SOURCE: Berghaus, Günter, “Producing Art in Exile: Perspectives on the German Refugees' Creative Activities in Great Britain.” In Theatre and Film in Exile: German Artists in Britain, 1933-1945, edited by Günter Berghaus. Oxford: Oswald Wolff Books, Berg Publishers, 1989.

[In the following essay, Berghaus traces the contributions of noted German artists living in exile in Great Britain after 1933.]

Following Hitler's appointment as Chancellor on 30 January 1933 a number of laws were passed which enabled the Nazis to assume total control over the German population: a Law for the Reconstruction of the Civil Service (7 April), a Denationalization Decree (14 July), a Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour, and a Reich Citizenship Law (13 September: the so-called Nuremberg Laws) and a Law for the Establishment of a Reich Cultural Chamber (22 September), to name just a few. A few weeks after Hitler's seizure of power the Große Säuberung began, the clearing out and elimination of left-wing and Jewish art and culture. On 10 May 1933 a burning of books was held, and in September 1933 Joseph Goebbels was charged with the formation of a Reichskulturkammer, a guild-like organization with compulsory membership for all artists working in the media of literature, theatre, music, film, radio, fine arts and journalism. In order to qualify for membership a proclamation of loyalty to the new régime was required; those who were not prepared to support the new cultural policy were barred from exercising their profession and having their work shown in public.

As a result of these measures many artists were arrested, deported or killed in prisons and concentration camps. Others went into so-called ‘inner emigration’; but the majority of Germany's critical intelligentsia and creative artist community went into exile. Some of them were forced to leave Germany because they found themselves on the Ausbürgerungslisten (lists of expatriation) on account of their ethnic background or political record. For them, fleeing Germany was the only way to secure their physical survival. However, famous artists found themselves, generally, in a much more secure position than the so-called man on the street who was caught and put through the mangle of the Gestapo without anybody but his nearest friends and relatives knowing about his disappearance. The number of well-known artists who ended up in concentration camps or died in the torture chambers of the SS was very small indeed. A few prominent left-wing or Communist intellectuals fell into the hands of the Gestapo (e.g. Willi Bredel, Berta Lask, Egon Erwin Kisch, Ernst Busch, Wolfgang Langhoff, Hermann Duncker, Karl August Wittfogel), but none of them shared the ill fortunes of Carl von Ossietzky or Erich Mühsam.

Many artists were made extremely tempting offers by the new government in order to ensure their loyalty. Actors, for example, were given long-term contracts, paid holiday leave, free medical treatment and generous social security and superannuation schemes.¹ The Nazi rulers themselves must have been rather unsure about who could be classified as their supporter or enemy. The well-known case of Fritz Lang who was offered the chair of the Reichsfilmkammer and then decided to leave Germany, just a few hours after his audience with Goebbels,² may have been an extreme example, but it was indicative of the Nazis' attempt to prevent a cultural famine following their take-over. They were perfectly aware that the loss of one Thomas Mann could not be redeemed by the retention of ten Ernst Jüngers, Ernst Wiecherts or Hans Carossas.

The attitude of those artists who could be persuaded to stay in Germany after 1933 ranged from open support for the Nazis or restrained loyalty, to passive resistance or inner emigration. In the field of theatre one could mention the playwrights Gerhart Hauptmann and Max Halbe; the directors Gustav Gründgens, Heinz Hilpert, Erich Engel, Jürgen Fehling and Karl Heinz Martin; the designers Caspar Neher, Traugott Müller and Cesar Klein; the dancers Mary Wigman and Harald Kreutzberg; the actors Heinrich George, Werner Krauß, Paul Wegener, Eduart von Winterstein, Horst Caspar, Lothar Müthel, Friedrich Kayßler, Paul Hartmann; the actresses Käthe Gold, Marianne Hoppe, Käthe Dorsch and Paula Wessely. Although a number of prominent artists and a few of international repute stayed behind in 1933, their creative output over the next twelve years could not make up for the intellectual bloodletting caused by the exodus of no fewer than 2,000 writers (420 of them dramatists) and 4,000 theatre practitioners.³ Some were overtaken by events at a time when they were travelling abroad and found ‘that while one is away one's country is running away somewhere and one can't get hold of it anymore’.⁴ Others were Spätexilanten (late emigrants) who initially tried to come to some kind of arrangement with the new régime but then decided to leave when the full extent of Nazi oppression and the cultural implications of their take-over dawned on them. Whether exiled by design or coincidence, few of the emigrants conceived of the possibility that their ‘prolonged trip abroad’ would actually last ten to twelve years. What initially looked like a short interlude in their lives soon grew into a veritable nightmare. Even the most starry-eyed artists, who had to experience the November pogroms of 1938 (Kristallnacht) and German expansion into Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland to see clearly what was afoot, eventually became aware that the Nazi régime was proving to be a durable factor in German politics and was, in fact, developing into a major political force threatening European peace and security. The sooner they came to terms with the fact that their exile was more than just a passing phase the easier it was for them to build up a new existence abroad and to find a new purpose for their art.

Many artists, when they arrived in France, England, Sweden or wherever, expected to be received with the same friendliness they had experienced on their former trips to these countries. However, after 1933 things turned out to be very different. The friends, who had invited them to their country (and it was usually personal contacts that determined the artists' choice of exile country), may have given them a warm welcome, but the rest of the population was usually less enthusiastic about the possibility of a large refugee community in their midst.

Once-famous artists suddenly had to realize that they were virtually unknown figures in their guest country. The self-importance they had always attached to themselves, and the notion of international repute they thought they had achieved following an exhibition in Paris, a lecture tour in Scandinavia, or the granting of an honorary degree in Oxford, suddenly fell apart when an unimportant magazine declined to publish one of their poems because it was not considered ‘good enough’, or when they tried to secure the commission of a portrait or some book illustration, and their offer was rejected because nobody wanted to buy the work of an ‘unknown artist’. This experience is reflected in Max Herrmann-Neiße's poem ‘Ein deutscher Dichter bin ich einst gewesen’ (Once I was a German poet), where he says:

… hier wird niemand meine Verse lesen,
ist nichts, was meiner Seele Sprache spricht;
ein deutscher Dichter bin ich einst gewesen;
jetzt ist mein Leben Spuk wie mein Gedicht.(5)
(No-one will read my poems here,
The language of my soul has no meaning.
Once I was a German poet,
Now my life is a spectre, just like my work.)

Most artists were not able to survive by their creative work alone. Many were forced to take any job offered to them in order to supplement their meagre income. They had to join the queue of other refugees on the labour exchange and compete with the native unemployed on the job market. As a result of this, the population's indifference towards these artists often turned into open hostility. The frosty atmosphere caused by xenophobia and anti-Semitism, the loss of self-esteem, and the sudden realization that they had been cut off from their old public and stood little chance of gaining access to a new market, led many artists into severe personal crises. Some were driven into isolation and despair and committed suicide (Kurt Tucholsky, Walter Hasenclever, Ernst Weiß, Carl Einstein, Stefan Zweig and Walter Benjamin, to name just a few), which seemed to be the only logical answer to Hasenclever's question: ‘We are banished, we are homeless, we are cursed. What right do we have to live?’⁶ Stefan Zweig confessed that after his move into exile ‘I felt that I didn't quite belong to myself anymore. Something of my original and real self had been destroyed forever.’⁷ As early as 1937, Ernst Stern wrote a book on this phenomenon entitled Die Emigration als psychologisches Problem (Emigration as a Psychological Problem). Klaus Mann, in his Emigrantenroman Der Vulkan, called this attitude ‘Entwurzelungsneurose’ (neurosis caused by uprooting a person), and Alexander Granach coined the term ‘Emigrantenpsychose’ (emigrant psychosis) for this.⁸

Artists who relied on language as a medium of expression (writers, actors, etc.) found it invariably frustrating to see themselves reduced to stuttering in a foreign language when their accomplished command of the German tongue had brought them justified acclaim in their homeland. One might assume that artists who used a visual language might have been in a better position and more able to transcend any national barriers and to continue their career in exile without too much of a hiatus. But this was far from being the case. The living and working conditions forced nearly all artists to relinquish their personal style and interest and to produce whatever might find a buyer on the market. For example, one painter who had come to England in the 1930s still remembers how his works were considered too expressionistic and how he was constantly asked to tone down his colours:

As much as I have an accent in my language I have an accent in my painting. In German art of our century, expression and feeling comes into it a lot. Whereas mainstream art in Britain is more good taste and playing down feelings. The majority of English people find my paintings too emotive, too direct. English art is a refined understatement.⁹

The modes of expressions that had prevailed in the Weimar Republic (e.g. Expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit) were known to only a few admirers abroad. When a courageous gallerist was prepared to organize an exhibition of one of these artists, the show was often greeted with consternation and revulsion by the local population and turned into what Ludwig Meidner called in his case ‘a second class funeral’.¹⁰

Theatre artists did not fare any better, as the examples quoted on p. 33-41 reveal. The artistic traditions in the countries of exile were so different from those that had existed in Germany before 1933 that many artists felt that they could not elicit any desired response from their addressees, or that they were, as Leonard Frank put it, ‘playing on a violin of stone, a piano without strings.’¹¹ As a result of this, artists had to turn to menial tasks in order to make a living. Stage designers had to do window decoration for department stores; painters worked in china factories and sculptors in toy shops; poets wrote advertisement slogans and composers little ditties for the radio. There were few who could agree with Schoenberg when he said: ‘If immigration to America has changed me—I am not aware of it.’¹²

On the other hand, it would be misleading to assume that exile had only negative experiences to offer. The life of an émigré artist may have been hard but it also granted valuable lessons, which some of them later would not have missed for anything. Bertolt Brecht saw exile as a school for life and reminded his fellow emigrants that ‘the Chinese poets and philosophers are wont to go into exile just as we are used to going to an academy’.¹³ Egon Schwarz came to appreciate his exile experience as a blessing in disguise ‘which led me away from the insularity, provincialism, the narrow-mindedness full of resentment and hostility of my middle-European existence’.¹⁴ Alfred Kerr rhymed in a similar vein:

Manchmal fühlt das Herz sich sehr erheitert
(trotz der zugeschlagnen deutschen Tür):
Weil die Flucht den Horizont erweitert,
Ja, du dankst den Jägern fast dafür.(15)
(Sometimes my heart cheers up
(Despite the German door being closed):
Because exile widens the horizon—
I could nearly thank my persecutors for this.)

