Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Photo: Stiftung Jüdisches Museum Berlin/Jewish Museum Berlin/ Convolute 816/Curt Bloch collection
Het Onderwater Cabaret, 1943. The satirical magazine, now on exhibit in Berlin, was produced by a German Jew hiding in a Dutch attic during the war.

Both the New York Times and the Guardian reported recently that a German Jew, hiding like Anne Frank in a Dutch attic during WWII, produced an angry, humorous magazine because he could. His magazine was in the news thanks to an exhibit in Berlin.

Nina Siegal writes at the Times that many people hid in attics during the war but that Curt “Bloch’s experience was different because, in addition to sustenance and care, his helpers brought him pens, glue, newspapers and other printed materials that he used to produce a startling publication: his own weekly, satirical poetry magazine.

“From August 1943 until he was liberated in April 1945, Bloch produced 95 issues of Het Onderwater Cabaret, or the Underwater Cabaret. … Writing in both German and Dutch, [he] mocked Nazi propaganda, responded to war news and offered personal perspectives on wartime deprivations.”

Charlie English at the Guardian has more from the perspective of Bloch’s daughter, Simone, now 64.

“As the daughter of antiques dealers, Simone Bloch grew up in a New York house filled with rare and mysterious materials. The dining room was packed with precious volumes, including a collection of small, hand-written magazines, illustrated with collages in a dadaist or surrealist style.

“ ‘All of my parents’ books were kind of intimidating,’ Simone, now 64, says. ‘But this was weirder. It wasn’t something I would ever want to pick up.’

“She found them a little creepy, with their frequent images of Adolf Hitler and other wartime leaders. It was only many years later that Simone came to understand that these magazines represented her father’s resistance to the Holocaust.

“Born in Dortmund in 1908, Curt Bloch was the first in his family to go to university, studying law in the German capital, which at that time was the centre of the buzzing avant-garde cabaret scene. Curt was Jewish and objected to Hitler from the first. In 1933, when Hitler introduced a law banning Jews from civil service positions unless they had fought in the first world war, Bloch wrote a biting response to the authorities, declaring that, no, he hadn’t served in the war since he was only five when it had broken out. When the Gestapo came knocking, Curt was ready. He slipped out of a top floor window with some cash he’d hidden, and fled across the rooftops, eventually reaching Holland.

“But he wasn’t safe for long. The Germans invaded the Netherlands in 1940, and … Bloch took refuge in the crawlspace above the attic of a small suburban house in Enschede, on the German border. It was here that he began to produce the first issue of his magazine. He wrote in fountain pen, made collages from cuttings and stitched the pages together by hand. He called his volume the Underwater Cabaret in reference to the Dutch term for people in hiding, ‘divers,’ and to the favored form of political theatre in Weimar Berlin. Friends in the Dutch resistance helped circulate the Underwater Cabaret to 30 or so other ‘divers.’ They would bring the issue back a week later, by which time Bloch had prepared a new one.

“Alongside political commentaries, Bloch published highly personal writing. His mother Paula and little sister Hélène had followed him to the Netherlands, and had also gone into hiding. In May 1943 they were detained. … He devoted several poems to Hélène, one of which contained the lines: ‘Stay strong against the hatred, betrayal, and scorn / And when the war someday comes to an end / I will go looking for you.’

“Writing this kind of material was extremely dangerous. … Why take the risk? Simone believes it was a way for her father ‘to fight his own despair.’ It was a demonstration that, even in such circumstances, resistance was possible. ‘It’s getting away with something when you can’t get away with anything,’ Simone suggests. …

“In all, Bloch produced 95 magazines. The last issue is dated 3 April 1945. By that day Enschede had just been liberated, and Bloch could leave his hiding place. He travelled back to Amsterdam, where he met and married an Auschwitz survivor, Ruth Kan. In 1948 they emigrated to the US. …

“It was only recently, after years of research conducted in part by her daughter, Lucy, that Simone came to understand the full significance of the zine as a rare literary monument capturing a terrible period in history.”

More at the Times, here. And at the Guardian, here. Is it any wonder that today’s Germany is a loyal supporter of Israel? Unlike America, I suggest, Germany has reckoned with the weight of history.

All 95 copies of the Underwater Cabaret are on loan to the Jewish Museum Berlin, where an exhibition will run to 26 May.