angeles or the United States, there is still one more factor to be considered: the other emigrants from Nazi-occupied Europe. Rathert34 expresses that exiled musicians, like Dahl, almost exclusively encountered competition from Europeans, and only a few North Americans. Artists within this group were, according to the music critic and author Alex Ross, 35 Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók, Rachmaninov, Weill, Milhaud, Hindemith, Krenek, and Eisler. Accordingly, Dahl was neither the only nor the first musician to be a mediator between these two locations. In the following sections, his significant contributions to his new musical surroundings will be shown.

13.3 Cultural and Knowledge Transfer—A Two-Way Street Arriving in Los Angeles in 1939, Ingolf Dahl had great difficulty earning a living as a musician. In his first two years, he only revised parts of the Suite for piano and stopped composing until 1941.36 Anthony Linick describes Dahl’s first American years with the words: “displacement, isolation, illness, unemployment and emotional collapse.”37 In addition to the challenges posed by emigration, such as isolation and displacement, two things in particular occupied Dahl in the early 1940s, and possibly prevented him from composing: firstly, his serious financial situation that forced him to apply “for unemployment benefits on several occasions,”38 and which was the reason he needed to constantly look for new jobs; and secondly, his personal life. After marrying in 1940, Dahl, who had had relationships with men and women from

252  Melina Paetzold a young age, admitted that he also wanted to be with men. In a time where homosexuality was forbidden in the United States, this decision was emotionally very challenging for Dahl and, of course, resulted in further problems in his marriage. Nevertheless, Dahl remained married his whole life and Etta Dahl kept his affaires secret.39 These personal and professional matters would not have allowed Dahl much time for composing. James Berdahl40 divides Dahl’s music into four periods, of which the first two cover the years surrounding his emigration. The first period (1933–1942) encompasses Dahl’s time in Switzerland, where he was influenced by atonal expressionism, and his works featured intense chromaticism and free atonal sections,41 as well as the years in which he ceased composing. This period ends for Berdahl42 with the Allegro and Arioso (1942) for woodwind quintet, which he regards as a transitional work into the second neoclassical period (1944–1952). The quintet was premiered on 22 May 1943 at the Festival of Modern Music. Linick writes, “local reviews were favorable, but the early history of the work was disappointing,”43 and adds that Dahl began to reject his Schoenbergian style. In 1942, Dahl and Igor Stravinsky met for the first time, and afterward Dahl became Alexei Haieff Stravinsky’s closest professional associate until 1948.44 This cooperation could have influenced his own way of composing toward a more neoclassical style. Another influence at that time could have been the American contemporary music scene in Los Angeles, with which Dahl came in contact, especially as a part of the “Evenings on the Roof” concert series. He played many new compositions by his American contemporaries, and in 1944, for example, he and Sol Babitz (1911–1972) completed the edition of Ives’ Third Sonata for violin and piano.45 Although Dahl had already adapted his “European” compositional style in the Allegro and Arioso to his new surroundings, it did not bring him great success, leading him to further stylistic modifications in his next piece, Music for Brass Instruments (1944). The jazz-influenced rhythms in the second movement were described by Lawrence Morton as “very American,”46 and Linick suggested, “Copland must have been a strong influence.”47 This time, Dahl received the desired recognition. Music for Brass Instruments has been recorded several times, was the theme music of at least two radio shows, and has remained one of his most popular compositions.48 Berdahl49 differentiates between two factors that affected Dahl, changing his way of composing. Firstly, the influence of American music, especially jazz, which resulted in Dahl’s use of syncopated and asymmetrical rhythms, and secondly, his acquaintance with Igor Stravinsky in the 1940s, which can be observed, for example, in the Concerto a Tre (1947). However, is it really necessary to distinguish between the “neoclassical European” and the “American” factor? Is it not rather probable

