Overture of Hope, page 8
Like Strauss, Furtwängler was obsessed with his art and believed the Nazi regime wouldn’t last. Emboldened by his appointment, along with Strauss, to the Reich Music Chamber in November 1933, Furtwängler continued to openly criticize the regime. He refused to give the de rigueur “Heil Hitler” salute at the beginning of performances. He blasted Hitler for his anti-Semitic policies and refused to fire Jewish musicians from the Berlin orchestras he controlled. He resolutely held on to his longtime Jewish secretary, Berta Geissmar.
But he wasn’t prepared for the unbridled ambitions of Clemens Krauss, whom he considered a minor talent who was unable to “relate to the great German music.” Naive and stubborn, Furtwängler, who was alternately described as “a visionary” and “a musical genius,” was ill-prepared for Nazi meddling in his artistic decisions when Krauss was rumored as the leading candidate to replace Busch in Berlin. Furtwängler was sure the Nazi menace would blow over. In the meantime, he would do his best to stay the course and focus on his life’s work. “Every German of standing today is facing the question whether he wishes to maintain and carry through with his position or not,” he told a friend in 1934. “Having opted for the affirmative, he somehow has to make a practical pact with the ruling party, or else, he will have to go.”20
However, these “practical pacts” were simply unrealistic when it came to Nazi thugs. Furtwängler’s own artistic defiance against the Nazis would end up stalling his career and paving the way for Krauss’s entrée into the upper echelons of German culture. For instance, despite the Nazi edict against Hindemith, Furtwängler went ahead and included one of his operas in the 1934–35 Berlin opera season. The announcement that Mathis der Maler would be featured as part of the new season lineup had immediate consequences. Goering ordered the removal of the offending work about the Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald and his battle for artistic freedom set against the backdrop of repression during the Protestant Reformation. Hindemith’s message that the opera mirrored his own struggle for freedom of expression under the Nazis was not lost on the National Socialist hierarchy, which quickly banned the work. Hindemith was married to a Jewish woman, and while many of his friends were prominent leftists, he considered himself apolitical. Nonetheless, he remained a Nazi target.
“When did the head of a State ever interfere with details of a theater repertoire?” complained Geissmar, who was eventually forced to leave Germany. “It was as if Mr. Churchill suddenly sent a message to Covent Garden telling Sir Thomas Beecham what to do, or Mr. Roosevelt asked the Metropolitan to put on a certain opera while prohibiting another.”21
But Hitler couldn’t help himself. Like the Cooks, he was fascinated with opera and recognized the power of its spectacle as an important propaganda tool to extol the glories of the Third Reich. In the first volume of Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote about his formative experiences of opera. As a twelve-year-old, he attended a performance of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin, becoming instantly enamored of the nineteenth-century composer: “In one instance I was addicted. My youthful enthusiasm for the Bayreuth master knew no bounds.” After quitting school at sixteen, he spent much of his free time going to the opera.22
Opera was deemed such an important symbol to the Nazi regime that Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, an ode to the glory of medieval Germany, was performed at the Berlin State Opera in March 1933 in a ceremony to commemorate the founding of the Third Reich. The following year, Hitler ordered the reconstruction of Nuremberg’s opera house, and the third act from Wagner’s opera was performed at the 1934 National Socialist Party rally in the medieval city, where it was filmed for the propaganda movie Triumph of the Will and conducted by Furtwängler. In its final lines, the hero might be describing Hitler’s state of mind in the 1930s: “Honor your German masters…even if the Holy Roman Empire should dissolve in mist, of us there would yet remain Holy German art!”23 Furtwängler himself possibly believed he was upholding “Holy German art” when he tried to resist lowbrow Nazi edicts against Hindemith, writing an impassioned letter to the press about artistic freedom and taking a strong stand. He even denounced Hitler as “an enemy of the human race” for interfering in the opera season and went ahead and boldly conducted a public performance of music from Hindemith’s opera in the autumn of 1934. Furtwängler’s very public defiance infuriated the Nazi hierarchy, and by December 1934 the Nazis had forced the great conductor to resign from all his official positions.24
Krauss, a much more malleable successor, was waiting in the wings.