Hermann Kesten adjudged that ‘we have found plenty of knowledge and experience of the ways of the world during our exile, which we can now use to enrich German literature with’.¹⁶

These quotations show that artists did not necessarily consider their exile a purely negative chapter in their lives. Therefore, Peter Laemmle's challenge: ‘Shouldn't the exile scholars for once admit that exile, or the experience of exile, has changed the quality of literary texts, and has changed them in a negative sense?’¹⁷ has to be treated with care. It is true that artists did not always create their best and most enduring works during their exile, but it was not always exterior circumstances which prevented them from achieving a level of quality which otherwise they would have been capable of. In many cases exiled artists continued a process already set in motion during the Weimar Republic, one which might roughly be described as ‘deconstruction of High Culture’. New genres had sprung up in the 1920s (e.g. reportage, Lehrstück, photomontage, collage, etc.) because they were more flexible and versatile, and therefore more suitable to express contemporary artistic concerns. The small, ‘operative’ forms preferred by the exile artists must be seen in a similar light. Works of art should not be judged by ‘absolute’ aesthetic standards. Using criteria derived from other historical periods and applying them to creations which differ from those of previous centuries in aim and function will, by necessity, lead to distorted judgements. Any artistic product has to be assessed within the parameters or historical conditions which determine its creation, otherwise its specific qualities will easily be overlooked and misinterpreted. Since the circumstances under which the exiled artists were creating their works differed so fundamentally from those in pre-1933 Germany, these conditions have to be examined first before one can arrive at a critical, objective assessment of the artists' achievements in the various countries of exile. In our case this means that we have to study the political and cultural climate in Britain before we can come to a proper understanding of the theatrical activities generated by the German exiles.

EXILE IN GREAT BRITAIN

Britain is a country with a high tradition of hospitality to foreigners and has, for centuries, offered refuge to those of every rank and station who sought asylum on her shores from persecution and economic plight in their own lands. During the nineteenth century, many Germans had to flee their country because of the anti-revolutionary backlash following the defeats of the 1830 and 1848 revolutions. Others decided to emigrate because of Germany's backwardness with regard to economic and scientific development. Because of her acclaimed liberalism Britain was a classic country of refuge for these men and women disenchanted with their homeland, and many Germans settled here, especially in London around Soho and Leicester Square, in St John's Wood and Camberwell.

Two of the most famous Germans to arrive in Britain were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Other political thinkers and philosophers included Arnold Ruge, Gottfried Kinkel, Wilhelm Wolff, Eduard Bernstein and Wilhelm Liebknecht. Amongst the poets one can mention Ferdinand Freiligrath, Georg Weerth and Moritz Hartmann; amongst the publishers Nikolaus Trübner and Julius Reuter; amongst the scholars the orientalist Friedrich Karl Müller and Theodor Goldstücker, the Germanists Karl Buchheim, Eugen Oswald, Robert Priebsch, and many more. Some immigrants such as the engineer Wilhelm Siemens or the architect Gottfried Semper decided to return to Germany; others made England their permanent home and founded institutions which are still with us today (e.g. Johannes Ronge, who introduced the first kindergarten in England in 1851, or Karl Halle, who founded the distinguished Hallé Orchestra in Manchester).¹⁸

Between 1826 and 1905 there existed practically no restrictions on immigration to Britain and, by all accounts, the reception refugees found in this country was very friendly indeed. Lord Malmesbury, in a speech to Parliament on 5 April 1852, sums up the prevailing atmosphere of hospitality by saying:

I can well conceive the pleasure and happiness of a refugee, hunted from his native land, on approaching the shores of England, and the joy with which he first catches sight of them; but they are not greater than the pleasure and happiness every Englishman feels in knowing that his country affords the refugee a home and safety.¹⁹

According to a census in England and Wales the number of foreigners resident in those two parts of the country rose from 50,289 in 1851 to 118,031 in 1881.²⁰ Most of these exiles had arrived in England on their own or with their nearest relatives. They found the political climate here more liberal and the economic structures more advanced than in their home country and therefore decided to stay and start a new life as British citizens. The situation changed drastically with the mass emigration of Russian Jews at the end of the nineteenth century. By 1901 the number of aliens resident in the country had risen to 247,758, nearly half of them being East European Jews who had arrived in Britain during the past two decades.²¹ This large influx of an ethnically and culturally diverse group of immigrants and their settlement in a relatively small, confined area (the London East End) gave rise to anti-Semitism, which soon turned into general xenophobia during the Boer War (1899-1902). As a result of this, the Aliens Act of 1905 was passed and soon afterwards was reinforced by the Aliens Restrictions Bill of 1914, curtailing the right of asylum and giving the immigration officers the power to refuse entry to those immigrants they considered ‘undesirable’. The outbreak of the Second World War caused an outbreak of Germanophobia and led to the internment of about 40,000 of the 50,000 Germans living in this country.

The restrictions of the Aliens Act of 1905 and 1914 were further reinforced by the Aliens Order of 1920 which stated that no alien was to be given leave of entry unless he was in the possession of a work permit or some visible means of support. These restrictions being still in force during the 1930s prevented Britain from becoming a country of mass exile after Hitler's seizure of power. The initial wave of emigration from Nazi Germany caused the British Cabinet to set up a committee under the chairmanship of the Home Secretary in order to consider the question of German refugees. It was judged to be in the public interest to

try and secure for this country prominent Jews who were being expelled from Germany and who had achieved distinction whether in pure science, applied science, such as medicine or technical industry, music or art. This would not only obtain for this country the advantage of their knowledge and experience, but would also create a very favourable impression in the world, particularly if our hospitality were offered with some warmth.²²

Since many of the applicants for exile status were neither prominent nor wealthy, they tried to enter the country as ‘visitors’. Consequently, the Foreign Office instructed the Passport Control Department that ‘such persons, especially those who appear to be of Jewish or partly Jewish origin, or have non-Aryan affiliations, should be discreetly questioned as to their family circumstances, and how their business or employment has been affected by recent events’.²³ Further instructions were to the effect that whilst any ‘distinguished persons, i.e. those of international repute in the field of science, medicine, research or art’ were to be granted a visa, those applicants who were not ‘likely to be an asset to the United Kingdom’ were to be refused entry. Amongst those regarded as ‘prima facie unsuitable’ were

• (1) Small shop-keepers, retail traders, artisans, and persons likely to seek employment.
• (2) Agents and middlemen, whose livelihood depended on commission and, therefore, on trade activity.
• (3) Minor musicians and commercial artists of all kinds.
• (4) The rank and file of professional men—lawyers, doctors, dentists.²⁴

As a result of these restrictions, only 5,500 of the 154,000 refugees who left Germany between 1933 and 1937 were granted asylum in Great Britain. Most of them were professionals, industrialists, scholars and academics who had personal contacts or family ties in Britain and who also managed to transfer a substantial part of their personal possessions from Germany to Britain.

This development took a drastic turn in 1938 following the invasion of Austria, the occupation of the Sudentenland and the anti-Jewish pogroms after the Kristallnacht. In 1938/39 more than 25,000 mainly Jewish refugees were admitted to Britain, and by the time war broke out the number of exiles from countries under Nazi rule had risen to 55,000. Nearly 90 per cent of them had left their home country because of the anti-Semitic coercive measures, and the rest were political exiles.

Because of the rather diverse ethnic, political and cultural background of these refugees it is difficult to speak of a German group of exiles in Great Britain. Besides the Reichsgermans there were the Austrians,²⁵ Czechs,²⁶ Hungarians, Poles, Rumanians, Yugoslavs, etc. Because of the apolitical nature of most of these refugees and because of the interdiction against forming political parties, most exiles organized themselves around Kulturvereine based on the emigrants' country of origin. Other popular meeting places were the clubs and coffee-houses, as well as the social events organized by the approximately 200 refugee charity bodies. Many English people looked at these refugee organizations with amusement and regarded the endless number of societies and associations that sprang up all over the country as a typical outgrowth of German club mania. Although this mentality cannot be completely denied, one should, however, not underestimate the cultural, political and social functions these innumerable clubs had.

