Chapter One

Into the Third Reich

January 1933-December 1933

The exodus from Germany of Jewish and left-wing artists and intellectuals began during the early months of 1933, almost immediately after Adolf Hitler's accession to power on January 30. As among thousands, the conductors Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter were compelled to flee, Hans Hinkel, the new Nazi president of the Prussian Theater Commission and the official in charge of the "de-Judaization" of cultural life in Prussia, explained in the Frankfurter Zeitung of April 6 that Klemperer and Walter had disappeared from the musical scene because there was no way to protect them from the "mood" of a German public long provoked by "Jewish artistic liquidators."1

Prominence and fame shielded no one. On January 30, 1933, Albert Einstein, on a visit to the United States, described what was happening in Germany as a "psychic illness of the masses." He ended his return journey in Ostend (Belgium) and never again set foot on German soil. The Kaiser Wilhelm Society dismissed him from his position; the Prussian Academy of Sciences expelled him; his citizenship was rescinded. Einstein was no longer a German. Max Reinhardt was expelled from the directorship of the German Theater and fled the Reich. Max Liebermann, possibly the best-known German painter of the time, was too old to emigrate when Hitler came to power. Formerly president of the Prussian Academy of Arts, and in 1933 its honorary president, he held the highest German decoration, the Pour le Mérite. On May 7 Liebermann resigned from the academy; none of his colleagues deemed it necessary to express a word of recognition or sympathy. Isolated and os