His beard was red; his face was made
Not much unlike a witches.
His habit was a Jewish gown,
That would defend all weather;
His chin turned up, his nose hung down,
And both ends met together.
Thomas Jordan (actor), 1664[1]
“Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?”
The Merchant of Venice, IV.i.174
Whereas the central theme of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice turns on various forms of bonding and bondage – between friends, between spouses, between creditor and debtor, to name a few – Portia’s/Balthazar’s ostensibly rhetorical question cuts to the core of this play’s preoccupation with identity and alterity. Bearing in mind that the early modern stage Jew, like Satan in late-medieval Mystery plays, would have donned a flaming red wig, as well as a huge nose and a gaberdine, “Balthazar’s” affectation of impartiality betrays one of many anxieties shared by Shakespeare’s contemporaries about Jews – namely, that Jewishness was neither essentially nor physically perceptible. Jews, most if not all “New Christians”, who had been living and working among them, bore no discernible marks to dispel these anxieties. Hence, in the courtroom scene, Shylock’s reply to “Balthazar” elucidates his chief distinguishing characteristic: his name. It is a name Christians use, albeit sparingly, only in his presence – to ingratiate themselves with him or to taunt him – but never in his absence. He is a dog, an infidel, an inhuman wretch, the devil incarnate. He is ‘the Jew’.
Agonistic agendas of reason and the imagination in governing perceptions of Self and Other were similarly played out in Nazi adaptations of The Merchant of Venice for both the theater and the classroom – bastions of German national identity. Although temporarily banned from the stage amid concerns that its non-Aryan characters – particularly the usurer and his convert-daughter, Jessica – might evoke the audience’s sympathies,[2] no fewer than fifty documented productions between 1933 and 1939, not to mention Werner Krauss’s infamous reprise of Shylock at Vienna’s Burgtheater in 1943, attest to the signal popularity of this play under the Third Reich. ‘Unser Shakespeare’ (our Shakespeare), moreover, the only playwright exempt from the comprehensive ban on enemy dramatists in 1939, enjoyed a privileged position in schools, where the arts were purposefully employed in the service of a National Socialist ideology. Under the guidance of a teacher, and despite the playwright’s limited understanding of racial theory, students learned that the correlation between individual and community was contingent upon blood and heredity (Korte & Spittel, 2009). Thus, inasmuch as the Bard was believed to embody the German spirit on the page and the stage, the Shylock topos – appropriated, adapted and radicalized – became an instrument for Nazi propaganda, for fomenting fear and loathing, by casting the Jew and Jewishness as genetically inferior and depraved.
In Nazi Germany, as in Shakespeare’s England, nationalism and individualism might be deemed cultural rather than political phenomena whose mutual implication begins with the sharing of a common term of difference. The question at the center of The Merchant of Venice, then, is not whether the play (or its creator) is antisemitic; such questions, to my mind, are moot and arguably redundant because, absent an immediate historical context, Shylock – at once an affirmation and indictment of Jewishness – is too Protean and complex to be reduced to a mere literary construct or stereotype. In fact, Shakespeare himself plants seeds of doubt throughout, beginning with the play’s title, which was first entered into the Stationers’ Register in 1598 as ‘the Marchaunt of Venyce or otherwise called the Jewe of Venyce.’[3] It is, therefore, particularly telling that students and theatergoers are wont to confuse the titular protagonist, Antonio, with his adversary, who appears on stage in just five of the play’s twenty scenes, yet whose formidable presence looms large and is never beyond our grasp.
For more than four centuries, this “grand, equivocal comedy” has sustained the medieval myth of the murderous Jew into the modern world by situating him in a contemporary, rather than biblical, frame of reference. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Nazified theater and school where, I shall argue, the medium is the message. Here, indeed, ‘the play’s the thing,’ for, as Mark Van Doren contended in 1938, “it can be said that every piece of literature is propaganda of a kind.” Hence, one might look to adaptations, interpretations and manipulations of The Merchant of Venice to discern the affinity between race and art – and, in Korte & Spittel’s (2009) view, to better understand that the playwright and his plays were afforded a privileged status under the Third Reich “not the least because [they] proved adaptable to the most extreme of political contexts.”
At first blush, education might be distinguished from propaganda in cognitive terms; the former, a means of enlightenment, teaches one how to think, whereas the latter, an instrument of control, conformity and disciple, teaches one what to think. Yet, the speed with which Hitler moved to Nazify German education and schools suggests that, for him, propaganda was more than programmed indoctrination. It appears, in fact, as a pedagogy of doctrines and ideologies designed to promote national solidarity, on the one hand, and unquestioning loyalty, on the other. Thus, in the social and political importance attributed to education under Hitler’s totalitarian regime, there is, as Kandel (1935) aptly notes, “no break in gauge between formal and informal education, between the cultural influences in the school and those outside it.” One need look no further than Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (RMVP) – including its theater division, or Reichsdramaturgie, and Bernhard Rust’s Ministry of Science, Education and Culture – to thoroughly appreciate the efficacy with which a play like The Merchant of Venice shaped and was shaped by ideologies rooted in blood and soil.
