THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020 39
Charles Laughton took the lead in a
1947 production of Brecht’s “Galileo.”
Nevertheless, even the most resource-
ful of the émigrés faced psychological
turmoil. Whatever their opinion of L.A.,
they could not escape the universal con-
dition of the refugee, in which images
of the lost homeland intrude on any at-
tempt to begin anew. They felt an ex-
cruciating dissonance between their idyl-
lic circumstances and the horrors that
were unfolding in Europe. Furthermore,
they saw the all too familiar forces of in-
tolerance and indifference lurking be-
neath America’s shining façades. To re-
visit exile literature against the trajectory
of early-twentieth-century politics makes
one wonder: What would it be like to
flee one’s native country in terror or dis-
gust, and start over in an unknown land?
T
wo of Germany’s leading novelists
had the good fortune to be away
on lecture tours as the Nazis were tak-
ing over. On February 11, 1933, two weeks
after Hitler became Chancellor, Thomas
Mann travelled to Amsterdam to de-
liver a talk titled “The Sorrows and Gran-
deur of Richard Wagner.” A onetime
conservative who had embraced liberal-
democratic values in the early nineteen-
twenties, Mann was attempting to wrest
his favorite composer from Nazi appro-
priation. He did not set foot in Ger-
many again until 1949. In the same pe-
riod, Feuchtwanger, a German-Jewish
writer of strong leftist convictions, was
touring the U.S., speaking on such top-
ics as “Revival of Barbarism in Modern
Times.” He died in L.A., in 1958.
At first, many of the exiles fled to
France. Few of them believed that Hit-
ler’s reign would last long, and a trip
across the ocean seemed excessive.
Feuchtwanger and others settled in
Sanary-sur-Mer, on the Riviera, where
the Mediterranean climate offered a dry
run for the Southern California experi-
ence. The onset of the Second World
War, in 1939, instantly destroyed this
temporary paradise. The fact that the
émigrés were victims of repression did
not save them from being thrown into
French internment camps. Feuchtwanger
captured the surreal misery of the expe-
rience in his nonfiction narrative “The
Devil in France,” which has been reis-
sued under the aegis of the Feuchtwanger
Memorial Library, at U.S.C. The devil
in question was the same shrugging
heartlessness that later enabled the de-
portation of nearly seventy-five thou-
sand French Jews to Nazi death camps.
When, in 1940, Germany invaded
France, Feuchtwanger was in dire dan-
ger of being captured by the Gestapo.
His wife, Marta, helped arrange an elab-
orate escape, which required him to don
a woman’s coat and shawl. That Septem-
ber, a motley group that included Franz
Werfel, Alma Mahler, Heinrich Mann
and his wife, Nelly, and Thomas Mann’s
son Golo hiked across the Pyrenees, from
France into Spain. Mahler carried a large
bag containing several of her first hus-
band’s manuscripts and the original score
of Anton Bruckner’s Third Symphony.
High-placed friends conspired to keep
these celebrity refugees safe. Eleanor Roo-
sevelt, an avid reader of Feuchtwanger’s
books, became alarmed when she saw a
photograph of the author in a French
camp. A New York-based organization
called the Emergency Rescue Commit-
tee dispatched the journalist Varian Fry
to France to facilitate the extraction of
writers and other artists, often by extra-
legal means. Such measures were required
because American immigration laws lim-
ited European nationals to strict quotas.
If the quotas had been relaxed, many
more thousands of Jews could have es-
caped. Fry, the first American to be hon-
ored at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust me-
morial in Jerusalem, ignored his narrow
remit and worked heroically to help as
many people as possible, including those
without name recognition.
Anna Seghers, a German-Jewish
Communist who spent the war in Mex-
ico City, painted a brutal picture of the
crisis in her novel “Transit” (1944), which
New York Review Books republished in
2013, in a translation by Margot Bettauer
Dembo. Refugees in France must nego-
tiate a bureaucratic maze of entrance
visas, exit visas, transit visas, and Amer-
ican affidavits. The main character’s plan
for escape relies on his having been mis-
taken for a noted writer (one who is ac-
tually dead, by suicide). Another’s path
to freedom depends on transporting two
dogs that belong to a couple from Bos-
ton. All around Marseille are “the rem-
nants of crushed armies, escaped slaves,
human hordes who had been chased
from all the countries of the earth, and
having at last reached the sea, boardedships in order to discover new lands from
which they would again be driven; for-
ever running from one death to another.”B
y 1941, the full company of exiles
had arrived in Los Angeles, blink-
ing in the sun. Their daily routines were
often absurd. Several writers, including
Heinrich Mann and Döblin, were granted
one-year contracts at Warner Bros. and
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. These offers
had little to do with active interest in
their talent; rather, the motivation was
to help them obtain visas. Required to
play their part in this benevolent cha-
rade, Mann and Döblin reported for
work each day, even though their En-
glish was poor and their ideas had no
hope of being produced. Once the con-
tracts ran out, the two struggled finan-
cially. Döblin wrote, “On the West Coast
there are only two categories of writers:
those who sit in clover and those who
sit in dirt.”
Such doleful tales raise the question
of why so many writers fled to L.A.
Why not go to New York, where exiled
visual artists gathered in droves? Ehr-
hard Bahr answers that the “lack of a
cultural infrastructure” in L.A. was at-
tractive: it allowed refugees to reconsti-
tute the ideals of the Weimar Republic
instead of competing with an extant lit-
erary scene. In addition, film work was
an undeniable draw. Brecht’s anti-Hol-
lywood invective hides the fact that he
worked industriously to find a place as
a screenwriter, and co-wrote Fritz Lang’s
“Hangmen Also Die!” Even Thomas
Mann flirted with Hollywood; there
was talk of a film adaptation of “The
Magic Mountain,” with Montgomery
Clift as Hans Castorp and Greta Garbo
as Clavdia Chauchat.
The real explanation for the German
literary migration to L.A., though, has
to do with the steady growth of a net-
work of friendly connections, and at its
center was Salka Viertel. Donna Rifkind
pays tribute to this irresistibly dynamic
figure in “The Sun and Her Stars: Salka
Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden
Age of Hollywood” (Other Press), and
New York Review Books recently re-
issued Viertel’s addictive memoir, “The
Kindness of Strangers.” Viertel worked
tirelessly to obtain visas for endangered
artists, and to help them find their foot-
ing when they arrived. Weimar on the