Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism (review)

Weimar on the Pacific is one of those rare books in which an entire career of eminent scholarship comes together in a book so interesting, so easy and such a pleasure to read that one just cannot help oneself from staying up late into the night, thinking about it one day after another and yearning to talk about it with anyone one can find who adores and yet abhors Adorno, despises Baudrillard's America for its reactive continental shallowness and who has the remotest clue of what 12-tone music is and why it is important to modernism.

Bahr's book is in great part a social history that reveals amazing interconnections between philosophy and the arts and politics in the German exile community in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 1940s. Above all, perhaps, one comes away with a highly imbricated sense of the generative and creative intersections between German modernist works and their relation to the Weimar legacy and the Enlightenment. One also comes away with case after case study of an immense and arguably naïve antipathy on these modernists' part to capitalism—an ever-present fear of compromising authentic art by "selling out" to kitsch and the Hollywood dream machine, as well equally of any return to the old mythology of religion. But above all, besides those interested in the complexities of modernism per se, I do believe that it will be those who are interested in tensions concerning German intellectual history and the Jewish Question who will find this book of the most enduring value.

Depending on whether one's interests lie in critical theory, music, literature, film or architecture, specifically in case studies of works respectively by Theodor Adorno and Arnold Schoenberg, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Doblin, Fritz Lang and Thomas Mann, Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler, and Franz Werfel, one will find each chapter of rather different use value. Taken as a whole, however, the great value of this study is the fluent ease with which Bahr conveys this history of the internal diversity of the arts so as to inform the study of exile modernism and its political and social dimensions. This is particularly the case as regards anti-Semitism and the Weimar legacy and the political role of art in times of extreme crisis as a medium for working out issues peculiar to modernism.

One of the many surprising things that one will learn here perhaps is the fact that so many of the most important writings of the Frankfurt School were produced while men such as Adorno were living in exile in Los Angeles. Moreover, as Bahr and Edward Said have presented it, it was the experience of being either exiled or immigrants that led to the most acute expressions and understanding of modernism and enlightenment, as for instance in the discussion thereof in Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno. Here Bahr provides us a very clear exegesis of the nature of the Frankfurt School and the centrality of dialectical theory. Through showing how the dialectical process is absent in, for instance, Werfel's work, he allows the non-philosophers among us to better understand issues in literature and philosophy that are usually far from transparent.

For myself, the most important chapters for the purpose of this review are the first two and last two, namely "The Dialectics of Modernism" and "Art and Resistance to Society: Theodor W. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory," and finally "Evil Germany versus Good Germany: Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus" and "A 'True Modernist': Arnold Schoenberg." In addition, the appendices make a valuable addition in that they include the text of the Kol Nidre, the Jewish prayer of atonement for which Schoenberg wrote an intensely historically significant score. This, in addition to the chronology, the inclusion of Schoenberg's text A...