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Restarting the Fire

Rock stars don’t retire. At the age of 65, Billy Joel is at it again. He’s at the pinnacle of his fame even though he hasn’t released a new pop album for more than 20 years. His fans have never forgotten him and are still crazy about his songs, the soundtrack to their lives for many of them.

“Welcome to my birthday party!” These are the words Billy Joel used to greet his audience of 20,000 in the sold-out Madison Square Garden in New York. It’s Friday, May 9, 2014 – and his 65th birthday. “I‘m supposed to retire at this age … or at least not have the name ‘Billy!’”

He starts the concert with his defiant self-confessional “My Life”, and then the star treats the crowd to two hours of his greatest hits, interspersed with a few rarely-played tracks. The audience celebrates the Piano Man as if he were a national folk hero and reacts just as enthusiastically as the music critics, who have long since made their peace with Billy Joel. This home fixture has been repeating itself (with a slightly changing set list) every month since January. Billy Joel loves New York and New York loves Billy Joel.

Billy Joel at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, 2013 · © Steffen Radlmaier

“Billy Joel at the Garden” is the name of this unusual project, which Dennis Arfa, Joel’s concert agent since 1976, helped arrange. “Madison Square Garden made Billy Joel a franchise in the tradition of the New York Knicks and Rangers,” said Arfa from Artist Group International (AGI) in New York. “Billy is celebrating that by playing at the Garden once a month as long as there’s a demand.” He’s the first artist ever to be offered this deal. And it’s not entirely coincidental, as Billy Joel holds the record for Madison Square Garden: Since 1978, he’s played 47 shows there, including a sold-out run of 12 consecutive nights in 2006, and a moving performance at the 12-12-12 concert benefiting victims of Hurricane Sandy.

Billy Joel was in good company for that show: “It was funny, because backstage at the 12-12-12 concert, nobody is a spring chicken any more. Here comes Keith, and Keith is from the time of King Tut. Then there’s Pete Townshend and Mick and McCartney. Rocking-chair rockers. Bon Jovi is next door to me, and then Bruce is down the hall, and we kind of felt like the youngsters. But everybody is still doing it much older than I thought we would ever be. I thought there was a mandatory retirement age at 40, but then the Stones broke that barrier. Now Bruce and I are in our 60s, and the older guys are in their 70s.”1

Even at retirement age, Billy Joel is breaking his own record: in 2014, all twelve Madison Garden concerts were immediately sold out. This went on into 2015 and 2016, with no end in sight. He may have to continue longer than he really wants to, so as not to break his contract. The Pope himself had to turn up, in order for one of the concerts to be postponed: Billy’s concert was put forward a day to make way for a visit by Pope Francis on 25 September 2015.

Billy Joel is obviously still somebody to be reckoned with. After a few test concerts (in Australia and at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival), there was a small tour of Great Britain and Ireland in the fall of 2013. In December, President Barack Obama presented him with the Kennedy Center Honor for his life’s work. The award is one of America’s most prestigious for the ‘best of the best’ musicians. In an interview with Billboard, the artist commented on the award ceremony in his usual offhand manner: “That was a really moving experience. You just sat there and one thing after another is happening. The State Department gives you the award, you meet the President and First Lady, they’re saying all these nice, effusive words about you. People come up shaking your hand, I didn’t have to do nothin’. I didn’t have to do a speech, I just sat there. There’s Tony Bennett talking about me. It’s funny, I go to places and people say, ‘You were great at the Kennedy Center Honors’, and I say ‘But I didn‘t do anything. I just sat there.’ So it was an easy job.”2

In the same interview, Billy told of what success meant to him: “It still goes back to the mutual respect other musicians have. The people I work with, the guys in the band thinking you did a good job, being proud of each other, and getting a kick out of each other. The same with my roadies, the people who set up the equipment, set up the lights, do the sound, the staging. They’re real proud to be working with us, they’d probably tell anybody they’d rather work with us than any other band. The ‘esprit de corps’ is there, we’re kinda like a military unit. We go in and we do the job, and afterwards you’re proud of the job you did. That’s real success to me, when you’ve enjoyed what you did. Look, the money’s great, I’ve had other jobs and this pays better than any other job I’ve ever had. But I think it’s more about the respect and the pride that comes with having done a good job, and the audience walking out of there really happy with what they heard, making a lot of noise. I’ve always said about 50% of what happens at a concert has to do with the audience. If you play for a dead audience you’re gonna stink. If we play for a great crowd we’re much better. You want ’em to make noise. It’s kinda like sex, if they don’t make noise, you ain’t doin’ it right.”3

