“I Cannot Find a Corner in the World Where I am Welcome”1: The Australian Wartime Experience of the Weintraub Syncopators

Abstract

Immigration stories tend to favor happy endings, but the Australian wartime experience of the members of the “nut” jazz band known as the Weintraub Syncopators offers a different model. Exiled from their homeland and disbarred from employment by the anti-Semitic ideologies of the Third Reich, the musicians arrived in Sydney as internationally acclaimed celebrities in July 1937. However, soon after the declaration of World War II in September 1939, the group was collectively denounced as having been engaged in espionage on behalf of the German government while touring in Russia in 1936. These allegations were never substantiated, but they synchronized with a deep national anxiety over Fifth Column activities among German-speaking “Jewish refugees” that followed on the Nazi conquest of Europe in the early months of 1940. Interned, ostracized within the profession, and stigmatized within the society at large, individual members of the Weintraub Syncopators found themselves variously at odds with prevailing ideologies of employment and political allegiance. The collective self-representation of the group was dismantled and loyalties were fractured, and while some individual members survived into successful post-war careers in music or business, others fell into obscurity. Using government records preserved in the National Archives of Australia, this article traces the wartime experience of individual members of the group, analyzing pivotal events in the biographical narrative to show how their social and personal identities were reconfigured.