A social analysis of the German emigrant population in Britain reveals that 27 per cent of the men and 17 per cent of the women had an academic profession, and 33 per cent were entrepreneurs and businessmen.²⁷ These refugees had been eager participants in the cultural life of their home countries, but a continuation of their former life-style was often out of the question when they arrived in Britain, partly for financial reasons, partly because they lived outside the centre of London where most of the cultural life was concentrated. But even when they had access to a theatre or music hall, a cinema or an art gallery, many of the immigrants did not avail themselves of these facilities. Their unfamiliarity with the English language and with English artistic traditions made it very difficult for them to appreciate cultural events aimed explicitly at British audiences.

This loss of a cultural identity came as a shock to many emigrants, since they had not expected that the process of adaptation to their new surroundings would be so difficult and long-lasting. The refugees' desire to keep in touch with their cultural traditions led to the foundation of several cultural associations which soon became a vital element in the life of the German émigré community. Out of the Kulturbünde grew a large number of projects and ventures such as journals, theatres, exhibitions, concerts, lectures, etc. which operated in two directions: they helped the refugees to overcome the feeling of loss inevitably connected with their emigration to another country, and they served to communicate the emigrants' concerns and interests to the native population. This latter element was, of course, of immense political importance. In most instances it was the left-wing artists and intellectuals who set up these enterprises. They had the self-confidence and political experience, and often the organizational skills, to build up a network of contacts with local parties and societies and to bridge the gap between the refugees and the British population.

A strong anti-Fascist attitude served as a common ground to unite the socially and politically diverse members of the refugee community. However, when it came to formulating a more precise programme for action, the differences of opinion and beliefs often proved to be an insurmountable obstacle for creating a popular front against Fascism. The economic, social and political causes for the rise of Fascism in Europe and National Socialism in Germany were interpreted and analysed by the émigrés in rather diverse terms. This often led to arguments and friction and caused serious ruptures within the organizations. Personal animosities, formations of cliques and coteries, ideological quarrels and political sectarianism enhanced the potential for discord and conflict. Not infrequently this led to the formation of splinter groups, which seriously weakened the effectiveness of the refugee organizations:

For most of the Social Democrat refugees it was out of the question to get involved with the Kulturbund because of the active participation of Communists in the organization. Rejecting co-operation with the League (which, after all, was the largest and most effective organization of the German emigrants in Great Britain) even implied, for the SPD leadership, the boycott of purely cultural or literary events.²⁸

In their initial stages, however, the refugee organizations knew few of these problems. The thousands of émigrés who had just arrived in Britain often led a lonely existence in tiny flats and dingy bed-sits; so if nearby there was a Refugee Centre they went there ‘because there was a restaurant, so in that sense people met and I mean during the war, any restaurant where you got food and especially food to your liking, was a great attraction and I would say most people were attracted by that sort of thing, the dancing and the social events’.²⁹

Whilst the first wave of immigrants had found it relatively easy to integrate into British society, the majority of the new arrivals in 1938/39 found the conditions of exile more difficult. They arrived in a country where few of them had any family ties, and where because of high unemployment it was extremely difficult to make social contact through work. According to Gabriele Tergit, ‘around 1943 many refugees—at least in London—had never been in an English home, didn't know an English soul except the milkman, the postman and the greengrocer’.³⁰ Due to this lack of social contacts their command of the English language improved only slowly and they found it difficult to entertain normal relationships with the people who lived around them. As a result of this, most of the refugees hoped that their stay in Britain would be a short one and that soon they would be able to return to their native country:

Each man might say to himself, or each woman for that matter, I've just come from Düsseldorf, I've just come from Mannheim, the war will finish, and I'll go back, because I'm a stranger here—I am truly a refugee. So it's better to keep together, and to retain each one's own culture, one's own interest, one's own language, one's own behaviour and so on because I don't know, tomorrow I might be able to go back. So you keep yourself to yourself.³¹

The only people many of them knew were other refugees who showed similar reactions to their new surroundings and went through similar experiences. Hence they frequented the same meeting places which offered social contacts and psychological support in a society which appeared alien and often hostile to them. When being asked why they spent so much of their spare time in the refugee clubs their typical answer was: ‘When meeting other refugees one does not feel an outsider.’³² This lack of integration into British society bred loneliness and depression, and without the Refugee Centres many of the emigrants would have ended their lives in utter despair. If there was no Centre near, a restaurant or a café could fulfil the function of acting as a social focal point for the local refugee population: ‘The majority were refugees who were at a loose end with language difficulties here anyway and that was the only way they could spend a Sunday afternoon or a Saturday afternoon to get some strudel and a bit of music but it was as innocent as that.’³³

Erich Fried, in a recent interview, remembered the refugee organizations ‘as a basis of our existence, as employment agency, as cheap restaurants where you could have a decent meal, and as cultural organizations’,³⁴ but he also underlined their political importance, especially for the younger generation of emigrants:

The exile organizations had been called into existence by the political movements. There were Zionist ones (amalgamated with the English Zionists) who had a great run from the Jewish refugees. Then there were communist ones, who were the biggest. Not that the communist parties—the Austrian or German ones—had all that many members, but their propaganda was very efficient. The communists opened up restaurants, founded culture clubs, organized cultural programmes, lectures, cabarets, etc. in order to reach as many emigrants as possible, especially the young ones. … The youth organization of the communists—not the Kommunistischer Jugendverband, although that was the core—had immense influence. The mass organization Young Austria alone had about 2,000 members, which was quite a number. And with the German communists it was similar.³⁵

The Refugee Clubs were, in the first instance, social meeting places, but since political discussions were a regular event, they often gained a reputation which put off some of the older, apolitical émigrés:

I know my parents used to say, you know that's quite a left-wing club you go to and I said nonsense, nonsense because I was not a bit interested and I didn't want to know, all I was interested in was that I could meet some young people of my age and I was quite happy with that, I didn't want to get involved.³⁶

Many of the younger refugees were less opposed to political activities, and they liked to come to the Centres because of the opportunity they offered for political debates and education:

Questions such as what had all this been about, you know, Hitler coming to power and the war breaking out and where was all this leading and what was going to happen and in those days socialism certainly seemed a way out of all these difficulties and so our activities at the centre and the cultural activities were geared towards widening our knowledge about what that really meant and we had some marvellous programmes. We participated in a young group of actors and we participated in a choir and when the War broke out we went right up to the north of Scotland where we took songs from Czechoslovakia, songs from the Spanish War, from Germany and then we had ‘Sprechchöre’ but we didn't only do that, we wanted to let the Scots know how much we appreciated living here. We recited Burns at them with rather strange accents and they bore with us with a great deal of pleasure and even more tolerance.³⁷

The biggest and most important exile organization in Britain was the Freier Deutscher Kulturbund (Free German League of Culture). Besides theatrical activities they organized exhibitions, concerts, readings, lectures, courses, published journals, books and pamphlets, and so on. Membership in the FDKB was open to British citizens, and in their public events directed at the native population the émigrés made the voice of ‘the other Germany’ heard in the country. They tried to explain to the British that ‘Germans’ and ‘Nazis’ were not the same, that Hitler and the NSDAP had seized power and were holding it largely through the use of terror and intimidation. They pointed out that there were Germans inside the Reich who were resisting the Nazi régime (as for example in the 1942 exhibition ‘Allies Inside Germany’, which had no less than 30,000 visitors³⁸).

This ‘two Germanies’ doctrine found support amongst some members of the British government. In April 1941, the Foreign Office explained the reason behind their support for the German-language newspaper Die Zeitung by saying: ‘It is part of [our general propaganda line] that we must admit the existence of two Germanies (a ‘good’ one and a Nazi one).’³⁹ But others held the opinion that while there were ‘other Germans’ there was no ‘other Germany’. Many refugees found it more and more difficult to defend their position when it became evident that even at times of increasing war-weariness Hitler's hold over the German people remained strong and that there were few signs of a widespread and effective resistance movement. Especially amongst the exiled politicians of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) this led to a reconsideration of the political line to be taken with the British government. Instead of seeking a rôle of representing the German opposition against Nazism they regarded themselves as representatives of the ‘better Germans’ who were going to erect a new German state after the defeat of the Hitler régime.