What’s always been more important to Billy Joel than success, is the music; he’s never really been interested in the role of the rock star, as he explained to actor and radio reporter Alec Baldwin: “I know I have a talent for music. I don’t think I’m all that good. I think I have a good perspective on it. I can separate the star stuff from the musician stuff. The music is really important to me. Well, one is a job and one is a life. The job thing, I can take off at 5 o’clock in the afternoon, the rock star thing. I go shopping, I cook my own food, I wash the dishes, I take out the garbage. I know who that guy is. And the music has nothing to do with money or career. It’s just part of me. It’s like love. Music, love, food, friendship, my daughter – all these great things.”4

However, the last few years haven’t only been rosy for Billy Joel, who has once again had to deal with a series of health setbacks and problems in his private life. In June 2009 he and his wife Katie Lee, 33 years his junior, made their separation public – his third marriage had failed after just five years.

And his hip problem was causing him more and more trouble. The pain was already almost unbearable during the “Face to Face” tour with Elton John in 2010, he could hardly walk. A double hip operation was necessary, incapacitating him for months to come. It took almost half a year for him to recover from the operation, during which he had to go through hours of laborious physiotherapy to learn to walk again. He told The New York Times: “I was probably born with dysplasia. In the old days, when they took a baby out, sometimes they used forceps. I was a breech baby, so the theory was that they displaced my hips. Over the years, jumping off the piano, landing on a hard stage certainly didn’t help. Way back in the early 70s, I used to do somersaults, flips off the piano. I would climb up the cables and hang upside down, anything to get attention. When you’re an opening act, you gotta do whatever you can. But over the years it got excruciating. I couldn’t walk at one point; I had one of those little scooter chairs, banging into furniture. By the time I finished the tour with Elton in March 2010, I was in a lot of pain, and over that year it got worse and worse and worse. I’m glad I did the surgery, because my life changed. I’m able to be ambulatory again.”5

Billy was still recovering from the operation when he got the sad news of his father’s death. Helmut Joel died in Vienna, Austria, on March 7, 2011 after a long illness. He was buried in the Jewish graveyard in the city of his birth, Nuremberg, Germany, as was his wish – next to his parents Karl and Meta Joel, Billy’s grandparents. Alongside his second wife and his son Alexander, his old friend Rudi Weber attended the burial. The funeral eulogy was held by another old school-pal: Arno Hamburger, chairman of the Jewish religious community in Nuremberg.

Billy Joel was unable to attend the funeral as the long flight from the USA to Germany would have been too strenuous for him after the double hip operation.

Three years later, just as things were really going well again for Billy Joel, his aged mother – to whom he’d always been particularly close – died on Long Island. The following was posted on his official website: “Rosalind Nyman Joel passed away July 13, 2014 at the age of 92. She is survived by son Billy Joel, and her daughter Judy Molinari; her sister, Bertha Miller; and her two granddaughters, Alexa Ray Joel, and Rebecca Molinari Gehrkin. In lieu of flowers the family requests a donation to The Little Shelter in her name.”

The Early Years in Nuremberg

Flashback: In the Golden Twenties, which in reality were not so golden, the Nuremberg salesman Karl Amson Joel had a vision. He wanted to set up a mail-order business based on the American model, America being the ideal of progress and success. The young man had experience in the textile trade through his work for the Witt mail-order house in Weiden. Joel gathered all his savings together, totaling 10,000 Reichsmarks, and in 1927 founded the Karl Joel Linen Goods Company. This sounds impressive, but in the beginning it was a modest, one-man operation. The plain four-room apartment at Uhlandstrasse 9 served as office and storeroom. This art nouveau building still exists in the Nordstadt quarter of Nuremberg. The ground floor is now occupied by a trendy bar.

Karl Amson Joel and his wife Meta · © Stadtarchiv Nürnberg

Registration cards of Karl and Meta Joel · © Stadtarchiv Nürnberg

Karl Joel started his mail-order business in this house in Nuremberg · © Steffen Radlmaier

The range of articles offered mail order by this aspiring company, which was slowly but surely building up a clientele, was limited: mostly bed articles and material sold by the meter. Soon Meta Joel was needed to help her enterprising husband. During the day they put together the orders, and evenings they took the bound packages with the handcart to the post office. Their young son, Helmut, often sat on the cart, enjoying the vibrations on the cobblestone streets.