Even as the de-Judaization, first, of Jessica and, ultimately, of her father, Shylock, purposed to neutralize early modern anxieties about conversion and miscegenation, stage histories of The Merchant of Venice demonstrate that, with the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, Nazi depictions of this proximal Jewish threat – in the theater as well as the classroom – were rooted in race rather than faith; simply, Lorenzo’s now illegal union with Jessica signaled an adulteration of his bloodline and, thereby, the Judaization of his Christian progeny. And, in a play capable of eliciting both antipathy and sympathy for an intricate figure whose myriad iterations – villain and victim, comical and caustic – have historically transcended the page and the stage, Shylock, as Untermensch, instantiates the antithesis of German patriotism and loyalty.
In the “New Germany,” I would therefore suggest, the pedagogy of propaganda is, first and foremost, a pedagogy of fear and loathing. Race science, and antisemitism in particular, dominated the school curriculum, designating and segregating the liminal Other while filling young minds with dangerous ideas. In Nazified classrooms and theaters, culture was the concern of the state, and the notion of an aberrant, criminalized Other – feared, loathed, or both – fostered suspicion, intolerance and exclusion of anything and anyone deemed harmful to the welfare of the community. Accordingly, from 1934, depictions of Shylock mirrored the escalating hostility towards and persecution of Jews and Jewishness by reducing him to a virulent, grotesque cultural signifier – a mortal threat to the Aryan state. And, for the next decade, no humanized Shylock, with ‘hands, organs, dimensions, senses affections [and] passions,’ could tread the proverbial boards of the German stage (Bonnell, 2010).
Though much can and should be said about the Third Reich’s misappropriation of Shakespeare as a cultural and political asset of its propaganda machine, I shall devote the remainder of this brief discussion to the regime’s flagrant exploitation of the “educative potential” of The Merchant of Venice on the stage and the page – namely, in Werner Krauss’s infamous 1943 portrayal of Shylock at Vienna’s Burgtheater, and in the classroom, where teachers, indoctrinated in the fundamentals of Nazi ideology, were charged with carrying out the party’s racist agenda.
In the spring of 1943, after Vienna had deported the last of its Jews, SS Gauleiter (district administrator), Baldur von Schirach, commissioned a performance of The Merchant of Venice to celebrate the city’s new Judenrein status. Still judged “the most notorious” production on record under the Third Reich, the pairing of Burgtheater director, Lothar Müthel, with the virulently antisemitic star of stage and screen, Werner Krauss, who had tread the boards in Shylocks’ shoes twice before in the 1920s, resulted in a portrayal of the Jew which, according to one critic, sent a shudder through the theater: ‘With a crash and a weird train of shadows, something revoltingly alien and startlingly repulsive crawled across the stage.’ Another oft-cited article, titled Shylock der Ostjude, suggests that Krauss’s Shylock – sinister, farcical and grotesque – needed no commentators to agitate or provoke, nor plants in the audience to stir up fear and loathing:
The pale pink face, surrounded by bright red hair and beard, with its unsteady, cunning little eyes; the greasy caftan with the yellow prayer shawl slung round, the splay-footed, shuffling walk; the foot stamping with rage; the claw-like gestures with the hands; the voice, now bawling, now muttering — all add up to a pathological image of the East European Jewish type, expressing all its inner and outer uncleanliness, emphasizing danger through humor.[4]
Indeed, the theater proved an effective instrument for furthering the Nazi agenda, but young people, Hitler believed, were critical to the longevity of a New Germany, and Goebbels’ propagandists viewed them as ready prey. Thus, the recruitment of boys and girls to the NSDAP began in the classroom, where ‘racial science and the Jewish question must run through education at every level.’[5] Courses and textbooks reflected the party’s racist agenda, and literature, according to Wilfried Bütow, was ‘especially suited to take hold of the entire human being, to affect people’s thoughts and feelings.’ In his compendium for teachers of literature, Bütow expounds:
Literary characters can … be accepted as models, so that the students’ ideological beliefs are confirmed, deepened and enriched. But literary characters can also . . . lead to critical distance and rejection; and these characters, too, contribute to the students’ ideological education because they spark discussion and critical response.[6]
By 1933, Shakespeare had been a long-established ‘messenger of the Germanic soul’ (Korte & Spittel, 2009) and the embodiment of National Socialist ideologies, which rendered him integral to the new school curriculum. And in The Merchant of Venice, which was deemed ideal reading for young socialists, the Bard, according to Wolfgang Keller, professor of English at the University of Münster and editor of the Shakespeare Society Yearbook, offered ‘no sympathy for this man who is filled with evil and hatred against all that is noble.’ As such, Keller and his colleagues contended that Shylock’s seminal ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ monologue – frequently cut from stage productions but not texts – lacks credibility, for the claim in favor of his humanity is uttered only by him.[7]
