DAble to play seven instruments each, critics hailed it as the best jazz combo in 1920s Berlin, and the likes of Marlene Dietrich and Josephine Baker fought to secure it as their backing band. But after the Nazi takeover, years of exile and imprisonment in Australia, the tradition of the Weindrops syncopators was lost in the mists of time.
Now, 100 years after they formed, the Weimar Republic's tight-knit jazz band is returning to the city that once adored them. Not in the flesh, but on canvas: On October 21, the group's painting will go on permanent display at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, after the company purchased it from its previous owners in Canada.
Painted in 1927 by Austrian artist Max Oppenheimer. Jazz band It captures the jagged energy of music that took the German capital's nightlife by storm in the years between the First and Second World Wars.
In the late 1920s, brochures advertising Weintrop's Syncopators concerts were used to illustrate the group, showing the group as a quartet, although they often performed with five or more musicians. The founding duo, Stefan Weintrop and Horst Graf, were featured on drums and saxophone respectively, although they would have been equally adept on piano or clarinet.
“What made Weintraub's band unique was their versatility in terms of the instruments they played and the genres they performed,” said Berlin-based historian Albrecht Dumling, whose book is due out in 2022.
They not only play symphonic jazz, swing and waltz, but hit – Catchy German-language pop songs were considered smarter and more sophisticated than their contemporary counterparts. The titles of their biggest hits include “My Sweetheart Wants to Take Me Boating on Sunday” and “My Gorilla Has a Villa at the Zoo”. Berlin's greatest cabaret composer, Friedrich Hollander, joined the band for a time in the 1920s and replaced Weintrop on piano.
They performed alongside Josephine Baker and the Tiller Girls, and not surprisingly, the Syncopators provided the musical strains for Marlene Dietrich's Song, a song that defined the cultural development of the Weimar Republic. “Falling in Love Again” – Other Cabaret Songs from Joseph Von Sternberg's 1930 film Blue Angel.
The rise of National Socialism put an end to the life of the syncretists. Although they dismissed jazz as degenerate “Negro music,” the Nazis never sought a nationwide ban on the music, and for some years the band continued to play Berlin venues under the Germanized name “Die Weintrops.”
But a day after seeing the burning of the Reichstag on 27 February 1933, the band decided to embark on an international tour from which they would never return. “The Weindrops syncopators were never officially banned or deported, but given the name they had and the majority of their members being Jewish, their fate was clear,” Dumling said.
After successful shows in the Soviet Union and Japan, the band moved to Australia, but struggled to gain a foothold on the local scene due to opposition from the musicians' union. In 1941, not only its German members, but also Polish and Chilean nationals in its ranks were imprisoned as enemy aliens. As Dumling discovered in the National Archives of Australia, a British official denounced them as Soviet spies, and with no proof or counter-proof of the charges, the Syncopatators were behind a razor-wire fence.
After the war ended, most members of the band remained in Sydney but split up, some working as mechanics and others as refrigerator salesmen.
Behind the Oppenheimer portrait of the band, however, are also the stories of many exiles from the rise of fascism. The artist left Berlin in 1931 and later moved to Switzerland and the United States.
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The owner of the painting, Hugo Staub, a famous lawyer and amateur psychoanalyst, left the city in a hurry in mid-March 1933, and the artwork remained in his apartment in the Kurfürstendamm. According to an affidavit signed by Staub's son in the 1960s, none other than Hitler's confidant Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstangel informed Staub of his imminent arrest as a prominent member of the League for Human Rights.
What happened during the war and in the first years after the war is unclear, but in 1962 the artwork was auctioned off to a former Berlin property developer in exile in Canada. For half a century, it adorned family living rooms in Montreal and Ottawa, was loaned to the National Gallery of Canada and finally sold to the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
“I thought it would be good to celebrate these musicians again where they came from,” said Ruth Freeman, whose uncle bought the painting in 1962.
The exchange took place with the permission of the descendants of the painting's first owner, Hugo Staub, who received compensation as part of the sale. Various families and individuals brought together by Oppenheimer's painting are set to attend its unveiling in Berlin on October 21.
“There's an enormous sense of completeness”, said Michael Fischer, a Zurich-based Australian whose father Emanuel and uncle Audi were part of the final line of syncopators before they were disbanded. “It meant the world to me to see the band return to the city they left the day after the Reichstag fire.”
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