Helmut, who was given the middle name Julius after his grandfather, was born on June 12, 1923, in Nuremberg – the year during which the devastating inflation reached its peak in Germany, destroying an unimaginable amount of monetary value. It was also the year of the failed Hitler putsch in Munich, the first attempt of the National Socialists to seize power in the crisis-riddled German Reich.

Helmut remained the only child of Karl Amson und Meta Joel. The Jewish family on the father’s side, whose name derives from the “small prophet” from the Bible, came from the small city of Colmberg in Franconia, which like Nuremberg is dominated by a castle. One of the ancestors of the early 19th century was Faustus Joel, the great-grandfather, born in 1806. The maternal grandparents were named Fleischmann. They too had five children and came from Oberlangenstadt, near Bamberg, where they owned a tobacco shop.

The Joels had long been in the textile business. Grandfather Julius, who had married Sara Schwab from Ansbach, was a professional tailor. Together they had five children: Two sons and three daughters. Karl’s older brother was named Leon, and his favorite sister was Melitta, called Litti. Melitta Joel married Fred Fleischmann, her brother-in-law, which made the issue somewhat complex. “Yes, my father’s sister married my mother’s brother,” confirmed Helmut Joel.

Word of the quality of the wares and the favorable prices of Karl Amson Joel’s linen business soon got about. It was the rural clientele in particular who made use of the mail order service. An increasing number of parcels and packages needed to be packed, and eventually the Joels were no longer able to keep up. Since the apartment was bursting, the successful young entrepreneur, a well-dressed man who even in his younger years had thinning hair, searched for a new space for operations. By 1929, six young women were working for Joel at premises on a street named Kohlengasse. The enterprise quickly expanded, moving first to the Hansa-Haus at Plärrer, and then into a factory building at Landgrabenstrasse 46.

At six years of age Helmut Joel, a thin youth with dark hair, was sent to Uhland School, where he got to know Rudi Weber, a boy his age. This was the start of a lifelong friendship. As was common then, they were in an all-boys class. On Sundays they most often wore sailor’s suits, and on schooldays short lederhosen and knee socks. At recess they played tag. Only during religion lessons were the classes divided into Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish pupils. No one had a problem with that arrangement.

The class of Helmut Joel and Rudi Weber at Uhlandschule, Nuremberg.

Helmut Joel (first row, second from left) and his classmates at elementary school in Nuremberg · © Private collection Radlmaier

“Helmut was a very good student and a funny guy with quick powers of comprehension,” remembered Rudi Weber, who has now passed away. “He was among the best in all subjects, especially interested in math and music.” Rudi Weber’s father had lost a fortune as a real estate investor during the global economic crisis. He had married a second time and was living with his large family under modest circumstances. The Webers were to the left politically, and the brazen National Socialists looked upon them with deep mistrust.

On their way to school, the two buddies often passed display cases containing newspaper articles. “The Jews are our misfortune,” the boys read slowly, laughing about the caricatures of ugly, hook-nosed men. Even most adults did not at first take the propaganda displayed in those cases seriously, which the Nuremberg publisher of the Stürmer [The Attacker] newspaper, Julius Streicher, used to spread his hateful ideas.

Ever since 1923, this bald-headed ‘Franconian Führer’ had been publishing the anti-Semitic weekly paper, which was now gaining an increasing number of subscribers and being distributed throughout the whole of Germany. The Joels would never have dreamed that they themselves one day would be part of the headlines of such a publication, for the times were extremely prosperous for the young Jewish entrepreneur and self-made man.

The business flourished, even during the global economic crisis at the end of the twenties and beginning of the thirties, the effects of which could be felt throughout Germany. The economic crisis abetted the polarization of society, just as did political radicalization. Unemployment became rampant, with over six million Germans out of work in February 1933 – and soon the struggling Weimar Republic would hit crisis point.

Thanks to their thriving business, the Joels could soon afford to rent a villa in the southern part of Nuremberg. Helmut had to change schools, but Rudi Weber still visited his friend regularly. Meta Joel was happy that her reserved son had found a true friend. “She was a warmhearted, generous woman who held the family together,” said Rudi Weber. Her husband worked from early until late; he was often out of the house and had very little time for family life.

