Held in the city of Goethe and Schiller, Yiddish Summer Weimar is the world's most prominent annual Yiddish culture event. This year it revives the Jewish creative fervor associated with Weimar-era Germany.
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For 20 years, Yiddish Summer Weimar (YSW) has served to restore the vibrancy of Yiddish culture, and especially music, that was once a key part of European cultural life.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Berlin developed into the capital of a kind of unofficial Yiddish cultural republic that stretched from Russia to France. This network of Yiddish-speaking cabarets, theaters, literature circles, educational institutions and even workers' organizations often seamlessly assimilated into broader culture and society.
The Holocaust tried, but failed, to put an end to that. Yiddishland is roaring back to life in the city most often associated with icons of German Romanticism.
1000 years of culture
"The Weimar Republic of Yiddishland," the 2019 theme for YSW that runs July 12 through August 17, celebrates a Yiddish creative heyday as secular Jewish culture peaked in Germany and Europe before Hitler rose to power.
"Jewish artists were prominent in all fields of Weimar era culture, including literature, classical and popular music, theater, film, cabaret, fine arts and even modern dance," YSW festival director Alan Bern told DW.
Jewish composers who died during the Holocaust but whose music lives on
Amit Weiner's project "Music in Times of Tragedy" revives the oeuvre of the Jewish composers who were murdered by the Nazis but who created timeless music that has survived.
Image: Yad Vashem
Erwin Schulhoff
Born in Prague in 1894, Erwin Schulhoff was a protege of Antonin Dvorak. "He saw in Schulhoff the next big promise of the European musical scene," said Amit Weiner, who founded the project "Music in Times of Tragedy." His music combined many avant-garde styles with jazz." Schulhoff was a professor of music in Prague before he was murdered in 1942 in a concentration camp.
Image: Yad Vashem
Gideon Klein
The youngest Jewish composer murdered during the Holocaust, Gideon Klein was only 26 when he perished in the Fürstengrube sub-camp near Auschwitz. His oeuvre fuses Jewish themes with modern composition techniques. In 1940, he was offered a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music in London. "This could have saved his life, but he was not allowed to travel from Prague," explained Weiner.
Image: Yad Vashem
Hans Krasa
"I find it very interesting that Krasa's music is always so happy and optimistic. Even the music he wrote in Theresienstadt is very lively," said Weiner about the Czech composer and author of the children's opera "Brundibar," who died in 1944 in Auschwitz. "Even in such dark times and horrible conditions, he saw hope and was optimistic about the future."
Image: Yad Vashem
Ilse Weber
The Czech poet had published several books of fairy tales in German before being transported to Theresienstadt in 1942. Weber started writing songs when she worked in the camp's children's hospital, and her music survived only thanks to her husband Willi, who discovered her songs after the war. Ilse and their son, Tommy, were murdered in Auschwitz in 1944.
Image: Yad Vashem
Mordechai Gebirtig
"He was not a professional musician — in fact, he was a carpenter who did not even know how to read notes. All the songs he composed were written down by his friend, a clockmaker," said Weiner about Gebertig, who, despite being just an avid amateur, remains one of the most popular singer-songwriters in Israel. The Polish composer died in the Cracow ghetto in 1942.
Image: Yad Vashem
Pavel Haas
Prior to his deportation to Theresienstadt, Pavel Haas had written film scores and orchestrations but also destroyed much of his work. "He was very depressed at first, but composers such as Klein or Krasa encouraged him to keep on writing," said Weiner. Paradoxically, the work he created in Theresienstadt surpassed what he had done before the war. He was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944.
Image: Yad Vashem
Viktor Ullmann
"If he hadn't been imprisoned and later murdered in Auschwitz in 1944, I am sure he would have become one of the most important musical forces of the 20th century," said Weiner about the Austrian Jewish composer who had been appointed conductor of the Prague State Opera before the war. The three years he spent in Theresienestadt were paradoxically the most prolific years of his career.
Image: Yad Vashem
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So too in architecture and philosophy. Names like Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school in Weimar that turned 100 this year, and thinkers Hannah Arendt — a student of Yiddish — and Theodor Adorno of Frankfurt School fame are examples of the impact that German Jews had on global culture.
The numerous Yiddish-language literature and music publishers located in Berlin during the Weimar Republic — including the Yiddish-language chapter of the international P.E.N. writer's association known as "Yiddishland" — were the outgrowth of 1000 years of Yiddish language in Germany.
"In fact, the Jewish presence in Weimar-era culture was so strong that it notoriously led to a reaction by the Nazis," notes Bern, a composer, accordionist and cultural activist from the US who has been based in Berlin since 1987.
The Nazis railed against Jewish cultural cosmopolitanism and "made it a major point of their nationalistic, anti-Semitic propaganda," he added. After coming to power in 1933, Hitler soon enacted policies that "excluded Jews from broader German cultural life."
But to highlight the fact that Jewish and Yiddish culture survived, and is indeed undergoing a significant global revival, YSW's Weimar Republic of Yiddishland event will premiere ten new international music and theater productions that go far beyond performances by traditional klezmer bands.
A cabaret revolution
These include the world premiere of the orchestral version of Bas-Sheve, the sole surviving European Yiddish opera. Composed by Henech Kon, the work premiered in a chamber version in Warsaw in 1924 and will be performed nearly a century later by the "Triangle Orchestra" consisting of thirty young musicians from across Europe. They accompany a libretto based on the biblical tale of King David and Bathsheba, with the performance coming to the Weimar Republic of Yiddishland on August 16.
