Ben Barkow & Klaus Leist. History Today. Volume 58, Issue 3, March 2008.
In April 1942 a sixty-six-year-old former merchant in the fur trade watched yet another group of Jewish men and women being herded out of Berlin. Later that year in an essay entitled Ostwgierts (Towards the East), he wrote that the spectacle reminded him of a picture he had seen some decades earlier by the Russian painter Vasily Vasilievich Vereshchagin (1842-1904), called ‘The Exiled’. The painting depicted a long line of people condemned to banishment, trudging across a snowy steppe towards the train which would carry them into exile. The fur merchant recalled the dignity of the sad figures in the painting and vowed to himself: ‘We too shall be unbowed when we pass through the gate of darkness into the gloom that awaits us.’
Within three months the merchant’s resolve would be tested to the full as he, together with his wife, climbed aboard a train bound for the ghetto of Theresienstadt in Bohemia, where they were to dwell for two long years before their final journey to Auschwitz and death.
Philipp Manes was born in Elberfeld on August 16th, 1875. His family had been living in the Rhineland since the eighteenth century, pursuing various trades. Manes’ father Eduard settled his family in Berlin in 1886, establishing himself as a fur merchant with his own firm, Eduard Manes Fur Agency. Philipp attended the Gymnasium and received a traditional German education.
After school and some jobs as a commercial traveller Manes joined the publications department of the New Photographic Society in Berlin. He travelled all over Germany, and also to some European cities, interviewing prominent artists and writers to prepare their photographic portrayal. This was perhaps the most formative period of his life, giving him a taste of the wider world and awakening his interest in literature and music, the arts and the theatre. In 1910, however, he followed his father’s call to join the family firm and went on to become a successful fur dealer.
By this time he had been married to Gertrud Elias for six years. Manes was a dedicated family man but also a strict and demanding paterfamilias who, for instance, carefully controlled which books and plays his four children were allowed to read and enjoy.
In the First World War Manes was drafted to the Russian front. He became a sergeant and was awarded the Iron Cross. During the Weimar years he became very active in the trade associations of the fur industry. This all came to an end the day after ‘Kristallnacht’, November 9th-10th, 1938—when his daughter Eva persuaded him that there was no hope left and that he should dissolve the business.
After this Manes worked with the Petkowitsch Fur Company until that too became impossible. By 1939 all four of his children had left the country. This was a bitter blow for Philipp and Gertrud, adding to the misery caused by the anti-Jewish measures in force at this time. Manes’ health deteriorated and his one refuge and consolation was writing. (He had been an enthusiastic diarist and writer from his early adult years.)
In spring 1942 Manes was called up to work in a factory manufacturing nuts and bolts. That July he was notified that he and his wife were to be deported to Theresienstadt. About nine months later he wrote a description of this and of his journey out of Berlin, entitled Last Days in Berlin, which serves as the prologue to the published version of a remarkable document he later wrote at Theresienstadt between February and October 1944. In this Manes recorded his experiences in the Ghetto in a series of nine notebooks of approximately A5 size.
By calling this text Tatsachenbericht or Factual Report, Manes announces an intention—he will rely on the power of facts, the power of truth: he will not interpret, judge, embellish or cover up. In practice he did not always fulfil this high ambition, but he clearly intended his report not just for himself or his children, but for a world beyond his own. He wanted perhaps to speak to posterity to give us the opportunity to learn the truth about Theresienstadt.
We must bear in mind that Manes was not looking back at Theresienstadt, but writing as the tragedy of its inmates was approaching its climax. His clarity and fair-mindedness are striking, although of course he had his prejudices. Manes wrote almost up to the day he and Gertrud were deported (his report breaks off in mid-sentence) and his last words are dated October 27th, 1944. The following day he and Gertrud were sent to Auschwitz where both were murdered practically on arrival.
The Factual Report begins where the Last Days end: with a description of the arrival at the little station of Bauschowitz, 3 km from Theresienstadt. Their first experience in the Ghetto was to be searched during which they were stripped of most of their possessions. Initially they slept in stables in the most primitive conditions—later in barracks, although these were little better.
Soon after his arrival, Manes was summoned to see the commander of the Ghetto-Watch, a kind of Jewish internal police force. He was instructed to take charge of a new auxiliary force to be called the Orientation Service. Both the Ghetto Watch and the Orientation Service were part of the Jewish self-administration under the Council of Elders. The purpose of the latter was to take care of people who got lost in the Ghetto. Theresienstadt was an eighteenth-century military garrison built to accommodate around 7,000 people. In July 1942 the population was over 50,000 and more transports from Germany arrived each day. Many of the inmates were elderly, disorientated and traumatized.