The government's attitude towards the Hitlerites or the exiles depended largely on the political expediencies of the day and the opinions which gained influence in Parliament. In March 1933, immediately after Hitler's seizure of power, there were debates in Parliament as to what attitude the government ought to take towards the stream of Germans who were forced to leave their country. Some MPs maintained that Britain had always welcomed exiles from anti-democratic countries, whilst others supported a Conservative MP who proclaimed that ‘hundreds of thousands of Jews are now leaving Germany and scurrying from there to this country … Are we prepared in this country to allow aliens to come in here from every country while we have 3,000,000 unemployed?’⁴⁰ In June 1933, the Marquis of Reading, a member of the House of Lords and himself a prominent British Jew, warned: ‘We have well in mind, in our duty as British citizens, that we must take care that we do not add to the great unemployment existing in this country.’⁴¹

The refugees who tried to gain entry to Britain were at the mercy of the vagaries of the official line the government was taking towards Nazi Germany. During the period of appeasement the attitude towards the German refugees was ‘carefully restrictive’,⁴² which meant that the exile question was handled in a manner avoiding any possible clashes with the diplomatic representations of the Hitler régime in Great Britain. The situation began to change after the Munich agreement, when Hitler's expansionist policies threatened the peace in Europe and eventually led to the Second World War. Germanophobia became rampant in Britain and sentiments against anything or anyone German were expressed even by educated people and by politicians who should have been able to distinguish between Nazis and the German victims of this régime. Sections of the British government spurred these anti-German feelings, and Robert Vansittart, Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, proclaimed a doctrine according to which ‘80 per cent of the German race are the moral and political scum of the earth. You cannot reform them by signatures and concessions. They have got to be hamstrung and broken up … They are a race of bone-headed aggressors …’⁴³ The Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, stated in 1941: ‘I have no confidence in our ability to make decent Europeans of the Germans and I believe that the Nazi system represents the mentality of the great majority of German people.’⁴⁴ Even William Gilles, International Secretary of the Labour Party, who had invited part of the SPD leadership to form a German shadow government in London, lost his trust in the German comrades and stated in 1943:

The HQ regards these émigrés as individuals and does not accept that they are representatives of a party. The Germans' spirit is not really democratic. They are too easily led, much more prone to follow any warlord to the conquest of their neighbours' lands. An insignificant part of the SPD leadership became exiles … and there is not much basis for the opinion that they will have any influence after the war.⁴⁵

In 1943 the British Institute of Public Opinion tested the British public's feelings towards Germany and reported that in reply to their question: ‘What are your feelings towards the German people?’ 45 per cent answered ‘bitterness, hatred and anger’, 20 per cent ‘the Germans are getting what they deserve’, and only 15 per cent stated any feelings of friendliness or pity.⁴⁶ These attitudes can be compared to an opinion poll carried out in the summer of 1939 when 70 per cent stated that refugees from Nazi Germany should be allowed to enter Great Britain (although 80 per cent of those in favour of giving these refugees leave of entry wanted to see restrictions attached to their entry permits in order to safeguard British workers and taxpayers⁴⁷). Andrew Sharf, who analysed the British press's attitude towards the German refugees, sums up his findings by saying that public opinion displayed ‘an anti-Semitic substratum lightly covered over by a mixture of vague humanitarianism and fear of German conquest’.⁴⁸

The Jewish refugees who had sought asylum in Britain found themselves in the ironic situation that after having had to leave Germany because of their Jewish origin they were now treated as Germans and subjected to the same enmity as their Nazi oppressors. Erich Fried, when questioned about his experiences of xenophobia in those years, stated that on the whole the English had been friendly to foreigners, but exceptions to the rule occurred fairly regularly: ‘Only occasionally one heard someone saying “Bloody German”. Then one replied: “But I'm not really a German. I am a Jew.” Then one could hear: “Worse still, bloody German Jew!”’⁴⁹ This inability to distinguish between Nazis and anti-Fascist exiles is mentioned again and again in the refugees' memoirs and personal recollections. The following statement of an exile employed in a Scottish household is typical of this experience:

They had four sons in the British army and one of them was shot down by the Germans and I got the blame for that. I find Scottish people very nice people and I wouldn't change my life but all the time of the war they hated us, they could not understand the difference between a Jew and a German.⁵⁰

Marion Berghahn interviewed a large number of Jewish exiles on the question of xenophobia and sums up her findings:

In general, though, they were convinced of the fundamental decency of the English people, and were confident that the liberal traditions of England would retain the upper hand—although some expressed doubt, because ‘after all, we believed that in Germany too’.⁵¹

The ambivalent feeling many refugees had towards the British population was further exacerbated when they looked for employment to match their professional training and expertise. Some were lucky enough to be issued with a work permit; but this still did not mean that they could find a position where they could use their professional training or which gave them an income comparable to what they had earned in Germany. Only a few of them were able to continue their secure middle class existence in Britain. More typical were the personal histories I was told by London émigrés, such as the case of a lady of good society who once commanded a large household with several servants in Berlin-Wilmersdorf and then became a maid in Putney; of a well-known lawyer from Vienna who had to work as a bank clerk; of a doctor from the Charité who became employed as a nurse at St Bartholomew's; or of a Germanist from Humboldt University who served as a farm hand in Cornwall. One can imagine how humiliating it felt for the mainly middle-class refugees to be pushed into the only work sector where a shortage of labour existed: domestic service. No fewer than 21,000 of the émigrés became employed as domestic servants⁵² (usually the women, since many men refused to lower themselves to become members of the ‘serving classes’). I quote from two interviews to give an impression of how reduced in their value these middle-class refugees felt:

And I really must say, they wanted to exploit us all! At home, we'd all had maids of our own. And it wasn't so easy, suddenly to become maids ourselves. But they made no allowance for this, I must say.⁵³

[My wife found a] position in Glasgow. It was a large tailor's workshop producing women's uniforms. Her job was at the sewing-machine. There were large rooms with a lot of people and a lot of noise, dust and dirt. She really got to know proletarian working conditions there. She accepted this with her usual courage, but it wasn't nice. … I often used to pick her up from work and would wait for her in front of the house in the city centre, in a narrow and rather unpleasant-looking street near the Clyde. After work the female workers would pour out. They were mostly very young girls who looked pretty dirty and unkempt. As a class they were below the shop employees, but gradually she even got used to these surroundings …⁵⁴

The employment situation improved after 1940. The acute labour shortage caused by the outbreak of the war made it easier for the refugees to find work. Many of the exiles contributed to the war effort on the side of the anti-Fascist allies. No fewer than 9,000 men and 1,000 women volunteered for the British forces and ‘conducted themselves’, as Col. Arthur Evans, MP, told the House of Commons, ‘in the best traditions of the British Army’.⁵⁵

Similar praise and distinction were earned by a number of scientists who had come to Britain. In 1933 some 1,200 scholars had been dismissed from German universities, and by 1934 about 650 of them had decided to emigrate. Within two years, 287 of them had been placed permanently in some thirty countries, and 336 temporarily. The British share was fifty-seven permanent and 155 temporary appointments.⁵⁶ Most of them remained after 1945 and contributed to the advancement of science and learning in Britain. By 1955, no fewer than twenty-five had been awarded fellowships of the Royal Society, and three, Born, Chain and Krebs, had won the Nobel Prize. By 1977, fifty-three of them had become Fellows of the Royal Society and twenty-eight Fellows of the British Academy. Art History in British universities gained international status by the arrival of the Warburg Institute and of celebrated scholars such as Nikolaus Pevsner, Ernst Gombrich, Frederick Antal and Rudolf Wittkower.⁵⁷ The British publishing world profited from the arrival of George Weidenfeld, André Deutsch, Bruno Cassirer, Oswald Wolff, Walter Neurath (founder of Thames and Hudson), or Bela Horovitz and Ludwig Goldscheider (who transferred the Phaidon Press from Vienna to London). British sociology took a new course through the enormous influence exercised by Karl Mannheim. There was hardly any university or academic discipline which did not benefit from the exodus of the cream of German scholarship; in fact several pages could be filled if one were to compile a complete list of all German scholars who became distinguished professors, heads of department, directors of medical schools, or chairmen of scientific research institutions in Great Britain.⁵⁸

Similarly beneficial to the country was the arrival of about 4,000 to 6,000 German industrialists, businessmen and entrepreneurs. Most of them were directed into regions of severe unemployment, and by 1939 about 300 firms had been established by refugee manufacturers, creating about 15,000 to 25,000 jobs. By 1947 this number had been increased to about 1,000 refugee manufacturing firms employing about 250,000 people.⁵⁹

There are no exact figures available on how many of the émigrés went back to their country of origin after 1945. Most of the political exiles returned to their homeland in order to participate in the reconstruction of a democratic Germany, whilst the majority of the Jewish refugees made Britain their home. Their break with Germany remained final, partly because of their distrust and reserve towards the Germans; partly because their family ties had been broken up by the Nazis and there were no relatives left in Germany to go back to. When Karen Gershon questioned these émigrés about their attitude towards Germany,⁶⁰ even thirty years after the war many of them still felt bitter:

When I go back to Germany I smell blood.

(p. 154)

I wish them all to hell, do unto them what they did unto others.

(p. 135)

As late as 1951, when I paid my first visit to Germany since leaving in 1938, I murmured, when actually seeing the mounds of rubble that were once cities: ‘Serves them right, serves them right, serves them right’.

(p. 139)

I have found that on a few visits to relatives my emotions have got the better of me. The old fears returned from the moment I set eyes on the man who inspects the passports.

(p. 139)

My attitude to Germany and the Germans is rather mixed. It varies between cynical admiration of their revival, to deepest revulsion about their past deeds.

(p. 136)

I do sometimes find myself resenting West German affluence and efficiency, and our recent purchase of a Volkswagen took some doing.