On December 10, 1934, Krauss recorded in his diary: “second interview in Reich Chancellor’s [Adolf Hitler’s] apartment.”25 Krauss, who had been hanging about in Berlin, was immediately engaged as director of the Berlin State Opera in place of Furtwängler, noted Geissmar in her own diary. “This we were informed was by Hitler’s special request.”26 Later, when Krauss made his Berlin debut, it was Goering who personally introduced him to the audience.
“He possesses a certain cold elegance and a technique that is not without interest to experts, but beyond that he has nothing, not even the slightest, to offer and he lacks even a trace of force and warmth,” noted Furtwängler of his rival.27 However, Furtwängler admitted that Krauss had something that was perhaps more valuable: he understood “the advertising machinery and the art of cultivating personal relationships.”28
Despite the widespread suspicions of Krauss’s strategic allegiances with the Nazis, these clinical decisions had successfully launched his career in Austria and would take him to the pinnacle of success in Germany. For Krauss, the Berlin posting was simply a stepping-stone to more greatness, and he promptly moved to the city, taking his wife and other prominent singers from the Vienna State Opera, forcing many to break their contracts. This bold act inflamed his critics and further marked him as a traitor to Austria. “Clemens Krauss is now enthroned at the Berlin State Opera, mantled in all sorts of Jovian powers and prerogatives,” wrote the classical music correspondent for the New York Times in February 1935. “He lost no time in asserting his rights of sovereignty.”29 Outwardly, at least, Krauss began to follow the Nazi Party line when it came to degenerate musicians. He publicly badmouthed the work of Alban Berg, whom he had once championed. He made a point of denouncing “the fallacies of atonality” and “the fruitless musical experiments of the moderns.”30
Krauss became increasingly sidelined, hated by Berlin’s diehard opera fans who demanded the return of Furtwängler. The New York Times noted: “The Nazi chieftains who with all sorts of enticements, lured Krauss away from the Vienna Staatsoper nearly two years ago to fill the berth of the Berlin State Opera precipitately vacated by Furtwängler, found themselves unable to cram him down the throats of the Berlin public and before long there was talk of shipping him somewhere else.”31
Adding to Krauss’s isolation in Berlin, the Nazis forced Krauss’s protector Strauss to resign his presidency of the Reich Music Chamber after they intercepted a letter he wrote to his Jewish librettist Stefan Zweig in the summer of 1935. In the letter, Strauss told Zweig “that he was only playacting” as the president of the Reich Music Chamber “to prevent the worst from happening.”32 After Nazi censors seized the letter, the Gestapo visited him at his home in Garmisch in southern Germany to compel him to resign and to cite ailing health as his reason for stepping down. Strauss complied although he wrote a letter to Hitler to beg for his job back. Hitler never replied.
“I consider it my duty to warn you,” began a letter from Strauss to his protégé in the autumn of 1935. “Indirectly, I learned in a Berlin meeting that the minister [Hermann Goering] pronounced himself very ugly about you. You cannot fight with the clueless, so be careful.”33 Clearly, Krauss was getting grief from all directions. And while he was beloved of Hitler and Goebbels, the volatile Goering was still not yet one of his supporters.
But Krauss’s incredible rise continued despite that lack of backing, and in 1936 he was awarded the greatest artistic prize in Germany: the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. The Bavarian capital, where Hitler had founded the Nazi Party, was to be a centerpiece of Nazi culture, which Hitler hoped would come to rival the Salzburg Festival. He commissioned a sweeping reconstruction to overhaul the city’s transit system, create grand new government buildings, and renovate the Bavarian State Opera house. Krauss, whom Hitler had come to recognize as “a brilliant organizer,” was put in charge of the opera as both general manager and music director. In his new role at the Munich Opera, Krauss was set to receive 400,000 Reichsmarks in annual operating costs—a staggering amount, equivalent to nearly $20 million today.