Manes chose twelve fellow Berliners and set to work. The Orientation Service soon got other assignments, such as guard duty, and grew into a general law-and-order plus social services unit. A women’s section was added and Gertrud Manes played her part. Eventually the service numbered around thirty men and ten women. Their work was on the whole mundane, but probably provided genuine service to the inmates.
German officers were rarely seen in the Ghetto although it was closely guarded, mainly by Czech Gendarmes. Theresienstadt was a ‘model camp’. Ostensibly first designed as a ‘refuge’ for the Czech Jews, it soon became the collection point for mostly elderly German and Austrian Jews, such as decorated First World War veterans, people with connections abroad and others deemed ‘deserving’ cases, according to the peculiar and shifting Nazi system of values. Although dismal, facilities especially medical ones—were rather better than at other camps. While large numbers died in the Ghetto it was not a place where many were murdered—for that they were sent on to death camps, mainly Treblinka and Auschwitz. Between 1941 and 1945, 140,000 men and women were in Theresienstadt. For about 88,000 of them it proved to be the antechamber to a death camp. 33,000 people died in the Ghetto itself. 19,000 survived the war.
Manes writes vividly about the physical hardships. Hunger is a constant theme, and he highlights the unequal access to food among the inmates. He also repeatedly refers to the plagues of bedbugs and lice which made sleep impossible and posed a serious health risk. He records fascinating insights into the maintenance of the Ghetto. Coming across a fellow inmate standing by a manhole wearing rubber boots and dirty overalls, he is told that the man led a team of twenty-two workers who cleaned and maintained the ancient sewerage system, thus preventing a public health catastrophe. Manes marvels at this and reflects, not for the first time, that on the battlefields of the First World War and here in Theresienstadt, the Jews as a people had demonstrated that they were the equals of the gentiles in terms of physical labour, devotion to duty, and self sacrifice and that contradicted the anti-semitic notion that Jews were effete, unpatriotic or work-shy.
Manes describes the administration of the postal service, the work of the camp bakery and the organization of the Jewish Ghetto Administration. He writes touchingly about the children’s hospital and of watching children playing or working in the gardens. In a sentimental vein he relates the story of a puppy that appeared in the Ghetto one day, lingered through the winter, becoming a symbol of hope for the inmates, before vanishing once spring arrived.
The SS and the Jewish Ghetto Administration promoted an appearance of normality. The prisoners supported this make-believe by working where they could as nurses or doctors, craftsmen or librarians, ‘for the good of the Ghetto’—although the majority sensed the air of unreality that permeated their lives. This make-believe reached its culmination in the so-called town beautification programme of 1944 when the numbers of inmates were drastically reduced (by deportations to Auschwitz), trees were planted, a coffee house opened and a cleaning programme ordered all in preparation for a visit by a delegation of the international Red Cross, which duly allowed itself to be taken in by appearances. Manes’ attitude to all this was realistic, if not cynical. He knew that the improvements were meant to disguise the truth, but he accepted them, ‘Whatever the reasons’, he wrote, ‘they make our life a little easier’.
This ‘easier’ time did not last long. At Yom Kippur 1944 the Head of the Council of Elders, Paul Eppstein, announced that the Germans
… had requested a working transport of 5000 men, aged 18-50. They must leave within the shortest possible time. We are assured that they will return in six weeks when the assignment in question is complete. Maintain discipline it has to be.
This announcement heralded the last great wave of deportations to Auschwitz, which eventually swept up Philipp and Gertrud Manes as well. He expressed admiration for Eppstein’s quiet and authoritative way of communicating his message and of course did not know that Eppstein would be shot by the Germans just a few days later.
From then on the transports dominated everything and Manes sensed his fate approaching. Before long, women were included in the transports, then the age limit rose from fifty to sixty-five. More and more of his friends disappeared. Philipp and Gertrud Manes ‘grew rigid in our chairs’ as they realized that the sixty-five-age limit would also be raised and that they would not escape. And yet they carried on helping people to prepare for the transports, until they themselves had to leave.
Manes, however, was not only a chronicler of the daily life of the Ghetto. Significantly, he transformed his Orientation Service into what the musician and fellow inmate Willi Durra called ‘a curious mixture of police station, theatre, adult education centre and concert agency’. Officially this soon became known as ‘the Lecture Series of the Orientation Service’. Initially at least this was not an activity of the Jewish self-administration but a private initiative. Its origins lay in the boredom and frustration Manes felt in his first days in the Ghetto:
Unemployed: the word weighed heavily on me and spoiled my pleasure in the hot July days. I had contacts in the stables around and about and at mid-day—I can’t recall now what drove me to it—I asked the old Hamburg residents in stable 13 if they would mind if I chatted with them to kill the time. They received me enthusiastically, brought me a bench and, like the Rhapsodists of old, I spoke to my audience, who listened eagerly.
