Abstract
This chapter focuses on the Lion Book Shop and library, which served as a cultural hub for many refugees who had arrived in Shanghai after fleeing Nazi Europe. The chapter is based on research into the lives of the author’s uncle and aunt, who met in Shanghai in 1940. He was a middle-aged bookseller from Germany named Bruno Loewenberg, she a teenager from Vienna named Lisbeth Epstein. The chapter is based on published interviews carried out with the author’s aunt by historians Steve Hochstadt and James Ross, as well as contemporary documents left to her by her relatives. Other sources include David Kranzler’s seminal and comprehensive work Japanese, Nazis & Jews, and memoirs of the period that mention the bookshop set up by Loewenberg in Shanghai in 1939. Bruno Loewenberg’s business ventures were also documented in contemporary files held by the Shanghai Municipal Police. In addition to selling and lending books, Loewenberg sponsored talks, discussion groups and art exhibitions, held either in his shop’s premises or in cafés or private homes. These activities enriched the lives of many teenaged and young adult German-speaking refugees, whose school curriculum, already curtailed in their homeland, was clearly limited in their new environment. The chapter will describe the history of Lion Book Shop within the context of cultural exchange among the Jewish refugees of wartime Shanghai.
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Notes
- 1.
This and much of the detail about Bruno’s life comes from personal contact, and an interview conducted with Doniphan Blair in 1981, published in an award-winning article in 1982 in Clinton Street Quarterly of Portland, Oregon [Bruno Loewenberg: Artist and survivor. Doniphan [Iphano] Blair]. For those interested in a fuller account of the personal story of Bruno Loewenberg and his future wife, Lisbeth Epstein, Rachel Meller’s book, The Box with the Sunflower Clasp, will be published by Icon Books, London, in April 2023.
- 2.
Ibid.
- 3.
Photograph of him outside this store, postmarked Dahlem.
- 4.
Bruno Loewenberg Interview with Doniphan Blair.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
On 14 June a change of the Nuremberg Laws had made an addendum to the Nuremberg Laws making it easier to plunder Jewish business; see Steve Hochstadt Exodus to Shanghai: Stories of Escape from the Third Reich (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 249 note 7 and interviews on 14 and 18.
- 7.
Steve Hochstadt, interview with Lisbeth Loewenberg in Steve Hochstadt, Exodus to Shanghai, 155.
- 8.
Ernest G. Heppner, Shanghai Refuge: A Memoir of the World War II Jewish Ghetto 1993 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 24.
- 9.
Irene Eber, Voices from Shanghai (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 9.
- 10.
Stella Dong, Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, 1842–1949 (New York: HarperCollins; Maidstone: Amalgamated Book Services, 2000), 2; Horst P. Eisfelder, Chinese Exile: My Years in Shanghai and Nanking (Teaneck, NJ: Avotaynu Foundation, 2004), 9.
- 11.
Passport Issued by Deutsches Reich Nr II 3266/391Z and stamped June 1939.
- 12.
Pao Chia census form, June 15, 1943.
- 13.
Lisbeth Loewenberg interview with Steve Hochstadt, in Exodus to Shanghai, 94, and contemporary Pao Chia census form.
- 14.
Advertisement from document from Bickers.
- 15.
David Kranzler, Japanese, Nazis & Jews: The Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai, 1938–1945 (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, Inc.), 398.
- 16.
Irene Eber, ed., Jewish Refugees in Shanghai 1933–1947 A Selection of Documents, Archive of Jewish History and Culture, ed. Dan Diner. Vol. 3. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018), 251, Footnote 74.
- 17.
The German-speaking immigrants benefited from the library’s stock of books and magazines in English (the lingua franca of Shanghai business). Since very few of them spoke English, the ability to borrow such reading material helped them acquire this new language. Irene Eber, ed., Jewish Refugees in Shanghai 1933–1947, 191: “Only a very few of the refugees speak English and this language difficulty is naturally a great disadvantage to them in finding employment and otherwise establishing themselves here.”
- 18.
Art historian: https://kuenste-im-exil.de/KIE/Content/EN/Topics/shanghai-en.html “Lending library”: “Emigration and Artistic Productivity”. In Irene Eber, ed. Jewish Refugees in Shanghai 1933–1947, 601 (translated from the German). While there is no evidence that Brieger is discussing the Lion Bibliothek specifically, there is no evidence to the contrary.
