The Jewish Kulturbund Theater Company in Nazi Berlin by Rebecca Rovit (review)

Rebecca Rovit’s monograph sets out to introduce its readers to the theater work of a very controversial cultural association that existed in National Socialist Germany between 1933 and 1941: the Jüdischer Kulturbund Berlin. Founded by members of the Jewish community, the association was readily embraced by the new German authorities as a means to counteract negative propaganda about Germany’s treatment of the Jews. Rovit’s book focuses on “the everyday life that the Kulturbund Jews continued to live despite the restrictive laws” (8) passed against them and “encompasses the complex interplay between history and human lives” (9). By explaining in detail the Kulturbund’s organization and goals, Rovit charts “the path that the theater company took to make art amid prejudice and censorship” (9) and shows how both the management and the artists continuously (re)negotiated their principles and compromised some of their ideals when faced not just with pressure from the Nazi authorities but also from within their own community. Ultimately, Rovit wants to provide answers to questions that have haunted the Kulturbund since its inception: what was the significance of the Kulturbund? How are we today to understand the attempt by a small group of Jewish artists to perform theater within a dictatorship that threatened the very community to which they belonged? Rovit claims that her study “raises questions about the fluidity of cultural identity and ideology under duress” as she points out that the Kulturbund’s management did not want to “create a solely Jewish culture.” Self-preservation forced it to find means to keep the association alive, which leads her to conclude that this “self-protective instinct reveals something about the restorative nature of performance, especially under extreme conditions” (212).

This book complements previously published works by Herbert Freeden (Jüdisches Theater in Nazideutschland, 1964/1985), Geisel and Broder (Premiere und Pogrom, 1992), Akademie der Künste Berlin (Geschlossene Vorstellung, 1992) and Corina L. Petrescu (Against All Odds, 2010). It marks the culmination of Rovit’s engagement with the topic, as she began publishing on the Kulturbund’s theater in the mid-1990s and has since contributed immensely to the discussions about its role. She has drawn from primary sources as varied as newspapers, production photographs and scripts, letters, memoirs, and archival materials from the Reich Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment, and has conducted interviews between 1995 and 2010 with Jewish émigrés from Berlin and former members of the Kulturbund.

Rovit’s book stands out through its very detailed analysis of the Kulturbund’s productions (for example: Nathan der Weise 37–40, Jeremias 56–60, Jaákobs Traum: Ein Vorspiel 64–66, etc.), but also of the negotiation processes between the association’s management and the National Socialist authorities. Her focus on the productions rather than the individual fates of Kulturbund members not only differentiates her from some earlier scholarship; it also allows her to show the extent to which the intentions of the Kulturbund’s organizers and those of the Nazi authorities collided, with the latter politicizing the Kulturbund from its beginning “by enforcing ethnic policies that squelched the spirit of inclusion for anyone who was not born Jewish” (29). The author shows how ambiguous the process was of separating Jewish from German culture with respect to the repertoire choices made by the management but also those approved by the authorities (73). She also draws attention to the highly problematic linguistic choice of the Kulturbund: the theater performed in German because that was the only language both all its members and audiences understood, making it clear from the beginning that, “[u]nlike the natural cultural communities developing in the Hebrew-language community in Palestine and the Yiddish-speaking East Europe, the Kulturbund emerged only because its artists and audiences were identified as Jewish and thus un-German” (97). The author furthermore illustrates how staging strategies were used to help convey the message that corresponded...