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

This book is volume 41 in the series "Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism," which deals with philosophy, sociology, anthropology, history, film, architecture, and design, rather than with literature in the narrower sense of the word. Ehrhard Bahr's stated goal is to present a more comprehensive picture of the German exile community in Los Angeles of the thirties, forties, and fifties as a group, and view their lives and activities from an American point of view rather than from their own perspectives, as has been the custom. While he deals with the Frankfurt school, with film, architecture, music, and politics, 5 of the 11 chapters—about half of the book—are devoted to literary authors and their works, if by no means only from an aesthetic or literary point of view. While trying to be comprehensive in an interdisciplinary way Bahr had to select just a few examples from a large number of possible sources, and he chose the most prominent names. Since the intended audience is not so much the specialists in the field of German exile studies, but a wider American public, it was necessary to provide the basic facts of the biographies and the making of the works in question. Still, he pursues his general thesis of the crisis of modernism, and it is against the yardstick of "modernism" that the works and projects analyzed are viewed and evaluated.

Modernism, as understood in this book, includes experimental techniques, aesthetic self-reflectiveness, non-closure in literary works, a progressive ideology, and above all, dialectics. Neither simple mimetic realism nor affirmative idealism would measure up; authors and artists should rather establish an inner distance and ambiguity that challenges the viewer, the listener, or reader to find their own responses to the problems presented in the works.

Ehrhard Bahr explains his thesis and procedures in his introduction, and then proceeds to the different aspects and forms of exile culture in Los Angeles. He builds his case on the foundation of an analysis of Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, that most controversial book of "philosophical fragments" first published in 1947, but known before among the exiles in Los Angeles, as a book that had a deep impact on the worldview of the postwar generations, especially its chapter on the "culture industry"—which was primarily an indictment of American commercialism and the movie industry of Hollywood. It is true that this book reflects much of the "elitist" European attitudes and prejudices of the exiles in Los Angeles; its analyses seemed so plausible to the new European generations that it became a "master narrative" just like, in a different way, the sometimes fragmentary and enigmatic writings of Walter Benjamin. The fundamental thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment that had the deepest and long-lasting consequences: rationalistic Enlightenment generates its own opposite, its own irrational demise. The striving for reason and freedom of thought turns into totalitarianism. The recognition of reason and of Enlightenment turning against itself generated the crisis of modernism, characteristic for the German-speaking exiles after 1933. Ideologically, there were several responses to the crisis, one of them being a "fascist modernism"; but among the exiles of Los Angeles it was rather the search for a new orientation beyond Stalinist communism and fascism. Feeling that modernist experimentation had left them floating in a void, the exiles were looking for solid ground, politically, spiritually and aesthetically.

After detailing the main arguments of Dialectic of Enlightenment and of Adorno's aesthetic theories, Ehrhard Bahr proceeds to an analysis of the works of Bertolt Brecht. He concentrates on the texts written during the exile in Los Angeles. Speaking about Brecht's poetry seems to lead inevitably to the issue of Brecht's alienation in Hollywood and the question of his "anti-Americanism." The legitimate question would be why the exiles had so much hostility against this environment...