- 19.
Eisfelder, Chinese Exile, 165; James R. Ross, Escape to Shanghai: A Jewish Community in China (New York: Free Press, 1994), 200.
- 20.
Irene Eber, ed., Jewish Refugees in Shanghai 1933–1947, 601.
- 21.
Lisbeth Loewenberg described how these books “didn’t last very long”: in Hochstadt, Exodus to Shanghai, 156; Eisfelder, Chinese Exile, 165–166.
- 22.
Eisfelder, Chinese Exile, 165–166.
- 23.
Personal communication, April 2019.
- 24.
Kranzler, Japanese, 398; Hochstadt, Exodus to Shanghai, 156; Eisfelder, Chinese Exile, 165–166; Ruth Sumner was also a young teenager who borrowed books from Bruno’s library, as stated in Hochstadt, Exodus to Shanghai, 159.
- 25.
Kranzler, Japanese, 398; also described by Lisbeth Loewenberg in her interview in Hochstadt, Exodus to Shanghai, 156.
- 26.
For more details, see chapter by Steve Hochstadt in this volume. Lisbeth Loewenberg, in Hochstadt, Exodus to Shanghai, 156.
- 27.
She would become the aunt of the author of this essay, her elder sister Ilse Epstein being the author’s mother.
- 28.
Lisbeth Loewenberg in Hochstadt, Exodus to Shanghai, 156.
- 29.
Kranzler, Japanese, 271 onwards.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
Arnold Epstein was the author’s grandfather, and a former wholesaler of parfumerie items in Vienna. Like many other Jewish refugees, he had served his country in World War I, and had considered himself as much an Austrian as a Jew.
- 32.
Steve Hochstadt chapter in this volume.
- 33.
Lisbeth Loewenberg, in Hochstadt, Exodus to Shanghai, 156; Eisfelder, Chinese Exile, 166.
- 34.
Eisfelder, Chinese Exile, 166.
- 35.
Hochstadt, Exodus to Shanghai, 156.
- 36.
Eisfelder, Chinese Exile, 166; sadly, Eisfelder could not recall the name of the journalist when the author interviewed him in April 2019.
- 37.
Business card at https://kuenste-im-exil.de/KIE/Content/EN/Persons/paulick-richard-en.html?catalog=1&x=1. Accessed 19 September 2021; Eisfelder, Chinese Exile, 166.
- 38.
A photograph of the six-story building is in the collection of Horst Eisfelder, and was shown to the author in April 2019, when visiting his home in Melbourne, Australia.
- 39.
Eisfelder, Chinese Exile, 166.
- 40.
https://kuenste-im-exil.de/KIE/Content/EN/Persons/paulick-richard-en.html?catalog=1&x=1 Draft letter from Paulick to I. L. Ovadia. Accessed 19 September 2021.
- 41.
This was how Paulick himself described his father, even if the term “Labour party” was not used to describe the left wing Social Democratic Party in Germany at that time.
- 42.
https://kuenste-im-exil.de/KIE/Content/EN/Persons/paulick-richard-en.html?catalog=1&x=1 A letter written by Paulick in 1940 to the company of E.D. Sassoon in Shanghai. Accessed 19 September 2021.
- 43.
- 44.
Taras Grescoe, Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love and International Intrigue in a Doomed World (London: Macmillan, 2016), 218.
- 45.
Ibid.
- 46.
This British Act of Parliament came into effect on 5 September 1939, days after the start of World War II. It was designed to prevent any British citizen trading with the enemy, or a “person acting on behalf of an enemy”. It set out the penalties for those found to have “had any commercial, financial or other intercourse or dealings with, or for the benefit of, an enemy” (defined as “any State, or Sovereign of a State, at war with His Majesty” [King George VI]). Any such commercial dealings could be punished with a prison sentence of up to seven years, or a fine. Purchasing enemy currency was also deemed “trading with the enemy”. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/2-3/89/enacted. Accessed 19 September 2021.
- 47.
Hans Poelzig, another Berlin architect and designer, as well as being a founder of the Friedrichstadt-Palast theatre in Berlin.
- 48.
https://kuenste-im-exil.de/KIE/Content/DE/Objekte/paulick-visitenkarte.html. Accessed 28 October 2021.