(p. 136)

All émigrés I spoke to over the last ten years see themselves as loyal Britons; yet culturally they have not broken with their past. They regularly frequent the German Film Seasons at the National Film Theatre, come to poetry readings at the Goethe Institut, or visit the performances of German theatre companies touring Great Britain. Many of them never set foot again on German soil. Some of Gershon's interviewees visited their old home town and found that ‘the home is destroyed by bombs, a new generation lives in the town, their social and economic culture is alien … There is nothing there for me’ (p. 140); or, ‘I went back to my home town last year. It was completely destroyed and rebuilt and seemed to me like a strange place’ (p. 141). Some of the Jewish émigrés occasionally return to Germany in order to visit a friend or relative, but their attitude towards the Germans as a people still remains ambivalent: ‘I know quite a few individual German people whom I like very much, but as an anonymous nation I hate and fear them’ (p. 140). Another former refugee explains why he takes a more philosophical view: ‘How can I hate the Germans; my worst enemies, but also my best friends were German.’⁶¹ They certainly feel more comfortable in Britain, although they cannot refrain from the occasional jibe about the British way of life. Marion Berghahn has studied the assimilation of German refugees into British society⁶² and has found that their attitude towards their new home country is overwhelmingly positive. They have become integrated into British life, but socially they still carry the stigma of being ‘Continental’. Their homes tend to exude a typical German notion of Gemütlichkeit and their eating habits are distinctly non-British.

Even the second generation of immigrants is still aware of their German-Jewish background. They were born in England, their friends are mainly English, but at the most they can say: ‘I am British, though I shall never be English.’⁶³ In Marion Berghahn's study, even in the third generation, 99 per cent stated that they do not feel English. They see themselves above all as Jews, but different from the English Jews. One of Gershon's interviewees explains this by saying: ‘We do not fit in completely because we are Jewish, yet not Jewish enough for English Jews.’⁶⁴ They do not feel German either, but then German-Jewish culture has always been different from the official German ‘high-culture’. Berghahn describes their identity as ‘German-Jewish ethnicity’, where the German component becomes more diluted and the Jewish element merges more and more with the Anglo-Jewish culture. But at the present, forty years after the Holocaust, an important part of German culture of the past still survives in Britain because, as Marion Berghahn says, ‘in England the Jews are permitted to be what, in the final analysis, they could not be in Germany: German Jews.’⁶⁵

GERMAN EXILE THEATRE: THE BRITISH EXPERIENCE

In 1945, when many of the exiled theatre artists returned to their home country, they were greeted by a population which was crying out for theatrical entertainment. Between 1945 and 1948 no fewer than 419 theatre enterprises were called into existence,⁶⁶ but the fare the audiences were provided with consisted mainly of comedies, operettas and classical plays. Contemporary anti-Fascist drama accounted for only a small fraction of the repertoire. Hans Daibler has estimated that of the circa 500 plays written during the period of exile only 5 per cent were performed after 1945,⁶⁷ and most of these in the Soviet Occupied Zone.⁶⁸

One of the few plays to be given repeated runs in several West German theatres was Friedrich Wolf's Professor Mamlock. Obviously audiences were interested in the play's political message—much to the distaste of the cultural establishment. On 13 December 1946 the Kölnischer Rundschau wrote: ‘What are we to do with tendentious plays such as Professor Mamlock? We have been fed with this kind of stuff during the Third Reich … Now we want to see works which lift us out of the narrowness of our poor existence into higher spheres …’⁶⁹ While anti-Fascist drama was being pushed into the background the protagonists of National Socialist drama, such as Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer or Hanns Johst, experienced a renaissance in West Germany. The political climate of the Cold War and restoration period led to a situation where the exiles, just as the resistance movement, ‘became for a second time victims of a political situation’.⁷⁰ A similar fate lay in store for the historians who had studied the cultural activities of the exiled artists and who wanted to inform the German public how the progressive and humanist traditions of German culture had been upheld and continued by the exiles outside the confines of the Third Reich. When Walter Berendsohn offered his manuscript of Die humanistische Front to the Munich publisher Kurt Desch the book was rejected because it was considered

a sort of pamphlet of an émigré against the writers who remained in Germany. We have to and want to object to this book most emphatically because of its sad and disgraceful tendency … which not only obstructs our attempts of bridging the gap between us and the émigrés, but also contaminates the atmosphere between Germany and her neighbours with new poison.⁷¹

The theatre artists returning from exile with the intention of informing their fellow countrymen about their activities abroad received a fairly similar reception, i.e. total disinterest or distinct hostility. Apart from a few articles and brochures published immediately after the war,⁷² no major study on exile theatre appeared until the early 1970s.

In 1973, the Academy of Arts in West Berlin organized an exhibition ‘Theater in Exil’ and a symposium on the same subject, and in the same year published the papers given at the conference. These events coincided with a research project organized by the Academy of Arts in Berlin (GDR) and the issuing of an Arbeitsheft containing a survey, entitled Das antifaschistisch-demokratische und sozialistische deutsche Theater im Exil. In West Germany the Hanser Verlag published Hans Christof Wächter's dissertation Theater im Exil. From then on, a major monograph on exile theatre has appeared nearly every year. … This sudden upsurge of interest in the exile period brought to a halt the irretrievable loss of valuable documents which had still been in the possession of the artists once involved with the exile theatre, or at least decelerated the rapid disappearance of material without which the history of exile theatre cannot be reconstructed. Since many of the theatre productions were badly documented in the first place, the personal scrapbooks of actors, directors or designers, containing texts, music sheets, photographs, or newspaper clippings are of considerable importance for the theatre historian. Unfortunately, many of these memorabilia do not have much of a sentimental value for the relatives of a deceased artist, which means that a large amount of unique documents has been destroyed and will no longer be available for future research.

It has been estimated that between 1933 and 1945 the exiled playwrights and theatre artists created about 724 dramatic works and 800 theatre productions, 108 radio dramas and 398 film scripts.⁷³ Only a few of the texts survive, and many productions were never reviewed in the exile or foreign press, which leaves us with very little evidence of how extensive the theatrical activity was and what artistic quality it did achieve. A systematic study of those documents that have been preserved in various archives and private collections makes us aware that an enormous variety of theatrical activities was instigated by the exiled artists. It is therefore misleading to speak of the exile theatre, when the diversity of theatrical ventures appears to be one of the most salient traits of the émigrés' theatre activities. The particular organizational or artistic shape of a theatrical enterprise depended on the artists involved, the composition of the exile community, the theatrical traditions of the host country, the financial and material conditions of the theatre, the political and legal framework under which they were operating and so on. Hence it is wise to avoid generalizations and sweeping judgements and to concentrate on specific descriptions and analyses of the theatrical work carried out in individual countries or theatres or by particular ensembles or artists.

The ten studies assembled in this volume offer an impressive picture of the range of activities carried out by the exiled theatre artists in Great Britain. Arising out of these essays a number of conclusions can be drawn. (These, of course, only reflect my own opinions and do not necessarily coincide with the views of the contributors to this volume.)

When comparing the German exile theatre in Great Britain with that in other English-speaking countries, especially the USA, it becomes apparent that the cultural climate in a receiving country was always more important for an artist's successful career than his or her command of the English language. While in the USA the refugee artists had relatively good chances of becoming integrated into the existing theatre structure, in Britain the co-operation with professional theatre institutions could be achieved only to a limited degree. Initially, the situation looked fairly promising. Many actors who were fleeing Nazi Germany seem to have regarded London as a favourite city in which to continue their theatrical career. On 21 December 1935, the exile journal Das Neue. Tage-Buch reported: ‘The transplantation of the Berlin theatre of old makes constant progress. After Elisabeth Bergner, Lucie Mannheim, Grete Mosheim, Oskar Homolka, Fritz Kortner, Conrad Veidt, Paul Grätz and others, Ernst Deutsch is now also making his passage to the English stage.’ It is interesting to note that between 1933 and 1938, when only a limited number of refugees had found asylum in Britain and only a small exile community existed in London, there were more productions of German plays in regular English theatre than in the following six years. Nick Furness, in his article ‘The Reception of Ernst Toller and His Works in Britain’ in the volume Expressionism in Focus, lists no fewer than nineteen productions of this dramatist, presented between 1933 and 1939, in British theatres. Toller, certainly, was the most widely performed German playwright in the country; but one should also mention some other notable productions of the pre-war era:

1933	Friedrich Schiller, Kabale und Liebe (perf. in German), Duke of York's Theatre, dir.: Leopold Jessner, des.: Caspar Neher
1933	Hermann Sudermann, Heimat, ditto
1934	Carl Zuckmayer, The Golden Toy, Coliseum, dir.: Ludwig Berger
1935	Kurt Weill, My Kingdom for a Cow, Savoy Theatre, dir.: Felix Weissberger, des.: Hein Heckroth
1936	Bruno Frank, Young Madam Conti, Savoy Theatre, dir.: Benn W. Levy, des.: Ernst Stern
c. 1936/37	Leo Lania, Der Held (mentioned in Wächter, p. 41)
1937	Walter Hasenclever (under the pseudonym Axel Kjellström), Scandal in Assyria, The London International Theatre Club at the Globe Theatre, London, dir.: John Gielgud, des.: Motley
1937	Walter Hasenclever, What Should a Husband Do? Theatre unknown; dir.: Robert Klein
1938	Bertolt Brecht, Señora Carrar's Rifles, Unity Theatre, dir.: John Fernald

It was a great loss to the English theatre that internationally renowned actors such as Fritz Kortner, Oskar Homolka or Ernst Deutsch could not be won permanently for the London stage. The same applies to directors such as Berthold Viertel, who directed only one major production in London, Max Catto's Gothic thriller They Walk Alone (1939: Shaftesbury Theatre).⁷⁴

Only after 1938, when the mass immigration of German refugees to Britain set in, did an exile community with an active cultural life come into being. Whenever the exiled actors, directors, designers etc. did not find employment in the theatre, the film industry or at the BBC they offered their service to one of the exile theatre ventures that had sprung up after 1939: the Laterndl, the Kleine Bühne des FDKB, the Blue Danube, the Österreichische Bühne, the Lessing Theater, the Spieltruppe der Freien Deutschen Jugend, the Kulturbund-Spielgruppe, the Austrian Youth Players, the Oxford Refugee Theatre Company, the Kleinkunstbühne der Jacob Ehrlich Gesellschaft.