Next, Manes sought out the old Berliners. Getting an equally warm reception among them he ventured further afield but then got into trouble with the Jewish self-administration. He was summoned by Rabbi Albert Schoen, later one of his regular lecturers, but at this time the head of the Leisure Time Department (Freizeitgestaltung). While praising his activity, the Rabbi warned him that each of these ‘lectures’ would need to be notified in writing eight days in advance so that it could be put before the ‘Commander’ and duly authorized. Failing this the ‘authority’ (the SS) would class it as an illegal gathering and punish both speaker and audience.
Having been charged with running the Orientation Service, Manes used this as his next forum.
We spoke from 7pm to 8pm—when we were unlikely to be disturbed by our duties—mostly about our own lives. With these personal sketches I managed to make those around me better known to each other, to learn about their past lives, and to study their characters.
After four weeks Manes felt they had said everything worth saying. He decided to look for speakers among his fellow prisoners and to open the lectures to a larger circle. He met with a response beyond his imagination. Imprisoned in Theresienstadt was an academic and artistic elite which in normal times would have been the envy of any community. There was an ample supply of the most eminent lecturers. Theologians such as the Rabbis Leo Baeck, Leopold Neuhaus and Regina Jonas (the first woman ordained as a rabbi in Germany), physicians such as Hermann Strauss, philosophers and psychologists such as Emil Utitz and Max Brahn, poets and cabaret artists such as Leo and Myra Strauss and the painter Julia Wolfthorn and others. And there was certainly a demand—hundreds of educated people, hungry for spiritual sustenance. Manes filled this gap, and the many words of praise in three little volumes dedicated to him by his fellow prisoners are testimony of how well he did this.
The first of the larger, more formal lectures took place on September 21st, 1942—Manes himself reminiscing about the Berlin of his youth. Two days later Ludwig Sochaczewer, formerly a journalist and a press attache at the Japanese embassy in Berlin, spoke, over two evenings, on the theme of My Contemporaries. After this, the lectures continued regularly, every second evening through the autumn months. The next speaker was Louis Treumann, a tenor who specialized in operetta and had performed the part of Danilo in the Viennese premiere of The Merry Widow. Treumann evidently spoke more than once, but his last lecture had to be cancelled as ill health suddenly overtook him: the precarious health of contributors, their sudden departure ‘to the east’, the collapse of their morale or their mental health was a recurring theme. Manes always had one eye on the hospital and the departing and arriving transports. The lectures that followed Treumann’s, reflect Manes’ commitment to intellectual rigour and variety:
- Dr Johann Weinberger: Origins of Christianity.
- Dr Berthold Feigel: On being a Prisoner of War in Russia
- Rabbi Leopold Neuhaus: The Number 13
- Prof Levy Bacteriology
- Rabbi Regina Jonas: Concerning the Talmud
- Franz Klein: The World of Music
- Prof Emil Utitz: The Art of the Actor
- Dr Paul Blum: German Humour, French Esprit, Jewish Wit.
The word spread and ‘The Lecture Series of the Orientation Service’ grew steadily.
When his audience expressed a wish for theatrical performances, Manes focused on the German classics that his audience craved. Lack of resources made staging plays impossible, so he decided on play-readings performed by actors of which there were many. A stage was cobbled together, and over the next months he mounted readings of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise and other classics, but it was Goethe’s Faust which gave him his greatest success. Faust offered his audience their closest and most precious contact with the world they had left behind.
During the autumn of 1942 Manes had been impressed by the poetry that inmates had shown him. He organized a competition that attracted 200 entries. Among those he admired were works by Otto Brod, brother of the author Max Brod, Gustav Hochstetter, an editor from Berlin and, above all, Georg Kafka, a distant relative of Franz Kafka, described by Manes as ‘the hope for the future’—he died in 1944 at the age of twenty-three.
The demand was so great that from the beginning of 1943 Manes presented lectures every evening. By March 10th, he was marking his 100th event. By the summer of 1943, lectures were regularly interspersed with play readings, with performances of a choir assembled and led by Willi Durra and other musical entertainments. The 500th event was celebrated in August 1944.
In the dismal atmosphere of Theresienstadt, having lost his freedom, family and possessions, Manes thus became the impresario of an incomparable ‘cultural feat’ and in this role also seems to have found an unusually high degree of self-realization. The ‘feat’ continued throughout 1943 and 1944 until the deportations of September/October 1944 robbed Manes of most of his speakers and much of his audience.
