TV REVIEW : ‘Exiles’ Details Artistic Flight From Hitler

In its first hour, Richard Kaplan and Lou Potter’s documentary “The Exiles” (at 10 tonight on KCET Channel 28) seems about to collapse under the combined burden of talk and aimlessness. But the adventure of European intellectuals and artists escaping to America from Hitler’s advancing march finally propels the film forward: In its climactic second hour, “The Exiles” becomes a story of miraculous survival.

Perhaps because it begins with Germany, and the gradual and awful rise of Nazism in the 1930s, “The Exiles” is top-heavy with German leading lights. Ignored, for instance, is the circle of British minds who later flocked to Los Angeles (Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley), and nearly ignored are such seminal non-German artists as Piet Mondrian and Willem de Kooning.

But German exiledom was truly epic in proportion: Few countries in history suffered such an enormous and speedy brain drain. And Kaplan and Potter cogently point out that the ironic legacy of Hitler’s putsch of the mind was to lose such scientists as Edward Teller and Albert Einstein to the other side. European physicists formed the backbone of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb.

Thus, America offered refuge, but it provided work that these exiles sometimes deeply regretted. Teller nearly tears up recalling Hiroshima, and Bertolt Brecht’s bitterness at Hollywood’s pleasure factory is richly documented here. For some, like composer Arnold Schoenberg (seen in a fascinating montage of home movies shot in Santa Monica), the creative juices dried up in exile; for others, like director Billy Wilder, Marxian theorist Herbert Marcuse and Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius, their adopted home became a veritable garden of productivity.

There were too many radical, visionary minds from the Old World for even Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt to eradicate; by the 1950s, as University of Chicago President Hanna Gray notes, the entire cultural climate in the United States had been fundamentally altered by the Europeans. These “Exiles” began as refugees, and ended up being revolutionaries.