When Hirsch (Zvi) Lewin began a recording label specializing in Jewish music in 1932, he had no idea how quickly Germany’s cultural life would be radically altered. Lewin, owner of the Hebrew Book Store (Hebräische Buchhandlung) in Berlin, created the Semer record label.
In January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. In February, a fire broke out in the Reichstag building. Blaming the communists for the fire and painting a picture of imminent Bolshevik revolution, Hitler and his conservative political colleagues almost immediately passed the Reichstag Fire Decree. The decree and the passage of the Enabling Act three weeks later effectively suspended most of Germany’s civil liberties, turned Germany into a one-party state and made Hitler the vessel of political power.
By April, the Hitler regime passed the Reich Law for the Restoration of a Professional Civil Service. This legislation led to the dismissal of Jewish conductors, singers, opera and orchestra administrators, music critics and musicologists. By June, musical associations of all kinds throughout Germany – from choirs to music appreciation clubs – were taken over by the Nazis and purged of their Jewish members. The purge of Jews from the German musical world was only part of the Nazi campaign to exclude Jewish participation in German culture.
In June, the Nazis set up the separate and unequal Jewish Cultural League (Judischer Kulturbund) in Berlin. Many in the community saw the organization as a source of employment for Jewish artists, a venue to promote Jewish culture and a way to resist the Nazi project to de-humanize the Jewish people. The Nazis saw the Kulturbund as a way to demonstrate to the world that German Jewry was really not being victimized. Ultimately, the Jewish Cultural League was liquidated. The cultural conformity that was at the center of Nazi ideology would lead to the liquidation of all people deemed to be inferior by the Nazis.
Meanwhile, Semer became the only place for Jewish musicians to go who wished to record. Between 1933-’38, Lewin produced more than 250 Jewish music recordings of all genres, from cantorial to cabaret, from Yiddish art songs to Palestinian folk songs. As the situation in Nazi Germany worsened, Lewin seemed to push himself to record as many examples of German-Jewish music as he could.
On Nov. 9, 1938, Nazis attacked the Hebräische Buchhandlung. The crowd set fire to Lewin’s store, destroying all his stock, including 4,500 recordings. Lewin was arrested and deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He was released after six months. He left Germany and eventually reached Palestine where he started the Hed Artzi record label, which included some Semer re-issues.
Ordinarily, given the destruction of Lewin’s store and the later mass murder of Germany’s Jews, the Semer label’s catalogue would have fallen into oblivion. However, beginning in 1992, German musicologist Rainer E. Lotz began a worldwide project to track down the Semer recordings. Over the next decade, Lotz located, recovered and restored almost the entire Semer catalogue of 78 rpm recordings. Lotz found copies in private and institutional collections. Some of the recovered recordings lived as single copies and some existed as test pressings.
In 2002, the German recording company, Bear Family, re-issued the restored Semer catalogue in an 11-CD box set, “Beyond Recall: A Record of Jewish Musical Life in Nazi Berlin 1933-1938.” The box set, costing 250 euros, came with a comprehensive 500-page book with details about the performers, the circumstances of the performances, pictorial renderings of concert programs, copies of musical notation and informative essays. Writing about this CD box, critic J. Hoberman likened the project to “a chunk of the planet Krypton crashing our atmosphere.”
One cannot invent a better story about these recordings than what happened to them in real life.
And, that’s not the end of the Semer story.
In 2012, the Jewish Museum Berlin commissioned Alan Bern to create contemporary interpretations of the archival recordings. Bern, co-founder of the seminal klezmer band, Brave Old World, assembled seven musicians from America and Germany. Thus was born the Semer Ensemble. Based in Berlin, the ensemble’s purpose is to breathe new life into the German-Jewish repertoire through high-quality live performances. In their concertizing aimed at a German audience, the Semer Ensemble provides living evidence of a shared cultural past – although one wonders if young Germans will make this historical reconnection through the Semer Ensemble’s concerts.
American audiences now can experience a taste of this repertoire with the release of Semer Ensemble’s “Rescued Treasure” on the German Piranha label. A “live” studio recording (recorded in real time), “Rescued Treasure” features a wide sampling of genres that would have been familiar to audiences in the 1920s and ’30s. Performances include romantic ballads (“Ich Tanz’ und Mein Herz Weint”), Yiddish cabaret (“Scholem Baith”), Israeli dance tunes (“Simchu Bi Jeruschalaim”) recorded in Berlin made for export to Palestine as no recording studios existed there, Yiddish folksongs (“Das Kind Liegt In Wigele”), cantorial (“Acheinu Kol bet Jissroe”) and Hebrew art songs (“Yad Anuga”).
My favorite tracks are the chanson “Vorbei” (“It’s Over”), which also was recorded by the famous Austrian singer Richard Tauber, and the pre-ironic ballad “Kadish: Der Jüdische Soldat” (“Kaddish for the Jewish Soldier”), recorded in several later versions by artists such as Martha Schlamme and Theodore Bikel.
The vocals (in German, Yiddish and Hebrew), especially those featuring the Klezmatic’s Loren Sklamberg, are outstanding. And, the musical arrangements, presumably done by Semer Ensemble artistic director Alan Berne, strike a perfect balance between being rooted in the original source material and reinterpreting the tunes using modern tempos and contemporary musical elements.
Given the paucity of documentation and recordings of German-Jewish music in the Weimar era, “Rescued Treasure” qualifies as this year’s most important piece of Jewish cultural history.