Villa Aurora : USC Selling Pacific Palisades Mansion for Use as U.S.-Europe Research Center

A Pacific Palisades mansion that was a gathering place for intellectuals who fled Hitler’s Germany is being bought by a West German foundation for use as a research center for European-American relations and German exile literature.

The decision by USC, which inherited the house in 1987, to sell it for $1.9 million is a victory for the German foundation and for preservationists who two years ago opposed a plan by the university to sell the property and move its prized 36,000-volume library to the university’s Exposition Park campus.

The Germans--with the support of West German President Richard von Weizsaecker and former Chancellor Willy Brandt--wanted to keep the house and library intact as a monument to German writers and artists who fled Nazi persecution and settled in Los Angeles.

Under the agreement signed in December, USC will allow approximately 22,000 volumes to be kept at the mansion on a long-term loan. The remaining books--all rare first editions or volumes printed before AD 1500--will be kept in a temporary storage facility near the campus until they can be moved into a permanent wing to be built in Doheny Memorial Library in the next several years, said George Abdo, USC executive assistant to the president.

The Spanish-style house, featuring a sweeping view of the Pacific from a bluff above Sunset Boulevard, was bought by the late German novelist and playwright Lion Feuchtwanger in 1943 and served as a hub for the German exile community in Los Angeles and other European notables. Among its regular visitors were Thomas Mann, Charlie Chaplin, Bertolt Brecht, Aldous Huxley, Arnold Schoenberg and conductor Bruno Walter.

“For them, the Villa Aurora was a productive and important meeting place during the exile period,” said Lothar C. Poll, spokesman for the group that is buying the house and publisher of the West Berlin Tagesspiegel, the city’s main daily newspaper. “It was a kind of ‘Weimar on the Pacific.’ ”

At least twice a year, members of the exile community would gather at the house to hear Feuchtwanger read from manuscripts of his latest plays or novels, according to USC professor Harold von Hofe, senior fellow of the new research center, called the Villa Aurora Institute. After discussions, the group would adjourn downstairs for herring salad followed by apple strudel, recalled Hilde Waldo, Feuchtwanger’s personal secretary.

The house was built in 1927 by the Los Angeles Times as a showcase of the latest in home design.

Feuchtwanger’s widow, Marta, left the mansion and library to USC upon her death in 1987, but her will gave the university the option of selling the house and using the proceeds to build a Lion Feuchtwanger Memorial Library on campus. The house’s library would have been moved to the new library on campus, in that case.

In addition to buying the house, the German foundation, called the Circle of Friends and Supporters of the Villa Aurora, has agreed to pay an estimated $2 million to upgrade the house’s interior and shore up its crumbling foundation. The group also will be responsible for raising funds to run the Villa Aurora Institute.

Von Hofe said the West German Bundestag, or lower house of parliament, and the West Berlin senate, as well as private donors, contributed funds to the preservation effort.

Details of the institute have yet to be worked out, but university officials said the main focus will be European-American relations, a topic they say will become increasingly critical as political events in Europe continue to unfold.

Among speakers already lined up for institute-sponsored lectures in the summer and fall are Brandt and West Berlin Mayor Walter Momper, said Daniel M. Evans, attorney for the Friends of Villa Aurora, the California counterpart of the German group. The lectures will probably be given at USC or at other facilities that can hold large audiences, Evans said.

The house will also serve as a center for research into German exile literature, including studies of works by Feuchtwanger, Mann, Alfred Doeblin and other German writers who produced many of their best-known works in Los Angeles. The exile studies center will be closely tied to the existing Feuchtwanger Institute for Exile Studies on the USC campus, said Von Hofe, who also heads the campus institute.

Von Hofe said the research center will necessarily operate on a small scale--the house does not comfortably hold more than about 50 people, he said, and parking on the narrow and winding road that leads up to it is minimal.

Moreover, plans for the institute must first be presented to neighbors at a public hearing chaired by a city zoning administrator, who will decide whether to recommend a conditional use permit for the center, said Claire Rogger, deputy to City Councilman Marvin Braude.

The agreement caps two years of long-distance negotiations between USC and the German foundation. USC initially rejected the Germans’ preservation proposal, but several weeks later said it would reconsider it, if the group came up with $15 million to pay for the new Feuchtwanger library on campus, repair the house and establish an endowment to run a research center at the mansion, which the university would continue to own.

The Germans said they would agree to such a plan only if half the money could be raised from American donors, a proposal that ultimately fell through because the U.S. fund-raising effort failed, Von Hofe said. However, the Germans’ fund-raising campaign was more successful, and USC changed its position and agreed to sell the house.

Final terms of the agreement were worked out last fall, Von Hofe said, and a board of trustees of the Villa Aurora Institute will be chosen soon after escrow closes in the next few months. Von Hofe said the institute’s acting director will be Daniel S. Hamilton, who recently joined the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as a senior associate after seven years as deputy director of the Aspen Institute Berlin.

“There was an evolutionary process, and in the end it simply proved that this was the most effective way to resolve the situation and accomplish the ends that they and we wished to accomplish,” Abdo said. “We are obviously pleased and supportive. We think it provides the grounds for the development of the Feuchtwanger Library on the campus and for the development of an important institute for exile studies and Euro-American studies in Los Angeles.”