Non­fic­tion

The Ghet­to Swinger

Coco Shu­mann; John Howard, trans.
  • Review
By – September 1, 2016

Heinz Jakob Coco” Shu­mann, born into a mid­dle-class Ger­man fam­i­ly, entered the world in the tumult of Weimar Ger­many. The fam­i­ly pros­pered even in these dif­fi­cult times, and lit­tle Heinz led a qui­et life in his ear­ly years until the Nazis’ pow­er began to increase. His father was a Chris­t­ian by birth but had con­vert­ed to Judaism after mar­ry­ing his moth­er; Coco’s par­ents would be forced to give up their busi­ness with the pas­sage of the Nurem­burg Laws. Even though the fam­i­ly was not par­tic­u­lar­ly reli­gious they cel­e­brat­ed all impor­tant hol­i­days in Judaism and Chris­tian­i­ty. Coco, as he would come to be named by a French girl­friend, was inter­est­ed only in the reli­gion of music. At age 14 he was giv­en a gui­tar and began his life-long love of jazz and swing music. As he grew into his teen years, Coco ignored the polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion around him and only thought about music. But soon he would not be able to dis­re­gard his pre­car­i­ous situation.

In Third Reich Ger­many, jazz was con­sid­ered art­fremd (alien) music and unac­cept­able in Ger­man cul­ture. The Reichsmusikkam­mer was cre­at­ed to be the arbiter of Ger­man music and musi­cians, through­out most of the 1930s jazz was banned by the gov­ern­ment. Coco Shu­mann joined the Berlin club scene that con­tin­ued to play jazz music secret­ly. In the late 1930s and ear­ly 1940s the Nazis often looked the oth­er way when patrolling the night streets of Berlin, but by 1943 there had been a com­plete crack­down on night clubs play­ing swing music.

At first Shu­mann was able to avoid detec­tion as a Jew and hide in plain sight due to his last name and cheru­bic face, but secrets were hard to keep in Nazi Ger­many. An infor­mant turned Shu­mann in to the Gestapo and he was ordered to the trans­ports. Through the inter­ven­tion of his father, Shu­mann was shipped to the There­sien­stadt ghet­to. This is the begin­ning of his sto­ry as the Ghet­to Swinger. The music he loved would save him from the worst of the depri­va­tions of the camps. The Nazis allowed pris­on­ers to form bands to both enter­tain them and to play the death march music for dai­ly trans­port arrivals. There are many doc­u­ment­ed reports of jazz in the camps such as Sach­sen­hausen as well as the War­saw and Vil­na ghet­tos. The Ghet­to Swingers became one of the more well-known camp bands, but few of the mem­bers sur­vived the Holo­caust. Among the sur­vivors were Coco Shu­mann and Mar­tin Roman.

Shu­mann writes of being in There­siend­stadt: When I played I for­got where I was.… We knew every­thing and for­got every­thing the moment we played a few bars.” For over 50 year after the war, Shu­mann had refused to speak about his expe­ri­ences, want­i­ng to for­get as he had want­ed to for­get in the camps. While attend­ing a meet­ing of the sur­vivors of There­sien­stadt, he had real­ized that silence was no longer an accept­able option and that he had to tell his sto­ry. This book was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in Ger­man in 1997, and rep­re­sent­ed the first time that Coco Shu­mann would dis­cuss his expe­ri­ences in There­sien­stadt, Auschwitz, and Dachau. 

The read­er is able to sense the ten­sion between the author’s reluc­tance to speak of the hor­ror and the simul­ta­ne­ous com­pul­sion to bear wit­ness. Shumann’s sto­ry is 145 pages long, but there are only 30 pages devot­ed to his expe­ri­ence in the camps. The rest of the sto­ry is about his life before and after his intern­ment. He admits it is dif­fi­cult to talk about, and he is not sure of the appro­pri­ate way to do so. In the final pages he writes, I am a musi­cian, a musi­cian who was impris­oned in a con­cen­tra­tion camp, not a con­cen­tra­tion camp inmate who also plays some music.” And per­haps this is the best way to under­stand the life of Coco Shumann.

Relat­ed Content:

Bar­bara Andrews holds a Mas­ters in Jew­ish Stud­ies from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, has been an adult Jew­ish edu­ca­tion instruc­tor, and works in the cor­po­rate world as a pro­fes­sion­al adult educator.

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