Multi-media Presentation John Minnion gives multi-media presentations on the subject of Hitler's List. Contact him at Checkmate Books for more details. An illustrated guide to 'degenerates': jews, bolshevists and other undesirable geniuses. By John Minnion Hitler's List was a long one. There was to be no place in the new Nazi Reich for anybody or anything that threatened the purity of his vision. Being an artist himself, he knew beyond doubt that abstract art was 'degenerate'. And modern design, jazz, atonal music, psychotherapy, Marxism, even quantum physics and Bambi. These things were a sign of 'Jewish infection' of the pure body of Aryan culture - or they were 'bolshevist', which amounted to the same thing. So the culture needed to be 'cleansed' of the people who practised them. Most people with lists like Hitler's never get the chance to take them further than the nearest psychiatric ward, but his obsessions were unleashed on a civilisation. Chagall, Freud, Klemperer, Koestler, Einstein, Primo Levi, Thomas Mann, Billy Wilder, Paul Klee, Hannah Arendt, Peter Lorre, Roman Polanski, Kurt Weill... all were on Hitler's List. They and their work survived, and thrived, because Hitler - ultimately - didn't. But other great talents lost everything: their jobs, their reputations, their lives. This book of portraits and life-stories is a tribute to all these 'undesirables' and their genius. Degenerate PHILOSOPHY Karl Popper Hannah Arendt Ludwig Wittgenstein Theodor W. Adorno Walter Benjamin Martin Buber Ernst Bloch Edith Stein Erich Fromm Sigmund Freud Degenerate SCIENCE Fritz Haber Hans Krebs Otto Meyerhof Max Born Niels Bohr Albert Einstein Leo Szilard Edward Teller Lise Meitner Degenerate WRITING Stefan Zweig Thomas Mann Heinrich Mann Franz Werfel Lion Feuchtwanger Arthur Koestler Kurt Tucholsky André Breton Primo Levi Elias Canetti Joseph Roth Eric Hobsbawm George Weidenfeld Anne Frank Degenerate FILM & THEATRE Max Reinhardt Erwin Piscator Bertolt Brecht Helene Weigel Lotte Lenya Peter Lorre Fritz Lang Billy Wilder Erich Korngold Roman Polanski Degenerate SPORT Helene Mayer Gretel Bergmann Johann 'Rukelie' Trollmann Degenerate ART & DESIGN Oskar Kokoschka Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Emil Nolde George Grosz John Heartfield Kurt Schwitters Pablo Picasso Marc Chagall Otto Dix Max Beckmann Max Ernst Felix Nussbaum Bruno Schulz Käthe Kollwitz Vicky (Victor Weisz) Paul Renner Jacques Lipchitz Erich Mendelsohn The Bauhaus Walter Gropius Lyonel Feininger Vassily Kandinsky Paul Klee Marcel Breuer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy Degenerate MUSIC Arnold Schoenberg Anton Webern Alban Berg Viktor Ullmann Kurt Weill Paul Hindemith Hanns Eisler Artur Schnabel Wladyslaw Szpilman Wanda Landowska Alexander Zemlinsky Berthold Goldschmidt Bruno Walter Otto Klemperer Georg Solti Alma Rosé Comedian Harmonists Jazz Ernst Krenek Django Reinhardt Josephine Baker KURT SCHWITTERS Some modern art is rubbish, as we all know. Take Schwitters, for example: tirelessly recycling worthless detritus - tram tickets, dishcloths, shoelaces, wire, feathers, cheese-wrappers, cigar bands, fag ends, bits of wood, torn newspaper and photographs - to make his collages, assemblages and sculptures. He was a 24-hour-a-day artist, who travelled with two huge portfolios from which he sold collages at 20 marks each. 'A totally free spirit; he was ruled by Nature,' remembered his fellow Dadaist Hans Richter. The Dada movement as such rejected him for having a 'bourgeois face', but even if his politics didn't fit, the earnestness of his absurdity was true Dada. Unfazed by rejection, he formed a one-man artistic movement: Merz, he called it, from a fragment of type in a Commerzbank advert that found its way into one of his collages. He drew Merz, sculpted Merz, recited Merz at his poetry soirées (the assemblage principle worked for words too) and he even called himself Merz. In his Hanover house he built his 'Merzbau', a walk-through installation with nooks and crannies, angular protuberances, and objects everywhere that were being added to constantly. A central 'column of erotic misery' rose up until it went through the ceiling, necessitating the eviction of the top-floor tenants (no problem: Schwitters was the landlord). The Nazis thought he should be locked up. They confiscated what they could of his works, but Schwitters himself escaped to Norway, where he started a new Merzbau. Then, when the Germans arrived there too, he fled to Britain... Back to the List | Order this book KURT WEILL Weill the composer had a