BEHRMAN READS ABOUT EXTERMINATION, 1933–34
Behrman's engagement with a print public sphere as reader and writer shaped the play: his unpublished diaries point to a literature of extermination long before the war began. The New York Times anchored Behrman's public sphere; satellites included the Nation, the New Republic, the Saturday Evening Post, Time, and Harper's, all of which Berhman read regularly. Berhman's note "read the papers" is a frequent diary entry. Meanwhile, in the few years leading up to the winter of 1934, Behrman socialized with Sonya Levien, Harold Laski, Ernst Lubitsch, Harpo Marx, Claire Trevor, Eddie Cantor, Felix Frankfurter, John Maynard Keynes, Lydia Lopokova, and many others. Rudolf Kommer and Salka Viertel kept Behrman informed about German emigrees. One entry typifies Behrman's chronicle of social life punctuated by reading, writ- ing, and world crisis: "read Sunday papers, Hitler whom I hope to live to see rejected of men, to Harpo for dinner whence I have just come" (Papers b. 28, f.13, 18 April 1933, p. 252). (A similar mixture of the comic and horrific sur- faced in a "[h]orrible dream about Hitler: had written something adverse to Nazis he got me out of a seat in the theatre & walked me out very amiable & charming saying: You ought to write – you have talent!" [Papers b. 29, f. 1, 4 March 1934, p. 143].) Behrman was accustomed to soirées with celebrities and to reading, and yet he catalogued the guests at parties and the newspapers, magazine articles, and books he read.
Fittingly, the idea for "The Last Jew" came to Behrman at a party, and an article in the Times provided material for the play's plot. Less than a week after the New York opening of Rain from Heaven, Behrman published an article in the Times describing his source, a short memoir by the German drama critic, Alfred Kerr (Behrman, "In Behalf "): Kerr's piece, too, had been published in the Times (Kerr). Roughly a week after Behrman wrote about Kerr, Brooks Atkinson, who had already reviewed the play, published a second piece about Rain from Heaven ("Mercy for Moderns"). Behrman wrote for an audience who would read his account of the genesis of his play in the pages of the paper in which he had discovered an important source for it. Behrman assumed an audience of readers in a particularly delimited print public sphere, and he as- sumed that many of these readers also went to the theatre. His diary includes a remarkable note on this connection between writing and reading: "Great urge to write a messianic last act! And to read everything – the passion all over again the minute I read anything!" (Papers b. 29, f. 2, 6 May 1934, p. 15). This loop through the Times illustrates the reciprocity between his writing and reading; Behrman's messianism will emerge below.
The assumption that future genocide was unimaginable before World War II is false, at least where the English-language press in 1933 and 1934 is concerned. Writers in the early 1930s regularly anticipated genocide in the near future. Further, Willens's fictional pamphlet describes with accuracy the centrality of the figure of the Jew to Nazi ideology and anticipates the sheer bureaucratic efficiency behind the "extermination" of Europe's Jews. The first of these points is now less startling than the second. Behrman, however, en- countered both in his reading: many commentators saw wars of extermina- tion as a likely consequence of the Nazi rise to power. Some of these writers may also have read Mein Kampf in German or in the English translation published in 1933.
Behrman's reading in 1933 and 1934 included a number of acute analyses of Nazism's need for the demonized figure of "the Jew." The critic Ludwig Lewisohn, for instance, in what Behrman judges "a superb article" (Papers b. 29, f. 1, 28 July 1933, p. 17), describes Germany's "pagan revolt" and its target, the Jew, "the symbol of the free personality alone with its God," "the symbol of the critical intelligence": "If the Jews were not there to be tortured, upon what symbolical object could the 'holy madness' wreak its self-justificatory pagan rage?" (Lewisohn 276). Though the theological turn in Lewisohn's in- terpretation of Nazism might have been unusual, related analyses were not uncommon. Mary Heaton Vorse, activist and co-founder of the Province- town Players, wrote after a visit to Germany that "the Jew in the minds of Hitler and his followers is a cancer on the body politic." Vorse realized the implication of this metaphor: the Jew "is a disease, to be treated as such and to be got rid of" (256; see Behrman, Papers b. 26, f. 1, 26 July 1933, p. 17). To get "rid of " this "cancer" could describe the forced immigrations and im- poverishment of what Vorse twice calls the "cold pogrom" of 1933 (255, 256). Intimations of extermination were, however, also audible.
Willens's parable allegorizes this necessity of the last Jew's survival as the real object of Nazi ideology: the Nazis will always need the Jew as barrier to the "millennium." But the more startling aspect of Willens's pamphlet is not its analysis of the importance of the Jew to Nazi ideology but its prediction of all but total genocide. Is there any similarly straightforward prediction of this possibility elsewhere?14 Again, Behrman's reading shows that he was not alone in picturing genocidal possibilities. Lewisohn, in the article quoted above, realizes the implications of Nazi racial thought and fears that the "pa- gan attack upon the very roots of the Judeo-Christian ethical and humane tradition" (276) would result in the crucifixion of the Jew: "They have begun. The scapegoat is being slain; the Jew is crucified" (281). In a discussion of the Versailles treaty's limitations on German power, Lewisohn asks, "Who would dare to favor equality of armaments for a nation fanatically convinced that it would be helping to save the world for the savior race of the Germans to 'gas in' (einzugasen) foreign provinces and exterminate life where inferior races live and then replace them?" (282). Lewisohn's unusual English phrase is a translation of a rare German word, but both foresee the transformation of the gas warfare of the trenches into a tool of extermination. Lewisohn saw the war against Jews as one of several racial wars in which Germany's pursuit of Lebensraum would spell mass death. Behrman also notes a "brilliant article" by Leon Trotsky (Papers b. 29, f. 1, 27 August 1933, p. 31). Trotsky predicts the Nazi push into Poland and other Eastern European countries, and observes that the Nazis "prefer the extermination of the conquered 'inferior' peoples to their Germanization," arguing that "[t]he whole historical philosophy of National-Socialism proceeds from the supposedly fundamental inequality of nations and the right of the 'superior' races to trample upon and to extir- pate the 'inferior' races" (387). Extermination, extirpation: Trotsky pictures a whole set of genocides, not limited to that of the Jews.
