Paris.
Of all the tragic consequences that have followed in the wake of Herr Hitler’s rise to power, there is none more poignant than the flight of the thousands of Germans who were forced to flee to foreign countries.
Consisting of pacifists, Socialists and Jews, this new Legion of the Lost—it is estimated to number at least 70,000—is scattered throughout the capitals of Europe, and the situation for them is daily growing more precarious.
Almost without exception these “enemies of the Nazi State” are not permitted to work in the country that shelters them, and they are therefore dependent on charity.
Today in London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Praha, Copenhagen, Zurich and Madrid you can find German refugees, solitary or in families, who are living in the last stages of destitution.
You may see in Paris men who were once judges, lawyers, doctors, or professors selling matches and bootlaces or canvassing for orders in mean streets.
The plight of the exiles’ children is, perhaps, more poignant.
Some of the children remember Germany and a happy childhood there before the Nazis came to power.
Others came into the world as exiles; born by mothers who were half-starved, weary, and desperate.
These children at least are innocent. They know nothing of Nazi or Communist, Gentile or Jew. Yet to the Nazis they are as “unclean” as their parents—and so become objects of slow persecution. Not enough milk: insufficient clothing; no shoes and stockings: these are the commonplace of their little lives.
Public assistance, in most civilized countries, supplies these elementary wants to the poorest child —but not to the refugee child. He is an alien, and the State has no obligation towards him.
Parents and children must remain pent in the towns, terribly overcrowded in furnished rooms. They live huddled together—four, five, and six sleeping and living in a single room.
Brave efforts to relieve the situation in the French capital have been made in recent months by a band of German emigrants themselves, mainly young social workers and physicians.
They formed the “Assistance Aux Enfants d’Emigrees” about a year ago, starting work without financial means or backing.
Swiss and British institutions, especially the Society of Friends, supported them; and, through their efforts, hundreds of children have been saved from tuberculosis and other diseases.
It is something of a shock to discover that a man who is thought of in the public mind as a “young” composer is fifty years old tomorrow.
Alban Berg, the Austrian composer of “Wozzeck,” is the man who has had more than his fair share of trouble in his first fifty years, the sort of trouble which only a Viennese can experience if he has the misfortune to be an innovator, and lives in his home town.
Berg’s opera “Wozzeck” was played all over Germany and was well established in the general repertory as the outstanding work of its generation—a grim, exciting and oddly beautiful creation with “theatre” in it from start to finish.
Then Hitler arrived.
Berg is a Jew. Even if he were not it would have made no difference, for you know what sort of music the Nazis like, and “Wozzeck” has been dropped. It is played from time to time in America, and there is more than a possibility that it will be heard at Covent Garden this season. Even Vienna, since Socialism was suppressed, no longer plays “Wozzeck.”
Alban Berg is left now at fifty with a small but important list of compositions (he has only written a dozen), and the prospect of hearing some of them again, only if he tunes into British radio, and with little prospect of ever seeing “Lulu” staged until Austria and Germany change their ways and decide to be intelligent people again.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