peculiar penchant for the voice, and for the peculiar voice of his wife Lotte Lenya, in particular. If it weren't for the Nazis - who would have considered his music degenerate even had he not been Jewish - he might have had a smooth, rich and successful life in Berlin, building on his early collaborations with Bertolt Brecht, principally The Threepenny Opera. This acidic satire, based on John Gay's 1728 Beggar's Opera, was performed 4200 times in its first year (1928-29). By 1930, however, the premiere of their Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny was being assailed by Nazi stinkbombs, and even the optimistic Weill was transferring his royalties to a Swiss bank. When the Nazis took power in 1933 he wrote, 'what is going on now is so sick that I don't know how it can last longer than a few months'. Once they learnt that they were blacklisted, he and Lenya left Germany: Weill for Paris, then England; and Lenya for Vienna, where she was having one of her countless affairs. At this point they divorced for a while, but she rejoined him when he sailed to New York in 1935, and they remarried. Weill embraced American culture with enthusiasm, feeling he had 'come home' at last... Back to the List | Order this book ARNOLD SCHOENBERG Moses understood God, but it was Aaron who could speak to the people. Schoenberg, an Austrian Jew who never found a way of ending his opera Moses and Aaron, had his own tablets of stone to deliver, but the people never really took to his message. He believed that, in pursuit of expression, Wagner had stretched harmony as far as it could go: music would now just have to abandon its grip on the tonal system, forget about keys and chords, and dive into atonalism. He took this plunge around the time that his painter friend Kandinsky was taking art into abstraction. (Schoenberg was a painter himself, in a raw expressionist style, and exhibited with the Blaue Reiter.) In 1909 he wrote Erwartung, in which a soprano expresses the fluctuating emotional extremes of a woman searching a forest for her lover: a piece without musical rules, sounding as if it might have poured straight out of the depths of his subconscious on the couch of his Viennese neighbour, Dr Freud... Back to the List | Order this book THOMAS MANN A 19th-century patrician who was led by unfolding events to address through fiction the political, social and cultural upheaval of his time. He did this first as an apolitical onlooker, but gradually as a participant, speaking out against 'these animals' (as he called the Nazis in his diary). He had the intellectual vision to understand the catastrophe that was looming in Germany, and to convey it in literary form with a rich mixture of realism and symbolism. Like Hitler, Mann revered Wagner: when the Nazis took power, he was away on a European tour delivering a lecture in which he confronted his own disquiet about Wagner's seductive power. For this he was publicly lambasted by pro-Nazi musicians, including Strauss, and decided not to return to Germany... ...His magnum opus Doctor Faustus was conceived in 1905 as a Faustian tale of an artist who deliberately contracts syphilis, in the hope that before dooming him the disease will heighten his creativity, literally intoxicate him into producing works of genius. By 1943 when, exiled in California, he finally began to write the book, events had mirrored the theme: Nazism, as a disease of the body politic, was delivering Germany both the triumphs and the nemesis in true Faustian style... Back to the List | Order this book HANS KREBS Cells must produce energy to survive. Fortunately our cells have little Krebs Cycles wheeling away inside them all the time, like power plants, taking half-digested food as fuel and churning out energy along with water and carbon dioxide. Each revolution of the cycle starts and ends with citric acid, enzymes move back and forth like well-oiled pistons, triggering a hydration here, an oxidation there, and we can get on with life knowing all these things are in hand. Hans Krebs, who discovered the cogs and cams of this process and got a Nobel Prize for it in 1953, was originally following his surgeon father's footsteps in medicine, but became increasingly interested in the link between physical chemistry and the biology of human metabolism. In December 1932 he was recommended for a lectureship by the dean at Freiburg University, yet within months the very same man signed a letter informing him of his dismissal under the new anti-Jewish laws. He fled to Cambridge... Back to the List | Order this book