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Epilogue: The Legacy of the League during kristallnacht, kurt singer, the first leader and cofounder of the Jewish Culture League, was visiting his sister and lecturing at Harvard University.1 Ernest Lenart, the Tempelherr in the League’s inaugural performance (1933) of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise and émigré since 1938, visited Singer during his trip. Lenart told him about Kristallnacht and urged him to remain in America. Singer replied: “Dear Lenart, I must go back.”2 Singer was offered a university position during his stay in the United States,3 but out of loyalty and the import he placed on the League, Singer refused. He returned to Europe “to rescue what could be rescued.”4 En route in Rotterdam, friends and acquaintances were able to intercede and persuade Singer to suspend his homecoming. Within a few days, he was convinced of the futility of continuing his trip to Berlin: he believed, with conditions worsening for Jews, the League could no longer function in Nazi Germany. On 8 December 1938, Singer wrote three farewell letters from Amsterdam to his League co-workers, including one to the Nazi Hans Hinkel. He remained in Holland and, until he realized the severity of the situation, participated in musical activities there, including concerts at the Joodsche Schouwburg, or Jewish Theater, which the Nazis established in 1941 based on the model of the Berlin Jewish Culture League.5 With the Nazi occupation of Holland, Singer tried to return to the United States, eventually pinning all his hopes on a non-quota visa. But no means of escape was forthcoming. On 15 July 1942, the ‹rst deportations from Amsterdam to Auschwitz began.6 Between August 1942 and November 1943, the Jewish Theater, of all places, was used as a deportation center, and Jews in the region, including Singer, reported there to await transport.7 Because of his “outstanding service to Germany’s artistic community,” Singer was sent to the “model” concentration camp Terezín, where he died on 7 February 1944.8 Singer’s rise and fall with the Jewish Culture League projects an image of 148 the organization as place of both salvation and damnation. From the very beginning , the regime used the League, and Singer, who regularly negotiated with high Nazi of‹cials, knew better than anyone else the extent of the League’s collaboration with Hitler’s regime. Certainly, others were aware that the Nazis exploited the League for propaganda purposes. In his diary entry of 9 September 1936, Victor Klemperer described the situation. The Nazi regime is more ‹rmly in the saddle than ever . . . And the whole world inside and outside Germany is keeping its head down. The Jewish Culture League (they should be hanged) have issued a statement, saying they had nothing to do with sensational foreign news reports about the situation of German Jews. Next they will certify that Der Stürmer9 publishes nothing but the truth in fondest fashion—Bolshevism rages in Spain, while here there is peace, order, justice, true democracy.10 But most members of the League community fully understood the magnitude of this alliance only in hindsight. This organization had been permitted to function under the strictest supervision by the Hitler regime, and only now, in retrospect, do we know, that in fact, we had“been used”to show the outside world, how well German Jews were still treated, by having their own theatre, etc. At the time we were not aware of this, and just happy, to be able to perform in a very professional atmosphere, with artists, who had stood on the stages of the Berlin Opera houses and Concert stages until then.11 Singer must have known then, on some level, what some former members are only ‹nding out now. But still he was willing to bargain with the Nazis. He saw something extraordinary in the League: the organization—his organization —gave Jews in Germany not only work, allowing actors and musicians to participate in their artistic ‹eld and hone their chosen craft, but also “a feeling of being home, that one belonged together, that one had a common destiny.”12 Lenart ties this positive function to the League’s insignia, a torch and the hexagonal Star of David, which appeared on their monthly publication and many programs (see ‹g. 10):“Not coincidentally the torch was the symbol of the Culture League.”13 The organization was “a ray of hope in a cloudy time.”14 For League performers and audience members, this was...

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