Granting that Shakespeare’s putative moral obtuseness, or lack of insight, about Jews and Judaism may point to what James Shapiro (1996) terms the “cultural moment,” stage histories of The Merchant of Venice underpin a wider frame of reference – that is, myriad cultural moments – which give this so-called problem play further currency and context and make it as relevant today as it was when first performed. On the stage and the page, The Merchant, to be sure, continues to occupy a paramount role in antisemitic mythology, just as the name “Shylock,” together with the phrase “pound of flesh,” has evolved in colloquial discourse from an anti-Jewish pejorative, synonymous with the modern loan shark, to a broader socio-economic slur. Contemporary social prejudices still inform Shakespeare’s play and its reception as “a triumph of ambiguity;” at once emotionally and intellectually compelling, the medium sustains the message in shifting portrayals of the Jew’s undoing between ethical and cultural contexts.
Consequently, the question of whether or not The Merchant of Venice can be adequately performed or taught “after Auschwitz” is as misguided as attempts to penetrate the Bard’s mind or motives in writing it. The question we, as educators, should ask instead is what contemporary audiences and students might glean from the play’s literary and performance history and how they might better appreciate the complexities of a character such as Shylock in his many iterations. After all, instruments of culture and historia (from the Ancient Greek, meaning inquiry) are intrinsic to the production of social knowledge and memory; people are living histories whose experience, like life itself, according to John Dewey, is rooted in the principle of continuity through renewal.[8] Yet, art, unlike logic, thrives on conflict and uncertainty; so, even when the facts of history are wont to spin eternal truths from fabricated tales, there is as much to be learned from the myth as the message – from the contest between art and morality.
NOTES
[1] Reprinted in the New Variorum Edition of The Merchant of Venice (1888). Henry Howard Furness, Ed., p. 461.
[2] Strobl, G. Cited in Korte & Spittel (2009), p. 275, note 44.
[3] Folger Shakespeare Library, Stationers’ Registry entry for The Merchant of Venice, July 22, 1598. Shakespeare Documented, https://doi.org/10.37078/401.
[4] Cited in Gross (1992), p. 322.
[5] Julius Streicher, founder and publisher of Der Stürmer. Cited in Die Judenfrage im Unterricht (The Jewish Question in Education), a pamphlet composed for teachers by Fritz Fink (Nuremberg: Stürmerverlag, 1937). Available at: https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/fink.htm
[6] Cited in Korte & Spittel (2009), p. 281.
[7] Ibid. p. 276.
[8] Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Education: An introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New York: MacMillan, 2.
REFERENCES
Bassey, A. (2018). Shylock and the Nazis: Continuation or Reinvention? European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe, 51(2), 152–158. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48587006
Bonnell, Andrew. (2010). Shylock and Othello under the Nazis. German Life and Letters, 63(2). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0483.2010.01490.x
Goutam, U., & Gautam, U. (2014). Pedagogical Nazi Propaganda (1939-1945). Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 75, 1018–1026. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44158487
Heschel, S. (2006). From Jesus to Shylock: Christian Supersessionism and “The Merchant of Venice.” The Harvard Theological Review, 99(4), 407–431. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4125264
Kandel, I. L. (1935). Education in Nazi Germany. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 182, 153–163. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1020438
Korte, B., & Spittel, C. (2009). Shakespeare under Different Flags: The Bard in German Classrooms from Hitler to Honecker. Journal of Contemporary History, 44(2), 267–286. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40543127
SECONDARY SOURCES
Bloom, H. (1998). Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books.
Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Education: An introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New York: MacMillan.
Fisch, H. (1971). The Dual Image: The Figure of the Jew in English and American Literature. New York: Ktav Publishing House, Inc.
Gross, J. (1992). Shylock: A Legend & Its Legacy. New York: Simon & Schuster
King, R. L. (1994). Shylock after Auschwitz. Chicago Review, 40(4), 59–67. https://doi.org/10.2307/25305889
Shapiro, J. (1996). Shakespeare and the Jews. New York: Columbia University Press.
Van Doren, M. (1938). Literature and Propaganda. The Virginia Quarterly Review, 14(2), 203–208. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26445450
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