As was common in bourgeois circles at that time, the Joels had a piano. In the evenings, Karl, who was passionate about the music of Richard Wagner, would relax at the piano. He made sure that his son took early music lessons from a Frau Hoffmann. In addition, Karl’s sister, the cheerful Aunt Litti, was a piano teacher and was able to teach the young Helmut a few things. The Joels cultivated their love of classical music. Occasionally the family would go to the Nuremberg Opera House to see operas and operettas. Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus [The Bat] would play a particularly important role in the family history. A waltz-like melody in this operetta, thematizing dissimulation, life malaise, and joie de vivre just as it does the magic of music, appears as a leitmotif again and again. It climaxes with a refrain, the maxim “He is happy who forgets what can’t be changed.” This popular song, Alfred’s drinking song, can be traced to an aphorism by Seneca (“It is glorious to forget injustice.”).

The Joel family in Nuremberg, 1927 · © Private collection Audrey und Helmut Joel

Within a few years Karl Joel had gained prestige and prosperity in Nuremberg. He had a car with a chauffeur at his disposal, and at home at Sigenastrasse 4 were a telephone and a gramophone, at that time not so usual. Yet despite the increasing affluence, the Joels remained quite down to earth, possessing an unassuming Franconian manner as a natural virtue.

On weekends they traveled to the country with the car as often as they could, preferably to the hills of Franconia’s ‘Little Switzerland’ region, gladly taking friends and relatives with them.

Die-Bruder-Leon-und-Karl-Joel-Anfang30erJahre-Garmisch.jpg

Leon Joel and his brother Karl in the Bavarian mountains · © Private collection Audrey und Helmut Joel

“We were a very normal Nuremberg family,” remembered Helmut Joel, who spoke four languages with the Franconian accent he was never able to lose. “It only occurred to me with time that we as Jews were something different.” The Joels were not especially religious. They readily ate the Franconian cuisine, such as roast pork with dumplings or bratwurst with sauerkraut. Like everyone else they celebrated the Christmas season with a Christmas tree.

Sometimes on Sundays Uncle Leon, Karl’s brother, who had a lingerie store in Ansbach, came to visit. His shop was on the ground floor of a two-storey house, the family living on the upper level. Leon had fought in the First World War and was proud of his Iron Cross. Sometimes he told of the horrendous fighting at the front, of the gangrene and clouds of gas. Like his brother Karl, who had not been inducted into the military because of a suspected case of Graves’ disease, he felt himself to be a German first and a Jew second. He was certain that as a staunch patriot and decorated war veteran he had nothing to fear from a Nazi regime. “Nothing can happen to us,” he always said when talk was about Hitler and his fanatic followers.

Advertisement for Leon Joel’s shop in the Fränkische Zeitung, March 1933

Leon Joel’s business at Nürnberger Strasse 22, near the castle, was a favorite of the Ansbach people because of the low prices. In his newspaper adverts he enticed customers with “unbelievably low exceptional prices”: Aprons for 2.25 marks, blue suit fabric for 4.20 per meter, men’s socks for 75 pfennigs, flannel sports shirts for 2 marks.

The problems started with Hitler’s seizure of power early in 1933. A majority of the population enthusiastically accepted the seemingly inexorable rise of the ardent anti-Semite and nationalist to omnipotent dictator. It was the beginning of the end of a once admired nation of culture, a break with civilization that would transform Germany into an empire of evil. The discrimination of the Jews and their expulsion from economic life became a professed political goal. The first step was the boycotting of Jewish businesses. With an unparalleled propaganda campaign, the National Socialists turned public opinion against Jewish citizens. On March 31, 1933, the Völkische Beobachter newspaper placed on the front page an appeal by the fanatical anti-Semite Julius Streicher, in which Jews were criticized as being war profiteers, convicts, deserters, and Marxist traitors. The tirade climaxed with the words: “Pan-Jewry shall be battled until victory is ours! National Socialists! Smite the world’s enemy! And even if the world be filled with devils, we must succeed!”