Ingolf Dahl (1912–1970) 253 that Ingolf Dahl was influenced by other European modernist styles and American music elements, which had previously been intertwined? Starr states, “Copland’s great initial discovery was that these [European] modernist elements were extremely compatible with jazzderived ideas and could be used in the service of a music that readily evoked the vernacular flavors of urban twentieth-century America.”50 Consequently, Copland’s integration of jazz into classical music was his “American” interpretation of the modernism in Europe. Further, Starr adds, “Copland was not the only or first one who discovered this. European music from Debussy, Stravinsky, Milhaud and others had been influenced by American vernacular styles.”51 This shows that European and US-American music were already in exchange long before Dahl’s emigration, and that the influences on his music, from Stravinsky or US-America, therefore, cannot be viewed as independently as Berdahl argues. As a preliminary conclusion, it can be noted that Dahl was influenced by Los Angeles’ music scene, whether by “American” composers or other European exiled musicians, and integrated local impulses into his own music. Now let us turn to Dahl’s cultural and knowledge transfer to the United States. In this process, his European modernist roots were, of course, crucial, but it is important to keep in mind the transformation process Dahl had already experienced in his first years in Los Angeles. Having discussed the effects of Dahl’s emigration on his music, we proceed with his impact on the music scene of Los Angeles through two roles: Dahl the translator and Dahl the teacher.

13.4  Dahl the Translator In 1944, Peter Yates, the founder of Evenings on the Roof, asked Dahl to translate and conduct Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire for the occasion of an all-Schoenberg program for the composer’s 70th birthday. The translation, which Dahl completed in cooperation with Carl Beier (1920–2000), was highly appreciated and also recommended by Schoenberg for future performances. 52 The linguist Dr. Isabell Maria Woelfel writes, “Schoenberg’s approval of the English translation indicates that he perceived a need to adapt his work to new audiences, cultures and times.”53 Consequently, Schoenberg accepted changes to his work, which originated from the environment of pre-First World War Vienna, facilitating the presentation of Pierrot lunaire to audiences in North America. In a letter to Schoenberg, Dahl described only having had a few difficulties translating Pierrot: Dear Professor Schönberg, Here is the promised translation of Pierrot lunaire, which Carl Beier and I made a few years ago. As you

254  Melina Paetzold can see, we have taken great pains to adjust the syllables exactly to the original, to both rhythm and intonation. Only in a few places this did not seem to be possible and we were forced to insert an unaccented syllable (for instance ‘washer woman’ for ‘Wäscherin’). I don’t believe that any of these minor changes do violence to the original, or are noticeable at all.54 This letter shows that, although no radical changes were made in the translation, Dahl and Beier had to adapt the language in some places to bring music and text together. However, Woelfel indicates, “Dahl’s translation resulted in a weakening of the strong work concept” but adds that Dahl “believed that an accommodation of the text was crucial for an effective communication of the work in the new environment.”55 Woelfel concludes that, overall, “Schoenberg and Dahl perceived this mutation of the work to be central to preserving the work in the new environment.”56 Another example of “Dahl as translator” can be found in his translation of Poetics of music by Igor Stravinsky, which Dahl translated in collaboration with Arthur Knodel, who remembered in a letter to Dahl’s stepson, Anthony Linick (1938), in 1979 that Dahl wanted to put Knodel’s name first so that it could help his career along. 57 The translation was not well received by composer David Diamond who reviewed it in 1948.58 Surprisingly, the review only briefly discusses how the translators communicated Stravinsky’s approaches and ideas, instead mainly dealing with the translators’ prose style. “As for the English translation itself, I find it lacks flexibility, is repetitive, and literal to the point of dullness, although Stravinsky’s ideas are never dull, nor his French inflexible.” Diamond’s assertion in the next sentence—“It is as though Mr. Knodel and Mr. Dahl were intent on primarily conveying the literal ideas intact rather than fusing an accurate, flexible translation with an English prose style that matches”—gives an indication of what could have been the translators’ intention: to make Stravinsky’s ideas accessible to a wider, English-speaking audience, especially given Stravinsky’s residency in North America at the time. Apart from the difficulties Diamond has with the translators’ style of writing, in the following he makes clear that the English version of the book can contribute to the understanding of Stravinsky’s ideas: “Despite the limitations of the translation, avid admirers of Stravinsky or curious readers not acquainted with Stravinsky’s sharp intellect will enjoy themselves thoroughly.” This opinion is also shared by other reviewers, such as Margaret Prall, who is more convinced by the English version: “Now an able translation in English by Mr. Arthur Knodel and Mr. Ingolf Dahl make the Poetics of Music accessible to an English-speaking public”59; Charles M. Dennis, who emphasizes the educational worth of the book: “One can’t fail to be a better musician

Ingolf Dahl (1912–1970) 255 and a more understanding listener after reading this volume”60; and Charles Riker, who writes, “The Poetics tells us much about Stravinsky the composer, but not much more than a careful study of his scores would educe. None the less, it is good to have the evidence on the record.”61 Like Schoenberg, Stravinsky must have also seen advantages in the translation of his works for their wider dissemination in his new environment. With his translations, Dahl adapted Pierrot lunaire and Stravinsky’s ideas to a new cultural environment. It is a task that only a European émigré to North America with his skills as a musician and his understanding of both cultures could have done. Although Dahl had to make some translation-related adjustments, the opportunity to spread and explain the music and ideas of important composers such as Schoenberg and Stravinsky through these translations was most likely more important.