The Orientation Service itself was closed down in February 1944, while the lectures continued throughout the summer, Manes found himself suddenly with more time for writing. He embarked on a series of interviews with prominent personalities, including Georg Gradnauer, a social democratic politician of the Weimar republic who had been Minister of the Interior, another with the Chemist Arthur Eichengrun, who has a claim on the discovery or isolation of Aspirin, and a third with Elsa Bernstein, granddaughter of Franz Liszt, wife of the lawyer and writer Max Bernstein, and a friend of Gerhart Hauptmann. These interviews offer an insight into the lives of some remarkable personalities but also into Manes’ own state of mind in the last weeks of his life. In the manuscript, they are written out in sections of between ten and twenty pages. Between these, Manes describes the transports rolling out of Theresienstadt for Auschwitz. Even at this stage, Manes had no complete notion of what Auschwitz was, though he clearly dreaded it more than he had a year or eighteen months earlier, when he really believed the Nazis’ disinformation, that in the great ghetto of Birkenau deportees from Theresienstadt were building new and permanent lives. Manes desperately needed a distraction from watching the Ghetto being dismantled, knowing that, regardless of the official announcements, his time and that of his wife was approaching. The interviews provided a means, not of blanking out the deportations, but of diluting them and providing himself with the illusion of the normality of work and the hope of a future. This hope was extinguished on October 28th, 1944, when Philipp and Gertrud Manes joined the last transport to leave Theresienstadt for Auschwitz.
The day before his final deportation, Manes wrote a note in the last part of the Factual Report requesting that it be sent to Fanny Frank, the wife of his closest friend, Adolf Frank, a doctor living near Munich. He gave the manuscripts to fellow prisoner Lies Klemich, who hid them under her mattress, thus saving them. After her liberation Lies Klemich suffered from serious illness and could not honour the request. She finally managed to contact Adolf Frank in January 1947. By then, Frank had been in touch with Manes’ daughters in England, and now established communication with the Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad in London which delivered the papers into the hands of Eva Manes in Burford in the Cotswolds in May 1948.
The manuscript was published in Germany in 2005.
Can the work of Philipp Manes be described as a sort of spiritual resistance, or did he in some way assist the work of the Nazis by keeping the Ghetto inmates passive before they were led to the slaughter?
In his book Rethinking the Holocaust (2002), Yehuda Bauer surveys the huge literature on the Holocaust and writes about Jewish resistance, making use of two concepts against which we can measure the work of Manes. The first is expressed in the Hebrew word Amidah, literally ‘standing up’ or ‘standing up against’. Under this heading he includes activities such as smuggling food, mutual self-sacrifice, and efforts to strengthen morale through cultural, educational, religious or political work. The second concept Bauer defines as ‘the sanctification of life’, by which he means acts which did not just promote physical survival but which gave meaning to life.
Manes would probably not have assented to being described as a resistance fighter. Yet, a case can be made for seeing him as that at least in the spiritual sense. He raised the morale of his speakers and audiences. He helped them remain psychologically intact where otherwise they might have collapsed more quickly—and this alone fits Bauer’s definition of resistance.
But he also did something more radical which arose, paradoxically, from his own conservative personality. In the face of the Nazi onslaught he refused to yield what they most wanted to strip from him—his identity as both a Jew and a German. To some it may appear as a weakness or perversion, a group of Jews worshipping Goethe in a Nazi ghetto. But through his work and example he helped a large number of victims maintain the integrity of their identities as well. In this Manes follows a great German/Jewish tradition: In his book The Pity of it All Amos Elon says:
The Jews of Germany never ceased in their efforts to merge German and Jewish identity. Their true home we now know was not Germany but German culture and language. Their true religion was the bourgeois, Goethean ideal of Bildung (high culture).
This describes the spiritual alignment of Philipp Manes exactly. Might there not be something heroic about his refusal to yield either of the twin pillars of his identity? When he eventually went to his death he did so as a great Jew and, perhaps just as tragically, as a great and patriotic German.
There is no evidence to suggest that Manes had much religious feeling, but in a historical sense he felt very much a part of the Jewish community, increasingly so once the Nazis were in power. In Theresienstadt religion became more central to his interests. He met and worked with some of the most eminent Jewish philosophers and saw the effect they had on their listeners. He witnessed a spiritual rebirth in many of his fellow inmates, and this touched him profoundly. He was proud that his lecture series was a vehicle in this process, and he shared the growing religious conviction. The Lecture Series could do nothing to ensure physical survival but by sustaining the spirits of the inmates allowed them to approach their fate in dignity and unbowed.
One of the key figures of Theresienstadt, the Rabbi and scholar Leo Baeck, wrote a short essay about his experience in the Ghetto, which was published in March 1946. He did not mention any names in it, but the following lines can only refer to the circle Manes created:
In the sheltering darkness of the long evenings, they were together in the cold and gloomy attic of a barrack, close under the roof. There they stood, pressed close to each other, to hear a talk about the Bible and the Talmud, about Plato, Aristotle, Maimonides, about Descartes and Spinoza, about problems of history, poetry art and music, Palestine of old and today, the Commandments, the prophets, and the Messianic idea. All those hours were hours in which a community arose out of the mass and the narrowness grew wide. They were hours of freedom.