Stefan Weintraub's top German jazz band!

Austrian artist Max Oppenheimer (1885-1954) painted in 1927, capturing the rough energy of a music that was taking Berlin’s nightlife by storm in the interwar era.

Max Oppenheimer, Weintraub's Syncopators, 1927. 

Jewish Museum Berlin

Used to illustrate brochures advertising Stefan Weintraub's (1897–1981) concerts in late 1920s, it showed the group as a quartet, though they often performed with 5+ musicians. Stefan Weintraub and Horst Graff, the founding duo, starred on the drums and saxophone respectively; and they were equally as talented on the piano or clarinet. Weintraub’s band stood out for their range of skills, both in their instruments and the genres of music they performed.

They played symphonic jazz, swing, waltz and schlager, catchy German-language pop songs, wittier than contemporary equivalents. Their biggest hits included My Sweetheart Wants to Take Me Sailing on Sunday and My Gorilla Has a Villa at the Zoo. Berlin’s most creative cabaret composer, Friedrich Hollaender, joined the band in the 1920s and replaced Weintraub on the piano.

They also performed with Josephine Baker and the Tiller Girls Dance Group, and unsurprisingly the Syncopators provided the musical strains to the defining song of the Weimar Republic’s cultural flourishing eg Marlene Dietrich’s Falling in Love Again (1930). Even better was when the band accompanied Marlene Dietrich’ cabaret songs in the famous film The Blue Angel (1930).

Marlene Dietrich and her favourite jazz band

Inside Story

See several other exiles who were brought about by the rise of Fascism, behind the Oppenheimer portrait of the band. The artist himself left Berlin in 1931, emigrating to Switzerland then US. The painting’s owner, prominent lawyer Hugo Staub, fled the city in March 1933, the artwork remaining in his Kurfürstendamm flat.

The rise of Nazism slowed the Syncopators’ booming career. Though the Nazis dismissed jazz as degenerate Negro music, for a few years the band continued to play Berlin venues under the name Die Weintraubs. However after seeing the Reichstag Fire in Feb 1933, the band decided to embark on an international tour (and never returned). Weintraubs Syncopators were never officially banned, but since the man whose name they bore and most of their members were Jewish, their future was doomed (Dümling).

These international musical celebrities of the 1930s left on a 4-year journey across Europe and Russia, in exile from the German Third Reich’s antisemitism. After successes in the Far East and Japan, they moved to Australia. This band of mainly Jewish musicians arrived in Sydney in 1937. The decision of some of them to stay brought them into conflict with the aggressively protectionist Musicians’ Union of Australia. The Union’s wish was to spread available work among a maximum number of Australian musicians, particularly in the difficult Depression-shadowed years of the 1930s. In a similar way, the counterpoint of nationalities within the group was a source of concern to the Australian authorities and grief to the musicians once war began.

Weintraubs Syncopators rehearsing

Weimar Berlin

When war came the men were forced to come to terms with a change in their status, from jazz celebs to enemy aliens. Accused of spying activities in Russia, they were interned, ending the band. In 1941 German, Polish and Chilean national members in its lineup were interned as Enemy Aliens. As Dümling discovered in the National Archives of Australia, a British officer had betrayed them as Soviet spies; for lack of proof for the allegations either way, the Syncopators were locked behind razor wire. Only after the war could most of the band’s members stay in Sydney but drifted apart, working as mechanics etc. Weiberg never played music professionally again. Read Albrecht Dümling The Vanished Musicians to see what happened to the other musos in Australia.

What happened to the art in WW2 and in the post-war years was unclear, but in 1962 the work was auctioned to an ex-Berlin property developer living in Canada, Hugo Staub. For 50 years it adorned his family homes in Montreal & Ottawa, then loaned to Canada’s National Gallery, The painting was sold with the permission of Staub’s descendants who received an ex gratia payment from the sale. The individuals linked together by Oppenheimer’s painting attended its unveiling in Berlin’s Jewish Museum in 2024, giving a sense of completion. To see the band return to the city they left behind, a day after the Reichstag fire, was essential.

Summary They could play 7 instruments each, and critics hailed them as the best jazz combo in 1920s Berlin; Marlene Dietrich and Josephine Baker were keen to secure them as their backing band. But after the Nazi takeover, and frustrating years of exile and internment in Australia, the legacy of Weintraub’s Syncopators was lost.

 A 100 years after opening, the Weimar republic’s best jazz band returned from Canada to the city that had once adored them, not in real life but on canvas. Now it is on permanent public display in Berlin’s Jewish Museum where the public can see the men safely return to the city they had left behind, after the Reichstag fire. Many thanks to Philip Oltermann who wrote Celebrated again: Portrait of German Jazz-age Pioneers Lost.

Read Silences and Secrets, Australian Experience of the Weintraubs Syncopators, 2013, by Kay Dreyfus