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79 Fritz Lang in Hollywood Had he not made another film after the Weimar period, Lang’s place in the film noir pantheon, based on the seminal M and his overall influence, would be assured. That he went on to make some of the earliest, most influential, and most highly regarded noirs in the United States only adds to his preeminence. His pioneering role in American noir is not surprising given his predilection for dark-themed films from the onset of his career. Indeed, Lang is the émigré director whose noir orientation can be traced most directly and unequivocally to his work in Weimar Germany. Siodmak and Bernhardt had made some borderline German noirs, and Edgar Ulmer had contributed to some as a set designer, but no other émigré director was typecast as a “master of the macabre” to the extent that Lang had been and would continue to be. Lang’s patriarchal position among the Jewish émigré directors is further enhanced by his being the first refugee director to make a film noir in Hollywood (Ulmer and Zinnemann arrived earlier, but neither directed any noirs until the mid-to-late 1940s). Jewish émigré filmmakers can be broken down into two contingents. The first, spurred by the Nazis’ rise to power in the late 1920s and early 1930s (and, for some, delayed by stopovers in France or England) included Lang and six others: Preminger, Ulmer, Brahm, Litvak, Zinnemann, and Billy Wilder. The second, which carried Siodmak, Bernhardt, and Ophuls onto Southern California shores, was propelled by the outbreak of World War II, the Nazi invasion of France, and the London bombings. Both contingents, unlike the first immigrant wave of the 1920s, were political refugees—but also, for the most part, somewhat privileged ones.1 Although their and other (Jewish and non-Jewish) émigré artists’ status as strangers in a strange land should not be discounted—and several, such as Ophuls, Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg, and, eventually, Salka Viertel struggled financially —most came with formidable pedigrees, existing or soon-to-be-acquired sources of income, and, most important, a ready-made and ever burgeoning support group.2 The Salon, California-Style The cohesiveness of the German émigré community lay not merely in its intellectual , professional, and ethno-religious affinities, but, perhaps most crucially, in its social structures. The touchstone of the latter was another European import, the cultural salon, which in Los Angeles, as on the Continent, existed both on the lofty artistic and more mundane professional planes. One of the latter (which 5 driven to darkness 80 included my parents) consisted of former lawyers, doctors, businesspersons, and their spouses that generically dubbed itself “Die Gruppe” (the group). Experts on various subjects would be invited to speak, and occasionally someone from the higher-profile gatherings, such as actor Alexander Granach, would make a guest appearance.3 No wonder that Los Angeles in the 1930s and 1940s—a sudden Parnassus of European artists, intellectuals, and the cream of the German film industry, as well as a sanctuary for the German-Jewish middle class that had composed a sizeable portion of their audience—took on the monikers “Weimar by the Sea,” “Weimar on the Pacific,” or simply the “New Weimar.” Formed as an offshoot of the French court by the Marquise de Rambouillet in the early seventeenth century, salons consisted of weekly “open house” gatherings in private residences hosted primarily by women. Coextensive with the Haskalah, the salons that emerged in Germany in the late eighteenth century became the almost exclusive province of Jewish women.4 The assimilationist advantages to emancipated Jews of promoting Bildung and Kultur have already been discussed. But salons were not merely social stepping stones for their hostesses or their guests; they also served, at their best, a progressive function. Taking their cue from the formative role that French salons had played in the Enlightenment, the first German-Jewish salons promoted cultural and political advancement and grew to become, in the Wilhelmine era, an integral part of the German modernist enterprise. The salon’s disappearance in Germany after 1914 can be traced partly to the war and its traumatic aftermath. Other factors, posited by a contemporary chronicler of the demise of salon life, Marie von Bunsen, are especially pertinent to the German salon’s revival in 1930s Los Angeles: “the acceleration, the Americanization of our existence, the restless need for travel and variety, the increase in hotel hospitality, the clubs, the passion for sports...

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