Due to the limited facilities these companies had at their disposal, short plays and revue shows were performed more frequently than full-length plays with large casts. The artists drew heavily on the traditions of cabaret and agit-prop, although some reviews indicate that even within the limitations of small budgets and restrictive technical apparatus attempts in the direction of psychological naturalism were undertaken. Experiments with new dramatic forms or innovatory theatrical languages are never mentioned. Even the three Brecht productions of the FDKB (the ‘Informer’ scene from Fear and Misery of the Third Reich in 1939 at the West Central Hall, the ‘Rechtsfindung’ scene from the same play in 1941 at the Toynbee Hall, and Señora Carrar's Rifles in the same double bill as Rechtsfindung in 1941) had been chosen solely for their political subject matter and were performed in a style that gave no indication of Brecht's importance as a radical innovator of the German stage.

The artistic quality of a production was largely determined by the technical facilities and the personnel available, and its formal characteristics were always subservient to the function of the production. The restrictions imposed by poor working conditions forced the exile theatres in their initial phase to use an Epic style similar to the one used by the working-class theatre collectives of the Weimar Republic. But later, when the facilities and finances allowed it, the style of many productions resembled those of a traditional Stadttheater of the Weimar period (see, for example, the last productions at the Kleine Bühne (Little Theatre) and the Laterndl).

The relationship between function and format of the exile theatre productions can be summarized under five headings:

• (1) The performances were organized by refugee clubs and took place in the early evenings or at weekends, when there were no curfews and few work commitments. The theatres served as a meeting point for the refugees and fulfilled important social functions within the exile community.
• (2) Many performances were given in the German language in order to help the refugees retain a cultural identity and serve as a reminder of the Weimar years when theatre had always played an important rôle in their lives. The retention of a cultural heritage reduced the feeling of loss which characterized other parts of the refugees' existence. Hence the emphasis on plays and scenes stemming from the traditional repertoire and the nostalgia which pervaded many performances.
• (3) The rediscovery of the humanistic and democratic traditions in German theatre served to emphasize the existence of an ‘other Germany’ and to counterbalance the appropriation of part of the classical repertoire by the Nazis. Since these performances were directed at an exile as well as an English audience they were given in the English language.
• (4) Plays and scenes written by authors living in exile often dealt with the everyday life of the refugees and offered help in coping with the exile situation and the innumerable problems attached to the émigrés' attempts at building up a new existence for themselves in a foreign country. These problems were dealt with in humorous little vignettes or sketches, but sometimes whole revues or serious plays were dedicated to this subject matter.
• (5) Anti-Fascist plays and scenes performed in English served to enlighten the British public about what was happening in Nazi Germany. They tried to reveal the true nature of the Hitler régime and served as a counterbalance to the propaganda of the Nazis and their British allies. These performances aimed at having a strong emotional appeal, which was usually achieved by offering the spectator the opportunity to identify with the victims of Nazi oppression. The Brechtian method of appealing to the spectators' rational capacities and making use of the Alienation Effect was rarely employed.

It is difficult to assess what kind of response these productions received outside exile circles. Reviews in the national as well as exile press tended to be very positive because many of the reviewers were personal friends or acquaintances of the performers, and they tried to support these theatrical activities by writing encouraging reviews. Therefore, one cannot attach too much significance to their assessment of the artistic qualities of the productions. From most reviews it transpires that the critics were so impressed by the mere fact that the refugees were creating theatre under such adverse circumstances that they would not discourage these undertakings by petty carping or fault-finding, even if they thought that the productions left a lot to be desired.

The attempts of the National Socialist embassy and consulate to suppress the activities of the émigrés and to hinder the performances of anti-Fascist plays (successful, for example, in the case of Bruckner's Die Rassen, which Robert Klein, former director of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, planned to produce in London in 1934⁷⁵) can be interpreted as a sign that the exiles' influence on public opinion abroad was taken seriously by the government in Berlin. The exile theatres were considered to have a detrimental effect on the image the Nazi régime sought to propagate abroad, and they tried to counteract it by founding a Truppe für Auslandsgastspiele (Foreign Touring Company) under the auspices of the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (Propaganda Ministry).⁷⁶

But it is rather doubtful that the importance the Berlin government attached to the exiles' activities can serve as a truthful indicator of the actual effect the émigrés' propaganda work had on the population of their host country. In 1943, the Foreign Office requested M15 to investigate the political activities of the German refugee organizations and was content to find, after they had received the secret service's report, ‘First, that German exiles were very much on their good behaviour and less outspoken than their colleagues in the USA and second, that whatever their views, they had in fact been able to gain little influence on any action of British public life not excluding the Labour party with which their contacts are strongest’.⁷⁷ Although the majority of the population was aware of the presence of a considerable number of German immigrants in their country, only a few of them took an active interest in their political and cultural activities. Until the outbreak of the Second World War, the arts programme of the Nazi consulates exercised a considerable influence in Britain, and it was not only the Mosleyites who were impressed by the glamour of Nazi culture and admired Hitler's solution to the economic crisis of the early 1930s.

Amongst those members of the public who felt sympathy for the émigrés, only a few attended their theatre performances, and if they did, they did not necessarily find them to their taste. For obvious reasons, the performances in the exile theatres did not compare favourably to productions in the West End. But even when the German theatre artists managed to break into the commercial theatre world, only a few of them received a favourable reception. The gap between the German and British theatre traditions was immense: the works of Expressionist playwrights such as Ernst Toller were greeted with consternation, atonal music of the Viennese School was slated as ‘sewing machine counterpoint’, Jessner's famous Treppen were gazed at in disbelief, and many spectators found Kortner's acting style downright revolting.⁷⁸ The revolutions in European theatre from Craig and Appia onwards had left virtually no trace in Britain. Even the productions in ‘experimental’ theatres such as the Gate or Cambridge Festival Theatre were tame compared to what had been performed in Germany, Russia, France or Italy in the early part of the century. In Britain, the pièce-bien-faite variety of theatre reigned supreme, and the production methods can only be described as slapdash. Friedrich Richter, later to become one of the few commercial success stories of German émigrés working in the British commercial theatre, draws a vivid picture of this type of production:

The Oxford Playhouse opens every week with a new play. How is it possible that the actors in Oxford can churn out a play in no less than six days (the seventh day is a Sunday when the theatre is dark and no rehearsals take place)? How is this in the long run possible? Well, first of all these plays are pure conversation pieces, and secondly these actors are incredible routiniers and play without director. True, the programme always mentions a director, and this person is also sitting in the stalls during rehearsals, but he very wisely keeps his mouth shut. He can't afford to hold up rehearsals by giving any hints or advice. There are six times four hours of rehearsals, half an hour of which is always taken up by a coffee break, when you go over into the foyer, have a cup of coffee, and become absorbed in a conversation with the charming English colleagues.⁷⁹

The six days rehearsal period also applied to arts theatres such as the Gate or Festival Theatre,⁸⁰ which despite the Continental flavour of their repertoire do not hold any comparison to the Art Theatre in Munich or Moscow.

Kurt Schwitter's judgement on the English art scene: ‘Nobody in London cares about good art. Only a few foreigners know what art is’⁸¹ would have been fully endorsed by the German theatre folk. For anybody who had grown up with the richness and diversity of the Weimar art scene London must have looked like a cultural desert in the 1930s and 1940s. However, it would be unfair to fault the British for not lapping up the ‘artistic manna’ which the German exiles were dispensing to a ‘culturally impoverished’ country. There were enlightened, cultured, sympathetic visitors to the performances created by the German exiles, and they found many productions lacking in artistic quality and unsuccessful in evoking the gripping emotional experience the executing artists had aimed at. A plausible explanation for this is given by Brooks Atkinson in an analysis of the genre of anti-Fascist drama on the occasion of the New York première of Friedrich Wolf's Professor Mamlock. He finds that the persecution of the Jews and the atrocities committed by the Nazis are so appalling that a mere description on stage turns them into Grand Guignol or a horror show. In order to avoid this danger anti-Fascist theatre has to lay bare the causes of this evil and the mechanism that enabled it to grow to these proportions: ‘The province of the playwright goes beyond surface events to the causes of action. What we need to know is how this relapse into ignorance and barbarism came about in one of the major nations of the world. … What the playwright should explain to us is not what, for we know that, but why.’⁸²

The reason for the lack of response which many productions received cannot be explained solely by the audiences' lack of appreciation or by the poor technical facilities in the exile theatres. Amongst the artists there existed a misconception of how art could operate under the conditions of exile. In the theatre this not only applied to the format of a stage show, but also to the communication structure of a performance and the stage-audience relationship. Productions that would be a reasonable success in Germany cannot be expected to receive a similar reception in England, because the audience has a different cultural background and goes to the theatre with different expectations and references in mind. The mixture of agit-prop and nostalgia which characterized so many productions in the exile theatres was bound to be anathema to an English audience raised on French farces and West End comedies.

