Four degrees of separation from Kristallnacht

If, like me, you were around in the 1990s, you probably remember a play that was later turned into a film starring Will Smith called Six Degrees of Separation.

In the movie, Smith is a young con artist who inveigles his way into a group of well-to-do waspish New Yorkers by convincing them he’s roommates with one of their offspring at Harvard and, furthermore, that he’s the son of legendary African-American actor Sidney Poitier.

The film’s title comes from a sociological theory that everybody in the world can be connected to everyone else in the world by no more than six social steps. For example, you’re a friend of someone, who’s the cousin of someone, who’s a colleague of someone, who’s a friend of someone, who went to school with the daughter of the person you’re talking about.

Next week, we mark the 88th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the state-orchestrated pogrom of 9-10 November 1938 across Germany and Austria that left thousands of Jewish businesses and synagogues smashed up and burnt to the ground. The violence also saw more than 90 Jews killed, while another 30,000 were arrested and taken to concentration camps.

Given the nature of our community, I’m fairly certain that most of us could easily connect to someone who experienced Kristallnacht as a victim or at the very least a witness within six steps. Fewer though could claim to have six degrees of separation from one Kristallnacht’s organisers.

That, however, is a rare distinction I discovered that I possess while researching my play Morgen Wieder Lustik, based on the life of my great-grandfather, the German composer Heinz Lewin.

Just seven weeks before the Nazis took power in 1933, a film was released in Germany titled Geheimnis Des Blauen Zimmers, which translates as The Secret of the Blue Room.

Now a cult classic, this 1932 thriller boasted a star-studded cast including Theodor Loos, Else Elster and Hans Adalbert Schlettow. The man listed on the credits as providing the music, meanwhile, was my great-grandfather, which is why, in one key scene the actress Else Elster plays the piano and sings a song that he composed for the movie called Du Bist Die Sehnsucht – You’re the One I Yearn For.

Nothing particularly out of the ordinary there. Heinz wrote music for a number of films, as well as several highly successful operettas and ballets.

What marks this song out, however, is that the person singing it, Else Elster, would go on to become the lover of a certain Obergruppenfuhrer Wolf Heinrich Graff von Helldorf, Chief of the Berlin Police.

In that role since 1935, von Helldorf had been instrumental in organising attacks on the city’s Jewish population. But even before the Nazis came to power, in the early 1930s he had been an active member of the party, with a particular responsibility for orchestrating anti-Jewish riots.

And then came the ultimate anti-Jewish riot. The day before Kristallnacht, Tuesday 8 November 1938, Chief of Police von Helldorf made a public announcement: the Jews of Berlin had been disarmed.

As Heinz says in the play, “Guns, bullets, knives, all taken away. It was in all the papers and on the wireless … It was an invitation. Come, attack. They can’t defend themselves.”

Lamenting the death and destruction that ensued, Heinz reflects ruefully that von Helldorf’s police stood by and let it happen. “They weren’t idle though. They made plenty of arrests. But not of the rioters. 30,000 Jews arrested. Sent to Buchenwald, Dachau and Sachsenhausen.”

As for Else, who had a daughter with von Helldorf, Heinz notes that she went on to appear in one of the Nazi’s most notorious antisemitic films Jud Suss, one of Josef Goebbels’ passion projects, so she was clearly no longer friends with Jud Lewin.

More than eight decades on, it’s chilling to think that there are only four degrees of separation between myself and a man who played such a prominent role in the genesis of the Holocaust.

Perhaps even more disturbing, that means I’m only five steps away from Hitler, although von Helldorf was never particularly enamoured of the Nazi leader and was among the senior members of the Third Reich involved in the failed assassination plot of July 1944. For that, the Police Chief lost his own life.

This Sunday, 88 years to the day after von Helldorf announced on the eve of Kristallnacht that the Jews of Berlin had been disarmed, I’ll be taking to the stage in the guise of Heinz Lewin, reflecting on that and other key chapters and relationships in my great-grandfather’s life. Accompanied by Tomi Kalinski, we’ll also be performing again next Wednesday, 11 November, when through the shattered glass and still smouldering remains of Jewish property, the extent of what had happened and where it all might lead, was starting to become all too apparent.

I dedicate these performances to the victims of Kristallnacht and all those whose lives would never be the same.

Zeddy Lawrence is a former editor of The AJN. Morgen Wieder Lustik is on Sunday 8 and Wednesday 11 November in Melbourne. He will be bringing the play to Sydney in the new year. Further info and tickets: morgenplay.com