13.5  Dahl the Teacher Dahl transferred his knowledge as a teacher to the United States in many ways, one of which is described in detail in the following. Alongside his teaching commitments—for example, the first course about Stravinsky at the USC—Dahl had another main duty, which is also highlighted on the USC’s website where Dahl is described as follows: “1945 he joined the faculty at USC and taught composition, conducting, and music history. In addition to his teachings, he also directed the university’s symphony orchestra (1945–1958), performing much contemporary music in addition to the standard repertory.”62 This text indicates that Dahl, as a teacher, was to a large extent well known for his work with the USC’s student orchestra and the especially progressive repertoire he rehearsed with the young students. With this orchestra, Dahl introduced many new orchestral works to the West Coast. In 1957, on the occasion of Stravinsky’s 75th birthday, Dahl and the USC Orchestra gave the West Coast premiere of Persephone,63 and two years later, they opened the 11th contemporary music festival of the USC, which Dahl founded, with scenes of Honegger’s Amphion, Milhaud’s Concerto for percussion and small orchestra, Berg’s Five Orchestral Songs, and Ode by Lukas Foss. All of these, except that of Milhaud, were West Coast premieres. “It is a credit to Mr. Dahl and the organization,” wrote the Los Angeles Times critic Walter Arlen, “to have taken on the job of presenting these works, for they were difficult but well worth the trouble.”64 In 1962, in honor of Ernst Toch’s (1887–1964) 75th birthday, Dahl presented the composer’s Fourth Symphony. Toch himself described that Dahl “brought everything, the smallest hidden items, to live and

256  Melina Paetzold breathe.”65 In the same program were also the Six Pieces for Orchestra op. 6 by Anton von Webern, about which, Walter Arlen wrote that the piece “was met by the orchestra and Mr. Dahl… [conducted]… from memory with complete assurance.”66 The concerts were held in high esteem, as Linick67 shows with numerous quotes from letters Dahl received over the years. “You are amazing in your activities and your concerts,” Harold Shapero wrote, finding nothing comparable in Boston or New York. “We really have nothing comparable here, even at Julliard,” stated Joseph Bloch from New York, and Paul Fromm, performing arts patron from the Fromm Music Foundation, sent a letter from Chicago in 1958: “Your programs are very exciting and more important than anything that we can hear at Orchestra Hall during the entire season. Music is really alive on your campus. And the credit for most of it must go to you.” Aaron Copland also expressed his enthusiasm: “I always enjoy getting the programs and realizing all over again how much modern music is performed on your campus.”68 Because of his musical European background and his musical understanding, Dahl did not rehearse the “standard” repertoire with the student orchestra. He seized the opportunity to present new sounds and works in Los Angeles—to the students, the public, and other musicians and composers. Not all compositions were from the progressive repertoire. He also conducted works, for example, by classical composers, which had not previously been performed. With this work, he made a substantial impact on the musical scene and developments in Los Angeles and beyond, as the recognitions show. He of course also shaped the next generation of musicians and composers by providing his students with an understanding of contemporary music by Berg, Stravinsky, and Toch.

13.6 Conclusion The intention of this chapter was to introduce exiled musicians other than Schoenberg who transferred their knowledge from Central Europe to the United States, and who made a significant impact on the music scene in their new homeland. One, who was closely discussed through the two provided examples, was the multifaceted musician Ingolf Dahl. Like many others, Dahl’s cultural transfer was not a one-way street. Very often, in order to be accepted or better understood, exiled artists firstly adapted themselves or their art to their new environment and, in doing so, altered their knowledge before transferring it to their new country. Dahl’s role as a translator represents a typical example of cultural translation. With Dahl’s English versions of Pierrot lunaire and the Poetics of music, he did not merely translate the text into another

Ingolf Dahl (1912–1970) 257 language but also adapted these European works, written in the first half of the twentieth century, for the American audience. The second example, Dahl the teacher, reveals one of Dahl’s modes of disseminating works by European or unfamiliar composers and how he opened American audiences to these “new” sounds. There are many more ways in which, and roles through which, Dahl transferred his knowledge to the United States. Because of his various talents as a pianist, conductor, teacher, and arranger, he reached a wide audience that included students, the public, other exiled composers, American composers, musicians, and musicologists and became a link between the two musical worlds of Central Europe and the United States.