These critical notes do not mean to detract from the fact that despite many faults the productions organized by the exiled theatre artists, taken in their entirety, did have considerable political effect and did amount to a remarkable artistic achievement. But at the same time one has to be aware of their limitations. Exile theatre can be assessed objectively only by examining the productions within the framework of the social and cultural conditions of the country where they were presented. If the artistic quality of many performances in the exile theatres was not always of the highest standard, one can find good reasons for it. If the political effect was not always as powerful as expected, again—with hindsight—one can see why. To write a history of exile theatre, therefore, also means to write a history of the obstacles and restrictions under which the artists were operating. It is astonishing to see how much—despite the most detrimental circumstances—was actually achieved by the exiled theatre artists and how many traces this activity has left behind to the present day.

Notes

1. See Wolf-Eberhard August, Die Stellung der Schauspieler im Dritten Reich, Ph.D Thesis, Munich, 1973.

2. See his own account of the event in an autobiographical sketch, published by Lotte H. Eisner, Fritz Lang, London, 1976, pp. 14-15.

3. See Curt Trepte, ‘Deutsches Theater im Exil der Welt’, in Helmut Müssener and Gisela Sandqvist (eds), Protokoll des II. Internationalen Symposiums zur Erforschung des deutschsprachigen Exils nach 1933 in Kopenhagen, Stockholm, 1972, pp. 520-56, here p. 522.

4. Quoted in Peter de Mendelssohn, S. Fischer und sein Verlag, Frankfurt, 1970, p. 1253.

5. Max Herrmann-Neiße, ‘Ein deutscher Dichter bin ich einst gewesen’, in Um uns die Fremde: Gedichte, Zurich, 1936, p. 84.

6. Walter Hasenclever, Gedichte, Dramen, Prosa, ed. Kurt Pinthus, Reinbek, 1963, p. 407.

7. Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers, Stockholm, 1944, p. 466.

8. See Ursula Ahrens, ‘Bericht über Alexander Granachs sowjetische Exiljahre 1935-37. Aus Briefen im Archiv der Westberliner Akademie der Künste erstellt’, Europäische Ideen, no. 14-15, 1976, pp. 127-30, here p. 129.

9. See the interview in Marion Berghahn, Continental Britons: German-Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany, Oxford, 1988, pp. 94-5.

10. Quoted in Michael Nungesser, ‘Die bildenden Künstler im Exil’, in Kunst im Exil in Großbritannien 1933-1945, Exh. cat., Berlin (West), 1986, pp. 27-34, here p. 31.

11. Leonard Frank, Links wo das Herz ist, Munich, 1952, p. 191.

12. See ‘The Sounding Board: The Transplanted Composer’, Los Angeles Times, 14 May 1950, part IV, p. 5.

13. Bertolt Brecht, ‘Geburtstagsbrief an Karin Michaelis’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 19, Frankfurt, 1967, pp. 477-8, here p. 478.

14. Egon Schwarz, ‘Was ist und zu welchem Ende studieren wir Exilliteratur?’, in Peter Uwe Hohendahl and Egon Schwarz (eds), Exil und Innere Emigration II: Internationale Tagung in St. Louis, Frankfurt, 1973, pp. 155-64, here p. 160.

15. Alfred Kerr, ‘Exil’, Neue Weltbühne, 4 Nov. 1937, pp. 1422-4, here p. 1423.

16. Hermann Kesten, ‘Erinnerungen und Erfahrungen: Schicksale der Deutschen Literatur 1933-1953’, Deutsche Universitätszeitung, vol. 8, 1953, no. 4, pp. 12-15; no. 5, pp. 14-17; here no. 5, p. 15.

17. Peter Laemmle, ‘Vorschläge für eine Revision der Exilforschung’, Akzente, vol. 20, 1973, pp. 509-19, here p. 518.

18. The history of the German exiles in Victorian England has recently been re-examined by Rosemary Ashton, Little Germany: Exile and Asylum in Victorian England, Oxford, 1986. Still informative on the subject is C.R. Hennings, Deutsche in England, Stuttgart, 1923. For a general characterization of German emigration to Britain in the nineteenth century see C.C. Aronsfeld, ‘German Jews in Victorian England’, in Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, vol. 7, 1962, pp. 312-29.

19. See Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, vol. 120, London, 1852, col. 675.

20. See Bernard Porter, The Refugee Question in Mid-Victorian Politics, Cambridge, 1979, p. 4.

21. In 1850 the Anglo-Jewish community in Britain numbered about 35,000 persons. The 1871 census counts 32,823 Germans and 9,569 Russians and Poles in a foreign population of 105,000. The 1891 census counts 50,599 Germans, 21,448 Russian Poles and 23,626 Russians. In 1901 the Russian-Jewish population is believed to consist of 95,245 persons with 43,000 of them living in Stepney, where they form 18.19 per cent of the population. The census of 1911 lists 272,204 foreigners, 51,165 of them being German and 106,082 Russian and Polish Jews. All figures are taken from Lloyd P. Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant in England, 1870-1914, London, 1973, p. 49; Colin Holmes, Anti-Semitism in British Society, 1876-1939, London, 1979, p. 5; Colin Holmes, ‘Immigrants, Refugees and Revolutionaries’, Immigrants and Minorities, vol. 2, 1983, pp. 7-22, here p. 8.

22. Home Secretary's Memorandum to Cabinet Committee on Alien's Restrictions, 6 April 1933, Public Record Office, Kew, CAB 24/239; quoted in Bernard Wasserstein, ‘The British Government and the German Immigration 1933-1945’, in Gerhard Hirschfeld (ed.), Exile in Great Britain: Refugees from Hitler's Germany, Leamington Spa and New Jersey, 1984, pp. 63-81, here p. 68.

23. Foreign Office Circular to Passport Control Department Concerning Visas for Holders of German and Austrian Passports Entering the United Kingdom, 27 April 1938, Public Record Office, Kew, FO 372/3284/9, quoted in Wasserstein, ‘The British Government and the German Immigration’, p. 72.

24. Ibid.

25. Werner Röder, Die deutschen sozialistischen Exilgruppen in Großbritannien: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Widerstandes gegen den Nationalsozialismus, Hanover, 1968, p. 23 gives their number as 12,000 in 1940.

26. A.J. Sherman, Island Refuge: Britain and Refugees from the Third Reich 1933-1939, London, 1973, p. 264 sets the number of Czech refugees in Britain at 6,000. Leopold Grünwald, In der Fremde für die Heimat: Sudentendeutsches Exil in Ost und West, Munich, 1982, p. 13 estimates that 3,000 of them were Sudentendeutsche.

27. See Röder, Die deutschen Exilgruppen, p. 25.

28. Ibid., p. 87.

29. Interviewee, quoted in Rainer Kölmel, ‘Problems of Settlement: German-Jewish Refugees in Scotland’, in Hirschfeld, Exile in Great Britain, pp. 251-83, here p. 272.

30. Gabriele Tergit, ‘How They Resettled’, in Britain's New Citizens: The Story of the Refugees from Germany and Austria, ed. The Association of Jewish Refugees in Great Britain, London, 1951, pp. 61-9, here p. 63. On unemployment and living conditions in Britain in the 1930s see Noreen Branson and Margot Heinemann, Britain in the 1930's, London, 1971. The refugee question is also dealt with in Malcolm Muggeridge, The Thirties: 1930-1940 in Great Britain, London, 1940.

31. Interviewee quoted in Kölmel, ‘Problems of Settlement’, p. 264.

32. Interviewee quoted in Karen Gershon (ed.) We Came as Children: A Collective Autobiography, London, 1966, p. 155.

33. Interviewee quoted in Kölmel, ‘Problems of Settlement’, p. 273.

34. ‘Gespräch mit Erich Fried’, in Michael Seyfert, Im Niemandsland: Deutsche Exilliteratur in britischer Internierung. Ein unbekanntes kapitel der Kulturgeschichte des Zweiten Weltkrieges, Berlin (West), 1984, pp. 151-6, here p. 155.

35. Ibid., p. 154.

36. Interviewee quoted in Kölmel, ‘Problems of Settlement’, pp. 274-5.

37. Ibid., p. 275.

38. See Cordula Frowein, ‘Ausstellungsaktivitäten der Exilkünstler’, in Kunst im Exil in Großbritannien, pp. 35-48, here p. 44.

39. Report in Public Record Office, Kew, FO 371/26554 c 1930, quoted in Anthony Glees, Exile Politics During the Second World War: The German Social Democrats in Britain, Oxford, 1982, p. 149.

40. E. Doran on 9 March 1933. See Hansard Parliamentary Debates: House of Commons, Fifth Series, vol. 275, London, 1933, col. 1352.

41. Quoted in Austin Stevens, The Dispossessed: German Refugees in Britain, London, 1975, p. 119.

42. Sherman, Island Refuge, p. 259.

43. Memorandum of 11 March 1940 in Public Record Office, Kew, FO 371/24418 c 5304, quoted in Glees, Exile Politics, p. 51.

44. Quoted in Glees, Exile Politics, p. 155.

45. Labour Party Archives, International Department, Middleton Papers, (M), Box 9, Letter to S.W. Smith and R.J. Davies of 21 September and 6 May 1943, quoted in Glees, Exile Politics, p. 103.

