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
A Film by Peter Rosen
[55:00] 