Another attraction is the "Café Cosmopole," a musical theater pastiche with original music by the Yiddish songwriting duo "Tsvey Brider" — Yiddish for "Two Brothers." Together, Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell on vocals and Dmitri Gaskin on accordion, piano and synthesizers create music set to the words of Yiddish poets and writers who embodied the between-the-wars café scenes of Berlin, Odessa, and Warsaw, where Jewish communists, socialists, zionists, emigrés and bohemians held sway.
Sasha Lurje, a regular performer at YSW, co-founded the annual "Shtetl Neukoelln" festival in Berlin that showcases the capital's thriving klezmer community while celebrating "the vibrancy and diversity of contemporary Yiddish music, language, culture, art, and life."
This year, the singer participates in several Yiddish music workshops at YSW and performs in the premiere of Baym Kabaret Yitesh, a reprise of the iconoclastic Warsaw Yiddish cabarets of the 1920s.
New York Times bestselling author and Yiddish expert Michael Wex is behind the revival of the revolutionary and avant-garde "expressionist experiments" that marked Yiddish cabaret in Poland and spread Europe-wide. On July 30 in Weimar, attendees can again experience music, song, stand-up routines, monologues and sketches performed by an international cast.
Rising above the past
This Jewish cultural revival is ironically going on not far from the Buchenwald concentration camp built by the Nazis in 1937. 11,000 Jews were among more than 56,000 prisoners murdered there.
"That we are located only a few miles from Buchenwald reminds us every day of the importance of our mission," says Alan Bern.
"The systematic murder of millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews in the Shoah meant that the living cultural base from which contemporary Yiddish culture grew was gone," he adds, noting also that millennia-old Yiddish culture was also rejected by the State of Israel founded on a "new cultural identity for Jews."
A part of what was lost across much of the 20th century will be revived at YSW by Yiddish rapper Josh "Socalled" Dolgin in Arestantnlider: Hearing Unheard Voices. Dolgin's work was inspired by ethnographic recordings of Eastern European Jewish prisoners in German POW camps during World War One.
Bern believes that with the contribution made by Yiddish-speaking Jewish artists to broader cultural and artistic life, such a cultural revival is even more important. YSW, he says, is ultimately dedicated to ensuring that this rich creative tradition can again be "a source of inspiration and ideas for all contemporary artists, Jewish or not."
Yiddish Summer Weimar runs July 12 through August 17 in venues throughout Weimar.
10 essential facts about Bauhaus
Germany is launching the 100th anniversary of the influential school of design. Revisit the history and the ideas promoted by the Bauhaus.
Image: picture alliance/dpa/J. Wolf
It started as an actual school
In 1919, Walter Gropius became the director of a new institution, the Staatliches Bauhaus, also simply known as the Bauhaus, which merged the former Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Academy of Fine Art. Even though Gropius was an architect and the term Bauhaus literally translates as "construction house," the school of design did not have an architecture department until 1927.
Image: picture-alliance/AP Photo
It was against the arts' class snobbery
In a pamphlet for an April 1919 exhibition, Gropius stated that his goal was "to create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist." Combining influences from modernism, the English Arts and Crafts movement, and Constructivism, Gropius promoted the idea that design was to serve the community.
Image: picture-alliance/akg-images
It proved that the functional needn't be boring
The most basic principle of the movement of the Bauhaus school was "form follows function." According to this idea, simple but elegant geometric shapes were designed based on the intended function or purpose of a building or an object. Illustrating this concept, the pieces of this chess game designed by Josef Hartwig (1923-24) are stylized to suggest how each of them moves and its rank of power.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/O.Berg
It promoted the idea of the 'total work of art'
The interdisciplinary approach of the school's professors and students meant that visual arts, graphic design, architecture as well as product and furniture design all came into conversation with how people lived in the modern world. They thereby actualized the concept of the "Gesamtkunstwerk," or complete work of art. This photo shows the interior of the Bauhaus school in Dessau.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
It included several influential artists
The school had many major artists among its teachers. This photo from 1926 features, from left to right, Josef Albers, Hinnerk Scheper, Georg Muche, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Gunta Stölzl and Oskar Schlemmer. Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe were also directors of the school.
Image: picture-alliance/akg-images
Bauhaus artists held legendary costume parties
Although the Bauhaus is associated with minimalist design, students and teachers invested an unsuspected amount of energy in creating surreal costumes for parties, as reported by Farkas Molnar in his 1925 essay, "Life at the Bauhaus." The parties began as improvised events but were later turned into large-scale productions, such as Oskar Schlemmer's "Triadic Ballet" from 1922 (photo).
Image: Getty Images/P. Macdiarmid
The institution closed several times
Political tensions led to different closures of the school. After being based in Weimar from 1919 to 1925, the Bauhaus moved to Dessau (picture). When the Nazis gained control of the city council there, the school closed again in 1932 and was reopened in Berlin. It was closed permanently in April 1933, pressured by the Nazi regime, which criticized the institution for producing "degenerate art."
Image: picture alliance/dpa/J. Wolf
Its ideals nevertheless spread worldwide
Even though the Bauhaus school was closed, different members of its staff kept spreading its idealistic concepts after they fled Germany. For example, many Jewish architects of the Bauhaus school contributed to the White City of Tel Aviv (picture), where a collection of 4,000 buildings were designed in the Bauhaus style. It is a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/P. Grimm
It still influences designers today
Though today people might most commonly associate modern, affordable, modular furniture with Ikea, the concept wasn't born in Sweden, but rather inspired by the classic works of Bauhaus designers. This photo shows tubular furniture designed by Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1927 to 1930.
Image: picture-alliance/ dpa
Germany launches its 2019 Bauhaus centenary
The Bauhaus school turns 100 in 2019. Germany's major celebratory program involves not only the three museums housed in the former schools in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin (picture), but also at least 10 of the country's 16 federal states will participate. Expect several exhibitions, events, publications — and even new museums.