Notes 1. Arnold Schoenberg, “Letter to Bessie Bartlett Fraenkel, 26 November 1935,” in Arnold Schoenberg Letters, ed. Erwin Stein (Berkley: University of California Press, 1987), 195–196. 2. James Berdahl, “Ingolf Dahl. His life and work” (PhD diss., Miami, 1975). 3. Isabell Maria Woelfel, “Translating the Texts of Vocal Music: Ingolf Dahl’s Performances of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire Opus 21 in Los Angeles in the1940s and 1950s” (PhD diss., University of Calgary, 2016). 4. Anthony Linick, The Lives of Ingolf Dahl (Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2008), 4. 5. Michael Saffle, “Self-publishing and musicology: historical perspectives, problems, and possibilities,” Notes, Second Series 66, no. 4 (2010): 726–738. 6. Linick, The Lives of Ingolf Dahl,4. 7. Linick, The Lives of Ingolf Dahl, 516. 8. Anna-Britta Marcus, interview by Melina Paetzold, Stockholm, 21 May 2019, audio 6:39. 9. Berdahl, Ingolf Dahl, 5; Linick, The Lives of Ingolf Dahl, 10. 10. Alfred Birgfeld, “Hamburg,” Signale für die musikalische Welt 26, (August 1931): 818. 11. Linick, The Lives of Ingolf Dahl, 14. 12. Berdahl, Ingolf Dahl, 8. 13. Michael Saffle, “Ingolf Dahl,” in Lexikon verfolgter Musiker und Musikerinnen der NS-Zeit, eds. Claudia Maurer Zenck, Peter Petersen (Hamburg: Universität Hamburg, 2007), accessed 28 April 2020, https://www. lexm.uni-hamburg.de/object/lexm_lexmperson_00002558. 14. Berdahl, Ingolf Dahl, 8. 15. Berdahl, Ingolf Dahl, 9. 16. Dorothy Lamb Crawford, Evenings on and off the Roof. Pioneering Concerts in Los Angeles 1939–1971 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1995), 21. 17. Berdahl, Ingolf Dahl, 10–11. 18. Crawford, Evenings on and off the Roof, 12–13. 19. Berdahl, Ingolf Dahl, 20. 20. Berdahl, Ingolf Dahl, 27.