On April 1 the systematic persecution of Jews in Germany began with a boycott of Jewish businesses. The organizer of this audacious action was Julius Streicher. In Nuremberg that Saturday, flyers fell from the sky. “All Jews! Your power is at an end! The time has come! Productive Germans! Today at 10 o’clock begins the German boycott against the abhorrent propaganda of international Jewry…no German will from now on buy from Jews!” In many cities the SA Brownshirts intimidated customers and blocked entrances. Department stores, owned mostly by Jews, were especially affected. The boycott was at first a one-off action; because of the negative response outside the country, it was broken off after three days. Yet the Nazi slogan “Don’t buy from Jews!” was soon to become a rallying cry. As a result, along with the harassments, the loss of business made the lives of many merchants, including Leon Joel, difficult. Der Stürmer listed the Jewish businesses in Ansbach, among which was the lingerie store of Leon Joel, and denounced customers as ‘traitors to the fatherland.’

In Ansbach, where on Rosenbadstrasse one of the most significant Baroque synagogues in southern Germany was located, the anti-Semitic speeches of the Nazis found eager listeners very early on. In the fall of 1922, in the Hofgarten, Julius Streicher first held a diatribe against the Jews. As early as 1923, red labels with the words “The Jews are our misfortune!” were being pasted on Jewish shops. In 1927 the Jewish cemetery was vandalized for the first time; it happened again in 1932. The National Socialist party always had excellent voting returns in the small governmental and military city, far above average compared with the rest of the country. Even before Hitler’s rise to power, Ansbach was a city filled with hate for Jews.

The Jewish professor Victor Klemperer clairvoyantly noted in his journal on April 20, 1933: “Is it the suggestion of the prodigious propaganda – film, radio, newspapers, banners, new holidays (today the national holiday, Adolf the Führer’s birthday)? Or is it the trembling slavish anxiety all around? I now almost believe that I will not live to see the end of this tyranny. And I have nearly grown used to the condition of losing rights. I am no German or Aryan, rather a Jew, and I must be grateful that I am left alive. They understand how to be resourceful with promotions. We saw (and heard) the day before yesterday in a film how Hitler made his great appeal: The mass of Brownshirts in front of him, the half dozen microphones that will transfer his words to the 600,000 SA people throughout the whole Third Reich – we can see his omnipotence and we have to cower. And always the Horst Wessel song. And everyone complies.”6

The political climate in Nuremberg, the City of the National Party Congress, whose medieval scenery with the castle and timbered houses elated Hitler, transformed rapidly.

During the night of May 10, 1933, the National Socialists held a book burning in Nuremberg and many other cities in Germany. This took place on the historical main market, where Frau Joel and her son liked to buy fruit and vegetables, and which was suddenly renamed Adolf Hitler Square. Books of disapproved authors, among them many of Jewish ancestry, were burned in large bonfires – the Manns (Thomas, Klaus, and Heinrich), Kurt Tucholsky, Bert Brecht, Karl Marx, Heinrich Heine, and many more. “When the Jew writes in German, he lies” is what the Nazis had been disseminating for weeks. A large crowd attended this spectacle at the main market without any sign of protest.

In that year Helmut Joel entered the local high school, today Willstätter High School. There he met Arno Hamburger (1923–2013), a student of his age, also the only child of a Jewish family. In the class there were only four Jews, who would soon serve as whipping boys. Jewish children were now made to sit apart from their Aryan classmates. In the lessons, a teacher would speak of blood and soil, of the ‘Master Race’ and inferior races – but the children did not truly understand much of that. Yet the atmosphere had changed. For example, the Nazi salute was introduced in all Nuremberg schools in the autumn of 1933. At the beginning and end of each session the students had to stand and salute their teacher by raising the right arm.

“They cut us off and bullied us,” told Arno Hamburger, who in later years became chairman of the Jewish Community in Nuremberg. “We were suddenly stigmatized, and some of our classmates would no longer play with us. I remember a sports teacher, an Oberscharführer [Technical Sergeant] of the SS, who always wanted to prove that Jews were flabby. He made me do so many chin-ups on the bar that I fell to the ground in exhaustion. If you kept a low profile you were mostly left in peace, but if you reacted to any provocation, there was big trouble. When I beat up a classmate who had called me a ‘pig-Jew’, I was suspended from school.” Hamburger’s father had already lost his slaughterhouse business as early as April 1933. A regulation forbade Jews from doing business in municipal buildings, and so Hamburger was simply no longer allowed to enter his slaughterhouse. With his business property confiscated, he was forced to make ends meet with odd jobs.

