German emigres in 30s-50s Hollywood

[Ray]

Can anyone recommend books about German emigres in Hollywood around WWII?

[dirac]

Ray, I have never read a book devoted to the subject, but I did see recently on PBS a documentary called “Cinema’s Exiles,” which was excellent. I remembered that PBS usually has suggestions for reading as well, so it might be worth looking around on the PBS web site link, here. Good luck and tell us about anything you find.

[bart]

You might have a look at Joseph Horowitz, Artists in Exile: How Refugees from 20th-century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts. (Harper, 2008).

The focus is broader, but he includes Erich Korngold (and other classical composers), Marlene Dietrich, Max Reinhardt, Fritz Lang, Thomas Mann, and others who came to Hollywood after fleeing from Hitler, both in the 30s and during the War.

It's a fascinating book by a serious musical scholar who understands a number of the arts. As a bonus for BTr's, there's a long section on both Balanchine and Stravinsky, although I realize these are outside your time frame, Ray.

Alex Ross (of The New Yorker) has a section on some of the exiled composers and musicians in The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century (Farrer, Staus and Giroux,2007). He even tell you what street the following lived on: Arnold Schoenberg, Bruno Walter, Korngold, Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, Otto Klemperer, Otto Preminger, Ernst Lubitsch, etc.

[dirac]

Thanks for reminding me of the Horowitz book, bart. Horowitz may spread his net a little too widely for your purposes, Ray – there is much talk of emigres who are not German, Balanchine, for example. I found his judgments on Hollywood figures to be questionable, but one thing you can say about Horowitz, he's never lacking in opinions. Have a look by all means, but it certainly shouldn't be the only book you read.

[bart]

Have a look at Anthony Heilbut's Exiled in Paradise. This also spreads a wider net than Hollywood, but there is material on Hollywood exiles as well. I can't find my copy, but it dates back 20 years or so.

In any such book, footnotes can often direct you to the area you want to focus on.

[dirac]

It’s not so much that Horowitz doesn’t spend enough space on the Hollywood emigres, German or otherwise – it’s just plain from his text that he doesn’t know movies as well as he does music. But it's worth checking out, certainly.

[papeetepatrick]

McGilligan's book on Fritz Lang that I mentioned on the reading thread has a fair amount of stuff, too, Not the most specifically focussed on the other Germans, but there always being discussed in the tale of Lang.

Otto Friedrich's City of Nets is also very good, but it's been a long time since I read it. It's about the 40s, and I can't remember how much it talks about German emigres, probably not as much as the others here, but definitely good. From late 80s I believe.

[dirac]

Oh, thank you, Patrick. I knew someone had mentioned that book in the General Reading forum but didn't have time to pull up the reference.

[bart]

It’s not so much that Horowitz doesn’t spend enough space on the Hollywood emigres, German or otherwise – it’s just plain from his text that he doesn’t know movies as well as he does music.

Ah, I see the point. When Ray mentioned "Hollywood," I was thinking about the large exile community that gathered in LA, many of whom were writers and musicians who did not have all much long-term involvement with that other "Hollywood," the film business. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

[Ray]

It’s not so much that Horowitz doesn’t spend enough space on the Hollywood emigres, German or otherwise – it’s just plain from his text that he doesn’t know movies as well as he does music.

Ah, I see the point. When Ray mentioned "Hollywood," I was thinking about the large exile community that gathered in LA, many of whom were writers and musicians who did not have all much long-term involvement with that other "Hollywood," the film business. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

No that's OK, I am actually interested in people like Adorno too, who never did compose for the movies but lived in the area. And I'm also now remembering the Horowitz discussion here on BT--I should probably go back and look it up! The Heilbut reference sounds like the kind of book I'm looking for, and I'm going to try to find that PBS documentary. Thanks!

[Quiggin]

There’s a fairly accessible essay about Mann, Adorno and Schoenberg called "Mephistopheles in Hollywood", by James Schmidt in the Cambridge Companion to Adorno. He sets the stage with:

It is difficult to think of a less likely spot from which to contemplate the collapse of European culture...As if by magic [albeit the blackest of magics] a steady stream of the Weimar intelligensia found itself transplanted along a line running from the oceanside community of Pacific Palisades through Brentwood, Bel Air and Beverly Hills to Hollywood.

“Adorno in America” by David Jenemann gives up a scene of Adorno advising William Dieterle on "ein B-film...absolut harmlos" that would have a climatic scene in a record store where six jazz records are being played at the same time in a sort of "utopian jazz symphony".

Schmidt cites Brecht:

I feel here as if I were in Tahiti, surrounded by Palm trees and artists, it makes me nervous, but there you are...Custom here demands that you try to 'sell' everything from a shrug to an idea, and so you're always a buyer or a seller.

Isherwood's early diary gives an excellent sense of the atmosphere of Hollywood in the 1940's. There are no big ideas but lots of interesting granular detail:

Met the Huxleys at Farmers Market. They love it there, despite crowds, the jostling, discomfort and noise. I suppose, after the quietness of the desert, it seems gay and exciting. A perfect stranger admired my bicycle, but scolded me quite severely for scratching some of the varnish off against a metal post...Brecht wants me to translate his version of The Circle of Chalk.

There’s also Susan Sontag’s account of her youthful visit to Thomas Mann in Pacific Palisades, and elsewhere a visit to a Hollywood record store, like that in Adorno's utopia movie, but here to contemplate Arthur Schnabel Beethoven recordings.

[dirac]

Thanks for those, Quiggin.

(Off topic - I browsed through Isherwood's diaries when they first came out and I was almost sorry I did. I didn't think he came across too well.)

[Quiggin]

(Off topic - I browsed through Isherwood's diaries when they first came out and I was almost sorry I did. I didn't think he came across too well.)

They're a bit petty, but they do have the smell of the smog of the fifties in them, and are interestingly gossipy. Living in Los Angeles and being an emigre helps you to lose your sense of proportion--like the juxtaposition of scratched bicycle paint and translating for Brecht, as if they were of the same order of importance.

But the German presence is in LA at that time pretty amazing--Dialectic of Enlightenment and Dr Faustus are pretty major (and a bit of a reach for me other than in intriguing samples), and then there was also Renoir and Stravinksy, and Balanchine and Maria Tallchief passing through...

[Ray]

Thanks Quiggin for the Cambridge Companion reference. That series is often a great place to begin research on so many topics! (Sidebar: has anyone looked at the Cambridge Companion to Ballet, ed. Marian Kant?) And I read the Sontag piece--it appeared in the New Yorker, right? (I imagine it has now been republished elsewhere.)

[dirac]

Thanks Quiggin for the Cambridge Companion reference. That series is often a great place to begin research on so many topics! (Sidebar: has anyone looked at the Cambridge Companion to Ballet, ed. Marian Kant?) And I read the Sontag piece--it appeared in the New Yorker, right? (I imagine it has now been republished elsewhere.)

I remember seeing it in her Journals??