2023-10-09 12:32:55
Immediately after Hitler came to power, a “Germany Emergency Committee” was formed in Great Britain. While it supported 18 refugees in 1933, five years later it had increased to 14,000. During the same period, the Academic Assistance Council offered refuge to hundreds of scientists who had lost their positions in Germany. When reports of the pogrom night arrived in England in November 1938, the “Movement for the Care of Children from Germany” organized the so-called “Kindertransporte”; ten thousand Jewish children were able to leave Germany. For a long time, the British government saw the “Jewish problem” as a peripheral issue in its relations with the Reich government. Now the horror was great – and the population’s willingness to help was overwhelming: “We have to save the children!”
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With the threat of war breaking out, the mood changed. Distrust replaced pity. When asked how many refugees from the Nazis were in the country, most English people estimated the number at two to four million. In fact there were 73,000. A rumor spread that a “fifth column” of Nazi sympathizers had formed among the refugees and were planning attacks all over England. As fears of invasion grew following Belgium’s surrender, new Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered all male “enemy aliens” aged 16 to 60 to be interned. They were imprisoned in prison camps without charge or trial.
Those who fled from the Nazis experienced internment as punishment for exile. No distinction was made between them and Nazi sympathizers. A Conservative MP called for “interning the whole bunch and then picking out the good ones”. The absurdity of the authorities’ actions was demonstrated by the lawyer and journalist Rudolf Olden: before his arrest, he had written propaganda scripts on behalf of the British domestic secret service MI5 that were to be broadcast in Germany.
„The Artist Camp“
Just a few weeks after Churchill’s internment order, Hutchinson Camp was opened in Douglas on the Isle of Man. The number of internees there quickly grew from around 400 to over 1,000. These included gardeners and architects, locksmiths and opticians, cake bakers and coal dealers, a lion tamer and the elephant keeper at the London Zoo. A large contingent of internees included scientists, including a number of ‘Oxbridge Dons’, writers, journalists, film directors and actors, as well as around twenty professional artists and sculptors. Hutchinson quickly got the name “The Artist Camp”. After extensive archive research, journalist Simon Parkin retold the story of the camp in his book “The Island of Extraordinary Prisoners”.
The military commanders at Hutchinson Camp had advised the internees when they entered prison to exercise physically and mentally so as not to become depressed and demoralized by the forced idleness. A football team was formed and chess, bridge and boxing tournaments were organized. According to Parkin, a “microcosm of civilization” quickly emerged in the camp: a prison became a university, a camp became a cultural center, a tangle of cables became a broadcasting station, a field became a fitness club and a meadow became an open-air stage. The prisoners elected a kind of camp government; the writer and translator Friedrich Burschell was elected as the “camp father”. The camp had its own post office, library, fire and air raid protection service, as well as a bank and its own currency.
Culture behind barbed wire
A Cercle français was founded, people met in the “De la Dame absente” café and had fun in the “Barbed Wire Cabaret”. The camp newspaper “The Camp” was published in English every fortnight. The camp was soon named “Hutchinson University,” and the topics of the lectures ranged from an overview of Chinese culture to the applications of X-rays in cancer therapy to a review of the history of “brown and white bread.” There were never fewer than 150, often up to 400 listeners, and a lecture on Byzantine music had to be repeated three times.
Improvisations were necessarily the order of the day. A former accompanist reconstructed Beethoven’s opera “Fidelio” on hand-drawn music paper; A group of internees practiced the “Choir of the Prisoners” and performed it to their fellow inmates. The visual artists became true improvisation geniuses. The toilet paper, which was labeled “Property of the War Ministry” for the fun of the internees, became “illustrated manuscript scrolls,” toothpaste formed the basis for paintings, and colors were mixed from minerals found and the remaining oil from the sardine cans.
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In terms of improvisation and ingenuity, however, no one surpassed the prisoner, whom the writer Richard Friedenthal introduced to the camp’s less literate people as “the great Dadaist Kurt Schwitters”. Schwitters was represented at the Munich exhibition “Degenerate Art” with “Merzbild 32”. He fled to Edinburgh via Norway and arrived at the Hutchinson Camp sick and weak. As Parkin writes, the camp had an “invigorating effect” on him: “Schwitters began to decorate his attic bedroom with collages. The materials used were cigarette packs, seaweed, shells, pieces of cork, wire, glass, nails and porridge – hardening oatmeal”. Schwitters painted impressive portraits of fellow prisoners, he gave drawing courses and became a kind of “surrogate father” for many. His “Ursonata”, written in 1932, became the camp anthem and he performed it to huge applause in a crowded hall.
Hotels behind barbed wire: The camp on the Isle of Man
Quelle: Haywood Magee/Popperfoto via Getty Images
The accommodations at Hutchinson Camp surrounded a large manicured lawn and had many flower beds and shrubs. Soon the inmates were allowed to go on beach trips under supervision, swimming was also permitted, and on clear days the Irish coast could be seen on the sea horizon. Was Hutchinson less an internment camp and more, as the locals scoffed, a “full-board seaside retreat”? The idyll was deceptive. The prisoners lived behind barbed wire, they longed for their families, feared a victory for Nazi Germany, and the camp’s institutions soon included suicide counseling. The shipping disaster was depressing in July 1940, when a German submarine sank the SS Avandora Star, which was supposed to deport 1,000 internees from various English camps to Canada, 650 of whom drowned.
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In the camp, the internees’ desire to finally be released grew. It became increasingly clear that the internment policy initiated by Churchill was a moral disaster that damaged Britain’s reputation. But the British authorities’ release policy was as contradictory as their internment practices. Natural scientists, who were supposedly of greater use than humanities scholars, were given priority when released, and many internees signed up for the Pioneer Corps in order to gain freedom.
By March 1941, most of the internees in England were released. The prisoners looked back on their time at Hutchinson University with a mixture of anger, relief and often nostalgia. The impression that Kurt Schwitters made on his fellow prisoners remained alive for a long time. When two of them met later, it often happened that the first, as a sign of recognition, sang the “main theme” from the scherzo from Schwitters’ “Ursonata”: “lanke trr gll” – whereupon the second continued: “pe pe pe pe pe Ooka ooka ooka ooka”.
Simon Parkin: The island of extraordinary prisoners. German artists in Churchill’s camps. Translated from English by Henning Dedekind and Elsbeth Ranke. Structure, 576 pages, 30 euros
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