Weintraubs Syncopators was a jazz group started in 1924 by Stefan Weintraub and Horst Graff. Their first job was at the Brothers Clubhouse at Kurfürstenstraße in Berlin. By 1927, the members were Weintraub, Graff, Friedrich Holländer, Paul Aronovici, John Kay (Kurt Kaiser), Freddy Wise, Cyril "Baby" Schulvater and Ansco Bruinier. The group appeared in the 1930 movie "The Blue Angel" starring Marlene Dietrich, for which Holländer wrote the music, including the great standard, "Falling In Love Again" ("Wir sind von Kopf bis Fuß" in German). Holländer left the group and ended up in Paris in 1933 and then Hollywood in 1934.
Weintraubs Syncopators acheived great commercial and critical success, but in 1933, while traveling outside of Germany, laws were enacted in Germany that restricted the rights of Jews, including the right to function as a professional musician. Because the members of Weintraubs Syncopators were virtually all Jewish, they decided not to return to Germany. They toured throughout Europe and, in 1938, ended up in Australia where they settled.
In the interim, other members had come and gone. Two of the more famous ones were Franz Waxman and Eddie Rosner. Waxman landed in Hollywood and was an extremely successful film composer winning two Academy Awards. Rosner, a trumpeter of renown, went to the Soviet Union and achieved success but then, after WWII, was sent to Siberia where he spent eight years in a Gulag. He survived but was never the same.
The group was a hit in Australia but when war broke out in Europe, incredibly, several of its members were interned as enemy aliens. They were released after about one year but the group never recovered. After that, the stories are individual ones.
In 2000, a documentary on Weintraubs Syncopators was released in Germany under the direction of Klaus Sander and Jorg Sussenbach. It is mostly in German and not available commercially.