258  Melina Paetzold 21. Linick, The Lives of Ingolf Dahl, 523. 22. Michael Saffle, “Dahl, Ingolf,” in MGG Online, ed. by Laurenz Lütteken (Bärenreiter, Metzler, RILM, 2016), https://www.mgg-online.com/mgg/ stable/21583 (accessed 31 August 2020). 23. Kurt Stone and Gary L. Maas, “Dahl, Ingolf,” in Grove Music Online, 2001, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/ gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000007054 (accessed 31 August 2020). 24. Herbert und Elsbeth Weichmann-Stiftung, “30 Jahre Herbert und Elsbeth Weichmann-Stiftung: der Komponist und Dirigent Ingolf Dahl,” Video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=65&v=c9TYPJjeiBk& feature=emb_title (accessed 31 August 2020). 25. “Ingolf Dahl,” All Fellows, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, https://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/ingolf-dahl/ (accessed 31 August 2020). 26. “Award Winners,” University of Southern California, http://cet.usc.edu/ awards-grants/associates/award-winners/ (accessed 31 August 2020). 27. “Award Winners: Ingolf Dahl,” American Academy of Arts and Letters, https://artsandletters.org/?s=Ingolf+dahl&restype=awardwinner (accessed 31 August 2020). 28. Crawford, Evenings on and off the Roof, 45. 29. Wolfgang Rathert and Berndt Ostendorf, Musik der USA: Kultur- und musikgeschichtliche Streifzüge (Hofheim: Wolke Verlag, 2018), 183. 30. “Matthias Hermann, Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts 1,” hmdk Stuttgart, https://www.hmdk-stuttgart.de/fileadmin/downloads/Werkverzeichnis_ Professoren/Analyse_Musik_des_20._Jh._1__17.09.2013_.pdf (accessed 31 August 2020). 31. Larry Starr, “Tonal Traditions in Art Music from 1920 to 1960,” in The Cambridge History of American Music, ed. David Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 471–472. 32. Gilbert Chase, Die Musik Amerikas. Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Berlin: Max Hesse, 1958), 557. 33. Starr, Tonal Traditions in Art Music from 1920 to 1960, 472. 34. Rathert and Ostendorf, Musik der USA, 182. 35. Alex Ross, The rest is noise. Das 20. Jahrhundert hören (Berlin, München: Piper, 2013), 293. 36. Berdahl, Ingolf Dahl, 22. 37. Linick, The Lives of Ingolf Dahl, 61. 38. Linick, The Lives of Ingolf Dahl, 75. 39. Crawford, Evenings on and off the Roof, 212. 40. Berdahl, Ingolf Dahl, 207. 41. Berdahl, Ingolf Dahl, 214. 42. Berdahl, Ingolf Dahl, 210. 43. Linick, The Lives of Ingolf Dahl, 104. 44. Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Stravinsky in pictures and documents, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 378. 45. Berdahl, Ingolf Dahl, 29. 46. Linick, The Lives of Ingolf Dahl, 105. 47. Linick, The Lives of Ingolf Dahl, 105. 48. Linick, The Lives of Ingolf Dahl, 106. 49. Berdahl, Ingolf Dahl, 213–216. 50. Larry Starr, Tonal Traditions in Art Music from 1920 to 1960, 477. 51. Larry Starr, Tonal Traditions in Art Music from 1920 to 1960, 472.

Ingolf Dahl (1912–1970) 259 52. Schoenberg, Letter to Ingolf Dahl, 23 July 1949, “Die Übersetzung ist wunderbar und ich kann mir garnichts [sic!] besseres denken.” (The translation is wonderful and I can’t think of anything better.) 53. Woelfel, Translating the Texts of Vocal Music. 54. Arnold Schoenberg, “Letter to Ingolf Dahl, 10 July 1949,” in Schoenberg’s Correspondence with American Composers, ed. Sabine Feisst (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 764. 55. Woelfel, Translating the Texts of Vocal Music, 154. 56. Woelfel, Translating the Texts of Vocal Music, 7. 57. Linick, The Lives of Ingolf Dahl, 164. 58. David Diamond, “Poetics of Music. By Igor Stravinsky, with a preface by Darius Milhaud. Translated from the original French by Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl,” review of Poetics of Music, by Igor Stravinsky. Notes, June 1948. 59. Margaret Prall, review of Poetics of Music, by Igor Stravinsky, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, December 1948. 60. Charles M. Dennis, review of Poetics of Music, by Igor Stravinsky, Music Educators Journal, February–March, 1948. 61. Charles Riker, review of Poetics of Music, by Igor Stravinsky, The Sewanee Review, 1949. 62. “Timeline | USC Thornton School of Music,” University of Southern California, accessed 15 January 2020, https://music.usc.edu/about/history/ timeline. 63. Albert Goldberg, “Stravinsky Honoured by Monday Concert,” The Los Angeles Times, 26 November 1957, 20. 64. Walter Arlen, “Dahl, SC Orchestra. Heard in Festival,” The Los Angeles Times, 3 March 1959, 23. 65. Linick, The Lives of Ingolf Dahl, 380–381. 66. Walter Arlen, “Symphony Concert at USC Memorable,” The Los Angeles Times, 30 October 1962, 59. 67. Linick, The Lives of Ingolf Dahl, 282. 68. Aaron Copland, letter to Ingolf Dahl, 27 May 1958.

Index

Note: Italicized pages refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” refer to notes. Adorno, T. 223 Allegro and Arioso (Dahl) 252 Amtmann, W. 144–145, 148 Anschluss 2, 31, 33, 140, 148, 217, 234, 236, 241 Arendt, H. 190 Argentina 57, 117–124, 126–128 Argentinean theater 117, 118, 120–129, 130n1 Arons, R. 158, 169n29 Asia Seminar 223, 225 Aufbau 96, 97, 99 Aufklärungsarbeit (educational work) 36, 37 Avenida 167, 167 Babo, A. 168 Bachmann-Medick, D. 12, 117–118 Baeck, L. 98 Bal, M. 201, 205 baojia system 227 bathing suits 164–165 Beethoven 224, 226, 227 Beier, C. 253 Bell, G. 207 Benjamin, W. 88–89, 127 Bentwich, N. 50 Berdahl, J. 248, 252–253 Bildung 86, 88, 90, 222–223, 225, 230 Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, The (Gutman) 87 Black Sabbath (Katz) 98 Blake Prize 211 Bompernasse 159 Borgese, G. A. 100, 112n93 Bourdieu, P. 7, 14–15