Willens's word extermination also appears in an address by Samuel Unter- myer broadcast over WABC radio in New York on 6 August 1933, the text of which appeared in the Times. Untermyer predicts that the world will confront a picture so fearful in its barbarous cruelty that the hell of war and the alleged Belgian atrocities will pale into insignificance as compared to this devilishly, deliberately, cold-bloodedly planned and already partially executed campaign for the extermination of a proud, gentle, loyal, law-abiding people. ("Text" 4)
In The Coming Struggle for Power, John Strachey similarly foresees an era of vicious wars: "Some defeated nations may well be exterminated en bloc in the concluding phases of the contest" (255). In this book, Strachey underestimates the force of Nazi anti-Semitism and describes "kill the Jews" as rhetoric used to "catch shopkeepers" (266). In another work from the same year, The Men- ace of Fascism, however, Strachey emphasizes Nazi persecution of the Jews and begins with a relevant montage of passages from the English press. Extermi- nation as a likely consequence of a newly militant Germany's expansion was, then, widely feared. Few distilled these fears into so astonishing a scenario as did Behrman, but the threat of extermination was the subject of widespread apprehension.
ARGUMENTS ABOUT MASS DEATH: READING THE JOKE
Behrman's career was distinctly middlebrow. David Savran has argued for the concept's usefulness for understanding American theatre, which occupies an "impossible conjunction" (17), simultaneously seeking political efficacy, moral responsibility, commercial success, and cultural respectability. Rain from Heaven occupies that "impossible conjunction." Behrman made his high comedy the vehicle of his protest against Nazi racial ideology. One might object that this met a demand for a fillip of unobjectionable political content.
One might also say, however, that the horizon of fulfilment would have been a future in which our past would be unrecognizable. Had Behrman's comedy functioned as a successful warning against the extermination he predicted, history would be utterly different. The idea is grandiose, but only as gran- diose as the aspirations of that contradictory middlebrow culture Behrman embodied.
For Behrman, the question of how to respond to the threat of "Hitlerism" was an urgent one. He imagined that Rain from Heaven might contribute to the undoing of the threat of extermination the play predicted. These hopes are vivid in his account of the genesis of Rain from Heaven published in the New York Times on 30 December 1934, a week after the New York opening. This account focuses on the story of Alfred Kerr, the powerful German critic who provided Behrman's model for Willens. Kerr, one of the most influen- tial theatre critics of Weimar Germany, went into exile with the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Behrman was especially troubled by the playwright Gerhart Hauptmann's repudiation of Kerr. Kerr had long been an important advocate of Hauptmann's work, whose The Weavers (1892), with its sympathetic treat- ment of working-class revolt, provided a monument in the history of political drama. Kerr did not, as Behrman puts it, "measure up to the new standardi- zation" ("In Behalf " X3), which Hauptmann, a Nazi sympathizer, supported.
In the Times piece, Behrman imagines a meeting between the two men in "the great man's quiet study" as "an essential conflict":
There they were, these two men, two artists, two civilized men, two essences of what the race might hope to be – the author of "The Weavers" and the author of an exquisite poem in which a man mourns the untimely passing of another artist who might have become a friend. [...] Here, in a clear vapor, might rise an emanation so distilled and powerful that miraculously it might de-lethalize those other and headier exhalations from the test-tubes of the poison gas chemists and from the heated breaths of the demagogues. Because if not from this room, from where else? That it did not come – this for me – was essential tragedy. ("In Behalf " X3)
The otherwise slightly redundant sequence – "two men, two artists, two civ- ilized men" – economically suggests that art civilizes, and this suggestion is crucial to the episode's despair over what art should do for the "race," a term that oscillates here uneasily between national and universal connotations. In Behrman's fantasy of political efficacy, the encounter of Kerr and Hauptmann should have produced the "clear vapor" of a miraculous antidote to hot po- litical plagues: this alchemical enlightenment is itself an etherealized faith in the aesthetic. The phrase "poison gas chemists" resonates powerfully after the Holocaust. Behrman, like Lewisohn, intuited that that an echo from the trenches of World War I captured a lethal future threat, a chemical analogue to the poisonous words of the unnamed Hitler and other "demagogues." This critique of demagoguery leads to a contempt for crowds and masses that is the obverse of Behrman's emphasis on an encounter between individuals: "For the mob is the same in nearly all countries whether it engages in a pogrom in Rus- sia, an Armenian massacre in Turkey, a book-fire in Germany, a lynching-bee in America" ("In Behalf" X3). Mobs, Behrman argues, have no interest: "[T]hey may be reduced to the generalizations of the crowd-psychologist."