Krauss’s critics were further incensed. Furtwängler, for one, could not understand why the conductor, who in his opinion “has failed in the face of Berlin audiences,” would be given such an important promotion. “He is not in a position to really fill Wagner, not to mention Beethoven and the classics. And the most important part in the new Germany—Munich—is to be handed over to this man!”34 Still, Krauss had his work cut out for him in Munich. “It is also said that he will return from time to time to Berlin and conduct there,” wrote Peyser of Krauss’s new appointment. “All of which cannot disguise the fact that his Berlin sojourn was a fizzle. Will he be much more acceptable to the good people of Munich who, in the course of more than a decade, developed a strong affection for conductor Hans Knappertsbusch and would like to have him back, irrespective of his political intransigence?”35
Knappertsbusch’s intransigence took the form of openly insulting the Nazi Party and producing Lucedia, an opera by the American composer Vittorio Giannini. The Nazis accused the beloved conductor—who was a blond, blue-eyed giant of a man and had been at the helm of the Munich Opera for fourteen years—of favoring foreign talent at the expense of German artists. As such, he was forbidden to conduct in Germany. The Nazi Party additionally claimed that Knappertsbusch, a leading interpreter of Strauss and Richard Wagner, had openly insulted the Nazi Party when he inquired if a German diplomat in the Netherlands had been forced to join the party in order to secure his future. It was an odd turn of affairs for a man who, on the surface, appeared to be the very epitome of the perfect Aryan. Before his falling out with the Nazi Party, Knappertsbusch had moved in nationalistic circles and had even refused to perform in Paris because he still considered France an enemy as one of the victors of the First World War. In 1933, after several of his colleagues left their posts for political reasons, he said that he would rather “toil in a quarry than leave Germany.”36 However despite his loyalty, Knappertsbusch ran afoul of the Nazi Party, largely because Hitler had never liked him.
Ursuleac and Krauss watched the drama over Knappertsbusch with a great deal of concern. They understood that the Nazis would use even the most minor offences as a pretext to rid the country of those who did not support them. And they knew that if they wanted to save Mayer-Lismann, and perhaps others, they would accomplish nothing by pleading their cases with members of the ruling party.
After Mayer-Lismann approached the couple for help in 1934, they knew they had to be careful. And clever—more so than their Nazi censors, neighbors, police, and the press. “Give nothing of yourself in writing,” Krauss was fond of saying, rarely recording anything controversial on paper.37 Most importantly, they would have to carry out any subversive activities—namely the saving of their “undesirable” friends—in the shadows. And in silence, which carried its own dangers.
After Mayer-Lismann’s visit to London in 1935, the Cooks became keenly aware of the nightmare that was descending upon Jews in Germany with the application of the Nuremberg Laws.
On March 7, 1936, the same day that Hitler’s troops marched into the Rhineland, Jewish violinist Bronislaw Huberman wrote an extraordinary letter to the Manchester Guardian denouncing the Nuremberg Laws as “this document of barbarism” and blaming intellectuals for not standing up to Hitler. “Before the whole world I accuse you, German intellectuals, you non-Nazis, as those truly guilty of all these Nazi crimes, all this lamentable breakdown of a great people.”38 Huberman, who was among the first musicians to leave the Reich after the Nazis came to power, accused his peers of appeasement of an evil regime—the same response that the Allies adopted when the Germans so flagrantly violated the terms of the Treaty of Versailles by sending troops into a demilitarized zone. Huberman, who would go on to found the Palestine Symphony Orchestra later that year, continued: “It is not the first time in history that the gutter has reached out for power, but it remained for the German intellectuals to assist the gutter to achieve success. It is a horrifying drama…”39
The gutter was also reaching out in London. It was happening in the city’s impoverished East End, where on October 4, Oswald Mosley and his black-shirted followers staged an anti-Semitic march, denouncing Jews as “rats and vermin from the gutter.” Although more than one hundred thousand local residents had petitioned the government to stop the fascist demonstrators, who had been openly planning their protest for weeks, they were rebuffed when police sent more than seven thousand officers to make sure the marchers were undisturbed. Between one hundred thousand and five hundred thousand local residents (news reports differ widely) joined together to block the fascists in what came to be known as the Battle of Cable Street. Armed with broken furniture, chamber pots, and other improvised weapons, Jewish and Irish neighbors joined forces under the leadership of leftist groups to rout the fascists. Even children rolled marbles on the street to trip up police horses. Shouting, “They Shall Not Pass”—a nod to the Spanish Republicans who resisted General Franco earlier that year—the crowds forced out Mosley and his supporters.