Brinkmann, T. 22n31 Buenos Aires 121–122 Buetow, W. 90, 95 Burke, E. 5 Butler, R. 200, 203, 204 Calvacoressi 189 Canada 135, 147–149; musicians and scholars 139–147; and refugee 135–139 Ceniza al Viento 122 Chaimowicz, T. 4–6, 8, 13, 14, 16 Chen Yi 29, 34, 35, 39 China 29–32, 34, 37, 38, 40–46 Cohen, H. 101 Common Cause 100, 113n95 Compañía Francesa 123, 132n30 Copland, A. 251, 253 criollo grotesco 126, 127, 129 cross-cultural translation 223–230 Cultural Revolution 29, 34 Czechoslovakia 1, 2, 8, 19, 31, 39, 49–52, 54, 55, 58, 59 Dahl, I. 247–248, 256–257; Central Europe and US-America 250–251; emigration 251–253; identity 249–250; life and 248–250; as teacher 255–256; translation 253–255 Das Argentinische Tageblatt 121–122 Dembitzer, S. 165 Der kulturelle Aufbau im Distrikt (Cultural Development in the District) 222 Diamond, D. 254

Index 261 Diario de Coimbra 161–162 Die Truppe 119, 126, 127 Die Weltbühne 140 Die Zeitung 51 dramatic training 123–129 Duce 92–94 Eichmann, A. 2 Elon, A. 86, 90 Emigrant Letters from Five Continents 49, 51, 55–60 émigrés 7, 85, 86, 89, 96, 98–100, 120, 199–205, 207, 209–211, 213, 214, 255 Encyclopedia of Music in Canada 146 Escuela Nacional de Arte Dramático 124–125 Estado Novo 154–156 Ethical and Social Features of the German People in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Rose) 174, 179 European Jewish Artists Society (EJAS) 221, 224, 227, 229, 230 Eva 165 exile literature 183–186 Exiner, H. 3–6, 10–12, 14–16 fashion 162–164 Felber, E. 217, 230–231; biography of 218–220; cross-cultural translation 223–230; life and 219–222; music and 222–223; Shanghai Jewish Chronicle 221 First World War 14, 68, 174–179, 182 Flight into Egypt, The (Kahan) 211, 211–213, 212 Fooks, E. 203 Frankfurter Zeitung 56 Freie Deutsche Bühne 121, 123, 132n30 Fry, H. 188 Funkelman, M. 130n1 Funkprinzessin 94–95, 108n70 Garcia Lorca, F. 128 Garibaldi, G. 91 Gegen-Angriff 52, 54 Gehmacher, J. 66–67 gendered practices 66–67 German-American Broadcasting Company 96, 109n76

Germania Broadcast 96, 109n76 Germans abroad (Auslandsdeutschtum) 55 German-speaking political refugees 50–52 Germany 2, 51, 53, 54, 154, 173, 174, 248–250; nationalism in 181–183; Nazi 50, 135–137, 139, 144 Gershwin, G. 251 Goethejahr 100 Goethe-Jahr of 1949 98–99 Golden Cockerel, The (RimskyKorsakov) 228–229 Graz 235–237, 239–241 Grossman, A. 16, 17 Grünbaum, M. 235 Gutman, H. 87, 104n24 Halpern, F. G. 143 Halpern, G. R. 142, 143 Halpern, I. 142–144, 148 Halsey, W. 191 Hassgesang 181–182 Heathcote, C. 202, 208 Heger, R. 236 Heimat 41–44, 47n25 Heins, V. M. 53 Helmer, P. 138–139, 144 Hernandez-Navarro, M. 201 History of Music in Canada 1534–1914, A (Kallmann) 146 Hoeflich, E. 48n38 Holocaust 38, 51, 199–202, 212, 213, 243, 244 Hutchins, R. 100 Iceland 234–237, 243–244; Melitta Urbancic in 240–243; Victor Urbancic in 237–240 Indian Club 219, 220, 230 International Institute 101, 114n101 Jacob, P. W. 121 James, W. 90 Jewish 1–3, 5, 7, 13, 16–18, 29–34, 45, 46, 91–100, 173, 174, 222; community 2, 33, 44, 91, 92, 122, 217, 218, 221–230; family 86–88; history 44–46; Maoist 38–41; refugees 17, 31, 41, 50, 53, 55, 58, 66, 136–138, 154, 165, 217, 220–230

