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  • Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism
  • Marjorie Perloff
Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism. Erhard Bahr . Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007. Pp. xvii + 358. $39.95 (cloth).

Between 1933 when Hitler came to power and the end of the Second World War, Los Angeles became the (mostly temporary) home of an illustrious set of German and Austrian émigré writers (Thomas Mann, Berthold Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, Alfred Döblin), film directors (Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder), composers (Arnold Schoenberg, Hanns Eisler), and intellectuals (Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer). Many of these settled in Brentwood and Pacific Palisades—lush wooded areas, then on the city's periphery, whose ocean setting evidently reminded the refugees of the beauties of the Italian Riviera or the Swiss lakes. Here, amid the pine, eucalyptus, and purple bougainvillea, Adorno and Horkheimer wrote their Marxist classic, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Brecht his Galileo, Mann, Dr. Faustus (all 1947), Schoenberg, his unfinished Moses und Aron (1930–1932). The refugees formed a fairly tight-knit German-speaking cenacle, even though, as Erhard Bahr's chronicle tells us, there was also a good deal of friction among its members.

Unlike its New York counterpart, most of whose members soon began to assimilate into American life and became U.S. citizens, "Weimar on the Pacific," as Erhhard Bahr euphemistically calls it, kept aloof from the indigenous culture of Los Angeles, a city they took to be the very emblem of the capitalism most of them despised. These émigrés had come to LA largely for practical reasons; no sooner was the war over, then Adorno and Horkheimer returned to Frankfurt, Brecht to East Berlin, and Mann to a Switzerland he took to be more congenial than Pacific Palisades. Consequently, although there is no doubt that this important refugee circle had a transforming effect on Los Angeles culture, especially in the realm of experimental music, film noir, and Frankfurt school aesthetics and politics, the question remains whether their Los Angeles sojourn had any significant impact on their own cultural views.

Oddly, Bahr never asks this question. His wide-ranging and absorbing book is essentially an historical reconstruction of a fascinating chapter in exile history, in particular, a largely sympathetic exposition of some leading German émigré texts. He is particularly skillful at tracking the heated debates of 1943–44 on the future of a postwar Germany, with Mann and Brecht on opposite sides (Chapter 9), and in detailing the role both Adorno and Schoenberg played in the genesis and conception of Dr. Faustus (Chapter 10). Indeed, Bahr's reading of Dr. Faustus as Mann's final and definitive statement on the splendors and miseries of German history and culture is especially valuable.

But, as the subtitle of Bahr's book suggests, his is a book with a thesis: namely, that the German émigré community in Los Angeles embodied "the crisis of modernism":

Modernism had always been divided, although this division did not become apparent until 1933. Prior to that year most modernists had associated their movement and its goals with a general progressiveness, but the political events of 1933 made clear that a progressive modernism had failed and a totalitarian modernism had triumphed. Vladimir Mayakovsky, Pablo Picasso, Ignazio Silone, and Brecht had supported communism, while Gabriele d'Annunzio, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Ernst Jünger, and Gottfried Benn had moved toward fascism. . . . Los Angeles became the battlefield for the wars of German exile modernism in the 1940s.

(11)

This passage is somewhat murky. For one thing, it assumes that 1933 is the key date, not only for Germany, but for the world. For another, even within the European frame, it conflates the utopian avant-garde of the pre-First World War period (Marinetti, Mayakovsky) with a [End Page 410] later much more establishment "modernism" that had, by the 1940s, become something quite other. Mann's Dr. Faustus, for example, has less in common with, say, Joyce's Ulysses than with the mandarin, mid-century symbolism of Malraux's Man's Fate (the title itself is indicative); it deploys elaborately coded...

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