Although the gutter mob was temporarily defeated in London, they were triumphant in Germany. To their credit, both Krauss and Ursuleac saw what the gutter was doing in the Reich early on, when Ursuleac asked the Cooks to help Mayer-Lismann.
“Louise and I would never have started our refugee work without the encouragement of those two, and we could never have maintained it without their help,” wrote Ida, recalling that when they arrived in Frankfurt to help the Mayer-Lismann family, they began to formulate a plan to help them.40 Opera was central to the plot, and they would use their love of the art form as an excuse to visit their new friends in the Third Reich. On that first visit, the Cooks were met at the train station by Mayer-Lismann herself, who held out two tickets to that evening’s opera performance featuring Krauss and Ursuleac.
And so the work began, with almost no preparation except the promise of great opera, which was their cover when they crossed into the Third Reich to interview their Jewish refugees. If anyone asked, they were simply opera fans, journeying to attend “Krauss and Ursuleac’s superb performances.” And that is what they would tell the border guards. But it would require both courage and ingenuity, and, as 1936 came to a close, Ida and Louise found themselves entering an international stage to perform in a real-life drama that was part farce, part tragedy.
CHAPTER 5 The Operas
“My dear Cook girls!” began the cheery letter in German from Viorica Ursuleac, inviting the sisters to a much-anticipated June 1937 performance of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, conducted by her husband—one of the centerpieces of his new residency at the Bavarian State Opera house in Munich. “It would be wonderful if you could come for this performance.”1 It was an innocent-enough missive full of the details of Ursuleac’s hectic operatic schedule—one that had her rehearsing for Fidelio in Hanover one day, then immediately traveling to Munich and Nauheim for a series of concerts, before heading to Berlin for a performance of Tannhauser, and appropriately culminating with the June performance of a Wagner opera about an accursed sailor who spends years at sea trying to get home. “Always on the road!” she wrote in the May 23 letter, lavishing praise on Louise for learning German so quickly. “Thank you very much for your kind lines, especially for the good German of Louise. Her German is really very good.”2 Louise, the diligent bureaucrat, had taken it upon herself to learn the language when she and Ida became serious about saving Jews. “Many of the people spoke English, but Louise gradually was able to interview those who spoke only German,” wrote Ida.3 Of course, Louise’s German also came in handy when communicating about their complex mission with Ursuleac, who spoke only halting English.
On that first trip to Frankfurt to visit Mayer-Lismann, the Cooks had worked out a plan with Krauss and Ursuleac not only to use opera as a cover for their trips to the Third Reich, but also to spend their days meeting other Jews planning to escape and plotting how they could help them spirit some of their assets to England.
Although the invitation to The Flying Dutchman seemed simple enough, the letter was just one in a series of ruses created by the soprano, Krauss, and the Cooks to give the sisters an excuse to make the journey from England to Germany in order to coordinate their refugee activities. Should Reich censors ever attempt to intercept the correspondence as they did with Strauss’s letter to Zweig, there would be nothing except opera schedules and an invitation to a premiere. What could be more innocent than two British opera fans so committed to the art form that they thought nothing of traveling to Germany on their days off? The Nazi hierarchy would surely understand this devotion, for who wouldn’t want to hear great music conducted by a master and sung by Viorica Ursuleac, an operatic superstar?
