Strangers in a strange land

ONE of the wry passages in “Weimar on the Pacific” by Ehrhard Bahr is an entry in the journal that Thomas Mann kept while living in Los Angeles in the 1940s and early 1950s. The great man of German letters, a Nobel laureate who served as the public conscience of German civilization in the face of Nazi barbarism, was somehow moved to preserve the following observation: “Nach Westwood zum Haarschneiden” (“Gone to Westwood for a haircut”).

This oblique glance into the private life of a world-historical figure is a good example of the author’s curiosity about the interplay between the inner and outer lives of artists in exile during troubled times. Bahr reveals too that Bertolt Brecht was moved to contempt by the garden setting of his bungalow on 26th Street in Santa Monica, a pretty sight that only reminded him of the atrocities that were unfolding back in Europe. “I / Who live in Los Angeles and not in London,” wrote Brecht, “Find, on thinking about Hell, / that it must be / Still more like Los Angeles.”

Yet Bahr has achieved something far more exalted than these ironic details might suggest. He seeks to show that Los Angeles, still an “idyllic garden city” in the 1930s and ‘40s, played a crucial role in the emergence of modernism in the art and literature of the mid-20th century, if only because “the exiles had to adopt a dialectical stance toward the image of Los Angeles as a natural paradise in order to perceive it as the cityscape of modernism.” Bahr embraces as his own credo Brecht’s notion that “emigration is the best school of dialectics.” And he points out that the same contrast between utopia and dystopia resonates in the work of other historians and critics who have tried to make sense of Los Angeles, from Mike Davis to Kevin Starr.

When Bahr refers to Weimar in the title of his book, he doesn’t mean those moments of an era’s excess that are caricatured in “Cabaret.” Rather, he is referring to “the charming little town in Thuringia that served as a center of German classical culture and as the birthplace of German democracy” and its symbolic attachment to the “humanist, pacifist, and cosmopolitan Germany” that crashed and burned when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Then, too, when Bahr focuses on the German exile community in Southern California, he is embracing German speakers from all over Europe: composer Arnold Schoenberg came from Vienna, actor Peter Lorre and director Michael Curtiz from Hungary, actress and screenwriter Salka Viertel and director Billy Wilder from Poland.

As Bahr reminds us, the German exile community in Los Angeles was variously and fabulously gifted, and it included not only novelists, philosophers and composers but also artists, architects, psychiatrists and a great many actors, screenwriters and directors. For Bahr, the accident of history that placed Mann (both Thomas and Heinrich), Brecht, Theodor W. Adorno, architect Rudolph M. Schindler and other German-speaking intellectuals in Southern California turned out to be fateful and decisive. Precisely because “so many canonical authors of modern German literature had lived in exile in Southern California and produced their major works here,” argues Bahr, “Los Angeles could have served as an icon of intellectual and artistic resistance to the Nazi regime.”

To illustrate the point, he harks back to the remarkable gathering that took place at Viertel’s home in Pacific Palisades on a summer evening in 1943. Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger and the brothers Mann were there, among many others, and they all set to work on a statement of solidarity with the Allies while, at the same time, seeking to “distinguish clearly between the Hitler regime ... on the one hand and the German people on the other.” Predictably, however, no consensus could be reached, and the stillborn manifesto was the prelude to a bitter struggle within the German exile community.

Bahr is perfectly willing and able to guide his readers through the thickets of aesthetics and dialectics in which the German intellectuals-in-exile lived and worked. Thus, for example, he devotes two dense chapters to the theoretical and critical writings of Adorno and his collaborator, Max Horkheimer. But there is no difficulty in understanding what they mean when they argue that the “culture industry,” as they put it, “endlessly cheats its consumers out of what is endlessly promised” or when they crack that “for centuries, society has been preparing for Victor Mature and Mickey Rooney.”

Bahr, a distinguished professor emeritus of German at UCLA, understands the lay of the land, and his experience of Los Angeles informs his critical judgments. When he seeks to explain “a specific poetics of exile that Brecht developed in Southern California,” Bahr finds meaning in the fact that Brecht lived in Santa Monica. “Brecht’s poem comparing Los Angeles to Hell demonstrates that he needed to establish its ugliness in order to become productive as a poet on the Westside,” writes Bahr. “If he had lived in the slums of East Los Angeles, such a poem would not have been necessary.”

Then, too, he allows us to witness an encounter between Thomas Mann and Austrian-born modernist architect Richard Neutra at a party in 1941. Mann had decided to commission a house of his own, and Neutra presumed himself to be the inevitable choice to design it. Mann, however, secretly detested the “cubist glass-box style” for which Neutra was already famous, and he bristled at the “overzealous salesmanship” of the architect. “Get that Neutra off my back,” Mann muttered to one of his fellow party-goers.

Each chapter in Bahr’s book is capable of standing alone, but the author also invokes ideas, incidents and personalities in each chapter that strike sparks off the material in other chapters. The best example, and the crown jewel of the book, is “Evil Germany Versus Good Germany,” in which Bahr analyzes Mann’s “Doctor Faustus” as “an allegory of Germany’s most recent history” and shows how the novel, completed at Mann’s home in Pacific Palisades, came into existence. Along the way, we see the various sources of inspiration for Mann’s work, including the work of Mann’s fellow exile in Los Angeles, Adorno. “Their relationship was intense and not exempt from Mann’s malicious irony,” writes Bahr. “He slipped Adorno’s suppressed Jewish patronym ‘Wiesengrund’ into the text of the novel [and] sympathetically furnished one of the devils of the pact scene with the philosopher’s features and arguments.”

“Weimar on the Pacific” is a brilliant tour de force of intellectual history and cultural criticism, both audacious and accomplished. Bahr makes a convincing case for the notion that, in the 1930s and ‘40s, the German exile community in Los Angeles created an “exile culture” that is imprinted deeply if also invisibly on the city’s history as well as for the “genuine exile modernism” that can be detected in film, literature, music and philosophy. “This chapter in history has an impact far beyond Southern California,” he urges, “and is of global significance for the production of cultural artifacts at a time of persecution and genocide.” Thus does Bahr insist on reminding us that we, too, live in an era of, as Brecht put it in his own California poetry, “butchers” and “bloodbaths.”