- 49.
Richard Paulick’s first job had been at The Modern Home, a firm set up by his friend, Rudolf Hamburger. In 1934 the Sassoon family bought the company, dropping the “The” from its name. After Modern Home was liquidated in 1936, Paulick and his brother—also named Rudolf, and with whom Richard set up a number of architectural and design companies—reclaimed it, distinguishing it by adding an “s”. Modern Homes and Paulick’s other enterprises created functional, modernistic interior designs for many of Shanghai’s wealthier residents.
- 50.
- 51.
- 52.
Eisfelder, 166; http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110810105558212. Accessed 19 September 2021.
- 53.
Bruno Loewenberg interview with Doniphan Blair; Kranzler, Japanese, 282 onwards.
- 54.
Redlich was a Viennese lawyer who worked for the legal department of the largest refugee organization in Shanghai, the Jewish Community of Central European Jews (the Jüdische Gemeinde). He was active in civic affairs in the refugee community from his arrival in Shanghai in May 1939 until his departure in April 1948; Kranzler, Japanese, 407, 414, 439.
- 55.
Kurt Redlich writing to Kranzler: Japanese, 363.
- 56.
Interview with Doniphan Blair; and for his inclusion of Bloch and Frisch works.
- 57.
Interview with Doniphan Blair, 1981.
- 58.
https://archive.org/stream/davidludwigbloch01blocrs#page/n277/mode/2up. Accessed 19 September 2021.
- 59.
Among artefacts relating to Bloch’s work in Shanghai are posters for his exhibitions, including the one at the Shanghai Jewish School in 1946, whose front page is a large advert for Bruno Loewenberg’s new bookshops (Lion Bibliothek) in two streets within the Ghetto. A December 2019 exhibition in New York (The Art of Exile—Paintings by German-Jewish refugees) also featured Bloch’s work. https://kuenste-im-exil.de/KIE/Content/EN/Persons/bloch-david-ludwig-en.html. Accessed 19 September 2021.
- 60.
Matthias Messmer, Jewish Wayfarers in Modern China: Tragedy and Splendor (Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2012), 178 onwards.
- 61.
Ibid., 178–179 for his art appealing to Western visitors.
- 62.
Cited amongst Bloch’s archives; p. 19 of article On the Green, Bloch’s One-Man Show, p. 53 of 879 in pdf. This is also the source (confirmed elsewhere) of the White House China commission.
After Bloch’s retirement, his art took a more disturbing turn. Only then, in his sixties and seventies, could he use his art to express some of his earlier experiences. A chilling linocut named Reception-Deception showed a skeletal violinist in striped pyjamas welcoming new arrivals to Dachau. In the background, a crowd of pyjama-clad figures flanked by armed guards forms the shape of a swastika. The piece comes from Bloch’s memory of entering the camp almost forty years earlier. Violin music greeted each new trainload of prisoners in an effort to calm their terror. Bloch’s work “From A to Z” depicted the Nazi nightmare from Adolf to Zyklon B, Zyklon being the deadly cyanide gas used so efficiently in the concentration camps’ showers.
- 63.
Both Bloch and Schiff are mentioned by name as exhibitors in Bruno Loewenberg’s interview with Doniphan Blair, 1981.
- 64.
Messmer, Jewish Wayfarers, 155.
- 65.
In later years Schiff’s illustrations of the contrasts between East and West, poverty and wealth, added life and humour to various publications still available today. Schiff’s entertaining drawings in Ellen Thorbecke’s Shanghai (Through Western Eyes) can be seen on Vogue’s website; from time to time, auctioneers continue to offer copies of Schiff’s Shanghai Sketchbook, Maskee (pidgin English for “Never mind”, and the name of a Viennese nightclub), or Final Notice: A Shanghai Emergency. Maskee included the artist’s glamorous Miss Shanghai, a long-legged, slinky and confident beauty, posing provocatively in her slashed-to-the-waist cheongsam (chia-pao in Mandarin). Beside her familiar picture was the popular rhyme “Me no worry, me no care, Me go marry A millionaire”. Another typical Schiff cartoon was Final Notice. Here, a pretty blonde Shanghailander in a silk dressing gown, arms folded challengingly, asks her Chinese chef: “Why you no make Yorkshire pudding?” His pidgin reply is: “Missie—market-side no can catchee Yorkshire!”