46. Public Record Office, Kew, FO 371/34461 c 12764, quoted in Glees, Exile Politics, p. 201.

47. See Andrew Sharf, The British Press and Jews under Nazi Rule, London, 1964, p. 199.

48. Ibid., p. 206.

49. Fried in Seyfert, Im Niemandsland, p. 153.

50. Interviewee quoted in Kölmel, ‘Problems of Settlement’, p. 261.

51. Marion Berghahn, ‘German Jews in England: Aspects of the Assimilation and Integration Process’, in Hirschfeld, Exile in Great Britain, pp. 285-306, here p. 295.

52. See Francis L. Carsten, ‘German Refugees in Great Britain 1933-1945: A Survey’, in Hirschfeld, Exile in Great Britain, pp. 11-28, here p. 13.

53. Interviewee quoted in Kölmel, ‘Problems of Settlement’, p. 259.

54. Ibid., pp. 263-4.

55. Quoted in Francis L. Carsten, ‘German Refugees’, p. 24. See also the statistics in Norman Bentwich, I Understand the Risks: The Story of the Refugees from Nazi Oppression Who Fought in the British Forces in the World War, London, 1950, pp. 176-7.

56. All figures are taken from Norman Bentwich, The Rescue and Achievement of Refugee Scholars: The Story of Displaced Scholars and Scientists 1933-1952, The Hague, 1953, pp. 1-2 and 13. See also Kurt R. Grossmann, Emigration: Geschichte der Hitler Flüchtlinge 1933-1945, Frankfurt, 1969, p. 217.

57. See Dieter Wuttke, ‘Die Emigration der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg und die Anfänge des Universitätsfaches Kunstgeschichte in Großbritannien’, in Kunst im Exil in Großbritannien, pp. 209-15.

58. The most important names are mentioned in Britain's New Citizens, pp. 35-43 and Bentwich, Rescue and Achievement, pp. 80-92. See also Gerhard Hirschfeld, ‘Die Emigration deutscher Wissenschaftler nach Großbritannien, 1933-1945’, in Gottfried Niedhart (ed.), Großbritannien als Gast- und Exilland für Deutsche im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Bochum, 1985, pp. 117-40; and Bernard Wasserstein, ‘Intellectual Emigrés in Britain, 1933-1939’, in J.C. Jackman and C.M. Borden (eds), The Muses Flee Hitlēr: Cultural Transfer and Adaptation 1930-1945, Washington DC, 1983, pp. 249-56.

59. See Herbert Loebl, ‘Refugee Industries in the Special Areas of Britain’, in Hirschfeld, Exile in Great Britain, pp. 219-49, here pp. 221 and 246.

60. See Gershon, We Came as Children.

61. Quoted in Berghahn, ‘German Jews in England’, pp. 297-8.

62. See idem, Continental Britons.

63. Interviewee quoted in Gershon, We Came as Children, p. 168.

64. Ibid., p. 155. In the wake of the Jewish emancipation in the eighteenth century many German Jews had become integrated into German society and given up their Jewish culture. They despised their non-assimilated co-religionists, especially if they were Ostjuden. Many of these Eastern Jews had settled in Britain at the turn of the century and regarded the new influx of German Jews after 1933 with suspicion, resentment or aloofness. One refugee remembers: ‘The Glasgow Jews took just as little interest in us. On the contrary, they to a certain extent resented the German-Jewish refugees. Most of the Glasgow Jews had come from Russia or Poland; their families had emigrated in the 1880s and 1890s, at the time of the pogroms there. Earlier, German Jews had looked down on them; now they avenged themselves by being very reserved towards us.’ (Quoted in Kölmel, ‘Problems of Settlement’, p. 267. See also the interviews in Berghahn, Continental Britons, pp. 231-4.) These distinctions account for the fact that to this day there are culturally different Jewish communities living in Britain.

65. See Berghahn, ‘German Jews in England’, p. 304.

66. See Hans Daibler, Deutsches Theater seit 1945, Stuttgart, 1976, p. 90.

67. Ibid., p. 57.

68. See Werner Mittenzwei et al., Theater in der Zeitenwende: Zur Geschichte des Dramas und des Schauspieltheaters in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik 1945-1968, vol. 1, Berlin (GDR), 1972, pp. 82-136.

69. Quoted in Gerhard Roloff, Exil und Exilliteratur in der deutschen Presse 1945-1949, Worms, 1976, p. 203.

70. Hans-Albert Walter in an interview with Heinz Ludwig Arnold, in Akzente vol. 20, 1973, p. 483. See also Erhard Bahr, ‘Das zweite Exil: Zur Rezeption der Exilliteratur in den westlichen Besatzungszonen und in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland von 1945 bis 1959’, in Donald G. Daviau and Ludwig Fischer (eds), Das Exilerlebnis: Verhandlungen des Vierten Symposiums über deutsche und österreichische Exilliteratur, Columbia, 1982, pp. 353-66: and Martin Mantzke, ‘Emigration und Emigranten als Politikum in der Bundesrepublik der sechziger Jahre’, Exil, vol. 1, 1983, pp. 24-30.

71. See the facsimile documents in Walter A. Berendsohn, Die Humanistische Front: Einführung in die deutsche Emigranten-Literatur. Zweiter Teil: Vom Kriegsausbruch 1939 bis Ende 1946, Worms, 1976, pp. 229-30.

72. See Curt Trepte, ‘Freies Deutsches Theater in Schweden 1938-1945’, Theater der Zeit, vol. 1, no. 2, 1946, pp. 22-4; Erich Freund, ‘Deutsches Theater im Londoner Exil’, Theater der Zeit, vol. 1, no. 4, Oct. 1946, pp. 20-4; Paul Walter Jacob (ed.), Theater: Sieben Jahre Freie Deutsche Bühne in Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, 1946; Kurt Stern, ‘Eine Bühne im Exil: Deutsches Theater in Mexiko’, Theater der Zeit, vol. 2, no. 4, 1947, pp. 23-6; Erich Freund, ‘Studio 1934: Die erste deutsche Bühne im Exil’, Theater der Zeit, vol. 2, no. 7, 1947, pp. 30-2; Egon Larsen, ‘Deutsches Theater in London: Ein unbeschriebenes Kapitel Kulturgeschichte’, Zick-Zack, vol. 2, 1948, pp. 13-15; Paul Walter Jacob (ed.), Theater 1940-1950: Zehn Jahre Deutsche Bühne in Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, 1950; Karl Otto Paetel, ‘Deutsches Theater in Amerika’, Deutsche Rundschau, vol. 81, 1955, pp. 271-5.

73. See Curt Trepte, ‘Archiv Deutsches Theater- und Filmschaffen im Exil’, Mitteilungen der Deutschen Akademie der Künste zu Berlin, vol. 5, 1967, no. 1, pp. 11-12, here p. 12 and Curt Trepte, ‘Deutsches Theater im Exil der Welt’, in Müssener/Sandqvist, Protokoll des II. Internationalen Symposiums, p. 522.

74. See Friedrich Pfäfflin (ed.), Berthold Viertel (1885-1953): Eine Dokumentation, Munich, n.d. [1969], p. 35; Berthold Viertel, Schriften zum Theater, ed. Gert Heidenreich, Munich, 1970, p. 531; Konstantin Kaiser, ‘Theater im Exil: Das Beispiel Berthold Viertel’, Wiener Tagebuch, no. 11, Nov. 1986, pp. 22-4; Eberhard Frey, ‘Ethisches Theater: Berthold Viertels Theatertätigkeit im Exil’, in Wolfgang Elfe et al. (eds), Deutsches Exildrama und Exiltheater: Akten des Exilliteratur-Symposiums der University of South Carolina, Berne, 1977, pp. 77-84, here p. 78.

75. See Joseph Wulf, Theater und Film im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation, Gütersloh, 1964, p. 245.

76. See Georg Wilhelm Müller, Das Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, Berlin, 1940, p. 28.

77. Quoted in Glees, Exile Politics, p. 189.

78. In his autobiography, Aller Tage Abend, Munich, 1959, pp. 386 ff., 428 ff., 465 ff., Fritz Kortner paints an amusing picture of the London theater world and describes how the British tradition of underacting (he calls it ‘Gefühls-Tiefstapelei’ [p. 466] or ‘Ausdrucksanämie’ [p. 429]) forced him, who had always strived for expressiveness, to forgo his best qualities as an actor and to adapt to the ‘charming virtuosity of a non-committal acting style’ (charmante Virtuosität der Ausdrucksunverbindlichkeit, p. 428) which the British audiences favoured. See also the sources quoted by Alan Clarke in this volume, pp. 100-7.

79. Friedrich Richter, ‘Auf Theatertour in England’, in Renate Seydel (ed.), … gelebt für alle Zeiten: Schauspieler über sich und andere, Berlin (GDR), 1978, pp. 293-306, here pp. 296-7.

80. See Richard Cave, Terence Gray and the Cambridge Festival Theatre, Cambridge, 1980, p. 14.

81. Schwitter in a letter of 1 April 1947 to Louise Spengemann, in Kurt Schwitter, Wir spielen, bis uns der Tod abholt: Briefe aus fünf Jahrzehnten, ed. Ernst Nündel, Berlin (West), 1974, p. 272.

82. Brooks Atkinson, ‘Culture under the Nazis’, New York Times, 25 April 1937, Section X, p. 1.