Everything that is said here, certainly
Don't amuse the noble Germans
The OWC [the name of the satirical newspaper in Dutch] firmly declares
What he thinks, at any time*
The author of these few verses, from a dangerously subversive poem since it was published on December 18, 1943, could have been forgotten.
However, Curt Bloch, a German Jew hidden in the Netherlands during the Second World War, and his unique creation have just resurfaced, as an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Berlin as well as a website dedicated to his work have opened their doors this February 8.
During 19 months, from August 1943 to April 1945, Curt Bloch created 96 issues of his magazine,
Het OWC
, a shortened version of
"Het Onderwater Cabaret"
, which in Dutch means
"the submerged cabaret"
.
Around fifteen hand-bound pages thick and no wider than a postcard – to fit in a pocket – each issue of
Het OWC
presents a picturesque cover: collages, caricatures, like that of Hitler in author of German tragicomedies.
Nearly 500 poems were written by hand by Curt Bloch, who for almost two years acted as editor-in-chief, editor, designer and poet of his own magazine.
Curt Bloch, undated photo.
Jewish Museum Berlin, Curt Bloch collection, inv. no.
2023/90/05, donation by Lide Schattenkerk
Nothing predestined him there, however: born in 1908 in Germany, Curt Bloch studied law before fleeing his country after the National Socialist Party came to power in 1933. He took refuge in the Netherlands, but History caught up with him: the war broke out in 1940, and when the mass deportations of Jews began in 1942, he found refuge with a family in the city of Enschede.
To avoid sinking, Curt then begins to create: every week, he prepares a single copy of his magazine.
He draws inspiration from the Dutch and German newspapers entrusted to him by his hosts and makes fun of the propaganda.
“He probably also listened to the BBC
,” explains Thilo Von Debschitz, creator of the website dedicated to the work of Curt Bloch.
Curt Bloch, Het Onderwater Cabaret, cover of the xxxxx Jewish Museum Berlin, Curt Bloch collection, loan from Charities Aid Foundation America
“He was desperate sometimes”
Curt Bloch redoubles his creativity.
He invents stories, plays with words, and never misses an opportunity to make fun of current events, in verse but also sometimes in songs.
“In one of the poems he addresses Hitler's mother.
He describes her as a fishmonger from the market, in order to explain where his son got his way of screaming
,” laughs Gerald Groeneveld, author of
Het Onderwater Cabaret
, (W Books, 2023, untranslated).
But far from confining himself to Germany, Curt Bloch comments on everything, from England to Japan, without forgetting France: Pétain, Laval and de Gaulle are mentioned several times.
When Marcel Déat was appointed Minister of Labor, he described him as an
“imitator”
in its issue of March 17, 1944, calling him a
“pocket Führer”
and making fun of his mustache.
When Philippe Henriot, Secretary of State for Information and Propaganda of the Vichy regime, was killed by the resistance, Curt wrote a poem,
“France wakes up”
, where he predicted that the traitors of the nation would be punished. .
In his magazine of August 23, 1944, after hearing of the battles around Chartres, he announced that the Lutetia would soon be freed from German soldiers.
In December of the same year, he mocked the career of Jacques Doriot, leader of the French Popular Party, who had gone from fervent socialist to fascist.
Marcel Déat, Abel Bonnard and Jacques Doriot in France during a meeting at the Vélodrome d'Hiver in 1942. SZ Photo / Scherl / Bridgeman Images
Other poems, finally, are the sentimental outpouring of a lonely man, far from his family of whom he has no news.
“He was desperate sometimes.
In one of the issues he talks about stopping the magazine
,” explains Gerald Groeneveld.
However, Curt Bloch never stopped, even if he was aware of the risks he ran.
In October 1943, he commented on news from Germany: four people had been executed there for having written a poem against the Nazis.
“Four lives for a single poem, / I say to myself with astonishment / What will they do with me / I have more than four hundred,”
confesses Curt, before correcting himself:
“My poetry is like dynamite / She is nitroglycerinic / Breaks the Führer’s edifice into granite / Satirical, mocking, cynical.”
When Enschede was liberated, he published his last issue, an ode to freedom, whose cover depicts two men emerging from a hiding place.
The copy also contains the only poem in English, intended to thank the allied troops:
“You brought this freedom by your tanks / And thus to-day, I'm screaming: thanks”.
Curt Bloch, Het Onderwater Cabaret, cover dated 12/18/1943 Jewish Museum Berlin, Curt Bloch collection, loan from Charities Aid Foundation America
After the war ended, Curt Bloch spent three more years in the Netherlands before emigrating to New York with his new wife, Ruth, herself a concentration camp survivor.
He trades his robe as a lawyer – and clandestine poet – for that of an antiques dealer, and puts aside his literary ambitions.
Although he does not fail to carefully preserve his work, which accompanies him to the United States,
Het OWC
remains on the shelf of his Manhattan apartment, where he is content to sometimes show it to a few friends on social occasions. .
“At the end of the war, upon learning of the death of the rest of his family (his mother Paula and his sister Helene were deported and killed at the Sobibor extermination camp on May 21, 1943, Editor's note), he became, like many survivors, very depressed
,” explains Gerald Groeneveld.
“He no longer had a reason to live, nothing remained of his life spent in Germany
. ”
After starting a new life in the United States, he died in 1975, without the OWC having resurfaced.
Curt Bloch, Het Onderwater Cabaret, cover of xxx Jewish Museum Berlin, Curt Bloch collection, loan from Charities Aid Foundation America
"A love story"
His daughter, Simone, is by her own admission not close to her father during his lifetime.