Arno Hamburger enjoyed visiting the affluent Joels. The boys played with Helmut’s electric train or his technical construction set, toys that most children could only dream of. Helmut’s mother, who was always a little concerned that her son was not eating enough, served marble cake and cocoa. When the weather was good, the friends would visit the nearby zoo and the Luitpoldhain park. The elephants and the talking parrots in particular were hits with the boys.

One day a gang of boys lurked in ambush in the overgrown garden next door and threatened to beat the friends. “You’re Jews. We can see that!” They meant Rudi in particular, who in fact was not Jewish. “We can’t!” responded Helmut before the two of them left in haste. Karl Joel had once said in fun: “You just need to put a hat on that Rudi and then he could come with us to the synagogue.” Fortunately nothing ever happened, but the feelings of constant threat and the constraint of never wanting to draw attention to oneself were always there. On the way to and from school, Helmut Joel used to pass by the grounds of the Jew-hater and ‘Franconian Führer’ Julius Streicher on Holzgartenstrasse. “That’s where Streicher lives!” his friends would say with a pleasurable horror, as if they were talking about Count Dracula in person. A new regulation in Nuremberg ruined that fine summer for the boys: In 1933 Jews in the city were forbidden from using public swimming facilities.

More than 70 years later, Arno Hamburger remembered a couple of traumatic experiences: “I will never forget how at the end of 1933 male Jews in Nuremberg were rounded up by SS men on the square of the ASV South, on the Old Canal. There the men were forced to do things, which included ripping up the grass with their teeth. My mother and I saw this harassment with our own eyes as we had followed the group to see what would happen to our people. In the middle of April, my Uncle Siegfried was taken in my grandparents’ apartment by an SA gang. They forced him to undress and lie on a table. The Brownshirts beat him with chair legs until he was unconscious and then threw him out into the street. My father and I visited Uncle Siegfried in the hospital. His face had black marks all over it and was so swollen that I couldn’t recognize him.”

The adults could also sense the growing danger in the City of the National Party Congress, but they were hoping that the brown spook would soon be over. The linen business had in the meantime found space in an industrial building on Singerstrasse, with a store outlet on Landgrabenstrasse and its own sewing production on Muggenhofer Strasse. In the modern factory space, 200 sewing machines and assembly lines created a smooth production process. This clothing factory complemented the linen-goods mail order division, making for an efficient textile production and therefore lower retail prices for the finished goods.

Karl Joel was not only a clever businessman but also a socially engaged boss who paid his workers well and was beloved as a result. Even sixty years later, a group of former Joel employees met regularly in Nuremberg. They raved about their former boss. “He was generous. There were some who could have taken a leaf out of his book,” told one-time employee Katja Betzold as an elderly woman. “He was an elegant fellow and his wife was a warm-hearted, gentle person.” The boss regularly invited the personnel out on company outings and sometimes played on the company’s soccer team.

This Jewish success story was a festering thorn in the flesh of one person in particular: The Franconian Nazi district administrator and Hitler confidante Julius Streicher knew precisely how to stoke social jealousy and create scandal by means of contrived stories. At first Karl Joel tried to defend himself legally against this slander. In vain. In 1934, many articles on the “Nuremberg Linen-Jew Joel” were published in Der Stürmer. One typical example: “The owner is the full-blooded Jew Joel. It seems he has ordered his representatives to lie to the world that the Karl Joel Company is a German business. And credulous Germans fall for this. Thus the Jew Joel does a good business. Every week he sends thousands of packages throughout all of Germany, among them many for Party members, SA people, administrators, etc. The Jew Joel laughs about this, scoffing and jeering about the fact that he is making a killing from the money of national-socialistic Germans. He uses his profits in a Jewish way, putting carousing with non-Jewish women and girls…we hope and wish that the Jew Joel will soon lose any opportunity to laugh and scoff about the ‘goyim’. If there be any representative portraying the Karl Joel Linen Goods Company as a German or Aryan business, we are to be informed.”

Article from the “Stürmer”, March 1934

Karl Joel reacted with dark humor to the defamations. “Der Stürmer has written about me. I’m famous at last!” he told the family. But if he had not already done so, he recognized then that it was time to leave Nuremberg. His family and his business were in great danger. But he was still convinced that National Socialism was a temporary phenomenon. In the cosmopolitan city of Berlin, so he thought, he would be safe from the personal attacks by Streicher. With his legal advisor Dr. Loeb, he traveled to the capital city early in 1934 to evaluate the situation. He received information about the possibility of moving his company to Berlin from the textile manufacturer Fritz Tillmann, head of the economic advisory board and Nazi party member.

