Silences and secrets: the Australian experience of the Weintraub Syncopators

This thesis explores the early Australian experience of the Weintraub Syncopators, a group of Jewish musicians from Berlin remembered as the on-stage band in Josef von Sternberg’s classic 1930 film The Blue Angel. The Weintraubs arrived in Australia as contracted celebrity entertainers in July 1937, and eventually secured well-paid, high-profile employment at a fashionable Sydney night-club. The outbreak of war created a rupture in the group’s story; the band ceased to exist under that name when three of the musicians were interned on 6 June 1940. Reflecting that rupture, my thesis falls into two thematic sections. The first explores the musicians’ encounter, as immigrant professionals, with the Musicians’ Union of Australia, an organisation which, for four decades of the early twentieth century, sought to exclude all foreign musicians from membership and hence from work in the mainstream profession. I argue that, in order to understand the Union’s attitude towards Jewish (and refugee) musicians in the 1930s, including the Weintraubs, it is necessary to trace the evolution and decline of Union policy on foreign musicians between c. 1918 and c. 1960, and to place this policy in its social, industrial and legislative context. The second thematic section explores the impact and consequences of civilian denunciations of so-called ‘enemy aliens’, including the Weintraubs and other Jewish refugee immigrants, and its link to internment in wartime Australia. In this section, I also examine the ideologies of citizenship and allegiance that governed official assessment of the relative credibility of denouncer and denounced. Common to both themes is the question of how much it mattered that the musicians were Jewish. I conclude that a failure to distinguish between Jewish refugees and other foreigners, or other German-speaking nationals, rather than overt antisemitism, characterised the approaches of (respectively) the Union and security services. Research is primarily based on named files held in the National Archives of Australia and the extensive records of the Musicians’ Union of Australia held in the Noel Butlin Archive Centre, Australian National University.