Shadows in Paradise - Hitler’s Exiles in Hollywood
A Film by Peter Rosen
TV Format NTSC 4;3, Sound PCM Stereo, Languages E,D,F, Region Code 0
EUROARTS DVD 2058268 [55:00]
This hour-long documentary considers the fate of those exiled to the
‘Weimar on the Pacific’, Los Angeles, which at one point housed
much of the elite of the Jewish and anti-Nazi artistic diaspora. There is a
strong case to be made that the arrival of so potent a cultural force
materially readjusted the hemispheric nature of American intellectual life
by rapidly realigning the zeitgeist to the West Coast. This applies as much
as to Schoenberg as to Fritz Lang, and it is as well to note that this disc
devotes itself to the full range of artistic life, of which music plays an
important but by no means overwhelming part, even though it’s narrated
by conductor James Conlon.
Mediated by interviews with cultural historians we get a broad overview of
this colony or series of colonies, and of their variously open or hermetically
sealed natures. Some exiles clearly never overcame the shock of leaving their
country or their language or both. Thomas Mann’s famous comment, reported
in the New York Times, that ‘Where I am, there is Germany’
was not a sentiment shared by his brother Heinrich, for instance, whose inability
to write creatively is succinctly delineated by Christopher Hampton (in an
old filmed interview). For every Fritz Lang there was an Erich Zeigel, a talented
refugee from Austria who, despite a teaching job, was almost wholly neglected
as a creative artist. For every Korngold there was an Alfred Döblin.
The author of Berlin Alexanderplatz, like Heinrich Mann, found the
summary divorce from his language, and its context, too devastating. He too
withered in his exile.
The photographs of elite gatherings sometimes skews the reality of
the morass, sunlit but scarred, into which many fell. An evening at which
Rachmaninov, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky swapped gossip - they represented
different stages of emigration, and for different reasons - was wholly
different from the tragi-comedy of Austro-German society trying to
re-establish itself in the neon panorama of the West Coast. The fact that
they were so elevated in their professions, and so internationally lauded,
hardly diminishes the pitiful if companionable fate of émigrés
clinging together tenaciously like limpets on the hull of American West
Coast cultural life.
Had this wagon-circling manoeuvre been consistently helpful, and had
it engendered new work, then it might have been less pitiable. But Mann and
Schoenberg soon fell out, the result of simmering resentment, and after the
war men like Eisler were forced out of America, in a bitter shadowplay of
their earlier forced emigration from German: first National Socialism did
for them and then McCarthyism. Thomas Mann, repelled by the whole thing,
left America in disgust.
There is something melancholy in considering Theodor Adorno and Lion
Feuchtwanger - the latter very much at the centre of things in his adopted
city - Alma Mahler, and Franz Werfel and their transplanted book-lined
conversations when, somewhere a long way to the south, unmentioned here,
another man of letters, Stefan Zweig, as eminent as they, similarly exiled,
took his own life unsolaced by the companionship of a chimerical Vienna.
The voice of reason here is the laconic though admiring actor and
director Norman Lloyd, born in 1914 and still alive as I write this. His
patrician but cogent look at Brecht and Eisler offers an American’s
perception on the workings of this curious colony of displaced, misplaced
interweaving characters. Elsewhere, the readings from diaries, in strongly
accented German, plump up the dimensionality of their experiences though the
film captioning leaves something to be desired - labelling Thomas Mann
‘an intellectual giant’ rather as one might caption Stanley
Matthews an ‘outside right’ is surely insufficient.
The rapidity of the arrival and the eventual dissipation and
dispersal of this remarkable, if heterogeneous collection of men and women,
is perhaps the lasting impression with which one is left. And if scorn is
the only reasonable response to the fact that America’s ‘Jew
quota’ remained pitifully unfilled - a relic of its isolationist past,
and its lingering disdain - then at least some kind of solace can be gained
by the longer term artistic and creative impulses generated in various ways
by the exiles who clung to New Found wreckage, sometimes extremely elegant
and prosperous wreckage, in the hills of sun-kissed, film-drenched Los
Angeles.
Jonathan Woolf
Considers the fate of those exiled to ‘Weimar on the Pacific’.