The “Kulturbund Deutscher Juden” was founded by the doctor and conductor Kurt Singer in Berlin in 1933. The aim was to create earning opportunities for the many Jewish artists and academics dismissed from their place of employment when the “Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums” (“Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service”) was passed. The federation’s events were accessible exclusively to Jews, who funded the Kulturbund through membership fees.

Based on the Berlin model, over 35 regional cultural federations with 70,000 members were set up throughout Germany. They organised concert, opera, theatre and cabaret evenings, exhibitions, lectures and film screenings. In April 1935, the National Socialist authorities forcibly constrained them all under the umbrella organisation of the “Reichsverband Jüdischer Kulturbünde” (“Reich Association of Jewish Cultural Federations”). The name change was intended to signify that there was no such thing as “German Jews”. All the activities of Jewish artists and academics thus came under National Socialist control. Events had to be approved; the programme was increasingly reduced to a supposedly “Jewish” repertoire, while performances of works by composers or poets regarded as “German” were banned.

After the November pogroms of 1938, the regional organisations were dissolved; only the Berlin Kulturbund was permitted to continue its work, albeit for the purposes of producing propaganda. It was finally dissolved on 11 September 1941. Many of those people remaining in Germany who had been involved in the Kulturbund and who had decided against emigrating or found themselves without the means to do so were deported and murdered.

Further reading:
Akademie der Künste (Hg.): Geschlossene Vorstellung. Der Jüdische Kulturbund in Deutschland 1933-1941. Berlin: Ed. Hentrich 1992
Frisch-Vivié, Gabriele: Gegen alle Widerstände. Der Jüdische Kulturbund 1933-1941. Fakten, Daten, Analysen, biographische Notizen und Erinnerungen. Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich 2013