They could play seven instruments each, critics hailed them as the best jazz combo in 1920s Berlin, and the likes of Marlene Dietrich and Josephine Baker fought to secure them as their backing band. But after the Nazi takeover, and frustrating years of exile and internment in Australia, the legacy of Weintraubs Syncopators was lost in the mists of time.
Now, 100 years after their formation, the Weimar republic’s tightest jazz band returns to the city that once adored them. Not in the flesh, but on canvas: on 21 October, a painting of the group will go on permanent display at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, after the institution acquired it from its previous owners in Canada.
Painted in 1927 by Austrian artist Max Oppenheimer, the work entitled Jazz band captures the jagged energy of a music that was taking the German capital’s nightlife by storm in the years between the first and second world wars.
Used to illustrate brochures advertising Weintraubs Syncopators concerts in the late 1920s, it shows the group as a quartet, though they frequently performed with five musicians or more. Founding duo Stefan Weintraub and Horst Graff take centre stage, here on the drums and saxophone respectively, though they would have been equally as dexterous on the piano or clarinet.
“What made Weintraub’s band stand out was their versatility, both in terms of the instruments they played and the genres of music they performed,” said Albrecht Dümling, a Berlin-based historian whose book on the Syncopators’ forgotten story was published in 2022.
They played not just symphonic jazz, swing and waltz, but also schlager – catchy German-language pop songs, back then considered wittier and more sophisticated than their boorish contemporary equivalents. Titles of their biggest hits include “My Sweetheart Wants to Take Me Sailing on Sunday” and “My Gorilla Has a Villa at the Zoo”. Friedrich Hollaender, Berlin’s most prolific cabaret composer, joined the band for a period in the 1920s and replaced Weintraub on the piano.
They also performed with Josephine Baker and the Tiller Girls, and it’s no surprise that the Syncopators provided the musical strains to the defining song of the Weimar Republic’s cultural flourishing, Marlene Dietrich’s “Falling in Love Again” – as well as the other cabaret songs in Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 film The Blue Angel.
The rise of National Socialism brought the Syncopators’ career to a halt. Though they dismissed jazz as degenerate “negro music”, the Nazis never sought a nationwide ban on the music by law, and for a few years the band continued to play Berlin venues under the Germanicised name “Die Weintraubs”.
But a day after watching the burning of the Reichstag on 27 February 1933, the band decided to embark on an international tour from which they would never return. “Weintraubs Syncopators were never officially banned or expatriated, but since the man whose name they bore and most of their members were Jewish, their fate was clear,” said Dümling.
After successful gigs in the Soviet Union and Japan, the band moved to Australia but struggled to get a foothold on the local scene due to the musician union’s opposition. In 1941, not just its German members but also Polish and Chilean nationals in its lineup were interned as enemy aliens. As Dümling discovered in the National Archives of Australia, a British officer had denounced them as Soviet spies, and for lack of proof or counter-proof for the allegations the Syncopators remained behind razor wire fencing.
After the end of the war, most of the band’s members stayed in Sydney but drifted apart, some working as mechanics, others as fridge salesmen.
Behind the Oppenheimer portrait of the band, however, also lie the stories of several others exiles brought about by the rise of fascism. The artist himself left Berlin in 1931, later emigrating to Switzerland and the US.
The painting’s owner, a prominent lawyer and amateur psychoanalyst called Hugo Staub, also left the city in a haste in mid-March 1933, the artwork staying behind at his apartment off the Kurfürstendamm. According to an affidavit signed by Staub’s son in the 1960s, none other than Hitler’s confidant Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl had informed Staub that he was imminently due to be arrested as a prominent member of the League for Human Rights.
What happened to the painting over the course of the war and first postwar years is unclear, but in 1962 the artwork was auctioned off to a former Berlin property developer living in exile in Canada. For half a century, it adorned family living rooms in Montreal and Ottawa, before being loaned to the National Gallery of Canada and finally sold to the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
“There came a point where I thought it would be good for these musicians to be celebrated again where they came from,” said Ruth Freiman, whose uncle purchased the painting in 1962.
The exchange took place with the permission of the descendants of the painting’s first owner Hugo Staub, who received an ex gratia payment as part of the sale. The various families and individuals tied together by Oppenheimer’s painting are set to attend its unveiling in Berlin on 21 October.
“There’s an enormous sense of completion”, said Michael Fisher, a Zurich-based Australian whose father Emanuel and uncle Addy were part of the Syncopators’ final lineup before their dissolution. “To see the band return to the city they left behind the day after the Reichstag fire means the world to me.”
