38 THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020
Clockwise from top: Franz Werfel, Salka Viertel, Lion Feuchtwanger, Thomas Mann.
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THEA RTS
EXODUS
The haunted idyll of exiled German novelists in wartime Los Angeles.BYALEX ROSS
ILLUSTRATION BY CRISTIANA COUCEIRO
Y
ou can visit all the addresses in the
course of a long day. Bertolt Brecht
lived in a two-story clapboard house on
Twenty-sixth Street, in Santa Monica.
The novelist Heinrich Mann resided a
few blocks away, on Montana Avenue.
The screenwriter Salka Viertel held gath-
erings on Mabery Road, near the Santa
Monica beach. Alfred Döblin, the au-
thor of “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” had a
place on Citrus Avenue, in Hollywood.
His colleague Lion Feuchtwanger occu-
pied the Villa Aurora, a Spanish-style
mansion overlooking the Pacific; among
its amusements was a Hitler dartboard.
Vicki Baum, whose novel “Grand Hotel”
brought her a screenwriting career, had
a house on Amalfi Drive, near the left-
ist composer Hanns Eisler. Alma
Mahler-Werfel, the widow of Gustav
Mahler, lived with her third husband,
the best-selling Austrian writer Franz
Werfel, on North Bedford Drive, next
door to the conductor Bruno Walter.
Elisabeth Hauptmann, the co-author of
“The Threepenny Opera,” lived in Man-
deville Canyon, at the actor Peter Lorre’s
ranch. The philosopher Theodor W.
Adorno rented a duplex apartment on
Kenter Avenue, meeting with Max
Horkheimer, who lived nearby, to write
the post-Marxist jeremiad “Dialectic of
Enlightenment.” At a suitably lofty re-
move, on San Remo Drive, was ThomasMann, Heinrich’s brother, the august au-
thor of “The Magic Mountain.”
In the nineteen-forties, the West Side
of Los Angeles effectively became the
capital of German literature in exile. It
was as if the cafés of Berlin, Munich, and
Vienna had disgorged their clientele onto
Sunset Boulevard. The writers were at
the core of a European émigré commu-
nity that also included the film directors
Fritz Lang, Max Ophuls, Otto Preminger,
Jean Renoir, Robert Siodmak, Douglas
Sirk, Billy Wilder, and William Wyler;
the theatre directors Max Reinhardt and
Leopold Jessner; the actors Marlene Die-
trich and Hedy Lamarr; the architects
Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra;
and the composers Arnold Schoenberg,
Igor Stravinsky, Erich Wolfgang Korn-
gold, and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Seldom
in human history has one city hosted
such a staggering convocation of talent.
The standard myth of this great em-
igration pits the elevated mentality of
Central Europe against the supposed
“wasteland” or “cultural desert” of South-
ern California. Indeed, a number of ex-
iles fell to scowling under the palms.
Brecht wrote, “The town of Hollywood
has taught me this/Paradise and hell/can
be one city.” The composer Eric Zeisl
called California a “sunny blue grave.”
Adorno could have had Muscle Beach
in mind when he identified a social con-
dition called the Health unto Death:
“The very people who burst with proofs
of exuberant vitality could easily be taken
for prepared corpses, from whom the
news of their not-quite-successful de-
cease has been withheld for reasons of
population policy.”
Anecdotes of dyspeptic aloofness
belie the richness and the complexity
of the émigrés’ cultural role. As Ehrhard
Bahr argues in his 2007 book, “Weimar
on the Pacific,” many exiles were able
to form bonds with progressive elements
in mid-century L.A. Even before the
refugees from Nazi Germany arrived,
Schindler and Neutra had launched
a wave of modernist residential archi-
tecture. When Schoenberg taught at
U.S.C. and U.C.L.A., he guided such
native-born radical spirits as John Cage
and Lou Harrison. Surprising alliances
sprang up among the newcomers and
adventurous members of the Hollywood
set. Charlie Chaplin and George Gersh-
win played tennis with Schoenberg.