SILENCES AND SECRETS: The Weintraubs Syncopaters
Kay Dreyfus
Monash University Press, 2013, $34.95 (pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
Stefan Weintraub and Horst Graff, German-Jewish jazz musicians, were alarmed when, having fled persecution in Nazi Germany, they were then interned in Australia in 1940 in a prison camp in Victoria run by its German-Australian Nazi detainees, who were menacingly effective at ‘maintaining order’ in the grateful eyes of the Australian military. This “cruel irony” is one of many noted by Monash University’s Kay Dreyfus in Silences and Secrets, her study of the German jazz band, the Weintraubs Syncopaters.
Exiled under Hitler because they were Jews who played ‘Negro’ music, the seven-piece band finished a world tour in Sydney in 1937 where their first obstacle was a hostile Musicians Union of Australia with its fiercely protectionist policy on jobs for Australian musicians. Battered by the Depression, and the new sound movies, mass unemployment amongst Australia’s working musicians had accelerated the union towards an anti-immigrant jobs policy. Governmental ‘White Australia’ policies under the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 gave the union a receptive lobbying ear in parliament and conferred practical influence through the legislated industrial awards and arbitration system.
It took patriotic war fever, however, to cause the demise of the band. A lone, fanciful denunciation about espionage by the band for the German government whilst on tour in Russia was made to Sydney police by a businessman whose Britishness and war veteran status outweighed, to Australian security agencies, his dubious credibility (he was arrested after the war for theft and black-marketeering of Red Cross packages intended for POWs). As a result, three of the four German nationals (all Jews) in the band were interned as ‘enemy aliens’.
“With hindsight”, says Dreyfus, “it seems absurd that the Weintraubs Syncopaters, as Jews and refugees … should have been suspected of spying for the German Government” but, on the lookout for potential ‘fifth columnists’, the guardians of ‘national security’ regarded all Germans as disloyal and therefore dangerous by definition.
Dreyfus avoids the tempting but facile equation of Nazi anti-Semitic persecution and the war-time treatment of Jewish refugees in Australia. The Nazi state’s “ultimately murderous program of cultural purging” was not the same as the parallel civil rights abuses in Australia despite the similarity of “state-sponsored racist ideologies”.
Dreyfus’ book, betraying its origins as a doctoral thesis, doesn’t always avoid the nose-bleeding heights of conceptual abstraction, nor the muddy quagmire of bureaucratic detail, but the story is engrossing and the human interest quotient high, whilst always on stark display through the Weintraub Syncopaters’ experience is the malign effect of nationalism – in the labour movement and in politics.
The Musicians Union eventually dropped its opposition to refugee and migrant workers (realising it was better to organise with them than against them) but whilst the working class can learn just who loses from racial divide and rule policies, to judge by the fate of contemporary refugees, Australia’s ruling class politicians have always known, only too well, just who benefits.