262  Index Jewish Family Solidarity: Myth or Fact? 87 Joana, M. 165 Jüdische Gemeinde 224 Jüdische Hilfskommitee 95 Júnior, J. C. 166 Kahan, L. 19, 199, 201–202, 205–210, 213–214; in Australia 199, 200, 202–204, 207–214; Flight into Egypt, The 211, 211–213, 212; Nodegoat software 210, 210–211 Kallmann, H. M. 145–146, 148 Kaminski, G. 30–31, 42, 43, 47n25 Kaplan, M. 88 Kardegg, F. 227, 228 Katz, R. 98 Kelbetz, L. 235 Kerr, A. 184–186, 185, 187 Kindertransport 138, 145 Klepac 214 Komlosy, A. 10 Konvitz, M. 100 Kraemer, F. 146–148 Kraus, G. 139–142, 146, 148 Krilla, H. 117–118, 129, 130n4, 130n5, 132n28; in Buenos Aires 121–122; to dramatic training 123–129; for La Mascara 117, 118, 122, 123, 125; in theater 118–121 Künstler-Klub Wien-Paris 120 La Mascara 117, 118, 122, 123, 125 La palabra en acción (The word in action) 125, 129 L’Atellier 120 La Violencia 5 Lewin, O. 221 Library of Burned Books (Rose) 178 Limits and Effectiveness of the State 86 Linick, A. 248, 249, 251, 252, 254, 256 Liu Shaoqi 29, 34, 35, 39, 40 llamada 121 Lövinson family 83–94, 85, 96–98, 101; Duce and 92–94; fate 98–99; Funkprinzessin 94–95; and Italy 90–94; Jewish 91–100; Mother Meyer 101–102; multiple affinities 88–90; pacifism 99–101; and Pennsylvania 95–96; and race 93–94; and Rome 83–86

Luftcicerone 93 Lull, J. 10 McCulloch, A. 208 Mädchen in Uniform (Sagan) 74, 119, 120 Mainz 235–237, 239, 241 Making of the Jewish Middle Class (Kaplan) 88 Manifesto on Race (Mussolini) 93–94 Maoist 38–41 Mao Zedong 18, 29, 34, 38–42, 44 Mark, H. F. 140 Martins, M. J. 155 Mello, R. de 159 Men and their Motives (Rose) 183 Mendelsohn, E. 45 Men, Myths and Movements in German Literature (Rose) 182–183 Mixa, F. 236, 237 Miyahara, T. 226 Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina (MPF) 154–157, 164, 165 Moguy, L. 120 Morawetz, M. 157–158, 163 multiple affinity 88–90 Mundo Gráfico 154, 159, 159–161, 163–164, 167, 167 music 222–223; see also Canada; Dahl, I.; Felber, E. Music for Brass Instruments (Dahl) 252 Music Information Centre (MIC) 242 Mussolini 84, 92–94, 100 National Socialism 33, 54, 66, 70, 71, 79, 117, 239, 240 Nazism 135–139, 213 Neuer Vorwärts 52, 53, 55–59 New Fourth Army 30, 34, 35, 35, 36, 39, 41, 47n25 Newmann, C. 201 Nodegoat software 210, 210–211 Nordau, M. 92 Norst, M. 202–203 Nuremberg laws 1, 2, 140 O Cavalo Espantado 158–160 Oesterreichische Musiklexikon 236 Offene Singstunden 235–236 ORIGIN 194n28 Origins (Stanišić) 184