The political climate there was more moderate, with the NSDAP having not yet received a majority of the votes in an election. On Oranienburgstrasse a lawyer collective committed to the rights of Jews was located. It had good connections to the ministries and even had direct contact to Hermann Göring, who, however, was playing a diabolical game by portraying himself as supporting the existence of Jewish businesses. Such businesses were in fact bogged down by regulations, one stating that an Aryan partner had to be part of the management – but at least they were allowed to continue on under their Jewish owners. These deceptive maneuvers lulled even the Jewish jurists into a feeling of security, who were of the opinion that “after resolving formal difficulties, cooperation with Hitler is quite possible.”

In the following weeks, Fritz Tillmann negotiated with the Nazi mayor of Nuremberg, Willi Liebel, as well as with the district administrator Streicher, who, in seeming contradiction to his habit of harassment, argued in vain against letting a flourishing business leave. Soon it was agreed that the linen business would be allowed to relocate to the Wedding quarter of Berlin. On May 16, 1934, Karl Joel dictated a letter to his secretary for all employees: “I hereby make it known to you that, with the permission of the Reich’s Ministry of Economy and the city of Berlin, I will over the next few months relocate my business, with the exception of the linen factory, to Berlin. I am therefore forced, with regret, to release you from employment on June 30, 1934. I however leave open the possibility of your relocating with the business to Berlin.”

It speaks not only for the difficult situation in the employment market but even more for the good working atmosphere in Joel’s company, that 75 percent of the employees followed their respected boss to the capital city despite Nazi threats.

Some 160 railway cars loaded with equipment and inventory were sent on their way to Berlin. The company found a spacious home in the modern Osram complex on Utrechter Strasse. The sewing factory with the three assembly lines and 200 sewing machines remained in Nuremberg.

There, Der Stürmer resumed its repellent smear campaign against ‘Linen Joel’. Along with personal insults concerning the owner (‘Jew Joel, the bloodsucker and oppressor’), the contemptuous articles – in 1934 alone there were seven – concerned themselves with defaming and alienating the customers of the ‘Jewish vermin infesting the folk’. The hateful attacks were very hard psychologically on the Nuremberg businessman, who had done nothing wrong. How was this all going to end?

In September the city was as usual the stage for the annual National Party Congress, better known as the Nuremberg Rally. In the streets of the old quarter and on the Zeppelin field, tens of thousands of Germans marched in uniform. Among the spectators of this carefully staged spectacle were Helmut Joel and Rudi Weber. The American journalist William L. Shirer noted in his journal on September 4, 1934: “Like a Roman emperor he [Hitler] rode into the medieval town at sundown, past solid phalanxes of wildly cheering Germans who packed the narrow streets that once had been the gathering place of Hans Sachs and the Meistersinger. Thousands of swastika flags blotted out the Gothic beauties of the city‘s architecture, the facades of the old houses, the gabled roofs. The streets, hardly wider than alleys, were a sea of brown and black uniforms. I got my first glimpse of Hitler, as he drove by our hotel to his headquarters at the Deutscher Hof, a favorite old hotel of his, which had been newly remodeled for him. He fumbled with his cap, which he held in his left hand, as he stood in his car acknowledging the delirious welcome with somewhat feeble Nazi salutes with his right arm. He was clad in a rather worn gabardine trench coat. His face had no particular expression – I expected it to be much stronger – and I wondered what there was in his almost modest bearing, in his rather common look that could unleash such hysterical acclaim in the mob.”7

During those weeks Karl Joel was arrested three times, but because of his good connections with Fritz Tillman he was freed each time within a couple of days. Yet it was high time that the family moved. In the Charlottenburg quarter of Berlin the Joels found a lavish villa bordered by a forest.

That year, the French writer Simone de Beauvoir was on a visit to the City of the Rallies with her companion Jean-Paul Sartre. For them it was an eerie experience, as she wrote in her autobiographical book The Prime of Life: “We had expected much from picturesque Nuremberg. But thousands of swastikas were still fluttering from the windows, and the images that we had seen in the news oppressed us with their insatiable arrogance: The enormous deployments, the raised arms, the glassy looks, a whole people in trance. We were relieved when we had left the city behind us.”8