- 66.
Interview with Doniphan Blair, as above.
- 67.
Catalogue included in Archives of David Ludwig Bloch, p. 280 onwards (283 for Fred-Fredden’s work) https://archive.org/stream/davidludwigbloch01blocrs#page/n277/mode/2up. Accessed 19 September 2021.
- 68.
See front cover of the 1946 catalogue for YIVO logo [could be included in text].
- 69.
The achievements of the Shanghai branch of YIVO and its establishment date are discussed in Lewin, O., ed., Almanac—Shanghai 1946/47. 1947, The Shanghai Echo: Shanghai. p. 57.
- 70.
Interview with Doniphan Blair.
- 71.
Interview with Doniphan Blair. It is not certain that Bruno was the first president of YIVO, but I have no evidence to contradict this.
- 72.
Ossi Lewin, ed., Almanac—Shanghai 1946/47 (Shanghai: Shanghai Echo, 1947), 57 of 121. Before the War in the Pacific, the Echo, a daily morning paper, had been called the Shanghai Jewish Chronicle; Kranzler, Japanese, 365.
- 73.
Catalogue included in Archives of David Ludwig Bloch, p. 280 onwards. https://archive.org/stream/davidludwigbloch01blocrs#page/n277/mode/2up. Accessed 19 September 2021.
- 74.
In the possession of the author.
- 75.
Kindly supplied by Professor Robert Bickers, University of Bristol. The bulk of the SMP’s Special Branch records are now held in the US National Archives, in Record Group 263; https://archive.org/details/DerKreis/page/n1/mode/2up. Accessed 19 September 2021.
- 76.
SMP Special Branch file D8149-F161 from R. Bickers; in response to a letter No. F. 20/5 dated July 19, 1940, signed by the Secretary and Commissioner-General of the Shanghai Municipal Council regarding the publication of political manifestoes. Signed by [illegible] for Editor of Der Kreis (The Circle); Certificate and letter F.20/5 issued on November 19, 1941.
- 77.
Der Kreis: Monatsschrift fuer Kunst 1:1 (December 1941). A rare copy survives in the Leo Baeck Institute Library Periodical Collection and can be found via the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/DerKreis/ (accessed 27 April 2022).
- 78.
“As dem Inhalt des Januar—Heftes”. Der Kreis, 1:1 (December 1941), endpaper.
- 79.
SMP Special Branch file D8149-F161, Detective Sergeant W. A. Nicoll to Officer I/C, Special Branch, 23–24–42.
- 80.
The Meisinger Plan is controversial, and not confirmed by all historians.
- 81.
Eisfelder, Chinese Exile, 166–167.
- 82.
Kranzler, Japanese, 489 onward.
- 83.
An accompanying newspaper article defined “stateless refugees” as those who had “arrived in Shanghai since 1937 from Germany (including former Austria, Czecho-Slovakia), Hungary, former Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia etc. and who have no nationality at present.” This equates the definition with the Jews fleeing Hitler.
- 84.
Kranzler, Japanese, 491; Hochstadt, 127–128.
- 85.
Kranzler, Japanese, 489 and others.
- 86.
Interview with Lisbeth Loewenberg in Hochstadt, Exodus to Shanghai, 155.
- 87.
Adverts in Bloch art catalogue showing the two new addresses in Hongkew.
- 88.
Rena Krasno, Strangers Always: A Jewish Family in Wartime Shanghai (Berkeley, CA: Pacific View Press, 1992), 181.
- 89.
Lisbeth Loewenberg in Hochstadt, Exodus to Shanghai, 156; James Ross interview personal communication.
- 90.
See, for example, caricature of Ghoya in Wang Jian, Shanghai Jewish Cultural Map (Shanghai: Shanghai Story Culture Media Co., 1991), 32 [also in I. Eber, Voices from Shanghai (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)].
- 91.
Lisbeth’s interview in Hochstadt, Exodus to Shanghai, 156.
- 92.
Lisbeth’s interview with James Ross, personal communication.
- 93.
This anecdote is from Lisbeth’s interview in Hochstadt, Exodus, 94–95.
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Meller, R.E. (2022). Bruno Loewenberg and the Lion Book Shop. In: Ostoyich, K., Xia, Y. (eds) The History of the Shanghai Jews. Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13761-7_6
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