Pacific “Weimar” Palisades: German Exiles in L.A.

By STEPHEN MOTIKA Palisadian-Post Contributor August 12, 1942: “Moved to 26th street, Santa Monica. the house, one of the oldest, is about 30 years old, California clapboard, whitewashed, with an upper floor with four bedrooms. I have a long workroom, which we immediately whitewashed and equipped with four tables. There are old trees in the garden (a pepper-tree and a fig-tree). rent $60 per month’.’ This excerpt is from the journal of the great 20th-century German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht, who spent six years in Los Angeles, five of them on 26th Street. He was not alone. In fact, dozens of German writers and intellectuals lived in Southern California during World War II, including Nobel Prize-winning novelist Thomas Mann, philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and composer Arnold Schoenberg, among many others. A recently published book, ‘Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism’ by Ehrhard Bahr (University of California Press), brings new attention to the work these writers created during their exile in California. Bahr, a retired professor of German at UCLA, says the project began as a private interest. ‘My main field is 18th-century German literature, but as I became aware of how many German exiles had lived in Los Angeles, I started to explore this topic in the 1970s.’ He later co-wrote a book with Palisadian Carolyn See on the exile literature of Los Angeles; he wrote on the German contribution, and she on the British. ‘In the 1990s, I developed a graduate seminar that explored the literature, architecture, music, philosophy and film.’ Bahr’s research expanded from a purely literary pursuit to a cultural and intellectual history, a shift that mirrored the development of German studies over the last 20 years. He worked in earnest on the manuscript from 2001 until submitting it for publication in 2005. The book is not a history, but rather takes different examples of exile literature as avenues to explore the period. Bahr dedicates a chapter to Adorno; three to Brecht (one on his poetry, a second on his play ‘Galileo,’ and a third on the film he made with Fritz Lang, ‘Hangmen Also Die’); one to the architecture of Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler, one to Thomas Mann’s ‘Doctor Faustus,’ and another on Arnold Schoenberg. Bahr’s thesis is clear: ‘In exile, these writers had to develop a new identity,’ he says. For example, Brecht didn’t feel as though he could write in the beautiful landscape of Santa Monica, as evidenced in his poem in which he compares Los Angeles to hell, modeled after Shelley’s poem comparing London to hell. While Bahr wondered why Brecht did this, now safe from Nazi persecution, he concluded that the poet must have needed an ugly Los Angeles in order to write. It wasn’t so for Thomas Mann. ‘For Mann, Los Angeles was the Weimar on the Pacific, in which he felt like Goethe in the 18th century,’ Bahr says. ‘Each writer developed an internal topography in order to produce.’ Brecht and Mann approached the problem from different angles, so one thought of himself in hell, the other in heaven. When Mann first arrived in Los Angeles in 1940, he was completing his epic saga ‘Joseph and His Brothers.’ ‘The palm trees in Los Angeles attracted him,’ Bahr says. ‘There were seven palm trees on his first property in Pacific Palisades. They gave him the Egyptian and Palestinian setting for the final volume of his Joseph book.’ Mann liked California and in 1944 became an American citizen. He built a house on San Remo Drive and soon began work on ‘Doctor Faustus,’ his 20th-century re-imagining of Goethe’s masterpiece in which an avant-garde composer, Adrian Leverkuhn, sells himself to the devil for 24 years of fame. Although the book is meant to be a parable of Germany under Nazism, the life of Leverkuhn is based on Mann’s Brentwood neighbor, composer Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg was upset with the novel, and Bahr thinks he had reason to be. ‘In the novel, 12-tone music is associated with the demonic,’ Bahr says. Yet Mann learned much of his information on Schoenberg and his 12-tone technique from another neighbor, philosopher Theodor Adorno. ‘And Schoenberg didn’t think very highly of Adorno,’ Bahr adds. Still, Mann felt bad about the end result and made efforts to reconcile with Schoenberg. Mann’s personal taste in music leaned towards the Romantic, and it’s important to remember that although the exiles were from the same culture they had different interests and aesthetics. Brecht and Mann were antagonistic to one another and embraced their adopted city in very different ways. But most of the ‘migr’s were critical of American consumerism and popular culture, famously labeled the ‘culture industry’ by Adorno and Horkheimer. Many returned to Europe as soon as they were able. Although Mann had intended to stay, the experience of being called to testify before the House Un-American Activities in 1952 changed his mind and he returned to Europe, where he died a couple of years later. The novelist Leon Feuchtwanger remained but lost his passport and was unable to travel out of the country for the remainder of his life. ‘Three days before he died he had another interview with the FBI,’ Bahr notes.’ Today, Feuchtwanger’s home in Paseo Miramar, Villa Aurora, houses 22,000 volumes from his library and remains an international meeting place for artists and literary exiles. Although Bahr didn’t know any of the exiles, he has enjoyed imagining their lives in Los Angeles since he first arrived at UCLA, where he taught from 1966 to 2003. Born in Germany in 1932, he came to the United States to study journalism at the University of Kansas from 1956-58 before commencing graduate work in German literature at UC Berkeley in 1961. A Bel-Air resident, Bahr has often thought of Mann’s trips to Westwood to see a movie or to visit Oakley’s, his barbershop on Gayley. All of the exiles went down to the Palisades Park in Santa Monica. ‘They ate at a restaurant in the Miramar hotel or they would also meet at a Belgian restaurant in Santa Monica that no longer exists.’ Perhaps the most surprising thing about the exiles, however, is that the homes where they lived are still standing. ‘You can take a map and travel from house to house if you’re interested; you can easily reconstruct their world,’ says Bahr, who has included the addresses for all the homes in his book. Beyond the physical sites, the only history of the exiles remains in articles and books, and Bahr cannot imagine a historical society dedicated to German history because of the strong feelings associated with the Holocaust. ‘Even though the exiles were against the Nazis, they were still part of German-speaking central Europe,’ he notes. For his part, Bahr wishes that he had written more on the women from the period, including two Palisadians, Greta Garbo scriptwriter Salka Viertel and popular novelist Vicki Baum, author of the bestselling novel ‘Grand Hotel,’ which became the basis for the successful movie. ‘All the ideas associated with modernity are reflected in her novel,’ Bahr says. ‘I discovered her so late myself. Now I wish that I could write a chapter on her.’ Along with Baum, he’d also like to add sections about the work of Feuchtwanger and Heinrich Mann, Thomas’ brother. ‘Maybe someday there will be a second edition,’ he adds. Bahr will read from and sign his book, ‘Weimar on the Pacific’ on Friday, July 27 at 7:30 p.m. at Village Books on Swarthmore.