Index 263 Ost und West 92 Outline of Modern Knowledge, An (Rose) 174, 178–179, 183 pájaro (bird) 128 Palmer, L. 200, 201 Paraphrase (Miyahara) 226 Paris 208–209 Pariser Tageblatt 52–54 Pariser Tageszeitung 52, 54, 56–59 Pastelaria Suiça 159–160 Pellettieri, O. 123, 124 People’s Republic of China (PRC) 29, 31, 32, 43, 46n1 Pétursson, H. 238, 239, 242 Pierrot lunaire (Schoenberg) 251, 253–257 Pimentel, I. F. 166–167 Poetics of music (Stravinsky) 251, 254–257 Popper, K. 203 Portugal 154–156; bathing suits 164–165; cafés in 158–159; fashion 162–164; influences and changes 166–168; Pastelaria Suiça 159–160; refugees in 154–155; sports activities 165; women in 156–158, 162 Prager Nachrichten 54 Prison sans barreaux (Moguy) 120 Ramalho, M. M. 166 Ramos, A. W. 161–162, 164 Reconstructionist (Konvitz) 100 Redol, A. 158 Reichsfluchtsteuer 14 Reichskulturkammer 182, 190 residência fixa (assigned residence) 161, 165 Reykjavík 234–237, 240, 241 Rimsky-Korsakov, N. 228–229 Rodeph Shalom 98, 111n86 Roma Israelitica (Lövinson ) 92, 98 Rosenfeld, J. 18, 29–46, 30, 35, 46n6, 47n25, 48n38, 48n39 Rose, W. 173–174, 175, 190–192; collection 174–175; exile literature 183–186; First World War and Second World 176–179; Hassgesang 181–182; intelligence service 187–190; Men, Myths and Movements in German Literature 182–183; press cuttings 180, 180; Weltschmerz 177, 179–181

Ruhrdörfer, I. 142 sainete criollo 126 Salazar, A. de O. 154–156 Sander, W. 49, 56 Saslavsky, L. 122 Schenker, H. 139 Schmidt, F. 240 Schoenberg, A. 20, 73, 247, 248, 250–256 Schoeps, J. H. 16–17 Schubert, F. 240 Schütz, A. 13 Second World War 59, 69, 137, 138, 142, 143, 147, 154, 155, 158, 173, 175–179, 188, 190, 191, 192n7, 199, 200, 202, 206, 212, 240 Shanghai 7, 18, 19, 31, 33–34, 143, 217–231 Shanghai Jewish Chronicle (Felber) 219, 221, 228, 229 Shen Qizhen 34, 39, 43 Sjón 242, 244 Snowman, D. 2 Sozialistische Mitteilungen 59 Spirit of Revolt in German Literature from 1914–1930, The (Rose) 181–183 Stadttheater Zürich 249 Stanišić, S. 184 Stanislavsky, K. 124 Stanislavsky method 122–125 Starr, L. 250–251, 253 Steed, H. W. 180, 186 Steinberg, A. 143 Strauss to Matilda (Norst) 202–203 Stravinsky, I. 250–256 Strobl, P. 154 Tagore, R. 219–220 Taylor, C. 90 Teatrito (Little Theater) 122 Teixeira, C. H. 166 Teixeira, M. B. 158, 166, 168 Telo, A. J. 168 theater: Argentinean 117, 118, 120–129, 130n1; Krilla and (see Krilla, H.) Thompson, D. 50 Tillich, P. 223–224 Tillinger, E. 166 Toch, E. 255–256

264  Index Tonn, W. Y. 225 topological thinking 204–205 “traduttore, traditore” (“translator, traitor”) 185 transculturation 7, 10–12 transition phase 124 Urbancic, M. 234–237, 239, 240–244, 244n1 Urbancic, V. 235–241, 243, 244n6 Varieties of Religious Experience (James) 90 Viertel, B. 68–71, 74, 76, 77, 118, 119, 125, 127, 129 Viertel, S. 18, 67–71, 77–79; hospitality 75–77; translation practices 71–74 Vortragskünstlerin 94 Vorwärts 140 voseo 126–127

Wachtraum der Weltverbesserung 90, 99–100 Walls have Ears, The (Fry) 188 Walter, A. M. 140–142, 145–148 Weigel, S. 118 Wellesz, E. 142 Weltschmerz 173, 174, 176, 177, 178–181, 191 Werfel, F. 175, 176 Wiener Freie Volksbühne 118–119 women: men and 45, 60, 66, 76, 78, 135, 147, 158, 251; in Portugal 156–162, 166–168 Wylie, J. 205, 213–214 Zelter, C. 222 Zhou Enlai 34, 38, 42 Zionism 44, 92, 93 Zoff, O. 162 Zweig, S. 181, 182, 186, 186 Zweig-Winternitz, F. 157