Monument to Civility

New efforts to restore and preserve Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades are most welcome. This residence, more than any other structure, was at the center of the extraordinary cultural life of German intellectuals living in exile during the horror of the Nazi years.

Lion Feuchtwanger--novelist, playwright and bibliophile--and his energetic wife, Marta--adorned in costumes that earned her the appellation of Queen of the Night--presided in the 22-room mansion at gatherings that included Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Ludwig Marcuse, Stefan Zweig, Arnold Schonberg, Hanns Eisler, Alfred Doeblin and many luminaries of Hollywood. They bought the house in 1941. Lion Feuchtwanger died in 1984, Marta last October.

Marta has left the library and the mansion to the University of Southern California, the archives to Harold von Hofe, a professor of German literature at SC who specializes in the literature of the Germans in exile. The survival of the building as a cultural center depends on efforts now being made in West Germany to raise the money necessary for extensive repairs as well as an endowment to assure continued operation. If those efforts succeed, the university will consider joint programs, although the bulk of the books will be moved to the campus.

The 36,000-volume library was the third collected by Feuchtwanger. The first was confiscated by the Nazis, the second largely lost in the German occupation of France. Rare as the collection is, it was a working library. “How do you keep them dusted?” Peggy Lloyd, wife of actor Norman Lloyd, asked Marta. Marta replied: “Lion reads them, you know.”

There is growing interest in the villa’s preservation in Germany among scholars and major cultural and political figures--including Gunter Grass, the author; Richard von Weizsaecker, president of West Germany, and Willy Brandt, former chancellor. They share a concern that the building be preserved to mark the resilience and vigor of humanism in the face of barbarism.

“It should be a monument,” Norman Lloyd told us, “just for this planet.”