Jewish Professionals in Reich Pauperized, C. V. Zeitung Says

The bleak, hopeless outlook for Jewish professionals in this country is given a startlingly frank portrayal in the current issue of the C. V. Zeitung. That once prosperous doctors, lawyers, teachers and journalists are sinking into a state of abject pauperization, with all its attendant misery of starvation and despair is revealed in an interview a Zeitung writer had with a thirty-year-old but already gray-haired doctor whom he chanced to meet.

“Just outside the Gesundbrunnen Station,” says the writer, “I came across a man with three small boys. He had iron-grey hair and almost hollow cheeks, but he laughed and strode along with his sons as if he were still a boy himself. Although their clothes were neat they seemed to have been worn a long time. Their shoes were dusty. As they came near, I recognized them. The last time I had met the man was two years ago; in the meantime his hair had turned grey. He is in the early thirties. A doctor. When his turn came to go to the front the War ended. ‘And so my panel practice is gone,’ he said.

PRIVATE PRACTICE ‘SLACK’

“I asked him about his private practice: ‘Very slack.’ But how do you live?’ He confessed at first hesitatingly, that his wife did work of some kind. Sometimes he even had envelopes to address. ‘When we manage to earn 120 marks on top of our rent, we can get enough to eat. But in these last ten months we haven’t always managed. . . . But the advantage is, you see, that I can pay more attention to my boys. We’ve just come from Niederschoenhausen Park. We have an outing every day.’ ‘But suppose a patient comes while you’re out?’ He laughs a trifle artificially. Obviously he bears a burden more heavy than he admits. ‘No,’ he says, ‘I am no exception. It is rather the Jewish doctor who can still live decently who is the exception. There is no sense in deceiving oneself.’

“No, our Gesundbrunnen doctor is no exception. Discharge necessarily involves pauperization; and when these Jews, slowly or quickly but inevitably, sinking into poverty, still bear up, still starve and suffer their way through without running away, without doing anything desperate, although the knife is against their throat, when they do not parade their distress and declaim it before the world, let no seeing and thinking man believe that the Berlin Jewish intelligentsia is not in dire want.

LAWYERS IN WORSE STATE

“Even worse off than the Jewish doctor, who earns scarcely a fraction of what he needs, is the discharged lawyer; while a discharged doctor can still practice privately, a discharged lawyer can do nothing. I have been through the courts in Moabit and Charlottenburg, I have spoken to lawyers who can still practice, and to lawyers whose title has been taken away, I have spoken to legal lights, recognized for their talent as speakers; and when I put questions to them, they were silent, and their silence was clearer and more devastating than words and figures.

“On fine days, on the park benches, in the center of Berlin, one can meet numbers of Jewish teachers who have lost their places. What do the teachers do? It is difficult to ask them. One only knows them by sight. Last year I often saw some of them appear in the Jewish Library or the State Library; then they came daily. After a few weeks many of them came no more. One thought: “The red-haired fellow who always sat over there has found work.’ Now one realizes that he had only got tired of reading and studying in the void, without prospects. . . . One knows oneself how hard it is not to get tired.

“And what of the writer or journalist? Today, practically no Jewish author earns anything from German papers, and the Jewish papers are too few, too small and limited in their interests to make up for a fraction of what ten times as many papers with a hundred times the circulation, appearing ten times as often with three times the role of payment, could take from Jewish authors.

“Near the Halensee Bridge is a concern where non-Aryans are allowed to address envelopes. For addressing 1,000, one earns enough to live for a day (according to the official cost of living figures). But at most a person can address only 700 envelopes in ten hours. The concern is not unsatisfied with its Jewish casual workers. They are intelligent people, I am told, writers, actors, professors, and they do their work quickly, neatly and silently. . . .”