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ABSTRACT
In 1936 Stefan Lux, a Jew born in Vienna, and naturalized in Czchoslovakia, shot himself during a session of the League of Nations in Geneva. The situation would become much more dire for German Jews in the coming years, and few sensed that anything akin to the Holocaust was in store. Lux believed he had timed his suicide precisely to bring attention to, and counteract, the problem of “statelessness” that was on the agenda of the League. Lux also feared that the defences Jews had utilized before 1933 to ward off antisemitism were no longer viable, as they were under assault by the entirety of the arts and cultural apparatus in Germany. This case illustrates both the prescience and limits of Lux’s carefully orchestrated suicide.
Acknowledgements
The initial version of this paper was presented at the conference Suicide, Society, and Crisis: An International Symposium funded by the Wellcome Trust, held at the Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield, 18 May 2018. I wish to thank Dr Julie Gottlieb for her interest and support. I also wish to thank the anonymous readers of this article for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions. Research for this project was supported by a fellowship from Yad Vashem, summer 2016.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Michael Berkowitz is Professor of Modern Jewish History in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London. His most recent books are Jews and Photography in Britain (2015), and a co-edited volume with Martin Deppner, The Jewish Engagement with Photography (2017). He has recently held fellowships at New York University’s Remarque Institute and the Institute for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Notes
1 Sargent ([Citation2001] Citation2002), 187–201, especially 196–7; Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41402132; accessed:13-02-2018 09:12 UTC.
2 There is some question of the year of publication, as one catalogue entry lists the date as 1911.
3 There is apparently only one copy of this work extant, held at the State University of New York at Binghamton.
4 “The German Early Cinema Database”.
5 One of the more striking illustrations of seeing the period prior to the Holocaust per se as the worst of possible worlds, see Korman Citation2005.
6 For a recent assessment, see Weissbrodt (Citation2008), available at http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199547821.001.0001/acprof-9780199547821-chapter-4 [accessed 29 June 2018].
7 I wish to thank my colleague at the University of Texas, Professor Naomi Lindstrom, for sending me a copy of this rare volume.
8 Ernst Lubitsch to Hal Wallis, 24 February 1937, Hal Wallis papers, f. 2249, in Wallis, Hal, personal correspondence, Motion Picture archive, Beverly Hill, CA. Added to this tragedy is that Graetz also had appeared in the notorious Nazi antisemitic movie, Jud Suss. The generally reliable IMD (movie database) relates that Graetz died of a stroke, but “in tributes to well-known personalities suicide was not always mentioned” (Hartig Citation2007, 252).
9 Ernst Lubitsch to Hal Wallis, 24 February 1937, Hal Wallis papers, f. 2249, in Wallis, Hal, personal correspondence, Motion Picture archive, Beverly Hill, CA. Added to this tragedy is that Graetz also had appeared in the notorious Nazi antisemitic movie, Jud Suss. The generally reliable IMD (movie database) relates that Graetz died of a stroke, but “in tributes to well-known personalities suicide was not always mentioned” (Hartig Citation2007, 252).
10 One of the better analyses of the right-wing’s highly dishonest use of media is explored in Almond (Citation2018).
11 Wojtek Rappak, email note to the author, 16 May 2018 09:33. For a description of that event, see https://www.eventbrite.com/e/workshop-the-life-death-and-significance-of-szmuel-zygielbojm-tickets-45508244384# It commenced with a story of Zygielbojm’s London memorial by David Rosenberg <https://rebellion602.wordpress.com/>, followed by Wojtek Rappak on Zygielbojm’s speeches in 1942, then Michael Fleming on the way Zygielbojm tried to make the Labour party take a stance on the news of the Jewish catastrophe coming from Poland in 1942–43 and closed with a short documentary film on Zygielbojm.
12 Document collection, Yad Vashem, suicide of the Jewish press photographer, Stefan Lux, Coll. 0.8, Jewish Central Information Office-Amsterdam, Lage der Juden in Deutschland, Antisemitismus (1936–1938) l circular from Amsterdam, 4 Juli 1936.
13 British Foreign Office appraisal of Avenol, upon his consideration for the Secretaryship (Barros Citation1969, 11).
14 “Harand, Irene”.
15 Historian Julie Gottlieb is leading an attempt to refocus scholarly attention, concerning suicide, on the political crises of 1938; see “Historian reveals link between suicide and political crisis”.