The Human Touch

FAITHLESS as the German majority has been to its Jewish minority, that Jewish minority, by and large, has insisted on returning good for evil. They whom Aryan Germany tries so frenetically to disown do not disown, do not discredit, the fundamental culture of Germany; in fact, they strive to scatter more widely and plough in more deeply, the seeds of knowlege of the best in the German past, in the Germanic achievements in the real culture as against the false kultur proclaimed by the disciples of hat.

The Einstein concert was not given to point a moral; it was given to raise a sum of money for some of Einstein’s friends in need in Berlin. And yet that purpose will not have been invalidated if I do extract a moral from the occasion. Most of the performers who volunteered their services-if not all-were Jewish. Virtually all who heard the concert-with the exception of a few newspapermen-were Jewish. And yet the performers played, and relished, and the audience took delight in, music that was profoundly German, in the best sense of the word. They played Bach, they played Beethoven, they played Mozart. Even the solo that Einstein was to have played, and didn’t, was pure German-a Sonatina by Schubert. So that that concert was nothing less than an affirmation of the German spirit, of the German genius, in music. Among those for whom the concert was a little more than an opportunity to look at Einstein in a relaxed mood, in a private role, there must have been the feeling, unexpressed, which might best be rendered in the phrase” “This belongs to us, too, and nothing you can do will deprive us of it, or make us turn against it because you make exclusive claim to it.”

Some weeks ago. The Bulletin published a cable from Amsterdam, Holland, which illustrates the service to German culture of those non-Aryans Nazi Germany is disclaiming. Professor Jessner, the greatest German regisseur after Max Reinhard, had organized a troupe of non-Aryan actors and was presenting a repertoire of this classic German drama outside Germany, in the chief cities of Holland and Belgium particularly. Perhaps this is a way of earning a living for Professor Jessner and his colleagues, but the living is earned through the affirmation of the German genius, and not in spiteful denial of Germany. It is to be hoped that the Germany of tomorrow will remember to make restitution to those whom the Germany of today is wronging.

When Bruno Walter came from Salzburg, Austria, to New York to conduct the Phil-harmonic Symphony Orchestra, every work which he conducted, for at least the first five or six concerts, was purely German. None of the music critics, in reviwing Dr. Walter’s performances, wrote of him as one whom the Germans had rejected, or pointed out the nature of his programs, except our own music critic, Mr. Lipskin, who made the comment that the exclusive selection of German works, in the light of Dr. Walter’s treatment by Germans, was a typically Jewish mode of rejoinder to persecution. A return of good for evil? Perhaps. I should like to believe that Dr. Walter deliberately, or at least sub-consciously, chose to reply to the Nazis with the finest symphonic works created by the German imagination, but it is of course also possible that he performed that music which he knew best, but even so, he impressed upon a few minds, at least, a moral no less distinct than that which can be extracted from the Einstein concert.

To revert to the Einstein concert once more, and without moral-pointing. New York newspapers showed more curiosity and enterprise in reporting the event than Berling newspapermen showed on a previous occasion when the world-famous physicist made his first Berlin concert appearance. The head of one of the American news-gathering agencies had to leave Berlin for a week or a week-end, and when he returned he asked his assistant, a native and an Aryan native, whether he had cabled a story on the concert. “Why, no”, said the assistant. “Why not?” asked his boss. “Well, I thought his playing was very mediocre”, Which illustrates the difference in news sense between European and Ameican news-writers, and recalls the classic story of the cub reporter who was sent to report a wedding and returned, a long time after, without any story because the bridegroom had failed to appear at the church! I can easily imagine the head of the American news-gathering agency in Berlin saying to his dumb Nordic assistant: “Listen, buddy, when Einstein plays, that’s news; never mind how he plays!”

PROPAGANDA MONOPOLY

Perhaps one reason the Germen government punshes the authors of what it calls “atrocity propaganda” is because it resents the intrusion of strangers on its own monopoly of atrocity propaganda. Just when people are about ready to forget and forgive all that the Nazis have done, the Nazis must refresh memories, refresh contempt and stiffen resistance by making the front papes with a particular example of contemptible vengefulness and what amounts to petty thievery. They have cancelled one journalist’s insurance policy; they have confiscated the earned, but unpaid, royalties of Thomas Mann, an Aryan thought not a Nazi; they have taken away the home of Otto Weis, and have punished in similar ways Alfred Kerr, dramatic critic, and Arnold Zweig, the novelist who wrote “The Case of Sergeant Grischa” and who, more recently, published a novel on Palestine life, “De Vriendt Goes Home.”

I cannot believe that the sum total of all the royalties, insurance premiums, bank books and securities, furniture and objects of art, books and miscellaneous object which the Nazi goverment has taken away from the men and women it does not like will make an appreciable difference in the Reichs-bank figures, or will make available for foreign debt service any countable figure. The Nazi government gains greatly, however, in its already staggering reputation for meanness and in the already large contempt which civilized people must feel for it. We hear a good deal about the government’s sensitivity to foreign opmions, but when it takes 4,000 marks from Thomas Mann, and publishes the fact, it proves that it is about as sensitive as the skin of an elephant.