It was only when her own daughter became interested in magazines, in the 2010s, that she got back into them too.
“I knew what they were, but they intimidated me,”
explains Simone, who still lives in New York where she works as a psychiatrist.
She then began to talk about it, contacting journalists, professors, historians, and even linguists... Everyone agreed that it was an exceptional story.
But no one knows what to do with it.
“I ended up realizing that I needed to talk to people in Europe
,” she continues.
Simone is right: it was on the other side of the Atlantic that, little by little, a handful of individuals took an interest in her father's history, including Gerald Groeneveld, a historian specializing in the Second War. worldwide.
Contacted by a friend who acts as intermediary for Simone, he goes to New York to meet her and her mother, Ruth.
Then begins a long and winding research work in the archives, at the end of which Groeneveld manages to reconstruct, little by little, the history of Curt during the war.
When he discovers the testimony of Karola Wolf, known as
“Ola”
, Curt's secret love, everything changes.
“I thought I was getting into the story of a German Jew in hiding during the war who had created a magazine, which was already extraordinary in itself, but I ended up discovering a love story
,” he says. he moved to Le
Figaro.
Ola and her then-boyfriend, Bruno, were Curt's hiding companions during part of the war.
Curt falls in love with Ola and this forbidden love inspires him to write many barely disguised poems for a certain
“Jeannette”
.
A love triangle which must have caused some commotion, given that his companions were among the few people to consult the magazine.
An explosive situation, according to the historian,
“but it means that, even victims of repression and forced to live in hiding, people fell in love, they continued to feel emotions that they wanted to experience”
.
The exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Berlin
Aside from Gerald, Simone continues to meet many people who might be interested in history, and comes across Thilo von Debschitz, a German designer and author of a book on Fritz Kahn, a German Jewish doctor famous for being the pioneer infographics.
“I immediately understood that he was the right person,”
says Simone.
Together, they convinced the Jewish Museum in Berlin to launch an exhibition around
Het OWC.
“I was immediately fascinated,”
recalls Aubrey Pomerance, director of archives and conservation at the museum.
With Ulrike Sonnemann, who heads the institution's library, they spent months studying and restoring the magazines and building the exhibition: a real challenge, given the quantity of poems and numbers, and the nature literary collection.
“Each cover will be displayed, accompanied by a poem
,” they detail.
“At the start of the war he wrote more in Dutch, then gradually he began to write in German, urging his compatriots to open their eyes
,” explains Aubrey Pomerance.
“Reading his correspondence, I discovered that he wanted his work to be used after the war, he hoped that it would serve to “re-educate” the Germans, so to speak
,” he adds.
During the exhibition, more poems in German than in Dutch will be highlighted, due to the expected audience.
“We chose a very broad spectrum because we want the visitor to discover the variety of themes covered
. ”
Recordings and public readings of poems are also planned by the museum where, after the exhibition,
Het OWC
will be integrated into the permanent exhibition.
“It is above all about anti-fascism”
But the exposure was not enough for Simone and Thilo.
Together, with the help of around twenty people, they spent more than two years creating a site listing all of
Het OWC
, a project carried out independently of the museum.
“We wanted it to be freely accessible to everyone,”
insists Thilo.
Everything is there: the history of Curt Bloch, that of the Jews of the Netherlands, an overview of the magazines, a timeline specifying the dates of major events that Curt Bloch comments on, a presentation of each issue... But above all, all the poems available in three languages.
An American, a Dutchman, a German and the team of a museum: nothing less was needed to understand and decipher this unique multilingual heritage and now accessible to all, online and at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, whose team is certain that the exhibition will be a success:
“it is not an exhibition intended only for history buffs.
It deals with a certain historical period, but it goes well beyond that.
It is a powerful work of creative resistance
,” notes Aubrey Pomerance, for whom it has lost none of its relevance:
“He especially wrote against persecution and propaganda, but we live in a world where disinformation abounds”
.
“It’s not just about the history of Judaism during the Second World War, it’s above all about anti-fascism
,” confirms Simone.
In the meantime, the
Guardian
and the
New York Times
have picked up the story, and the American newspaper's article has already provoked an unexpected reaction:
“that day, I received a voicemail.
It was a woman with a German accent, who explained to me that she was in the same concentration camp as my mother and that they were very friends at the time,”
says Simone, not without emotion, before add:
“they are in contact again now.
“This is just one example of how much has changed
. ”
Curt Bloch, Het Onderwater Cabaret, cover of xxx Jewish Museum Berlin, Curt Bloch collection, loan from Charities Aid Foundation America
After so many years without understanding him, the American now manages to sum up her father in three words:
“he was a mixture of Anne Frank and
Tupac
, with a little bit of Stephen Colbert”
.
The comparison with Anne Frank is indeed obvious.
Both were German Jews, refugees in the Netherlands.
Both lived hidden in an attic.
Both, finally, wrote to keep up.
“He continued relentlessly because he wanted to maintain his sanity. He needed something to make his brain work
,” says Gerald Groeneveld.
“But while Anne Frank kept a diary, Curt created a magazine, which was intended to be distributed and read by others
. ”
And if one survived the war, the other was deported and killed: Anne Frank's diary comes to an abrupt end when her family is discovered, while Curt Bloch himself puts an end to his magazine, about which he himself had written these few prophetic verses:
I hope the day will come
where it will cease to exist
Because when peace finally comes
the OWC will disappear.
*The verses reproduced here have been translated from the English translation of the poems in Dutch and German, except for the English verses reproduced as is. All the poems are accessible on the site:
curt-bloch.com