Staging Miscegenation in Shanghai Exile: Hans Schubert and Mark Siegelberg’s Dramatic Critique of the Racist West

Abstract

Following the Reichspogromnacht of 9-10 November 1938, widely known under the Nazi euphemism Kristallnacht, Shanghai witnessed the influx of nearly 20,000 German-speaking Jews. Among these exiles were the Jewish-Austrian writers Hans Schubert and Mark Siegelberg who authored and staged two dramas: Die Masken fallen (The Masks Fall), which played at the British embassy in Shanghai on 9 November 1940, presents an Aryan German man and his Nazi lawyer who pressure an Aryan German woman to divorce her Jewish husband, until finally the couple flees to Shanghai. Fremde Erde (Foreign Soil), performed through EJAS (European Jewish Artist Society) on 8 and 10 April 1941, portrays a Jewish-Austrian couple exiled in Shanghai. The husband was once a successful physician who cannot find enough money to open a new medical practice in Shanghai until his wife sells her body to a wealthy Chinese man. Despite the seemingly countless hardships the exiles face in Shanghai, the greatest impediment to this couple’s recovery turns out to be their own racism, the very force that caused the Nazis to expel them so violently from Europe. The relatively small amount of scholarship on theater in the exiled community in Shanghai has suggested that these exiles produced primarily apolitical dramas for entertainment, due to fear of potential negative reactions from both the Nazis and also the occupying Japanese military. This article explains, however, how these two plays take a political stance on the Western racism of the day in their portrayal of relationships between so-called Aryan Germans, Jews, and Asians. Against the background of both the racial distinctions established during the colonial period and also the “Nuremberg Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor,” which in 1935 legalized the idea that interracial relationships weakened German purity and thus impacted German-speaking Jews and their Aryan partners, the depiction of mixed relationships in these two plays suggests that the authors were thumbing their noses at the West’s mistreatment of anyone considered foreign to the national community. Together, the two plays communicate changes in European notions of a mixed marriage as a union between two people with different religions to one of racial comingling. Interestingly, the authors do not spare even the Jewish exiles in their critique of Western racism, for in the Shanghai of Foreign Soil only the labels used to identify the exiles as Jewish distinguish them from anyone else who might have grown up in the German-speaking culture of the time. Moreover, in the character of the physician/husband in Foreign Soil we find an additional critique of the natural sciences as part of the West’s racist discourse. As a physician, this man should have been aware of how various academic disciplines that founded Western medicine in the first half of the twentieth century had been used not only against non-whites but also against him and his wife, but his reactions to his wife’s relationship with a Chinese man prove his initial blindness to the racism inherent in his own German culture.