Germans Push for Preservation of Villa Aurora : Politicians, Intellectuals Campaign to Keep Home and Library Intact

Novelist Thomas Mann called it “truly a castle by the sea.” Bertolt Brecht was a regular visitor there. Aldous Huxley used to drop in now and then. Charlie Chaplin, too.

Villa Aurora, a 22-room, Spanish-style mansion nestled in the hills of Pacific Palisades, served as a meeting place for many of Germany’s greatest artists and intellectuals who fled Adolf Hitler and moved to Los Angeles in the 1930s and ‘40s, and their American friends.

Now a group of leading West German politicians and intellectuals have launched a campaign to preserve this piece of history. West German President Richard von Weizsaecker and former Chancellor Willy Brandt are among those supporting the effort.

The home was owned by the late German novelist and playwright Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife, Marta, who died last October. Marta Feuchtwanger willed the mansion and her husband’s celebrated 36,000-volume library to USC.

But the university plans to sell the aging house and move the books to its downtown campus.

Exile Literature Center

The West Germans want USC to keep the house and they also want the books to stay at the Villa Aurora. They would like to raise enough money to repair the house’s foundation--which could cost between $600,000 and $700,000--and use the site as a research center for German exile literature of the World War II period.

But if USC insists on selling the mansion, the West Germans said they might try to raise enough money to buy it.

They say the house and the library are inseparable and should be preserved as a monument to a literary movement that decried Nazism and promoted humanistic values.

“The library and the house are one entity, and that entity should not be destroyed,” said Volker Skierka, a correspondent for the Munich newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, who wrote a biography of Lion Feuchtwanger in 1984. He is one of the leaders of the preservation effort, which began shortly after Marta Feuchtwanger’s death on Oct. 29.

The library, one of the most comprehensive private collections on the West Coast, features thousands of first editions published from the 16th to the 20th centuries and includes several “incunabula”--books published before 1500--such as a “Nuremberg Chronicle” printed in 1493.

The Los Angeles Times built the house in 1927 as a demonstration home featuring the latest in architectural technology and comfort.

Feuchtwanger, who was Jewish, bought the house in 1941 after fleeing the Nazis, who attacked his pro-Socialist writings and burned his books. Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, described Feuchtwanger in a radio address as “a vicious enemy of the German people.”

Famous Guests

Among the others who regularly visited the home were Thomas Mann’s novelist brother, Heinrich, and writers Alfred Doeblin, Stefan Zweig and Ludwig Marcuse.

“This is the last authentic document of that era,” said Reinhard Dinkelmeyer, director of the Los Angeles office of the Goethe Institute, which promotes the study of German language and culture abroad. “If you look through the guest list of the Feuchtwangers during the ‘40s and ‘50s, you have all the names of the people that formed the image of the Weimar Republic. This is an important chapter of German cultural and political history.”

Harold von Hofe, a professor of German literature at USC and director of the university’s Feuchtwanger Institute for Exile Studies, said the house is a tribute to a literary movement that was brutally suppressed by Hitler but flourished in exile in Los Angeles.

“The only building testifying to that (movement) in this country is the Feuchtwanger house,” he said.

Skierka said President von Weizsaecker, former Chancellor Brandt and Hans-Jochen Vogel, chairman of the Social Democratic Party’s parliamentary delegation, have written letters supporting the preservation effort. He said he plans to ask private foundations and the West German government for funding.

After a memorial service for Marta Feuchtwanger on Dec. 13 at USC, West German Ambassador Juergen Ruhfus asked USC President James H. Zumberge to reconsider plans to move the library. But Zumberge said the decision to move the books was final.

“The house will be vacated in terms of the books,” Zumberge told Ruhfus. “The house needs serious repair. To be honest with you, it will not be cheap.”

Zumberge promised that “we will not sell the house out from under your nose” and said the Germans could buy the house from USC, pay for the repairs and possibly borrow some of the library’s books and temporarily keep them at the mansion.

USC officials said they would use the money from the house to pay for a planned Lion Feuchtwanger Memorial Library on a separate floor of a new campus library to be built in the next two to three years.

USC Executive Vice Provost Robert Biller said the books will be stored in the university’s Doheny Memorial Library and in a storage facility across from campus until they are moved to their permanent home.

Sweeping View

On a steep bluff above Sunset Boulevard near Pacific Coast Highway, the Villa Aurora features a sweeping view of the Pacific Ocean from Malibu to the Palos Verdes Peninsula. From his study on the second floor, Feuchtwanger could see Santa Monica Bay and the verdant hills of Pacific Palisades.

The Times devoted extensive front-page coverage to the ground-breaking and opening of its demonstration house on April 28, 1928.

“The Los Angeles Times has built here in Miramar Estates this dwelling which embodies in every detail and appointment the best material and workmanship,” the newspaper wrote. “Only the finest materials have been used, and within these walls is every modern convenience known to home-making.”

The kitchen employed the latest in technological convenience: an electric refrigerator, dishwasher and a “small utility motor guaranteed to polish silver, beat eggs and prepare refreshments.”

Discussions in Evening

After the Feuchtwangers bought the house in 1941, it became a center for the community of German artists and intellectuals living in exile in Los Angeles.

Von Hofe said he remembers spending evenings at the house listening to Lion Feuchtwanger read from his books. Heated discussions often followed the readings, he recalled.

“Everybody would wait for Thomas Mann to say something before anyone spoke up,” he said. “I felt too intimidated to say anything when Brecht was there or Thomas Mann was there.”

After her husband’s death in 1958, Marta Feuchtwanger became the doyenne of the German intellectual community on the Westside. Her elaborate wardrobe and regal manner earned her the nickname “Queen of the Night” among her circle.

She saw herself as a citizen of the world and promoted cross-cultural dialogue in meetings at the Villa Aurora.

“I am happy to be a citizen of a country that combines the legacy of my German heritage with the traditions of many other nations,” she wrote in her autobiography. “As an American, one is very close to all the peoples of the world.”